Another School Shooting, this time in Florida

[ORCACommander]

Everything you need for your basic pipe bomb is available at your local hardware store and only requires a high school understanding of chemistry to make. Distribute your ingredients over the period of a few weeks and no one will notice.

[Wild_Kraken]

The recent killer even posted months before that he wanted to become a professional school shooter.

So someone wants to be a school shooter. If they don't have a gun, how do they accomplish this goal?

Fire. Stabbing. Drive a car into a group of people. A bomb. Pick one.

Again, you think a gun enables a killer. It doesn't

And as soon as you can show me anywhere on Earth where these sorts of lone wolf fires/stabbings/driving cars through the halls of a school/bombing are in anyway comparable to mass shootings in America I'll believe you. But you can't.

Everything you need for your basic pipe bomb is available at your local hardware store and only requires a high school understanding of chemistry to make. Distribute your ingredients over the period of a few weeks and no one will notice.

And yet we don't see pipe bomb attacks anywhere else in the world at a level at all comparable to mass shootings in America. Really makes you think

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Not lashing out literally like Black Lives Matter protests but I do believe these kids are misguided, don't understand current laws and are being pushed by the adults to forward their agenda. It's not research the problem in society. I have no problems. They want knee jerk emotionally driven laws made right now, like assault weapons ban. That's not helpful. And no amount of crying will change anything

Okay, that's an answer, but I still don't see how any of this leads you to the conclusion "Guns in a America are different from guns anywhere else." What does all of this have to do with gun violence and attempts to limit preventable deaths?

I focus on the violence part of that term. Not the gun part. What I said before, guns are not the problem. The people who use them are. Somehow making laws that do not work, because they have been tried before, does not prevent these types of people from doing evil. And to me, it's not about numbers of death. It's how. These guys that shoot up schools are no different than Jeffrey Dahmer or Timothy McVeigh or Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy or Charles Manson. And these other guys have become infamous far beyond the tools they used. It's very short sighted to say, this guy used a gun, we should ban all guns. That's your mindset. You think guns enable evil. They do not. We need to look beyond the gun and focus on the person and the why and how we can prevent another one like it from doing evil.

Again, I still don't understand how what you described as the traits specific to America lead to more violence. What do the mingling of different ethnic groups or the youngness of the nation have to do with bloodlust?

Don't dismiss these kids.

Just because somebody is emotionally engaged, that doesn't make their argument invalid. I'm not just listening to my feelings, I'm listening to what these people actually have to say, and that is informed by their firsthand experience with a killer.

Have you met Ted Bundy? Did you take geometry class with the Unibomber? I think that these kids know a bit more about the brutal realities than you give them credit for.

If you outright disregard the numbers, then you are doing a disservice. Saying "they will eventually find a way to do evil" ignores the number of solutions that could at least make it harder.


You really wanna address the root cause though? Let's talk about white culture. Let's talk about toxic masculinity. Let's talk about anti-semitism, sexism, xenophobia, and racism.

[ORCACommander]

The recent killer even posted months before that he wanted to become a professional school shooter.

So someone wants to be a school shooter. If they don't have a gun, how do they accomplish this goal?

Fire. Stabbing. Drive a car into a group of people. A bomb. Pick one.

Again, you think a gun enables a killer. It doesn't

And as soon as you can show me anywhere on Earth where these sorts of lone wolf fires/stabbings/driving cars through the halls of a school/bombing are in anyway comparable to mass shootings in America I'll believe you. But you can't.

Everything you need for your basic pipe bomb is available at your local hardware store and only requires a high school understanding of chemistry to make. Distribute your ingredients over the period of a few weeks and no one will notice.

And yet we don't see pipe bomb attacks anywhere else in the world at a level at all comparable to mass shootings in America. Really makes you think

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack not a single attacker but it does prove a point.

As for bombings, Well the middle east has been filled with them for the past 30 or 40 years easily. Or is that different because they are freedom fighters?

But what is the point of talking this over with you, you basically stated that the standard you hold will be an ever retreating goal post before an infinite horizon.

And indeed fuzzy, they are problems we need to address and rectify, however those people who would deny claim to those traits will never be willing to reform themselves and will either go underground or they will snap and lash out and those they view as oppressors.

Lastly there is another factor that factors into near paranoid levels gun entitlement. I apologize in advance to Admiral X, as If I remember right he has some native american heritage. Shortly after the colonization effort in new england the least took off a few native american tribes foresaw the inevitable and started raiding the european settlements. One in particular memory I have is known locally as King Phillip's War. Its part of what lead to the formation of the Minute Men. All able bodied men were meant to defend their towns an village from these raids. From our inceptions us white people have felt at threat by anyone and anything different, that were are self righteous and can do no evil. That we are to be the undisputed masters of this realm. We could well be a case study of on how the oppressed become oppressors.

