Las Vegas shooting

[Karha of Honor]

As someone used a rental truck from the company I work for to run over people Saturday night the intention to do harm to others does seem to be the core of the issue. The real world expression of the power fantasy of just murdering a great many people in a public places strikes me as a bona fide mental health AND cultural problem.

Cultural problem? How does the culture mainstream or otherwise endorses this sort of action?

White boys who kill lots of people get romanticized as bad boy anti-hero "lone wolf" figures, as far as cultural problems go.

Intention to do harm isn't the core of the issue. The core is how easy our shitty laws make it to do that harm on a massive scale. You can shoot a lot of people with an automatic weapon a lot faster than you can run them over or stab them to death.

indian movies do it, Frencjh movies do it, Korean movies do it i utterly fail what the fuck color got to do with it.
Rent a truck and you got your mass murder weapon.

I'm not talking about movies. I'm talking about News Reports. Every time a white guy shoots up a bunch of people, you can't swing a dead cat without hearing about how intelligent and sensitive he was, without seeing a shot of him smiling and being nice, hearing about his backstory, describing him as a troubled genius and lone wolf and basically anything they can do that will humanize and glamorize him rather than taking the advice of experts in the field and simply referring to him as "the _location_ shooter".

it's a giant country, there will be some firefights and the police is running wild in some cases and on some issues.

"Some". Yeahright. They are probably not comitting as many crimes as the entirety of the criminal underworld in the US, but they are right up there, along with Senators and Don Vito Corleone.

The idea that a few real life firefights involving police lead to mass shooters feeling empowered is nonsense.

I can't remember having written that, so where are you taking that from? My point was, that in a country where the police can arrest you for having done nothing, can permanently confiscate whatever they want without ever having to give it back even if you have done nothing wrong and kill people almost at will for the flimsiest of excuses and can get away with that almost always, is rotten to the core and one only needs to look back to last month, when Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, to see that there's an institutional problem. You know the country and society as a whole fucked up royally, when the gun-tooting nut-crackers who defend their right to bear arms by saying that they need them to defend themselves from their own government, have an actual valid point.

The US has real violence problem? It cetainly does not prevent people from seeing it as a tourist destination or one for immigration. So it must be more than tolerable.

Every other varblenecking klorbag in this gods-abandoned country has a private Rambo fantasy.[/b] This people lead dull, stressful lives, but they dream that SOME DAY, whether it's after the robot holocaust or when the Big Gummint comes ot Take Away Their Guns, they will turn into a frelling action hero, and the thought of not having enough magazines to take out a children's choir and a small concert afterwards is intolerable to them. How will they kill all the nameless evil henchmen if they don't?
These people banded together, took control of the NRA, bankroll our congressmen, and now it's a party of the holy far-right culture which must be protected at any cost because the goll-durn liberals oppose it.

That's why children have to do active shooter drills in our classrooms, and not in the UK classrooms or Australian classrooms or Japanese classrooms. That's why every time I walk into a movie theater I wonder if it will be my last.

And if the right would want to take away the second they would also be opposed.

What are you saying. That this is another "both sides are equally at fault" issue?

Why do we keep talking as if a real solution is IMPOSSIBLE when there are other major nations that actually HAVE solved the problem, including Canada with it's megalithic moose and Australia where everything except some of the sheep is trying to kill you? It HAS been solved. The solutions are real and proven by real-life experience. We just sit in an America First bubble, thinking and praying without actually putting two and two together.

You do understand that the US is not going back to the 50s in terms of public trust towards the government? It did not stope real hardcore mass murder people in other countries from committing it.

But those measures in those countries DID stop real, hardcore mass murder people from committing mass murder. That isn't opinion. That is proven, solid, historical fact, unless I'm misunderstanding your sentence.

Breivik? The French truck attack? i assume those country have more gun control than the US.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I understand you better.
It helped. It stopped them from killing several people per second. It's a lot harder to pull off mass murder with a truck.

Since when has the difficulty of stopping crimes become an argument against even trying to stop them? Why is this only treated as a legitimate argument with regards to gun control? You still haven't answered that one, Vinod, and it seems to be the point on which a lot of your arguments rest.

[Karha of Honor]

I understand you better.
It helped. It stopped them from killing several people per second. It's a lot harder to pull off mass murder with a truck.

Since when has the difficulty of stopping crimes become an argument against even trying to stop them? Why is this only treated as a legitimate argument with regards to gun control? You still haven't answered that one, Vinod, and it seems to be the point on which a lot of your arguments rest.

i would say they are both difficuklt since they are pulled of by fairly nutty anti-social people who can start spazing out at any moment.

Who said they cannot be stopped? Am i against a the police investigating something like this if it's reported?

[Admiral X]

The comparison between types of speech and types of weapons is absurd and illegitimate.

The mentality that the Second Amendment should be limited to muskets is where the absurdity lies. Applying the same logic to the First only helps make it more obvious just how absurd it is.

A musket is not fundamentally the same as a nuke.

A classic nonsense talking point. "Arms" is well defined, both in terms of what it meant at the period and what it means now. You might have heard the term "small arms." That is what it means. This does not refer to nukes or anything that would be considered ordinance. This is why I made a point of using what a typical infantryman would be carrying as an example. Back in 1776, that was a musket. In 2017, that'd be an M-16/AR-15.

Whereas the right of free speech can be safely extended to all new mediums that arise, extending the right to bare arms in the same manner would quickly lead to a world that would destroy itself.

The Second helps to ensure the First and all the others, frankly.

Unless you are among the hardest of hardcore Libertarians, no one finds private ownership of RPGs, missiles, and nukes acceptable.

