Submitted by lambert on Fri, 07/20/2012 - 11:50pm
What I find most fascinating is the universal insistence that an act that created, and will continue to create, an enormous amount of terror is not a "terrorist" act.
Perhaps a rethinking of our categories is in order?
Comments
somebody, dunno who, was on
somebody, dunno who, was on the tv yesterday saying that this (and other incidents like it) is indeed domestic terrorism.
This is classic Orwell
This isn't terrorism. It's too early to say, isn't it?
If anything, it seems like a mentally disturbed person snapped. These days, that is called 'terrorism,' as is pitching tents in a park.
American English is one of the few languages where the vocabulary gets smaller with each passing year.
Instead of calling this what it probably is, we slap the "T" word on it, as an excuse to justify more totalitarian-esque policies.
Guns and gun glorification.
After this latest mass shooting, there's renewed call for gun control. Good. Can we also call a halt to glorification of gun violence? Is gratuitous gore really that entertaining? Here's an article about a film distributor who had to pull their latest movie trailer - showing a gunman shooting up a movie theatre!
Warner Bros Pulls Trailer Of Gangster Shooting Up Movie Theater
It's certainly not unique - the last film showing the wonders of mowing down rows of people in a movie theatre with bullets was 'Inglorious Basterds.' I seem to recall a lot of people found some sick satisfaction in that movie.
And if only we could get rid of the gun lobby in this country. Literally - read it and weep, for the victims.
Expired Assault Weapons Ban Would Have Covered Rifle Used In Colorado Shooting
There is no correlation
There is no correlation between gun laws and murder rates.
Idaho 1.3 murders/100,000. Idaho has loose gun laws and everyone is armed to the teeth and has an NRA sticker on their vehicle.
Saskatoon 3.6 murders/100,000. Yet Canada has tough gun laws.
Cuidad Juarez, Mexico 169 murders/100,000 Yet Mexico has tough gun laws.
So what does correlate ? How about economic inequality.
Both Saskatoon and Juarez have crime related to the black market for drugs. Just like the black market for booze caused a lot of violent crime during Prohibition. Maybe we should talk about legalizing drugs ?
Finally, the former slave owning states have higher crime rates, perhaps due to racial tension, or perhaps due to an ongoing culture of violence (the same states also are more likely to spank their kids.)
Ciudad Juarez
Yah, it's a good thing the drug cartels have the US to thank for easy access to guns, circumventing the gun laws in Mexico.
And maybe, just maybe, without the assault rifle, the toll of the Colorado injured might have been say 5 dead and 20 injured? So I think that the law banning assault rifles would be worth it. It may seem strange to you but I'm completely willing to ban certain classes of weapons to 350 million people in order to save a few of lives.
I do not support the sale of automatic weapons
And I do support gun control, but banning the sale of automatic weapons is pretty pointless, because it takes all of five minutes to turn a gun into an automatic weapon.
So the scenario you propose, where fewer people would have been shot had the gun been banned, is invalid, because someone dedicated to the intention of killing as many people as possible, would surely take the few minutes necessary to ensure their weapon was fully automatic.
A silly statistic, because there's no distinction
between guns for hunting wild game, and those for hunting humans.
Break those stats down between handguns, hunting long guns and semi-automatics, then we'll learn something.
Your chart shows the USA with about triple
the homicides that its inequality would predict, so something else must be at work.
According to "Albion's Seed", the original 13 colonies were settled by four different waves of immigration from 4 different areas of England and those four distinct English cultures still are present. Even where only a tiny portion of the population is from the original English stock.
So, for example, Massachusetts (Puritans; Parliament side in the English Civil War) has always had higher literacy and lower murder rates.
When we glibly discount acts of domestic terrorism,
by assuming their products come from crazed lone gunmen not subsidized by our lax gun and mental health policies, we are letting those terrorists win, by not seeing the processes we can change to reduce the frequency of those acts reoccuring.