Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

There was an LA times column, the Homicide Report. Jill Leovy covered every single homicide in LA County. She also wrote an excellent book called Ghettoside about a murder investigation. Her column went away, but it was so good, so important. Probably won't see the likes of it again here.

if you're a seriously shitty or psycho driver you probably should be banned from being behind the wheel. But if they're not going to regulate guns in that way they'll never do it for cars.

In 2021, there were 48,830 gun deaths in the US. That same year, there were 42,939 motor vehicle deaths in the US. I mean these numbers are just insane. I realize the motor vehicle stuff is for another thread obv.

true but motor vehicles at least DO provide a very useful function in American life whereas guns are only a necessity in the FOX News America where everyone is trying to rob you or burn down the CVS or turn your kids gay. so yes the fact that FOX is the #1 news source in America is kind of a big big problem here.

even if we somehow "solved" mass shootings, the number of "regular" single shootings/suicides are staggering

This is true, but two caveats: The random mass shootings are essentially impossible for your average person to protect themselves from, which is why they resonate so much. Most other shootings are situational and circumstantial at least to the degree that an individual's own behavior and choices factor into them in a way that they don't with random mass shootings. Not that people can easily "choose" to extricate themselves from, say, a violent relationship. (It's in attempting the extrication that people are often killed.) But you know what I mean, it's not just that you're randomly walking down the street and suddenly you have a homicidal partner who kills you. Ditto being involved in interstate drug trafficking, another high-risk situation for being shot — once you're involved, it could be hard to get out, but your involvement won't be just a matter of chance.

The other caveat is that anything that works to make it harder to get guns for random mass shootings will also make it harder to get them for any purpose at all.

There was an LA times column, the Homicide Report. Jill Leovy covered every single homicide in LA County. She also wrote an excellent book called Ghettoside about a murder investigation. Her column went away, but it was so good, so important. Probably won't see the likes of it again here.

― omar little, Wednesday, May 31, 2023 12:00 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Baltimore's defunct City Paper weekly had a column, Murder Ink (originally by Anna Ditkoff) that I think did the same.

Hell, I didn’t even make the paper
‘Cause I only killed one man

- Steve Earle, “Billy Austin,” 1990 (!)

I'm going to read that book, OM. Thank you.

Wanted to add that when I said upthread that a lot of this feels foreign to me I meant that is because I never experienced the rural/suburban US obsession with guns. It's the average joe being gun crazy and feeling the need to carry 24/7 cause freedom shit that I've never really experienced. I did work as a youth workerworker in one of the roughest parts of Boston for a while so I absolutely saw an obsession and the impact of guns there. One of the guys on my caseload was killed in a gang shooting a year after I left.

(tried to link to an old thread there but don't think it worked. If anyone who can fix sees this pls do. ty.)

God I love all of you and it’s awful this culture we gave. Feels pretty hopeless sometimes.

As far as American bloodlust goes, isn't it safe to say that roughly a third of the country reflexively adulates the police and the military and subscribes to religious doctrines calling for, if not also reveling in the violent destruction and I guess eternal torture in some instances of people who are the "bad guys"? Comparatively speaking it's a hyper-violent country by just about any metric (our death penalty issues alone are majorly o.O) and regardless of how much a given person may wish to reject all of that, they are nevertheless steeped in that environment. It's all-pervading in a sense. There is an undercurrent of menace and hostility here in daily life that simply isn't present in most other countries.

I love this post, del

I still argue that the biggest difference between America and the rest of the "Western" world is the issuance of open carry and concealed carry permits. It is shocking to be in Canada and the rest of the world for years, and years, and years, and never once see a firearm in the hands of a civilian, not-ever, and then see people carrying within 48 hours of arriving in USA.

I seem to recall that New York State boasts one of the most stringent and bureaucratic processes for civilians to obtain concealed-carry permits, to the point that only six have been issued (with one of the issuees being none other than Trump, lol). Statistically it's pretty amazing (and telling) that New York State (and NYC, of all places) is rated in the top five safest states wrt gun violence.

