Today's Mass Shooting

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Yeah I'm watching my (mostly very progressive and liberal) Facebook feed do a very hilariously obvious 180 walkback on the "LOL I guess the shooter's race was 'taken into custody.' thing.

*Shrugs* Not that it matters as much or in the way that most people think it does.
 
William Parcher said:
He looks older than 21 and is balding.
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Is this from like an official verified news source or did some idiot on Reddit or Twitter find the first social media profile that matches the name in the rush to be the first one to identify the guy?
 
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Checkmite said:
Weird article. Its central conceit is, "it is true that most mass shootings are committed by white men when 'mass shooting' is given a definition that matches what most people mean and think of when they colloquially use the term;
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That's kind of the problem, isn't it? What people colloquially mean is white guys randomly shooting up. The article shows data that actual spree killers (what should be the colloquial use) are white 54% of the time. Statistically underrepresented. The thing is, we have a habit of thinking of spree killers in terms of the highest body counts. In terms of who is likely to pick up a gun and fill multiple body bags, that is statistically a black male, and by a huge margin.

Member Bogative takes a lot of heat for his postings here. I've given him some too. But his overall point is valid: why to we scream to the rooftops about a white shooter, but accept/dismiss the black shooters, who are demonstrably more likely to be triggermen? The NYT reported upthread that a black man was six times more likely to be identified as a shooter. That's a number that shouldn't be so casually handwaved away. The profoundly icky subtext is that "well, it's not outrageous for a black guy. We accept it."

...but, if we change the definition to include another category of multi-victim shootings that most people don't think of when using the term 'mass shooting', that ratio changes" which is just a bizarre contrarian argument; it seems to me like straining to find a way to make the issue more complicated purely for the sake of then having an excuse to "technically disagree". Yes, if we include crimes of a type that people aren't talking about, of course that's going to skew the accuracy of their stated conclusions because those conclusions weren't about the same set of data.
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Why should it be necessary to torque the definitions around till you find one that suits your confirmation bias?

Who is most likely to be firing the gun in a shooting with multiple victims? A black male, overwhelmingly.

Who is most likely to be firing the gun in a shooting with the highest fatalities? A white male, roughly in proportion to his societal representation (more or less, depending on the data used).

As I see it, we should be talking less about white people calling other white people racist, and more about removing guns from the playing field. This **** is serious.
 
For whatever it is worth:

‘Very Anti-Social’: Suspect in Boulder Supermarket Massacre Was Paranoid, Brother Says

Alissa described his brother as “very anti-social” and paranoid, adding that, in high school, he would describe “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”

“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Alissa said, admitting that he believes his brother is mentally ill.
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If true, then I suppose it may be less socially divisive than if the shooter were motivated by politics or religion or such. It is still early though, presumably more information will come out.

Given his middle eastern-sounding name, I also expect heaping tons of misinformation as well. We live in the era when poorly thought out conspiracy theories usually have more impact than any truthful reality, I expect that will hold true for this occurrence as well.
 
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Thermal said:
That's kind of the problem, isn't it? What people colloquially mean is white guys randomly shooting up. The article shows data that actual spree killers (what should be the colloquial use) are white 54% of the time. Statistically underrepresented. The thing is, we have a habit of thinking of spree killers in terms of the highest body counts. In terms of who is likely to pick up a gun and fill multiple body bags, that is statistically a black male, and by a huge margin.

Member Bogative takes a lot of heat for his postings here. I've given him some too. But his overall point is valid: why to we scream to the rooftops about a white shooter, but accept/dismiss the black shooters, who are demonstrably more likely to be triggermen?
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Yea why bother separating criminal vs criminal gang shoot outs from politically and racially motivated shootings, those are really the same thing. I mean just look at the statistics blacks are clearly predisposed to crime after all.
 
Well thank God we finally have a race to argue about otherwise this 10 person mass murder wouldn't be a discussion.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Yea why bother separating criminal vs criminal gang shoot outs from politically and racially motivated shootings, those are really the same thing. I mean just look at the statistics blacks are clearly predisposed to crime after all.
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Exactly. Why focus on one type of killing to flaggelate a race, even if your own?

Serious question, btw. I don't care a bunch *why* a psycho shoots. Seems to me, they are past reason when they take up mass murder, so studying the inspiration is academic. A nut will find his justification to kill, whether it is far-right rhetoric or religious zealotry or governmental persecution or women not sufficiently appreciating his Rico Suave.

The problem is willingness to kill, and availability of the tools. The Great White Savior trip is an unimportant sidebar hang up.
 
Thermal said:
Exactly. Why focus on one type of killing to flaggelate a race, even if your own?

