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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.

Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.

No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.

I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.

It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.

Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.

Sorry for the doomer take, but I don't see a solution to this. NAFTA, unchecked immigration, the sexual revolution and its consequences, and constant race baiting is collapsing our society.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other. No amount of restrictions or "doing something" is going to change that.

How do you solve the problem? I don't know, man. Maybe it's something [not so] simple like: Make everybody go back to church, bring the jobs back, undo the social problems created due to the sexual revolution, and encourage people to create families (but like I said, get people back in church, preferably a Catholic church).

How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?

I think that a program to make angry young man with no sense of hope about the future and an intense hatred of the present care more about the future and have some investment in the present might work better than constant kvetching and trampling on human rights. In fact, I suspect that more trampling on human rights will probably make the problem worse.

But hey: it's only the future. Not that big of a deal, right? Let's let some dorky lawyers and political grifters figure it out, they've been doing a really good job on everything else! Hey maybe we can get a McKinsey consultant on the job!

A solution to what? From here

The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 103 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2021. The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 706 people died in these incidents in 2021.

This is of 26,031 homicides, 20,958 of which were firearm homicides. Mass shootings aren't a sign of mass disaffection or societal collapse, which would exist independently if at all. Even of those 706, most of them are closer to family or crime-related violence than school or nazi shootings (chosen randomly here)

Two people were killed, and three others were injured, after a fight between two biker gangs led to a gunfight in a bar parking lot in the Fountain City neighborhood.[557]

An argument between two men escalated into a shooting that killed a young girl, and another man. Three children, including a toddler, were also shot.[561]

A fight at a house party led to six people being shot, with two dying from their injuries.[568]

A gunman invaded the home of his ex-wife in the Spring Branch neighborhood and began shooting. Two people were killed, and two others wounded including a teenager.[57]

A targeted shooting at a nightclub wounded ten, and killed two, after two men opened fire in the Oakhill Jackson neighborhood.[602]

This isn't obviously personal, but googling the above - "Michael Valentine and Nicole Owens were killed the night of the incident. Owens was Rush's ex-girlfriend, and mother of his child".

Four people were shot, two fatally, in a drive-by shooting in the West Englewood neighborhood.[572]

This is least obviously not a random mass shooter who hates society. "The group was standing on the sidewalk about 7:30 p.m. in the 1900 block of West Garfield Boulevard when someone inside a gray vehicle opened fire at them, Chicago police said.", and no further details were forthcoming on google. But ... intuitively, are drive-bys committed by incel mass shooters, or poor, usually black criminals?

So where does that leave OP? How has NAFTA or unchecked immigration caused high black crime rates? (compare to the lower crime rates of poor asians). What does the sexual revolution have to do with this, if domestic dispute homicides are more common than incel shooters? And race baiting? Non-sequitur.

I mean your argument really breaks down when comparing the gun deaths in the US vs countries that are even more liberal like Canada. More guns and easier access to them certainly lead to more gun violence.

By what metric you consider Canada more Liberal?

The post references religion as an answer. The US is substantively more religious than Canada. I mostly just used liberal as a stand in for “less religious”, bit sloppy but I don’t know many who would argue Canada is more conservative than the US.

While Canada certainly has fewer guns per capita than the US, we still have lots. AR-15s specifically are slightly hard to come by, especially since the most recent push -- but anyone who wants one can certainly have a black scary semiauto .223 of some stripe.

This seems sufficient for mass shootings, regardless of how many more guns are floating around the US? Like, you can really only shoot one at a time.

but anyone who wants one can certainly have a black scary semiauto .223 of some stripe.

Sure... if they're willing to wait an entire year for the license that takes a weekend, 400 bucks, and (for Restricted) knowing 2 people who'll vouch for you to obtain.

And by and large, this system works. It will still get you killed if you need a gun right now (the archetypical example of this is a stalker who isn't obeying their restraining order; angry exes kill families quite a lot and cops can't be everywhere), but even that isn't a design problem and has more to do with its implementation.

This is the "compromise" position, and if approached in good faith it works exceptionally well specifically because it keeps guns out of the hands of the poor, the stupid, and the friendless- all traits associated with criminality (European citizens are fine with this approach; the US' system of wokeness considering everyone trustworthy until proven otherwise is specifically a reaction to this!). True, existing socially-vetted owners can still become insane later, but the compromise is specifically "we prove ourselves to you, and in return you treat the people who do get through with a 'forgone conclusion, they would have just used a truck or fire instead' attitude (and as such don't launch a bunch of legislation to punish everyone else)", and by and large that works. Most European countries have more liberal gun laws than blue US states (and British Commonwealth states) do as a result- and the most liberal ones were occupied by the Soviets or on their border.