But I feel that my argument is unpopular, given that police violence is such an epidemic in USA, to propose that "we should restrict the civilian population's right to carry firearms"; I stand by the argument nevertheless

I don't know where I read that about New York State, but now I'm reading otherwise

Anyway, I am curious as to what would happen, when SCOTUS says “hey Illinois you have to issue CCWs”, or “hey New Jersey you have to make it easier for people to get their PCHs”, if the state just says “no we are not doing that”.

I think these murders happen so often that they simply can't give each one the attention they deserve, both as news and as investigations. So instead they get thrown together as this monolithic shorthand of "crime," which often gets conflated with cities, and sometimes distilled down to simply "Chicago." Which the usual bad actors use to foster more fear and anxiety and lure people into buying (more) guns.

But of course Chicago *is* dangerous, and there *are* lots of crimes, both random and not. The reason the focus is so often on mass shootings, however relatively rare, is that those goddamn AR-style weapons are typically to blame, and there is literally no excuse to own one. That gun nuts defend them is simultaneously sick and sad, because they remain both the sensible start and, tragically, likely end of the debate in this country. If they can't move the needle on weapons of war so big they can't even be concealed, I don't have a lot of hope, but if they did, hopefully they could start inching toward solutions that might reduce all the other shootings that occur all the time.

That (seemingly random, apparently victimless) shooting that happened outside a middle school here last week (nine rounds fired) earned the usual "what can we do?" responses on the neighborhood Facebook group, to which most could only sigh and say "not much." Then someone brought up guns, and one of the dudes on the group piped in with the inevitable, and stupid: " I’ve probably sat next to or walked past you or your friends in a grocery store … my gun didn’t shoot someone did it?" This guy is the fabled wild west type gun owner, and if he walks among us here, he walks among us all, everywhere. But if he really thinks his gun is making anyone safer, even though it's more like to do damage to himself, a loved one, an innocent victim rather than a target in the name of self-defense, he's either deluded or dangerous.

It's the average joe being gun crazy and feeling the need to carry 24/7 cause freedom shit that I've never really experienced.

I grew up mostly in rural and suburban areas, albeit western New York, and while guns were a normal part of the landscape — some of my friends' parents had guns, and during hunting season you'd hear boom-boom-boom all day — it was absolutely nothing like contemporary gun culture. The shift has really come in just the last few decades, as the NRA went crazier and crazier and the GOP/right-wing media completely embraced guns as a really core part of their identity. They did not used to occupy nearly as central a role for people. And hell the Heller decision is only 15 years old, until then there wasn't even a recognized individual right to gun ownership. People on the right like to frame this as just a continuance of our Great American Heritage, Davy Crockett and all that, but 21st century gun culture and jurisprudence is really a new and fairly radical thing in the U.S.

Yeah I was thinking something along those lines earlier and I think we're a fairly similar age so that makes sense. I grew up on Long Island but know upstate pretty well and there are parts that I'm sure were much bigger on guns both then and now but it definitely feels like it's become a much bigger thing. Columbine happened my senior year in college and I remember how fucking shocking and impossible it seemed at the time. I don't think my experience was necessarily typical at all but it makes reading other people describe the culture in parts of the country feel alien. Similarly, my father has lived in Florida for the last decade and it was extremely jarring for me to see all the gun shops/shows/billboards at first.

i think you are both right. as the country has gotten more polarized, people in the "red" parts of the country have started glorifying gun ownership as a kind of resistance to (what they see as) a hostile mainstream culture. it's not quite embracing violence over civility, but it is embracing hostility, defensiveness, and stubborn "independence" over any idea that one is part of a larger community. it's not a far cry from that mental atmosphere to actually shooting people gathering in public. so much in our culture primes people to see others as "other."

what is most annoying about it is that "red" america has legitimate grievances. these areas were often the economic casualties of neoliberalism. they were ignored as opioids raged through their communities. culturally, there certainly *is* a kind of coastal snobbery toward "middle america," i see it even in my students who describe "random" parts of the country as opposed to the new york suburbs where they live. but for some reason, there hasn't been any productive political organizing among these people and they just retreat into terrifying anti-social posturing, an obsession with "triggering" libs and scapegoating immigrants instead of meaningfully advocating for their communities.

so of course "guns" became central to right wing politics in america. these are objects that only destroy and the culture of right wing america is extremely toxic. even their view of christianity is extremely hateful and vengeful, from the "prosperity gospel" to the obsession with the last judgment. i am a socialist but i could respect conservatism more if it wasn't *this*.

