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~*Official Thread of America's Return to Thoughts & Prayers Normalcy*~


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On 2/9/2023 at 7:54 PM, osxmatt said:

Now with guns!!

Serious question: I keep seeing certain 'Murricans (read: mostly red state boomers) pointing out that when they were kids they regularly brought guns to school and it was no big deal. Specifically, rifles and shotguns in their cars during high school so that they could go hunting and shit after class. And yet there were virtually no spree killings by kids back then (maybe like one with a single death every few years). In other words, not really "now with guns".

 

So what changed to cause this explosion of cases?

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So juvenile school shooters are predominantly motivated by "far right wing rhetoric" and use "assault weapons"? 'Cause that's the phenomenon I'm primarily talking about. Mass shootings in general have been far more prevalent in the past by comparison (although still much rarer overall than today) so there the unidimensional gun explanation at least makes somewhat more sense.

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2 hours ago, Demut said:

So juvenile school shooters are predominantly motivated by "far right wing rhetoric" and use "assault weapons"? 'Cause that's the phenomenon I'm primarily talking about. Mass shootings in general have been far more prevalent in the past by comparison (although still much rarer overall than today) so there the unidimensional gun explanation at least makes somewhat more sense.

The shootings that aren’t just interpersonal squabbles gone wrong and out of control (and therefore have the higher body counts that make national news) absolutely are a right wing phenomenon. It’s when this isn’t the case that it is notable (eg pulse)

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Are they? Now, I'm no scholar and only know of school shooters' motivations what I remember from the respective coverage at the time but ... were school shooters like the guys at Columbine for example motivated by "far right wing rhetoric"? Seems to me like those cases are more aptly described as being committed by disillusioned, depressed nihilists, often on drugs like SSRIs (that have side effects like emotional blunting and increasing violent behavior), and frequently with traumatic pasts. If you read what the perpetrators left behind in writing (in the cases where they did so) you usually find them airing their grievances with the world in general rather than any particular partisan issue. So the access to guns is clearly a prerequisite for these shootings but given the aforementioned facts regarding their historic prevalence it cannot be a major, let alone primary, cause behind those incidents.

 

Again, I see your point when it comes to spree killings in general, way more of those are clearly committed for overtly right-wing ideological reasons than the reverse (or those drawn to said ideologies are more likely to commit them, however you wanna look at it). But at least from what I've seen school shootings don't mirror that trend so obviously.

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3 hours ago, Demut said:

Are they? Now, I'm no scholar and only know of school shooters' motivations what I remember from the respective coverage at the time but ... were school shooters like the guys at Columbine for example motivated by "far right wing rhetoric"? Seems to me like those cases are more aptly described as being committed by disillusioned, depressed nihilists, often on drugs like SSRIs (that have side effects like emotional blunting and increasing violent behavior), and frequently with traumatic pasts. If you read what the perpetrators left behind in writing (in the cases where they did so) you usually find them airing their grievances with the world in general rather than any particular partisan issue. So the access to guns is clearly a prerequisite for these shootings but given the aforementioned facts regarding their historic prevalence it cannot be a major, let alone primary, cause behind those incidents.

 

Again, I see your point when it comes to spree killings in general, way more of those are clearly committed for overtly right-wing ideological reasons than the reverse (or those drawn to said ideologies are more likely to commit them, however you wanna look at it). But at least from what I've seen school shootings don't mirror that trend so obviously.

Quote

Look at the first paragraph  

And even though one of them was Jewish that doesn’t mean much tbh

 

and others:

 

white-extremist-active-shooter-promo-156
WWW.NYTIMES.COM

Active-shooter episodes in which the gunmen espoused white extremist beliefs have been among the deadliest in recent years.

I did leave out the effect of the myth of traditional masculinity as perceived on the right as a cause

 

was gonna quote from wapo but it won’t let me and on mobile fixing this shit sucks

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Huh, interesting. That's fairly clear-cut* but I never heard that about the two of them. I wonder why.

 

*Although I suppose it could be argued that they sought out that kind of thing because of their pre-existing issues rather than being exposed to that content causing them. A chicken and egg kinda thing, I guess.

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On 2/11/2023 at 8:32 PM, Demut said:

Serious question: I keep seeing certain 'Murricans (read: mostly red state boomers) pointing out that when they were kids they regularly brought guns to school and it was no big deal. Specifically, rifles and shotguns in their cars during high school so that they could go hunting and shit after class. And yet there were virtually no spree killings by kids back then (maybe like one with a single death every few years). In other words, not really "now with guns".

 

So what changed to cause this explosion of cases?

Two words, begins with ‘social’ ends with ‘media’.

 

Twitter passes 100 million users circa 2011–use that as a proxy for the degree of penetration/ubiquity of these media platforms.  Not long after these episodes of violence begin to multiply in number.