Wouldn't mind owning a tank, actually, specifically an Easy 8. But as I already pointed out, you're making an apples and oranges comparison, because the examples you're giving fall under ordinance, not arms.

Which means there is an arbitrary limit to the right to bare arms.

You can bare your arms all you want. As for bearing arms, those arbitrary limits have been put in place by people who typically have no idea what they're talking about, as part of their "common sense gun control."

And since there is a limit, there's no reason it can't be extended to assault rifles, high capacity magazines, armor piercing bullets, etc. etc.

Yeah, because like I said, this is usually due to a lack of understanding, or intentional misinformation. Like, for example, almost any bullet fired from a rifle can pierce most armor due to the velocity it has. And what many claiming to be advocating only "common sense gun control" call "high capacity magazines" are simply the magazine the rifle was actually designed for. And of course there's the common conflation between a fully automatic weapon and a semi-automatic one.

The insurgencies in Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan are qualitatively different from any sort of hypothetical uprising or rebellion in the United States.

Not really. The Soviets in particular had no reason to pull any punches and to be frank, they didn't. But you seem to be missing the entire point I made, which was the "what, you want to make sure or something?"

"Appeal to emotion" lol. I hate to break it to you, but literally every policy has some emotional basis because it's impossible to derive an ought from an is.

Citation needed. Also, are you actually defending legislation like the Patriot Act?

[ORCACommander]

I know its not elegant but here I am just going to bullet out my thoughts on the matter

Honestly I am not sure what you would call me on the political spectrum except to say I think both Republican and Democrat agendas are repugnant but libertarians are short sighted and naive in their goals.

the government can never keep you safe.

Well then, clearly we should stop wasting money on such fruitless things as anti-aircraft weaponry, the Coast Guard, and Firefighters since "the government can never keep you safe."

I know what to call you. A centrist, convinced that your refusal to "take sides" is the same as objectivity and a moral high ground.

I don't trust myself to be objective on anything. we all have our biases one way or another. I keep myself informed on the activities and opinions of both the right and the left and they both make me sick to my core. The fact there is even a BINARY is inherently toxic. it gives no room for nuanced response or debate. The world is no where near cookie cutter.

You see the thing about firefighters and the coast guard is, they are most effective after the shit has hit the fan and you have already done something stupid or suffered a misfortune. They do not prevent

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

I understand you better.
It helped. It stopped them from killing several people per second. It's a lot harder to pull off mass murder with a truck.

Since when has the difficulty of stopping crimes become an argument against even trying to stop them? Why is this only treated as a legitimate argument with regards to gun control? You still haven't answered that one, Vinod, and it seems to be the point on which a lot of your arguments rest.

i would say they are both difficuklt since they are pulled of by fairly nutty anti-social people who can start spazing out at any moment.

Who said they cannot be stopped? Am i against a the police investigating something like this if it's reported?

You're acting like they are inevitable because you oppose any meaningful legislation that would limit the power of these people to enact mass killings so very easily.
They aren't fairly nutty people who can start spazzing out at any moment. White terrorism is not the same as mental illness.

[Admiral X]

It's interesting how some people feel the need to continually bring race into this.

[The Romulan Republic]

I understand you better.
It helped. It stopped them from killing several people per second. It's a lot harder to pull off mass murder with a truck.

Since when has the difficulty of stopping crimes become an argument against even trying to stop them? Why is this only treated as a legitimate argument with regards to gun control? You still haven't answered that one, Vinod, and it seems to be the point on which a lot of your arguments rest.

i would say they are both difficuklt since they are pulled of by fairly nutty anti-social people who can start spazing out at any moment.

Who said they cannot be stopped? Am i against a the police investigating something like this if it's reported?

You're acting like they are inevitable because you oppose any meaningful legislation that would limit the power of these people to enact mass killings so very easily.
They aren't fairly nutty people who can start spazzing out at any moment. White terrorism is not the same as mental illness.

God forgive me for (kind of) having to agree with Admiral X, but referring to the Las Vegas shooting as "white terrorism" is completely inappropriate, unless some major revelations have come out about motive of which I am not yet aware (if so, please elaborate).

Not every mass killing is terrorism. Terrorism refers specifically to violence committed to intimidate people in order to advance an ideological agenda. It is defined by motive, not by body count. There is a double-standard to an extent against Muslims and Arabs and in favour of white people when it comes to what is considered terrorism, but simply the fact that a mass shooting occurred does not make it terrorism. It is only terrorism if the shooter had an ideological motive.

Also, I would note that one can be both a terrorist and mentally ill. The two are not mutually exclusive.

[Admiral X]

In my view, a terrorist is a terrorist. It's kind of hard to say if that was the case here or not since there doesn't seem to be a motive, as he seems to actually fit the same demographic of the people he was shooting at. I'm actually kind of wondering if this isn't a similar case to the University of Texas tower shooting. I suppose maybe we'll know more later. :/

Of course the flip side of this are all the people who are like "if only the people in the crowd were armed." Admittedly I tend to have a similar mentality, but my view is a bit more pragmatic. Aside from law enforcement possibly confusing them for accomplices, what exactly would people in the crowd shoot at? The hotel? With a handgun? Just more dead and injured people at that point.

[The Romulan Republic]

Yeah. This is as clear a case as I can ever recall seeing where more armed bystanders would have done zero good. Though I'd also say that that applies to any shooting in a dark, crowded environment, like the Aurora theatre shooting or the Pulse Nightclub. Can you imagine if, in such an environment, instead of one shooter you had half a dozen (not necessarily trained, likely inexperienced, and probably panicking) people returning fire, with nothing to aim at in the dark by the flashes of each other's weapons fire?