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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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This could shape to be peak toxoplasma. A lot of things are still unknown so my thoughts are pure speculation.

28-year-old woman kills 3 students and 3 adults at private Christian school in Nashville, police say

An armed 28-year-old woman fatally shot three students and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville before she was shot and killed by police, authorities said, in the deadliest school shooting in nearly a year.

The shooter, who was not identified, entered the Covenant School via a side door and was armed with at least two assault-style rifles and a handgun, said Metro Nashville Police spokesperson Don Aaron. She fired multiple shots on the first and second floors of the school, he said.

A five-member team of police officers heard the gunfire, went to the second floor and fatally shot the woman, Aaron said. The first call about the shooting came in at 10:13 a.m. and the shooter was dead 14 minutes later, he said.

Police initially said the shooter appeared to be in her teens but later said she is a 28-year-old White woman who lives in Nashville. Police Chief John Drake said his initial findings showed she was at one point a student at the school. A vehicle was located nearby and gave clues as to the suspect’s identity, he added.

  • The police seemed to have actually acted adequately. It was not Uvalde - so the only thing resembling a good thing in the situation.

  • This is the first mass school shooting by a woman that I know. Probably the first mass shooting I hear at all committed by a woman.

  • The police released the race and age of the shooter, but not name or picture. There was a macabre joke that if the picture is not shown - the shooter is black. She is unidentified so far - which decreases slightly the chances the shooter was far right.

  • Two AR-15 and a handgun ... probably a loadout a bit high unless you are Caleb. (if you get the Blood reference - sorry buddy - you are officially in the risk cohort for covid by age)

  • Low body count - unexperienced shooter.

So I have the suspicion that either the shooter is trans or someone radicalized over Roe v Wade overturn. Also some last minute news outlets started saying female instead of woman. So I guess trans. Anyway CW-wise - will be toxic as hell.

Edit: NBCNews and NYPOST openly call it transgender woman. Not clear if MtF or FtM. And there seems to be manifesto.

wielding two assault-style rifles and a pistol

What video game logic is this? Not to make light of tragedy or offer constructive criticism to mass killers, but this is silliness.

The overwhelming majority of mass shooters are not gun people. If they were, we'd expect to see illegal rifles constantly (illegal magazines are a bit more common but even that's not guaranteed) because the anti-gun side is actually correct about short-barreled rifles being more conducive to increased lethality over a handgun without sacrificing much concealability.

But that observation only appears to be correct in theory: illegal rifles and pistols never show up despite all the parts necessary to create one common to every single gun store for the last 10 years (the "braced pistol" thing), and we've never heard of anyone getting stopped because their rifle was poking out of their bag.

What video game logic is this?

If one stops working, only a gun person will actually know how to fix it. Unreliable equipment run incompetently has ended many sprees, and someone doing research on past shootings would know this.

So might as well have one more; it's an extra 10 pounds and a thousand bucks on a credit card you're not planning on paying off anyway. (Come to think of it, I suspect that loadouts of mass shooters are generally dictated by how high their credit card limits are; if you're planning on suicide, why would paying it back be a concern?)

An experienced shooter (who isn't suffering from a brain tumor) would... well, we don't really know what they do because we've yet to see a conclusive example of one committing this kind of crime and most of the time body count comes from "medical attention was delayed because the police failed to breach and clear in a timely fashion". I guess the Vegas shooter counts; medical attention was timely and that body count is what I'd expect from someone competent (though the number and types of weapons used suggests significant incompetence) but we don't know if he just planned to shoot up the concert or if there was something else going on.

What about the Christchurch shootings? Anders Breivik? Both managed to get very high body counts.

I assume those were the first major shooting sprees in their respective countries. If it's never happened before, the first time could be quite bad.

Unreliable equipment run incompetently has ended many sprees, and someone doing research on past shootings would know this.

