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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37953 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.

"It's not the thing you are using as a scapegoat" inherently means blaming something else, but it's wrong to describe that as "suddenly concerned about".

If plagues were blamed on Jews poisoning the wells, and Jews said "wait a minute, bad sanitation by Christians is a better explanation", you wouldn't ask "why are Jews suddenly very concerned about Christian sanitation?"

The "suddenly very concerned" part comes from how 98% of the time American conservatives have somewhere between zero and negative interest in treating mental health as a public policy concern and bring it up only when taking a defensive position after a mass shooting (and generally without any actual policy proposals)

If someone's blaming you for something, the fact that you are pointing to the actual cause doesn't mean you're "suddenly concerned" about that cause, even if you haven't done much about it before. Jews aren't "suddenly concerned" about non-Jewish plague causes when accused of starting plagues, even if they have steered clear of the subject before for 98% of the time.

By your reasoning, if a mob tries to lynch a black person, and the black person says "I didn't kill anyone, the white guy down the street did", he's "suddenly concerned" about murders by white people. This is nonsense.

I imagine they aren’t too concerned because their solutions to mental health are largely outside the acceptable purview of policy. If enforcing people make culturally Christian choices to live a wholesome mentally stable life free of vice is intolerable to the secular Center left, to a conservative politician their hands are tied.

“Don’t make me pay for your sex drugs and rock and roll if you want them so bad” essentially.

That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US. And virtually unheard of in vastly more secular Western Europe. And also that even in the US, advancing state-enforced Christianity as a remedy to mental health problems is an incredibly fringe position, even on the right.

I think a more likely explanation is that the intellectual paradigm of mainstream American conservatism simply isn't equipped to provide solutions to that kind of problem. It's like asking a progressive to come up with a scheme for regulatory reform.

That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US.

Do you have a good source for that? I would love to see the data used and how they define 'more religious, more conservative south'.

That's my analysis, based on the Washington Post's database of school shootings and Census Bureau's regional divisions and population data. I do not entirely agree with the CB's regional divisions in a modern context, e.g. I don't agree with putting MD or DE in 'the South' (and I'll be dead before I accept the Dakotas as Midwestern), but it doesn't substantially affect the outcomes - moving them from South to Northeast makes the South look very slightly better and the NE look very slightly worse, but the South still ends up with ~66% more shootings relative to its population compared to the Northeast - and it's the external standard I decided to use beforehand.

Based on census regions and the aforementioned WaPo database, the number of mass shootings from 1999-2023 per 100k population as of 2023* (incidents, not deaths) by region are:

  1. South: 0.135

  2. Midwest: 0.111

  3. West: 0.111

  4. Pacific (meaning AK and HI): 0.093

  5. Northeast: 0.061

The assessment of the South as more conservative and more religious isn't based on any one source, just general knowledge of political outcomes and surveys of American religiosity. (I also want to be clear - my thesis is not that conservatism/religiosity cause mass shootings, merely that there is very little reason to think it is a preventative factor). I can dig up some sources if you like, but the South is consistently found to be more religious than the rest of the country.

*I did not try to adjust incident rate by population at year of incident because that was a lot more work and I doubt it will significantly alter the conclusions.

The problem with these databases of school/mass shootings is that they don't map onto what people think of as the sort of mass shootings we're discussing in this thread. A school resource officer accidentally firing his weapon, or a gang dispute that leads to one student shooting a few of his rivals, or a drug deal gone awry, or an 8 year old accidentally shooting a classmate when showing the cool gun he took from home, etc., - those all make it onto these lists. There's value in that, but it's important to recognize the broad scope of the dataset and not act as if these are lists of people who intended to kill as many people as possible, which is what our culture is almost always talking about when discussing mass shootings.

Yeah, if that data includes gang shootouts, then of course the South is going to be more represented. Are there no datasets of "mass shootings" or school shootings that include only what the layman would think of when they hear those terms?

The data includes shootings that happen in or near schools from 1999 to present. If gang members are shooting each other at school, it would be included. If they're shooting each other elsewhere, it is not. It's fair to raise the objection that some of these incidents are not 'active shooter'-type events that we think of, but making that demarcation is not so easy. I picked ten incidents at random and came up with:

  1. 1 instance of a parent being struck by stray gunfire from nearby while picking up her child

  2. 2 disputes between students that escalated into shooting (no indication of gang violence in either case)

  3. 1 instance where a former student arrived with a rifle allegedly looking for another student. He shot one person and appeared to be firing indiscriminately (if not very accurately), but is also reported to have let several witnesses go.