This position can't be reached in the US (and to a significant degree, the government couldn't enforce it even if they wanted to- everyone owns property and there's just too much ground to cover to stop illicit manufacturing), so you end up with a bunch of patches on symptoms like "high capacity mags" and "assault weapons" even though a single-shot shotgun and a .22 is all you need to perpetrate a mass shooting (which is how it happens in the UK). They then proceed to export this solution around the world; which is why the populations of countries closest to the American orbit (Aus, UK, NZ, CA) had licensing schemes and population tolerance thereof that were subsequently completely destroyed (the compromise that was licensing can no longer exist because the population is now too Americanized to tolerate it). For example, NZ was the freest former English colony in terms of gun law, but the population's ability to compromise had been hollowed out by exposure to American culture war until an Australian national came along and shattered it. Canada is more complicated, because it's close enough to the US that the concept of high-trust high-freedom leaks through more, but also lacks the political safeguards to keep that part of the nation safe from its largest cities that the US does... so the rest of the country (culturally closer to the red part of the US) suffers.

Sure... if they're willing to wait an entire year for the license that takes a weekend, 400 bucks, and (for Restricted) knowing 2 people who'll vouch for you to obtain.

How many American mass shooters would have been unable to manage this in advance? It's not like these are spur of the moment events. Anyways if you are poor(ish) and/or stupid, the black market remains an option.

While the situation is not as clearcut as in the US, my guess is that there's very little the government in either place could actually do that would make a difference to mass shootings -- an analysis of what percentage of American mass shooters would have been able to complete a PAL by hook or by crook (you don't actually need an RPAL to get a scary-looking 223 with 5/30 mags that are trivially de-neutered, either) would be fairly interesting.

That is an interesting one. There's a lot of friendless mass shooters that wouldn't have been able to get two people to vouch for them. On the other hand, some of those guys used guns that were owned by relatives. Ballpark? Maybe a quarter of mass shooters wouldn't have been able to fulfill those criteria.

B.J. Campbell would probably disagree. Here is one such article of his where he would, as it relates to a particular segment of the American populace most affected by gun violence. He argues that the missing link is indeed broken lives.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights

Why are they mutually exclusive? I don't have strong views on your proposed explanation, but we have plenty of disaffected people in Britain yet manage to keep our mass shootings down to single figures per decade.

IIRC a cracked journalist went into the characteristics of mass casualty attackers and found that all of them came from broken homes. This being the opposite of the usual cracked biases, I tend to take it seriously.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other. No amount of restrictions or "doing something" is going to change that.

The cornerstone of progressive education is that people are, at worst, a disease killing the earth. At least half of them are actively evil. And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.

The cornerstone of progressive education is that people are, at worst, a disease killing the earth. At least half of them are actively evil. And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.

This has many problems:

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You've also been warned about these type of comments in the past.

5 day ban

Is it? Would it be too much to ask for some substantiation of what is quite an outlandish and uncharitable characterisation?

And even the innocent ones who have done nothing yet are completely disposable if a woman finds them inconvenient.

There is almost no-one anywhere is the West who would agree that this at all resembles their view.

I assume that last part refers to abortion.

It could be the case that you simply interact in such circles that you are not exposed to such disposable men, but it both biologically obvious, and has been throughly examined from an academic perspective.

How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?

Honestly I doubt that this would change much - cases where people go bonkers and kill their families are much less rare than they should be.

Great comment, reported for quality contribution.

The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other.

This is an underrated point. So many times when societal ills come up in rationalist discourse, people hand wave away, are ignorant of, or flat out ignore the fact that at least 1/5 (probably more in actuality) of the US population is depressed or has some mental disorder. Even given that our modern psychiatric framing is largely faulty, this mass wave of disaffectedness means that traditional solutions, things that worked for our forefathers, need rethinking.

Even though past societies had plenty of times of upheaval, they had different ways of fixing things. Revolutions, massive aligned religions, cultural processes and holidays like the Roman Saturnalia which acted as a pressure release valve for hierarchical resentment. We've been increasingly preventing a release of the pressure, and it will only get worse as we continue to do nothing.

How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?

Yeahhhh. Seems pretty obvious that the perps in almost every case are people who have determined (correctly?) that they have very little to lose, and also very little to look forward to on their current life trajectory.

This is why Stephen Paddock was and is such an anomaly, since he seemed to have his life 'together' for most pursuits and purpose, though his personal life was very fraught with struggle, it must be admitted.