[Robovski]

I literally work for a company that rents large trucks for moving. Renting them so people can use them to kills others is not unheard of and something we watch for. We don't rent the trucks to under 18, but an 18 year old can rent a 26' truck with $100 and a license. And there have been several drive over pedestrian attacks with trucks in Europe in the last year; usually followed by a suicide murder spree.

And that is setting aside filling one with feritlizer and diesel...

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

And to me, it's not about numbers of death.

This is where it all falls apart.

You don't care about the numbers of death? I do.

I'm pretty sure those parents and kids would prefer that at least some of the graves not be filled.

We aren't sociologists or clerics or transhumanists. We don't need to solve the fundamental problem of human evil. If some basic gun laws can cut down that figure, can turn a would-be mass murderer into somebody who just managed to inflict a few stab wounds that will heal in weeks or acid scars that are horrific but survivable, and that infringes on some of your law-abiding gun owner civil liberties? I consider that an acceptable trade-off.

I don't think we're going to get any further in this conversation. I'll just say that there is SOME headway. Both of us believe the other is valuing perceived safety over actual safety.

I'll remember that you're not valuing some Rambo fantasy above human lives or driven by a senseless fear that the government is just looking for an excuse to disarm you. You remember that I'm not a virtue-signaling liberal trying to push pacifism as a way to score politically correct points.

[Wild_Kraken]

But what is the point of talking this over with you, you basically stated that the standard you hold will be an ever retreating goal post before an infinite horizon.

It's funny that you assume that I'll move a goalpost *that you haven't even reached yet.* I specifically mentioned lone wolf type attacks in other countries using other means that are comparable to mass shootings in America. The Kunming attack only proves that you can't provide examples, because it does not meet the criteria.

The same goes for the violence in the middle east. It's so pathetic that you have to draw an equivalence between terrorism and factions fighting in a civil war to some rando who buys an AR and shoots up a church/school/concert/theater/etc. "Well you see, Assad doesn't have an army, what he has is thousands of lone wolfs who commit random but also somehow highly coordinated attacks in conjunction with each other to beat back ISIS, another non group that's just thousands of lone wolfs whose random mass shootings and mass bombings just happen to also be coordinated and working towards some larger goal."

[Darth Wedgius]

You really wanna address the root cause though? Let's talk about white culture. Let's talk about toxic masculinity. Let's talk about anti-semitism, sexism, xenophobia, and racism.

Do you have anything linking any of these to most of the recent mass shootings? Other than white culture having (more or less) invented guns, of course.

And wouldn't you be happier in a country with fewer white people? There are a lot of countries in Africa with fewer white people, fewer rich people (who are evil), and, hey, bonus, you might be able to watch STD on Netflix as well.

[ORCACommander]

But you can't.

That defines the infinite goal post. not the 5 minutes I had to sift through a mire of google results.
bare in mind i am not a statistician
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/75 ... en-injured

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/wor ... s/1770395/

http://www.nationmaster.com/
this is an interesting site, but its data is incomplete and in one case its mislabeled, they put the guns per capita statistic in a criminal stat category as if ownership of a firearm was a crime in and of itself

Here isa decent database of knife attacks and it looks like they keep it updated
https://crimeresearch.org/2014/04/a-not ... e-attacks/


Further I am completely ruling out the syrian civil war. the fact it is a civil was makes it irrelevant for violence statistics.
What is the difference between a terrorist or a lone wolf? Honestly in my opinion none, However there is a point to terrorists being organized. So what prevents lone wolves from organizing and not being lone wolves is an interesting thought to consider.

Darth You went a little too far there and went into the personal

[excalibur]

Wild Kraken. Don't give me that bullshit that because guns can kill more people vs a sword or a knife is not the point. People have been killing each other far longer with sticks and stones and if you are so fixated on a single object that's killed more people in one instance, you might as well throw bombs into the mix since the largest mass shooting so far in the US (Vegas) has yet to begin to reach the stuff homemade bombs have done and those are easily made with hardware store items and can be learned with basic high school skills.

You just don't like guns, have never handled guns, never carried one for defense let alone trained or even have the mindset of a person willing to fight to protect.


Also, it's not that I don't care about the numbers. YOU guys don't care about the numbers. You don't care that even if death happens, less is better. But to me, that's still not acceptable in terms of murder. If you took away the gun magically and they started using bombs or start stabbing people or over the course of months turn into a serial killer, you did not solve the core problem. Countless individuals get murdered everyday and that doesn't make the news but when a bunch of them at one time does, that draws in the ratings for the news and now you pay attention? Every weekend in Chicago, there's an incident involving criminal elements with guns that always end in death but if it isn't a bunch of school children, no body cares. A bunch of kids, predominately white in a suburb at a school gets shot up and everybody loses their minds.

You're essentially saying that we can't change the human condition that we're all born with that can make any of us crazy killers and should just accept it. That we should focus on controlling people than changing them. Because that's what all things that tie into gun control is. Control of people. What do they, what they say, how they live and monitoring them even if they have done nothing wrong...yet. I can never agree with that type of mindset.