Serious question, btw. I don't care a bunch *why* a psycho shoots. Seems to me, they are past reason when they take up mass murder, so studying the inspiration is academic. A nut will find his justification to kill, whether it is far-right rhetoric or religious zealotry or governmental persecution or women not sufficiently appreciating his Rico Suave.
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So terrorism is a non issue we should really care about serious things like suicide. Race based terrorism is American as apple pie and not something anyone should worry about.
 
ahhell said:
Because they aren't, at least according to Ben Radford and the Center for Inquiry.

https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/who-are-mass-shooters-mass-shooter-demographics-part-2/

Roughly half spree shooters are white. Aside from that, 70% of Americans are white. Only a racists would expect the majority of domestic terrorists to other than white.
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Checkmite said:
Weird article. Its central conceit is, "it is true that most mass shootings are committed by white men when 'mass shooting' is given a definition that matches what most people mean and think of when they colloquially use the term; but, if we change the definition to include another category of multi-victim shootings that most people don't think of when using the term 'mass shooting', that ratio changes" which is just a bizarre contrarian argument; it seems to me like straining to find a way to make the issue more complicated purely for the sake of then having an excuse to "technically disagree". Yes, if we include crimes of a type that people aren't talking about, of course that's going to skew the accuracy of their stated conclusions because those conclusions weren't about the same set of data.
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Note really:
Newsweek based its claim on data from Mother Jones, which defines a public mass shooting as an incident in which the motive appeared to be indiscriminate killing and a lone gunman took the lives of at least three people. Under this definition, Mother Jones found that non-Hispanic white men have been responsible for 54 percent of mass shootings since August 1982. Another tally, with a longer timeline and a different definition of mass shooting, found non-Hispanic white men make up 63 percent of these attacks. Under both definitions and datasets, white men have committed more mass shootings than any other ethnicity group. Newsweek’s claim is literally accurate. But it’s worth noting the imprecision of this data, and the percentage of mass shootings by white men is lower than their share of the male population, according to Mother Jones.
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The only thing folks don't expect is the "three or more" but that's the definition most commonly used when reporting on mass shootings.

If you're talking about shootings with sat 10 more more victims, those perpetrators may actually be overwhelmingly white, on the other hand, they are so rare as to be useless when trying to draw some meaningful conclusion.

Norman Alexander said:
Also, their own numbers show that the "white" cohort is the largest of all the groupings by skin-colour for mass-shootings. So they are denying their own numbers. It's logic tortured beyond all reasonable levels. That, or they had a result they wanted to fit the data to. ;)
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Silly, sure, the white cohort is the largest of all the cohorts, the white cohort is also the largest cohort of the general US population. I posted this in response to the obviously wrong statement that the "vast majority" of such perpetrators were white. The demographics of mass shooters are roughly as white as the US population. The vast majority are male though.
 
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ahhell said:
If you're talking about shootings with sat 10 more more victims, those perpetrators may actually be overwhelmingly white, on the other hand, they are so rare as to be useless when trying to draw some meaningful conclusion.
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Yea only every week or so.
 
I would love to see some actual data to support the notion that politically and racially motivated killings are disproportionately committed by one race particularly in the US.

I fully expect that they are and that that race is white, but I suspect that it will be difficult to show that more than about 70% of such killings are committed by white people.
 
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If you're talking about shootings with sat say 10 more more victims, those perpetrators may actually be overwhelmingly white, on the other hand, they are so rare as to be useless when trying to draw some meaningful conclusion.
ponderingturtle said:
Yea only every week or so.
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I hate doing this but, Citation needed.

There has only been one this year, two if you reduce the thresh hold to 8.

About a half dozen if you use the most commonly used definitions of 3 or more victims.
 
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Steve said:
What I know on this topic has come mainly from reading the many discussions on these forums. It seems to be that the one issue "guns" people are much better organized, focused, and funded than the "life" people. Being able to focus on guns, a single and simple topic plays well with politicians and judges while the intricacies of a right to stay alive are confusing and require too much thought. "Keep it simple and stay elected" seems to be the focus of recent American politics. Shot people are just "collateral damage" (learned that from the US military :D).
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Yep.

On a broad basis, more people want sensible gun control, but few are passionate about it. While the groups that don't want any gun control are very passionate about it.

And then you get to the line drawing dilemmas: I am for X, Y and Z gun control, but another may only be for X and Y, while another is only for Y and Z and still others would like to see Z and Q or P and R. So the pro-gun control lobby is so fractured in what it is pushing for that no one thing has much support. The pro-gun lobby, as you point out, has a much simpler message.

And besides, the NRA has Russia in its corner and what is more American than that.
 
Steve said:
What I know on this topic has come mainly from reading the many discussions on these forums. It seems to be that the one issue "guns" people are much better organized, focused, and funded than the "life" people. Being able to focus on guns, a single and simple topic plays well with politicians and judges while the intricacies of a right to stay alive are confusing and require too much thought. "Keep it simple and stay elected" seems to be the focus of recent American politics. Shot people are just "collateral damage" (learned that from the US military :D).
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You'd almost certainly terribly misinformed about the issue then.
 
ahhell said:
Note really:

The only thing folks don't expect is the "three or more" but that's the definition most commonly used when reporting on mass shootings.

If you're talking about shootings with sat 10 more more victims, those perpetrators may actually be overwhelmingly white, on the other hand, they are so rare as to be useless when trying to draw some meaningful conclusion.
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Of course is it indiscriminate killing when say it is targeting blacks, jews or women?
 
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