There's probably some other "X factor" in there that causes them to lash out rather than simply collapse into a stupor of video games and drugs and degenerate gambling on the stock market.

But the rise in suicide, the rise in rates of depression, opioid overdoses, the increase in dissatisfaction with life, the general purposelessness that seems to be permeating whole generations... it all likely has a similar root cause with those few who decide to go on rampages.

The Las Vegas mass shooting is such a weird event. The event was odd, he has all sorts of oddities in his private life that suggest asset. I don't know what the real story is, but we definitely didn't get it.

What’s so weird about it?

His wiki article makes him look about as unhinged as I’d expect for a mass murderer. Clearly capable of planning, but just an absolute train wreck of a lifestyle.

Mainly it's the apparent lack of any real grievance against 'society' that would inspire one to act violently and indiscriminately.

The extent of the planning almost seems like his main goal was literally just to set a record for deaths, which indeed he did. Like he wasn't trying to lash out at any particular target, he just one day had the thought "I bet I could kill a shit-ton of people if I shot at a crowd from this casino hotel window."

And the sheer number of people he managed to kill is also slightly suspicious for just one man to pull off.

And parts of the plan are a little absurd on their face, the number of guns the guy brought, for instance. Even if you wanted maximum carnage, you'd bring like 2-3 guns at most, and tons of magazines for reloading. You certainly wouldn't bring in cases and cases of guns, if you were trying to keep a low profile!

The bit that really tickles one's conspiracy sense is multiple guns having bump stocks, which were an item the ATF sought to ban, shortly after the event.

Most hobbyist shooters will tell you these things are novelties at best, not something you'd use if you WANTED to kill a bunch of people.

And then the shooter's brother gets arrested for CSAM shortly thereafter.

Then charges were dropped and the guy more-or-less disappeared.

None of this is to convince you that it was a vast conspiracy, just to explain why this one stands out as a "WTF was happening?" situation.

Edit: Oh yeah forgot the strange missing hard drive situation.

which were an item the ATF sought to ban, shortly after the event.

How does this suggest anything conspiratorial? High-profile mass shooting uses X implement, government responds with ban. Just seems like they were impelled to action by the shooting.

Do I actually need to point out that governments, including the U.S., have used false flag tactics to achieve or advance domestic policy goals?

That that's a thing that has 100% happened before?

The fact that the 'government responds with a ban' doesn't DISCOUNT the possibility that the government intentionally created it's own justification for the ban.

That evidence tends to explain both possibilities. We'd expect a conspiracy to create the pretext for a particular government action would result in... government taking the action. This is not a contradiction.

Do you know how many other shootings or violent crimes bump stocks were involved in prior to this? Approximately zero.

Again, not asking you to believe in the conspiracy just noting why it tickles that particular part of the brain.

including the U.S., have used false flag tactics to achieve or advance domestic policy goals?

When?

More comments

Then charges were dropped and the guy more-or-less disappeared.

Absolutely Comped

A guy wins against the house for decades in Vegas, doesn't strike you as profoundly odd?

He's old, crime is a young man's game. The murder rate for the elderly makes everyone look violent.

His home was burgled after the crime.

Depends on how neurotic he was. Would it make any more sense for the feds to somehow bankroll him through Vegas?

And I thought he made most of his money in real estate, then blew it on video poker and high-end firearms.

They wouldn't bankroll him through Vegas they'd bank roll him through a black account or he was doing his own gun sales and claiming gamble as a cover for where the money comes from.

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-vegas-shooter-estate-20180301-story.html

That lists his estate as $800,000 far too little assets to fund the level of gambling he sustained. Other articles list sales here and there but very modest gains. The big transaction is a gain of less than $1,000,000 years before the shooting. Enough to fund a long modest retirement or a short burst of massive gambling but this guy was gambling for years with little other income to support it.

I try to eschew true tin-foil hat thinking. I never ever bought into Sandy Hook "crisis actor" stories, and I think most mass shooters are acting of their own volition, even if they were technically 'known to the FBI.'

But man, so little of the Las Vegas situation makes sense as described without there being some kind of conspiracy involved, even if the specific act of killing civilians was never a part of it, it reads like this was a situation that would have traced back to someone important and thus they opted to cloud the waters and feign ignorance rather than allow anyone to look too closely. Maybe the truth gets declassified in 30-50 years.

Maybe the truth gets declassified in 30-50 years.

I hope so but given the lack of declassification of the Kennedy Assassination records I'm not optimistic.

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