Today's Mass Shooting

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dudalb said:
That, and the FBI does not have the manpower to keep an eye on everybody who comes t thier attention:they have to choose which to keep an eye on and which can be ignores as being unlikely to act. Being Human, the FBI makes the wrong call on occasion.
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For example the time they sent 15 agents to investigate a garage pull rope.

Speaking of the FBI, here's what Wikipedia has to say about the subject you mentioned earlier when you called me a bigot.
According to the FBI, Black or African Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with Whites 41.1%, and "Other"/Unknown 3.0% in cases were the race was known.

The per-capita offending rate for African Americans was roughly six times higher than Whites, and the victim rate is a similar figure.
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JoeMorgue said:
Well thank God we finally have a race to argue about otherwise this 10 person mass murder wouldn't be a discussion.
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Exactly - from someone on the other side of the Atlantic, the important factor is that he had easy access to weapons that make little sense in the context of self-defence, but do in spree-killings.

Someone with a history of paranoid, disturbed, and antisocial behaviour and one arrest for violent behaviour.
 
I know, I know! Mass shooting threads always drift toward gun control. However, when I heard this on the morning news today it struck me as a concise comment on how indifferent many Americans are to shooting deaths in their country:

"Every time there’s a shooting we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders," (Senator) Cruz said, ......"

This tells me:

1. Shootings are so commonplace that they are considered to be business as usual, and perfectly normal, by an entire political faction.

2. Cruz, and his ilk, sit in a federal committee and complain about the committee trying to do its job of protecting US residents from gun violence. The concept of actually offering something productive and positive towards the objective is totally alien to him/them.

3. Support for this viewpoint is common enough in the USA that mass shootings will continue to be business as usual for many years to come. Americans are wasting their time even talking about such things. Each mass shooting will be in the news cycle for just a few days and then fade away.

4. Discussions such as seen on this forum regarding "motive" - terrorist, lunatic, political expediency - are largely irrelevant. People with guns will continue, quite regularly, to shoot people without guns regardless of motive.

5. Americans have no practical alternative to adopting Cruz's viewpoint and to learn/continue to accept mass shootings as normal in American society.

And with this rant I too have decided to take my own advice accept mass shootings a normal and acceptable in American society, and take no further interest in such discussions.
 
dudalb said:
True, but that not mean that the extreme left is not capable of similiar violence. I give you the radical terror groups of the early 1970's:The Weathermen, the SLA etc.
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Anyone is capable of mass violence.

There is no comparison between the danger of the radical right and the radical left in the US. It's bad faith to suggest such.

It's telling you have to cite radical groups from decades ago to even have examples. Lone right wing gunmen commit more murders during a single spree than these radical left orgs do for their entire operating history.

The evidence is overwhelming. The radical right is the chief source of domestic terrorism in this country, and it's not even close.
 
smartcooky said:
It is a mistake to attribute to skin colour that which is more likely to be attributable to poverty.
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In the same year, 14 million whites were below the poverty line compared to 8 million blacks. If poverty is the driver of homicides, whites would be committing nearly twice as many as blacks. Or if you use rates of poverty as a reference, the difference would be closer to 2.5 times higher rather than 6 times.
 
Steve said:
I know, I know! Mass shooting threads always drift toward gun control. However, when I heard this on the morning news today it struck me as a concise comment on how indifferent many Americans are to shooting deaths in their country:

"Every time there’s a shooting we play this ridiculous theater where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders," (Senator) Cruz said, ......"

This tells me:

1. Shootings are so commonplace that they are considered to be business as usual, and perfectly normal, by an entire political faction.

2. Cruz, and his ilk, sit in a federal committee and complain about the committee trying to do its job of protecting US residents from gun violence. The concept of actually offering something productive and positive towards the objective is totally alien to him/them.

3. Support for this viewpoint is common enough in the USA that mass shootings will continue to be business as usual for many years to come. Americans are wasting their time even talking about such things. Each mass shooting will be in the news cycle for just a few days and then fade away.

4. Discussions such as seen on this forum regarding "motive" - terrorist, lunatic, political expediency - are largely irrelevant. People with guns will continue, quite regularly, to shoot people without guns regardless of motive. 5. Americans have no practical alternative to adopting Cruz's viewpoint and to learn/continue to accept mass shootings as normal in American society.

And with this rant I too have decided to take my own advice accept mass shootings a normal and acceptable in American society, and take no further interest in such discussions.
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The highlighted.

I think it is worth pushing back on this, because it is not a problem in other countries. Yes there are spree killers, and often they are spree shooters, but they are rare because it takes more effort and planning.
 
