Some good points. I'm continually impressed with the coherence of arguments on this forum :)
Right?!
I love having these kinds of intense conversations, and I'm always so excited when I find people who are willing to actually think about big things.
I don't understand.
So the term "mass shooting" is pretty unscientific. There's no universal agreement as to what exactly constitutes a mass shooting. For example, I think we can all agree there's a difference between a mass shooting (defined as four or more victims, including or not including the shooter depending on who you ask) where one person murders the rest of their family and then themselves, all within their own home, and something like what happened at Sandy Hook, where someone with no personal connection murdered 26 people.
With the first example, it's still heart wrenching, but most of us can probably understand the emotional trajectory involved, and how factors like mental illness or alcoholism or abuse or extreme poverty, etc., can combine and feed off each other until the person experiencing those factors reaches a nightmarish climax of violence. It's not right and it's not acceptable, but most of us can still see the darker side of humanity within such an act. And I think a good way to address those sorts of murders would be to seriously reform the way we as a society deal with domestic violence. In those sorts of cases there are almost always plenty of opportunities to intervene. A few months ago I was listening to a former victim of domestic violence. Her former partner had murdered two people, and she was explaining how she'd tried to find help for years. She knew he was bipolar and violent, but every time she tried to get help the cops would show up. They'd either question him and leave, which would leave her at the mercy of her abusive angry partner, or they'd arrest him and take him to jail. He would get out in a few weeks, but then he would come home even sicker and more violent than before. And she couldn't cut him out of her life either, because she was unemployed (mostly as a result of the trauma and hospital time necessitated by the abuse) and they had a son, and since her partner had income and she didn't the courts wouldn't let her get a restraining order to protect her
and her son. Obviously, she wasn't going to let her son be alone with his abusive father.
I think the most important issue in that situation is the prohibitive cost of quality mental health care. If that woman had someplace she could turn, where she could check her partner into a care facility, where he could have access to therapy and medication and other people who understood what he was going through, he could have ended up like the millions of people who are bipolar and are
not violent or abusive. And I don't think that shooting this man would have been a good solution either. The woman made very clear in her interview that this man had a lot to offer the world, that he was a talented artist and a loving father when he wasn't having an episode. To her, even after everything that had happened, he was worth saving. But she couldn't get him the help he needed and every time she tried he just got worse, until it was too late. That's a story that repeats itself every day in this country. And, to me at least, that is unacceptable.
Especially since I also have relatives with severe mental illness. Every time my cousin or my uncle are having a psychotic episode I live in absolute terror that they'll attack someone or each other or get themselves shot by the cops. I love my uncle and cousin a lot, in fact my cousin is probably the one person in this world who actually
gets me, but I live on the other side of the country from both of them on purpose because I'm not an idiot and I know they're dangerous when they're having an episode. My uncle threatened to kill me when I was three and until a couple years ago it was my job as the oldest of the offspring to make sure he stayed away from my sisters and other cousins at family gatherings, because I'm the only member of my generation (other than his son, obviously) who's actually seen him during an episode before. There have been long nights when my mother and I wait next to the phone, because we know my uncle and cousin are fighting and each has threatened to kill the other. And there have definitely been close calls.
But events like what happened at Sandy Hook and at Pulse in Orlando are different. There's no understandable emotional trajectory for the violence. At least, I can't understand it. I don't have any kind of personal experience to connect it to, which is how I best understand things, so maybe that has something to do with it but
still. Events like those are more like war crimes, especially in terms of mass civilian casualties, but even the worst war crimes are committed by soldiers who have lost their own humanity in the fog of war. I can understand that's a survival trait, even if the results turn my stomach and make me feel guilty for paying taxes. No one is quite sure why people commit public mass shootings, but they don't have the excuse that war criminals do because they are part of civilian life, not traumatized by the battlefield.
Some law enforcement agencies make a distinction between "mass shootings" (4 or more dead) and "public mass shootings" (4 or more victims selected indiscriminately). In that sense, the difference is whether or not there is a personal connection between the shooter and his victims (I say his because mass shooters are almost exclusively male, with one or two rare exceptions).
Personally, I think there's another difference. I think your average murderer isn't really thinking beyond the act itself. But mass shooters want attention. They want the news coverage to be all about them afterwards. They're trying to cause as much emotional devastation to as many strangers as possible. It's not just about the violence in the moment, its about the pain and suffering that will come afterwards. I think they're trying to wound the world itself, as much as the people they're actually shooting.
Is this making any sense? I feel like I'm getting too emotional to make much sense, so let me know.
I don't know how many armed guards were there, but it sounds like only one shot back. If the shooter's hostages had been armed, this might have gone differently. Even with just one person shooting back, they were able to force the shooter into the bathroom where the police were able to rescue his hostages and kill him.
I still can't bring myself to read the full timeline of what happened at Pulse. I just tried again and started to cry. One of the victims used to live in my community, and I've been meeting her loved ones over the last week and I just can't read the fucking timeline, it's too...So I'll have to try and talk about this without having all my facts totally straight, so please bear with me.
So the shooter barricaded himself in the bathroom when the police arrived. I know that. I also know that people who were hiding in the bathroom were shot and killed while in there. I know that the police held back because the shooter was threatening to strap himself and the hostages with explosives. While that ended up being a lie, it was a possibility. If he had been wearing an explosive and someone had shot him every single person there would have died. That's the kind of problem you have to think about when you're considering arming people who don't have extensive training, neither firearms training
nor training for how to deal with an active shooter. It's an incredibly complicated situation. One wrong move can turn a tragedy into a cataclysm.