 

Unlike in earlier periods, you are now, via the social media platforms’ ‘engagement’ algorithms, systematically provoking paranoid, gun-bearing people with increasingly extreme right-wing rhetoric and conspiracy theories micro targeted to their circumstances and sensibilities—and doing so on an unprecedented global scale.  The algorithms are also pushing these individuals to connect with like-minded people to form so-called ‘echo chambers’, augmenting the effect.

 

There is also a rise in left-wing  or apolitical extremism, (the algorithms have no political preferences) but in the US lefties and the politically unattached are less likely to own guns.  Also, because of the US’s contentious racial history, and the cultural focus on the first black president at the time of social media ‘liftoff’, racially-focused right-wing rhetoric produces a bigger ‘dopamine hit’ of fear/outrage than non-racially-focused left-wing rhetoric; and, again, the algorithms are designed to maximize the dopamine hit.

 

The effect is also compounding, like the interest on a bad debt; maybe these platforms make just 5% of the ‘on-the-edge’ population a lot more cranky and pushes them into extreme territory; because this change is networked, it’s enough, over time, to produce exponentially more individuals predisposed towards violence.

 

People will say “oh they said the same thing about television”, but tv never had the same incentive structure/business model as social media, and never had the capacity to adapt its content for the individual in an instantaneous and microtargeted way.

 

There are other causes, of course, (economic decline/discontent is intimately related to all this) but I would argue that this is the central factor that accounts for the ‘big difference’ you mentioned.

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Yeah, so I was just told. For some reason I never knew that. From what I recalled they were "just" two edgy loners with anger issues. But what that article points out is pretty clear-cut, going around shouting "Heil Hitler", obsessing over WW2, planning the massacre on Hitler's birthday and so on. Was that a common part of the reporting at the time? Maybe that wasn't emphasized here for some reason. At most I remember certain outlets going with the "violent vidya!!!1one" angle, same as the Erfurt school shooting here three years later (where the perpetrator got inspired by Columbine).

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This country and the media have a long history of deep denial of white supremacist violence. 
 

like even the OKC bombing was branded (in my memory at least, growing up in what is now chud country) as “anti government” rather than explicitly white supremacist terrorism based upon the white nationalist fan fiction that is the Turner Diaries. 

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6 hours ago, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

This country and the media have a long history of deep denial of white supremacist violence. 
 

like even the OKC bombing was branded (in my memory at least, growing up in what is now chud country) as “anti government” rather than explicitly white supremacist terrorism based upon the white nationalist fan fiction that is the Turner Diaries. 


The Buffalo shooting is a good example. A lot of conservative white people told our station that it wasn’t white supremacy; it was mental health.

 

As if 1) white people killing black people for being black hasn’t been entrenched in U.S. history, and 2) having an issue negates your racism.

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w_800
WWW.CNN.COM

Students at Michigan State University were told to shelter in place immediately after shots were fired on campus Monday evening, campus police said.

 

 

Quote

 

Students at Michigan State University were told to shelter in place immediately after shots were fired on campus Monday evening, campus police said.

 

“There have been shots fired near Berkey Hall on the East Lansing campus. Please secure-in-place immediately. Police are active on scene. More information to follow,” MSU police tweeted.

 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

 

 

Two fatalities reported on the scanner so far.

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11 minutes ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

In this tragedy, the SRT teams themselves aren't broadcasting in the clear, but the other units are broadcasting the position of the SRT teams.

I've been watching that on Reddit wondering where the info was coming from.

 

This hits closer to home than the Oxford school shooting since I went here and my neighbor's kids go here.

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1 minute ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

 

In this tragedy, the SRT teams themselves aren't broadcasting in the clear, but the other units are broadcasting the position of the SRT teams.

 

Former LEO buddy of mine explained that with so many agencies involved they'll just patch all the dispatch channels together since some will be bound to forget. Ten Codes are also replaced by plain English.  

 

At the false alarm at my uni (the gunbrella incident), we had over 100 cops on campus in minutes from at least 5 agencies. 

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I've heard more than a dozen separate location references where either shots have been reported or a suspect sighted or some other suspicious activity, most -- if not, all -- of which we can be sure simply aren't accurate.

 

Just gives a sense of utter chaos and confusion that is part and parcel of these atrocities.

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9 minutes ago, Ominous said:

November 2021 Oxford High School had a shooting with multiple fatalities. There are for sure several freshmen at MSU that graduated from Oxford Highschool last year. Can you imagine going through 2 shooting events less than 24 months apart?


try 2-3 months but losing in the 2nd time around

 

image.jpeg
TORONTO.CTVNEWS.CA

A woman killed when a gunman opened fire in a Colorado movie theatre had survived Toronto’s recent Eaton Centre shooting and wrote in a blog that she was “blessed” to have survived the first incident.

 

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