How come none of these nutcases ever go shoot a billionaire or two instead of random Innocents?

It’s both. Even terrible people with something to lose are less likely to throw it all away.

If this guy makes $35k a year at dollar general, he probably doesn’t go on a murder spree.

But you could also just not be an asshole. Why go after random people instead of someone who actually helps cause the bullshit?

Both apply. Yes, he ultimately chose to do it. However society shaped and funneled him into that position. It’s not a binary decision between individual and systematic, both can apply. In this case, social systems failed and put a large number of people in a bad situation with an apparent easy way out. Almost all then chose not to go on a killing spree. Unfortunately, “almost all” is “all”. Some will make the bad choice, when put in that position.

As a society, we can’t change individual choices. What we can do however is change the framework those choices are made in. If we aim to put fewer people in that position, then fewer will make the wrong choice, and we will all be safer for it.

society isnt you or i society is the general way things are and yes society is the cause of shootings. mental health is a direct measure of society.

society fights tooth and nail to have guns be super easy to get.

society also fights tooth and nail to keep (mental) healthcare behind an impossible wall.

so now we are generating mentally ill people that have easy access to guns. multiply that by the internal bias and bigotry you were raised with and many millions of potential offenders. boom you have a shooting every freaking day.

yes the shooter is shitty and should be killed or in jail but society is at fault for the shooting even ever coming close to occuring.

You only said that some people have a lower threshold.

You guys are groomed in social=bad.

The US can’t even do cheap healthcare. How the fuck is UBI ever going to happen?

I agree with UBI fully, but we ain’t got nothing on Mansa Musa

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I don’t think that the blame assigned is in the literal sense I think it is in the philosophical sense.

Meaning the chain of events that led here had many MANY interruption points where society could have prevented this from escalating. There is no 1 person to blame for this entire thing, it’s a shared societal burden.

It’s essentially the Swiss Cheese Model for society and social outbursts.

Edit: I’m not saying what happened wasn’t wrong, I’m saying is that we can prevent this shit, and we keep failing over and over.

I completely agree. However, if we’re talking about solutions, blaming someone like this doesn’t get us anywhere, and it certainly won’t prevent another similar tragedy.

The people interested in actually solving this problem aren’t wasting their time on the motives of the shooters. They are all aberrations, but when the number of aberrations starts rising, that tells you there’s a problem in the system, and treating the symptoms won’t make it go away.

I hate the argument people make sometimes, “Anything can be a weapon, I could go around stabbing people with a pencil if I really wanted to. Even if you banned guns, it wouldn’t matter.” Yeah, except you can’t kill dozens of people within a few minutes with a pencil. We’ve got huge problems with economic disparity, a quiet epidemic of mental health disorders with little means to help the people that need it, coupled with ridiculously easy access to high-powered firearms in our country. There will never be enough “good people with guns” to protect the world. We need to reduce access to gun ownership to prevent mentally unbalanced people from having such powerful weapons at their disposal for when they eventually snap (since they’ll never have access to treatment), but that’s just a pipe dream at this point in time in America.

In the UK knife crime is a big issue for those in poverty or those in struggling cities. Having access to weapons of course increases risks of people dying ot those weapons, but removing guns isn’t going to just convince everyone trying to lash out to just lie down and suffer in silence.

I don’t live in a contry with civilan access to guns, and I don’t live in a situation where I feel the need to protect myself with weapons, so I’m not gonna stake a claim in the gun control debate. But if you ban every weapon ever conceivable, without addressing why people are becoming violent to begin with, people will just result to using their own hands (or perhaps more realistically, going above the legal means. Like with Shinzo Abe’s assassination).

But muh well regulated militia!

If you want to ban guns you need to ban metals and CNCs, will buying a CNC require a gun license and a clear criminal record?

If 1 in a million people will go on a killing spree, when driven to rock bottom, then you would expect to have a few, if you drive millions of people to that position.

Victorian England introduced various social safety nets not primarily out of goodness, but out of cost. It was actually cheaper to just feed the starving, rather than stopping them stealing for food, and punishing them afterwards. The fact it improved the lives of the downtrodden was just a convenient positive.

I think this post intends to convey that society has done those people dirty too and that we shouldn’t wait until those “millions of people who are in…this same situation” turn into shooters before doing something.

Assigning blame does nothing. It’d be great if potential murders would stop and think “hey maybe murder is wrong. Maybe other people have solver similar problems without murdering anyone!” But that’s not going to happen.