Columbine also involved unreliable equipment, although in that case it technically started rather than ended the spree (it was supposed to be a bombing, but the bombs didn't go off).

Would Virginia Tech count as an experienced shooter? 32 killed, all with handguns.

And oddly enough most killed with a 22 using 10 round mags.

Which I take as compelling evidence that semi-automatic rifle and standard capacity mag bans have nothing at all to do with mass shootings. A 22 handgun will 10 round mags, the minimum viable product of modern firearms, is sufficient to kill dozens of people.

That's just East Asian superiority in action. I would expect a Korean-American to actually do his homework and research the best approach to a mass shooting.

Unreliable equipment run incompetently has ended many sprees, and someone doing research on past shootings would know this.

Yes. The 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting involved some silliness regarding a non-standard oversized mag jamming the gun.

it's an extra 10 pounds

10 pounds of loaded mags is massively too valuable to exchange for a second loaded long arm.

If one stops working, only a gun person will actually know how to fix it.

Yeah, but we are friendly and helpful. Just join a shooting group and they'll help. I've shot with immigrants who own a gun but do not know how to clear pistol jams. I show them tap tap rack. It's not that hard.

But I get we are over analyzing a severely mentally unsound person.

10 pounds of loaded mags is massively too valuable to exchange for a second loaded long arm.

To a gun person, yes.

To someone incompetent, I think it's something that, given you know that malfunctions happen but not necessarily why, would mean a second gun (or third, in this case) would sound like a better option.

I'm really just taking the assumption that non-tech people have about computers, or that non-car people have about cars, and applying it: that they're mostly magic black boxes not worth learning the ins and outs of before using one for your task. Tap-rack-bang is absolutely not that hard; neither is asking ChatGPT what to do about Googling an error message.

In all honesty, the criminal just standing there, fumbling about for their extra magazine in their pocket or bag (and the only reason they know they need to reload is because the gun locked open and the trigger's dead) is probably what ends most sprees. By contrast, I wouldn't put good odds on most people if they're up against someone with a fully populated belt liberally dragged through the DAA catalog, even if they're not wearing armor, simply by what wearing that implies.

The 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting involved some silliness regarding a non-standard oversized mag jamming the gun.

Non-gun people just see that 100 is greater than 30. Gun people will claim coffin mags are named that because trusting them to work flawlessly makes it more likely you'll end up in one (the 60 round Surefire and Magpul drum are more reliable than the 100s, and while I don't remember if he had a C-mag or a Surefire 100 I distinctly remember reading it was one of those two).

Just join a shooting group and they'll help.

I don't think that someone who buys a rifle for the sole purpose of committing a mass shooting would have enough patience to make use of a shooting group (either because they're mad now, or because they tend to get booted if they do certain things suggestive of mass shooter-hood).

I don't think that someone who buys a rifle for the sole purpose of committing a mass shooting would have enough patience to make use of a shooting group (either because they're mad now, or because they tend to get booted if they do certain things suggestive of mass shooter-hood).

This is perhaps the most relevant to the discussion at hand - gun nuts aren't the people doing these shootings. If you know a guy that owns a half dozen rifles, hangs around the local range, maybe has a GOA bumper sticker, and can explain what MOA and parabolic trajectory, you probably know a guy that will almost certainly not fire that weapon in anger. I've never seen a clear study on it, but going by the basics of what we see from spree and mass shootings, it's pretty much never the people that putatively need to be disarmed for everyone's safety.

we don't know if he just planned to shoot up the concert or if there was something else going on

Did we ever find out much of anything about him or what was going on with that?

The state's final investigation report is available here. tldr, no, not really.

... except apparently 'final and complete' is a synonym for 'close enough?!'

EDIT: I don't buy it, but it's at least the sorta thing that should have been mentioned at length.

Yeah, maybe I've just been exposed to one too many conspiracy theories, but "rampage of revenge over losing big money in Vegas" feels...unsatisfying as an explanation.

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