Shooting at gay club

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Shooting at gay club

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2dajashby
Jun. 12, 2016, 7:44 pm

Looks to me like a case of when too much is not enough. Already we're hearing the same old, same old...

A very American tragedy.

3DinadansFriend
Jun. 15, 2016, 3:25 pm

It is pretty much the same old. The NRA was originally a very tame group, running shooting education courses and in the later 1800's helping the government sell off their war and militia surplus Springfield single shot cartridge rifles, a great deal has changed with the arrival of St. Pierre their current (and perhaps rabid) director. Now they are almost as powerful a lobby as the American health insurers.
The Orlando shooter has certainly provided Mr. Trump with more ammunition, though DaDonuld seems to be confused as to which of his themes will benefit most from this massacre. What if Andrew Jackson's parents had been excluded from the USA on the grounds that their child was going to be a disrupter of American politics?
The whole family, wife included now seems destined to the kind of celebrity usually reserved for a Kardashian....sad and tragic people, spreading their pain.

4LamSon
Jun. 17, 2016, 6:16 pm

Every time there is an incident like this, the roundup of the usual suspects to blame or things to blame goes into high gear. It's gays, homophobes, right wing, left wing, guns, video games, being 'dissed'...

Never is the individual held accountable for their decisions and/or actions. The Orlando shooter made the decision to kill and acted. If he had decided the opposite, none of this would have happened.

The downside would be no grist for the bloggers, the 24-hour news talking heads and various action committees for this or that.

5southernbooklady
Jun. 17, 2016, 7:04 pm

>4 LamSon: Never is the individual held accountable for their decisions and/or actions. The Orlando shooter made the decision to kill and acted. If he had decided the opposite, none of this would have happened.

In this case the guy was held accountable. He's dead now.

But just think, every day there are thousands of people not shooting up night clubs! All sorts of terrible things not happening!

6dajashby
Jun. 17, 2016, 10:15 pm

#4
At first glance your response just appears daft. Perpetrators are always held accountable; if not killed at the time of the massacre they are subsequently charged and tried.

However, it seems to me that yours is a peculiarly American attitude. I am perplexed by the resigned acceptance displayed by so many Americans to mass killings - it first struck me after the Sandy Hook atrocity. It's the sort of attitude which one thinks appropriate to a natural disaster; fire, flood, earthquake. "These things happen, you can't blame anybody." Pray for the victims if you're religious and get on with life until it happens again, as it inevitably will. Nothing to see here, move along, folks.

It's actually even more passive than in this country, which is prone to floods and bushfires. It's not unusual for there to be a subsequent enquiry - if not a Royal Commission - into whether the disaster could have been prevented or mitigated.

7John5918
Bearbeitet: Jun. 18, 2016, 1:49 am

>4 LamSon:

Of course we are all ultimately responsible for our own actions, and as others have mentioned all these murderers are held accountable, either dying during the incident or being arrested and taken to court.

But what is the mental state of someone who guns down a hundred people? Could we not at least explore the possibility that he is somehow disturbed and/or unstable, with a reduced capacity to make responsible decisions? It seems there are quite a few such people around. If guns were not so readily available, would disturbed and unstable people be able to kill so easily?

In Britain a couple of days ago a chap murdered an MP. According to initial reports he had a home-made pistol and a knife and he fired three shots, which was enough to tragically end the life of a respected public servant. But how much worse could it have been if he had had an assault rifle with hundreds of rounds of ammunition?

A victim's view from a different incident: UK Gun Laws ‘Saved Tube Knife Attack From Turning Into Orlando Style Massacre’ (Huffington Post). Incidentally, in this case the murderer is being held at Broadmoor, which is a secure psychiatric facility, so in fact he has been judged not to be responsible for his actions, and the victim says, "it is my personal hope that he continues to receive psychiatric help".

8BruceCoulson
Jun. 18, 2016, 9:05 am

>7 John5918:

But I think this misses the point. Why are these people doing this? The means and opportunity existed for quite some time.

Removing the method is a palliative...but it won't stop the problem unless we discover what's driving the phenomena. It's good that ONLY an MP was murdered...but that doesn't help the MP.

9southernbooklady
Jun. 18, 2016, 9:16 am

>8 BruceCoulson: Removing the method is a palliative...but it won't stop the problem unless we discover what's driving the phenomena.

You mean, like the way our culture values violent solutions over non-violent ones as a matter of course? We're an aggressive society. War is always an option in our diplomatic tool box. It's not even a always a reluctant option. In the US, we actually think guns are a resolution to a conflict. Britain isn't that bad, but we always keep violence as a possible or even probable resolution to a given problem.

10John5918
Bearbeitet: Jun. 20, 2016, 12:53 am

>8 BruceCoulson:

I agree with >9 southernbooklady: that nonviolence is not held up as a value in our societies. There are a couple of recent threads (can't remember where now) where I have alluded to a conference on nonviolence which I attended at the Vatican in April. The whole focus of it was to move away from the concept that there is such a thing as a "just war", ie accepting that violence is a valid option amongst others to resolve our problems and in the eyes of many individuals, organisations and governments is in fact one of the first options to be exercised, to shift to a culture where nonviolence is the default position and violence is considered to be unacceptable except perhaps as an aberration in the most extreme last resort edge cases when all else fails.

"Why are these people doing this?" It might be pertinent to ask why are so many disturbed and unstable people out on the street. Could it be because we are not willing to spend enough money on caring for vulnerable people? Which is perhaps another way of saying that we have not prioritised one very obvious nonviolent contribution to resolving the problem.

11DinadansFriend
Bearbeitet: Jun. 18, 2016, 4:55 pm

I (a Canadian observer but close enough to be collateral damage) return to a triune solution:
1) restrict the weapons, even do a buy-back of weapons, expensive but less so than all those funerals and lost potentially valuable lives.
2) Spend money on mental health facilities...and end the madness of the free market in health care...mental health isn't a high profit area, so your Insurance lobby isn't interested in providing it. And de-stigmatize mental health issues, but that would lead to the third part of the solution....
3) Educate your population, give "The People" at least the skills they need to operate your politics...if trusted and shown how your country actually works, you'd get a less violent, less racist, and less environmentally damaging country. Yes, it costs money to educate your people...and that would mean that the market-place would cease to be the final arbiter of your mortality...but you'd be better off.
>9 southernbooklady:: an insightful comment.
>10 John5918:: okay we seem to have good contributions here as well.