The singularity:

New: Hunter Biden's lawyers have told DOJ that if he's charged with owning a gun as a drug user (which is illegal), they will argue the ban is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment

Story: https://t.co/k21Z24bUe8

— Betsy Woodruff Swan (@woodruffbets) June 1, 2023

The quasi-apocalyptic part of me thinks that at some point in the future people will look back at the growth of gun culture and say, "Oh, this is what all of that was leading to."

The more hopeful part thinks there could be an era of think pieces about the decline of gun culture and obsessiveness. I'd rather live in that future than the other, but I don't really know which one is more likely. Or maybe it's sequential, the first and then the second, who knows.

There's already more hesitancy to enforce federal laws in heavily armed areas of the country. I imagine this is all heading toward societal collapse and the rise of warlords.

My personal prediction has been a steady increase in isolated skirmishes and conflicts with law enforcement, but yeah, there are already chunks of the population law enforcement is unwilling or unlikely to engage, either because they are sympathetic or because they are scared. Thankfully this country is too big and lazy to truly pursue a civil war; something like Jan. 6 might be the most they could muster, because even the majority of gun owners probably recognize their own limitations against law enforcement and military. That's also I think why the majority of gun people really emphasize the *idea* of gun ownership over actual mobilization. The tragic outcome is guns everywhere, including in the hands of the relative few willing to actually use them.

I know it's easier said than done and unlikely to happen for many practical reasons, but my wife and I's idle "wouldn't it be nice to live in a country that wasn't obsessed with guns" chatter has moved to very seriously investigating the hows, whys and wheres of actually getting the fuck out of this hellhole.

My ex moved to Spain a year ago, and the thing that's made the biggest impression on her so far is how much safer she feels, like she doesn't have to have her guard up all the time just to walk down the street or run an errand.

Yeah, I mean, it would just be great to live in a place where it wasn't a matter of "when, not if" my life is personally impacted by gun violence.

my attempts to escape went from a dream to "never going to happen", but also I don't want to abandon the friends I have here right now either (note, I don't judge anybody who desires to leave where they're at right now)

I only left Boston 5 years ago and I never that anywhere. Not even really in Boston after the shooting. I have no idea why but I was much more afraid of things like being somewhere that was blown up (the T, a mass event) for some reason I never really thought about guns even though that has to be a MUCH higher threat statistically. I have thought about it before though and wondered if maybe my brain somehow knows just not to go there because I couldn’t handle being that aware or anxious 24/7 idk.

Should have read “I never felt that”.

I mean, it gets to beyond the scope of this thread specifically, it just feels like the gun violence keeps creeping closer and closer (a coworker's 20 year-old nephew was shot in the back and killed just walking down the street last weekend, in what so far seems to be a completely random shooting) and fewer and fewer reasons for optimism about things turning around with each passing week. I know despair ain't helpful, but a hard honest look at the state of this country doesn't exactly fill one with the opposite.

not to mention - 'successful' suicide attempts are far more likely when there's any kind of firearm in the house

There is a not a day that goes by without at least the fleeting though that today could be the day I or someone I know gets shot. I mentioned years back about my daughter being woken a summer or two ago (I can't even remembered) by two speeding cars passing by shooting at each other. That was enough to get a couple of our neighbors to leave.

It’s awful. And I know the risk is incredibly real. I think my not thinking about it really was some sort of self-protective mental block.

I know its silly but every time this thread gets bumped while my kids are in school I feel a little pang in my stomach

Not silly at all! Mine too.

that is so sad

also so sadly understandable

Doesn't help that, so far this year, we've hard three "soft" and one full lockdown of our schools due to shootings near one school or other in the district. Thankfully none of them were actually at, or connected to, the school, but still disconcerting to get that alert pop-up. For reference, my son is in 5th grade. We had one "soft" lockdown the entire time he was in kindergarten through fourth grade and four this year alone.