I don't think it would have made much of a difference if everyone had guns. I think more people would have died from friendly fire, and we still don't know if that happened in this instance with the cops who might have accidentally shot some of the victims--the investigation is ongoing. Consider what happened last year in Waco, Texas. A shootout broke out at a meeting of different biker gangs. 9 people died and 18 were injured. And most of those deaths and injuries were because you had everybody shooting at the same time, bullets flying in all directions, and it was absolute chaos.
Also,
I don't want to go to a nightclub full of guns. It's already hard enough to escape from drunk, aggressive men who won't take no an answer on the dance floor or the bar. I've been groped and grabbed, but I don't even want to think about what might have happened if those men had been armed. When it's just physical contact, which I can duck, dodge, shake off or slip away and find a bouncer, that's something I can deal with even if all I want to do is dance my stress away and flirt with pretty girls. But I'm just imagining the last guy who was too aggressive. Before he grabbed me and dragged my torso into his groin (I'm short), he made a huge deal of telling me how many women he had control over in his job as a correction's officer at a women's prison. It was
very Orange Is The New Black. He showed me his work ID and he kept telling me I couldn't even imagine what he had to do on a daily basis to those "animals."
Of course, I'm sitting there thinking,
buddy, if this is your way of hitting on women at a club then I think those women at the prison need help, because you are clearly unbalanced. Now, at the time I was able to escape him when a friend to came over and pretended to cry and then we went and got a bouncer and they kept an eye on him for the rest of the night, and it was all peachy keen. But he got really angry when I pulled out of his grip, and given his obvious control issues and his level of intoxication at the time I shudder to think what might have happened if he had a gun.
Banning the purchase of arms isn't tyrannical in and of itself but it enables a tyrannical government. The purpose of the second amendment was first and foremost to defend against a future tyrannical government. An AR-15 is not necessary for hunting, but it does help defend against a government that has AR-15s. The government isn't tyrannical now and it might never be. But if it ever is, Americans will be a lot better off than were Jews in Nazi Germany and dissidents under Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and so on.
An AR-15 ain't gonna do jack shit against a drone. The firepower of the American government is so far beyond the scope of guns, it's almost funny. They've already killed some American citizens with drone strikes even though they're not supposed to, and I'm willing to bet that in the event of an actual insurrection all bets are off.
And there were plenty of Jews who armed themselves and fought back against the Nazis. They were outnumbered and outgunned and they died first.
Guns don't keep you safe from a tyrannical government. Love and community does. My great-grandparents were able to escape Hungarian fascists because their neighbors warned them that the army was coming to arrest all the Jews. I had a teacher whose mother survived because some friends of her parents agreed to hide her and she spent the entirety of WWII pretending to be so severely mentally retarded that the Nazi soldiers didn't even want to bother sending her to a camp. My grandmother's roommate escaped from a Nazi work camp a week before the entire camp was sent to Auschwitz because she had friends who lived in a nearby town who rescued her. And yes, sometimes armed resistance is necessary, but by the time it becomes necessary your rights have already been violated to the point of no return.
Like most Jews, I was grew up hearing over and over from my elders, "It's happened before. It
will happen again." There's no "can" or "maybe" or "if" about it. American Jews have been through so much persecution over the millennia that preparing for it has become part of our cultural heritage. Times will get bad again, but we survive those times by following our beliefs and by staying educated. It's how we survived the Dark Ages. It's how we survived the Spanish Inquisition. It's how we survived the Holocaust. And, God forbid, it might end up being how we survive a Trump presidency.
So as humans we survive the darkness by staying true to yourself. And that means that if you live under a tyrannical government and you're the kind of person who would violently resist a tyrannical government, no law is going to stop you. But that kind of person sounds like a reasonable enough individual to me, so an ideal gun control solution for our country and culture in it's current state would protect the rights of reasonable stable people.
Hopefully.
Looking at mass shootings specifically, we can certainly do with change. I'm with Dr. Paul in that a policy of interventionism is to blame for rising terrorism.
I agree, but I also think the world is too small for isolationist foreign policy. I think we should totally re-evaluate the goals of our foreign policy. Like, imagine how different things would be if the Security Council or anyone, literally
anyone, had been able to get Assad out of office
before his army started bombing Homs?
Before the peaceful protests turned violent?
Before the fundamentalist extremists from Iraq that eventually became known as Daesh (which I've decided to use instead of ISIS because Isis is a beautiful powerful mother goddess who is supposed to protect slaves
so these bastards should not get to use her name)? Back then we weren't talking about a complete and total shit show. We were talking about many thousands of young people dancing in the streets as a form of protest. That's how the war in Syria began.
I don't think we should have interfered militarily, but what if instead of just trying to kill enemies as they arrived we used the unprecedented resources and power of our country to address the underlying causes of these conflicts? What if, instead of occupying entire countries, we put all those trillions of dollars to use and built universal education? It's not a perfect solution, but it would help a lot of people and give many poor children in rural areas options other than joining the local militia--which for far too many young people in the world is the only job available. So by doing that we'd drastically cut recruitment numbers, as well as increasing prosperity and stability world wide. We know that poverty and ignorance are two of the biggest contributors to national and international strife.
I think the world has moved beyond conventional warfare. Globalization cannot be undone, especially since the introduction of the internet. I think we need to start changing our behavior drastically. But I also think isolationism won't work, because so many of us live and love and think and work on a global scale. Things that happen in other countries can affect me personally, so I can't just not do something to help the people I care about who are living in Denmark or Israel or Morocco or Thailand or Japan or Australia or wherever.
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