  4. 1 instance of the police shooting a child with an airsoft gun

  5. 1 instance of gunfire by an unknown shooter who withdrew

  6. 1 instance of a student bringing a gun to school and shooting himself with it

  7. 1 instance of a former student showing up to a graduation practice with a gun but being thwarted by police/security

  8. 1 instance of a student showing up at school with a gun and being thwarted school administrator + police

  9. 1 instance of a student showing up at school with a gun and opening fire

Of those 10 incidents, I'd consider 1, 2, 4, and 6 to be unambiguously not active shooter-type events (5 total). 7, 8, and 9 unambiguously are. 3 and 5 are debatable. Someone with more time than me is free to go through everyone one of the 366 incidents, but going off this small sample you're looking at roughly 30-50% being 'true' school shootings or attempts thereof.

Concerning aside: school shootings were flat-ish up through 2015-2016 and have been accelerating markedly since (except for a big dip in 2020 for obvious reasons).

I think there's literally only been a few dozen school shootings in the Columbine style in US history. Making your own database would not be hard.

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present) - it lists 80+251+125 incidents since the turn of the century. Of those, 8+17+6 had 3 or more deaths. 7 have 10 or more.

It seems like ‘more common in the south’ is really easy to measure.

Maybe that's because school shootings are aimed at devout Christians? No potetnial victims, no problem.

They're clearly not, though. If they were, we'd expect to see evidence that school shooters were actively targeting Christians. We'd also probably expect to see more shooting at churches and fewer at public schools.

This isn't that, though.

The analogy is to a clear easy solution (remove gun = less perforated children) that conservatives find embarrassing to reject due to 'fuck them kids', so they rapidly become extremally worried about something that they also have no intention to solve but is more complicated (mental health, alienation, whatever).

Your analogy only works if jews actually were poisoning wells.

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The analogy is to a clear easy solution (remove gun = less perforated children) that conservatives find embarrassing to reject due to 'fuck them kids'

Don't engage in this kind of weakmanning. You are expected to characterize your opponents' position in a way that they would themselves recognize. That doesn't mean you have to agree with it, or even assume they are arguing in good faith (though if you are going to claim they're not, you really need to justify that), but it does mean not representing them as taking a position they clearly do not, such as "fuck them kids."

Normally this would just be a warning, but since it's becoming a pattern with you and we are getting tired of having to crack down on a low effort sneers, you're banned for another week, and if you intend to come back and repeat this, please don't bother.

Was this actually weakmanning? It seemed flippant, but accurate. And that's with me being very on the supposedly weakmanned side here.

I don't know whether I'm maybe being overly charitable, but to me it sounded not like "this is the actual solution" and "that is what conservatives actually think" but decidedly like "this is how this measure is presented" and "this is the look conservatives wish to avoid".

Well, rereading, I see it could be taken either way - "conservatives think fuck them kids" or "conservatives are embarrassed about being accused of thinking fuck them kids."

Without lack of clarification from the OP, and given his history, I'm disinclined to give benefit of the doubt. The comment in general was still pretty boo outgroup.

The clear solution seems more like locking up crazy people that disarming non-crazy people. That really is my sincere position on the matter, it's not a deflection.

And almost entirely not because of mass shootings: let's reopen the insane asylums. But this time not equal parts neglect and abuse.

The third equal part, which necessitated closing the asylums in the first place: gathering in also those people other people wish to put away for being convenient.

I’ll go one step further with a radical idea I’d like to discuss, which I don’t actually know is a good idea: a free mental health screening every year while they are ages 20 through 25. This should catch most of the schizophrenics before they become homeless druggies.

Build a real functional society inside the asylums, where each participant has 90% of the rights they have outside of the asylums, but they have the best medication’s, the best monitoring, and the best mental health outcomes.

I mean, by extension your framing also means you have to concede that Christian sanitary practices are causing the plague rather than rats.

The root cause of the Black Plague was multi-factor, to my understanding: the Y. Pestis pathogen was carried by fleas, which hitched rides on rats, which were probably drawn to urban areas due to "sanitary practices" like chamberpots and "thunder buckets."

I mean it also hit China and the Islamic world, but in any case this was an extended metaphor for something or other, wasn’t it?

You're simply privileging a solution which is simple and obvious, without considering that it might also be wrong. Conservatives also have simple and obvious solutions to "perforated children", ranging from "lock up nutcases" to "no trans hormones" to "arm teachers". Why privilege "remove guns" above those?

Because removing guns is proven to be effective.

With the high percentages of mass “message shootings” which occur in gun free zones, removing guns makes everyone else a soft target for mass shootings, stabbings, and rammings.

Has it really? I mean even if discount the incredibly likely possibility that the USA lacks the state capacity to enact EU style gun control, it hasn’t actually seemed to stop mass shootings in countries that actually had a problem with them.

I guess the conservative argument would be sure the Jews put things in the well but on net those items improve health outcomes. Yet occasionally Christian sanitary practices clash and result in deaths.

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