It surprises me a little to think about people I know who have been directly impacted. I posted a little bit ago about the gun going off in a classroom in my son's school, which was bad enough. But I know several people who are/were members of our local Unitarian church, and who were there the day in 2008 when a guy came in with a shotgun determined to kill "liberals" and "Democrats."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knoxville_Unitarian_Universalist_church_shooting

A friend of mine, a writer, was the greeter at the door that day. He didn't recognize the shooter — who had his gun in a guitar case — but welcomed him and waved him through. Then a minute later he heard the gun shots from inside. Apart from the two people killed, it traumatized everyone there of course. My friend had basically a complete breakdown, spent years and years blaming himself for not somehow stopping or questioning the guy. He's still not "OK," really, but he's achieved some level of mental peace with it all. But every new shooting that happens reopens it a little for him. I think about how many thousands (millions?) of people there are like that now, living with the after-effects of these things.

Also, in that shooting, the guy had a shotgun -- the AR-15 craze I guess hadn't quite taken off yet? If he'd had an AR-15, many more people would have died.

To belatedly answer Jeff upthread, I'm sure it's the same shooting! It was this guy and a friend of his, a red Kia pulls up, they shoot him...just absolutely insane. My brother likes to take photos at night in Chicago and I advised him to be careful, but after this happened to his pal I suspect he doesn't need to be told that.

I'm not a fan of events these days and maybe there's a subconscious fear, idk.

My kid's school had a lockdown recently because an armed robbery suspect ditched his car and was running through the neighborhood.

Also, there was a 2A asshole who liked to stand across the street from the elementary school with an AR-15. The cops said they couldn't do anything about him.

yeah I've thought about that a lot too. I mean obviously the focus has to be on the victims but every kid who survives one of these shootings, especially those who are just 7-10 years old when it happens, are gonna be fucked up from it for life. even the shooting drills our school has to do puts some messed up thoughts in their heads. my son once told me he wants me to buy a gun for him so he can protect his sister in case a "bad guy" comes. congrats Republicans, your grand policy ideas could've come from the mind of a second grader.

Also, there was a 2A asshole who liked to stand across the street from the elementary school with an AR-15. The cops said they couldn't do anything about him.

god I hate this shit so much. a while back I saw a dude with a handgun in a holster, obviously positioned in a way that people could see it, while shopping at Festival Foods. oh are you supposed to be the "good guy with a gun"? sorry but I think you're a fucking lunatic because you legitimately think you're going to have to murder someone at the grocery store.

Think I might have mentioned this itt before, but one day my son was telling me about the fire drill they had that day which led into him talking about the tornado drills and active shooters drills they'd done as well. Which, y'know, heartbreaking enough that these have to be a thing, but I noticed that he kept saying "when we have a shooter come to the school" and not "if we have a shooter come to the school". It's just so fucking common that kids expect it to happen.

tipsy i read your post about your friend and the shooting story and i am so sorry. what a horrible thing. unbelievably sorrowful, i cannot think of more to say.

Also, there was a 2A asshole who liked to stand across the street from the elementary school with an AR-15. The cops said they couldn't do anything about him.

Yeah, there's a dude doing this not far from me in Maryland recently. I'm absolutely mind-fucked that this is not already illegal here. I've never heard of anyone else ever open-carrying in Maryland. I'm massively confused.

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/jden-mcadory-man-with-gun-severn-school-bus-stop-governor/43944583#

I know it's probably not wise to aggravate someone holding an ar-15, but my instinct would be to hurl abuse at someone open carrying like this. Probably lucky I haven't encountered this so far.

Man, tipsy! That story. My heart goes out to your friend (and everyone in this thread - what a world).

To belatedly answer Jeff upthread, I'm sure it's the same shooting! It was this guy and a friend of his, a red Kia pulls up, they shoot him...just absolutely insane. My brother likes to take photos at night in Chicago and I advised him to be careful, but after this happened to his pal I suspect he doesn't need to be told that.

xp That guy looks much older than 20.