The suspect in the Boulder grocery store shooting seems to identify as Muslim. Is there any indication that he was a practicing Muslim?
 
smartcooky said:
It is a mistake to attribute to skin colour that which is more likely to be attributable to poverty.
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Been addressed on other threads. Appalachia, one of the USAs poorest areas, is home to 25 million predominately white and impoverished people with high gun ownership and very low violent crime.

If you are suggesting inner city poverty among blacks to be "different" and more prone to extreme violence, you are tacitly acknowledging that police are right to profile. Its a no-win.

As politically toxic as it is to discuss, the Wiki article cited by Bogative and ahhell are the Big Kahunas of data points.

Black people commit 56% of homicides, and that's six times the rate of white people.

White people commit less homicides than their representation in the population.

Also, white cats, contrary to pop wisdom, commit less spree killings, proportionately.

These are FBI stats. We can debate the reasons for this disparity, such as socioeconomic and cultural factors, lack of opportunities and sufficient education grounded in generational racism and Jim Crow fallout and the like, but the data is the data and shouldn't get handwaved away on a ******* skeptics forum. Shouldn't this be a place to discuss these kinds of things dispassionately, and without the posturing?
 
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Thermal said:
Been addressed on other threads. Appalachia, one of the USAs poorest areas, is home to 25 million predominately white and impoverished people with high gun ownership and very low violent crime.

If you are suggesting inner city poverty among blacks to be "different" and more prone to extreme violence, you are tacitly acknowledging that police are right to profile. Its a no-win.

As politically toxic as it is to discuss, the Wiki article cited by Bogative and ahhell are the Big Kahunas of data points.

Black people commit 56% of homicides, and that's six times the rate of white people.

White people commit less homicides than their representation in the population.

Also, white cats, contrary to pop wisdom, commit less spree killings, proportionately.

These are FBI stats. We can debate the reasons for this disparity, such as socioeconomic and cultural factors, lack of opportunities and sufficient education grounded in generational racism and Jim Crow fallout and the like, but the data is the data and shouldn't get handwaved away on a ******* skeptics forum. Shouldn't this be a place to discuss these kinds of things dispassionately, and without the posturing?
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Perhaps, as a sketpics forum, we should ask why any discussion of mass shootings, especially those committed by white men, are quickly derailed by tedious references to black crime.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Perhaps, as a sketpics forum, we should ask why any discussion of mass shootings, especially those committed by white men, are quickly derailed by tedious references to black crime.
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In this case, the claims being made about the crimes committed by white men lacked evidence. IE that the vast majority of such crimes were committed by white men.

These arguments mostly ignore that neither white folks nor black folks are monolithic cultures. The violence of each group is largely isolated to particular places and cultures.
 
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Thermal said:
Sure, in the most narrow sense.

Should one consult a roster of white supremacists, you ain't finding any Omar and Muhammads
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Far enough into past and you wouldn't find any Flanigans or Alonzos, either.

I don't see why we give white supremacists' fluid opinion of who should count as "white" any more credibility than we give the rest of their faulty philosophy.
 
Checkmite said:
Far enough into past and you wouldn't find any Flanigans or Alonzos, either.

I don't see why we give white supremacists' fluid opinion of who should count as "white" any more credibility than we give the rest of their faulty philosophy.
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IDK, if the question is "was this guy motivated by white supremecy?" I'd say we probably should.

The claim was basically that white men commit the vast majority of mass killings. It seems to me that not just white supremecist would think that South, Central, and West Asians aren't generally listed as white in that context.
 
What we have so far is a guy with a history of paranoia, suggesting schizophrenia, who was able to by a rifle of some sort only a week ago.

And so far it doesn't look like he was ever seen by mental health providers. I'm very curious about that.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
What we have so far is a guy with a history of paranoia, suggesting schizophrenia, who was able to by a rifle of some sort only a week ago.

And so far it doesn't look like he was ever seen by mental health providers. I'm very curious about that.
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What's curious about that? Health care costs a lot of money here in the US. Plenty of people in need of treatment, including mental health treatment, do without.

It's very common for mentally ill people in the US to not have access to mental health treatment outside of a carceral context.
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
What we have so far is a guy with a history of paranoia, suggesting schizophrenia, who was able to by a rifle of some sort only a week ago.

And so far it doesn't look like he was ever seen by mental health providers. I'm very curious about that.
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With a history of paranoia and with a previous arrest for violence.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Perhaps, as a sketpics forum, we should ask why any discussion of mass shootings, especially those committed by white men, are quickly derailed by tedious references to black crime.
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Twasn't I who brought it up. The hackneyed white self-flaggelation of "why is it always white guys" was what I was initially responding to, and others widened the scope, as often happens in discussions.

What gets my goat is the refusal for skeptics to accept emperical data, and defer to Twitter rumors. Pisses me off, and I'll call it out at every opportunity that it arises. We, of all discussion fora, should be above that.
 
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