And yet those ppl are now dead. So advocating for any position other than the one which removes the possibility of people making the choice to kill others is to support those deaths. Which is to say to support the status quo in the USA is to support the deaths of these people.

You’ve just described the life of most people on Earth outside of American suburbia.

What the actual fuck are you talking about?

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you can’t acquire an automatic weapon, or “machine gun”, in the US without either an FFL, or buying an expensive as fuck and extremely rare automatic gun from pre-1986. You might see firearms with fire rates similar to automatic weapons as a result of illegal modifications, like that of the bump stock, but there are also less reversible modifications someone might end up doing. Anyways that’s more like a theoretical, really stupid correction for me to make, because it’s kind of up in the air as to whether or not automatic weapons would even be more effective if you wanted to kill a lot of people, as military doctrine generally employs them (full auto) as suppression or cover fire, making active zones of danger which enemies can’t pass through or fire from, rather than for the use of killing people. Though, the military doesn’t really tend to kill large unarmed groups of people, or, they prefer to do that with drone strikes, anyways. You don’t really care about any of that, though, probably.

I would also like to posit that probably america has a unique combination of factors which spurn on violence. Insane amounts of wealth disparity, probably only comparable to some places in the middle east, if that, but also a sense of entitlement towards middle class living, aka the “american dream”, which creates a kind of scorn and spite in the american mind when that middle class ideal is denied, or revealed as false. The way that these ideologies work is that they say that X is entitled to middle class living, that they deserve it, but that Y minority or Y oppressed group is in the way.

Also, these mass shootings, mass shootings of this specific type, tend to be relatively rare. Or at least, not as big of a problem as the media would have you believe, relative to: the vast majority of firearm violence, which primarily happens with handguns, and is related to gang violence (this category includes shootings by the police). Which is quite obviously related to poverty, and the protection of drugs as a high-value good that obviously can’t be protected by the actual government. So you see a local monopoly of force evolve taking advantage of the poor in order to bring themselves to a more economically workable position, yadda yadda, I’m sure you’ve heard that story before. And then on top of that you have handgun suicide comprising somewhere between half and a third of all gun deaths (I can’t quite remember).

All that considered, in combination with a lack of political will to get rid of guns, for somewhere around half the population, I’d probably make the prescription that you would see a better drop in violence from the legalization, or decriminalization, of drugs, universal mental healthcare, rectifying economic inequality, and of course, “common sense” gun laws, which would probably mostly apply to screenings for mental illness, primarily depression, but also conspiratorial thinking. The latter there, “common sense” gun laws, I think is agreeable to the majority of the population.

most people on Earth outside of American suburbia

Inside. You mean inside of American suburbia, the depressing, isolating, boring American suburbia. People in the first world outside of America have social nets and help from the society if they’re on the downswing. People in first world go to therapist when they feel bad about circumstances of their lives, not into sporting shop to buy a gun.
But you’re completely right, the situation when people can go to a random shop and buy a gun is fucking insane.

Damn, life looking pretty grim homes. King Charles?!

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People react differently to being abused by people and society for years and years, until they have every last ounce of hope drained from them.

100% this is such a bad strawman.

That’s all nice but not everybody is you and I don’t think we can reasonably expect every single person to be you. This is actually pretty close to the “homeless people just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps” mentality.

Notorious (as a subgroup of famous) would have been a better word choice. They got the point across reasonably well otherwise, however.

I think by fantastic the 4channer meant “newsworthy”, or “that really affects people’s lives”. The chances of someone with that kind of background doing something fantastic in a good sense is really small

Fantastic could mean unusual or extraordinary.

In this context I read fantastic in a morally indifferent sense, as in it set him apart from others and allowed him to leave an impression on the world, albeit a hugely harmful one.

Fantastic has the word fantasy as its root, but the meaning has shifted and that usage has fallen out of favor a bit. The same happened to terrific, which is an even greater oddity, terror being the root. The act was both fantastic and terrific but not in the most common contemporary usage of those words.

Problematic is that some people try to frame it as if his problems were the cause and reason for his actions. While obviously the point where people turn into mass shooters is when they decide to hate and blame (a specific group of) other people for it.

There is far from enough help for people who are struggling, but to prevent mass shootings the media probably shouldn’t talk about them this much and we need to look at people much closer who turn their hatred outwards.