• jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s an exaggeration, but you’re not far off.

    They count any shooting with 4 or more injured as a “mass shooting”.

    I doubt that most people hear the phrase “mass shooting” and think “People at a party having too much to drink, get in an argument, the argument turns into a fight, guns are drawn, and 2 people on one side get shot and 2 people on the other side get shot.”

    Example from my own back yard so to speak… 3 dudes from Texas show up for a marijuana buy from two brothers in Oregon. Buy goes bad, 2 Texans are killed, both brothers are killed, one dude walks away.

    https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2021/06/two-portland-brothers-two-marijuana-buyers-die-in-gun-battle-during-attempted-drug-ripoff.html

    GVA DOES count that as a mass shooting. I don’t, for the simple reason that while those people were armed, and DID end up shooting 4 or more people, nobody went down there with guns with the INTENTION of shooting a bunch of people.

    For me, and I wish more people defined it this way, a mass shooting is when one or more individuals show up armed in a populated area with the express intention of shooting as many people as possible.

    That sort of shooting is FAR rarer. But nobody makes money off keeping people scared if that’s the definition.

    • Cheesus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The definition of mass shooting shouldn’t detract from the fact that 500+ shootings 4+ injured is too many

        • _dev_null@lemmy.zxcvn.xyz
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          1 year ago

          500+ shootings

          Your figure is off by two orders of magnitude, it’s ~48k gun deaths, including suicides (for 2022).

          So about 5k more than your car accident figure.

          And it’s odd to me you’re arguing the license angle; are you advocating for a licensing system like there are for cars, like written and applied tests a citizen must pass before gun ownership?

          • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Unfortunately, we can’t require licensing. The Supreme Court already ruled that the core tenet of the 2nd Amendment is self defense and that can’t be burdened.

            What I PERSONALLY would like to see is a full root cause analysis on every shooting and plugging the holes that allowed it to happen.

            For example:

            In the Maine shooting, he bought the guns he used 10 days before being reported for abberant behavior and being involuntary committed for 2 weeks.

            Background checks wouldn’t work because he bought the guns before there were any reported problems.

            Being involuntarily committed should have resulted in a seizure of all weapons. It did not. Why not? In most cases because seizures require a court ruling and if the commitment wasn’t court mandated, that doesn’t happen.

            Bonus - if the commitment isn’t court mandated, that also won’t turn up on a background check, a common problem with other mass shooters.

            That needs to change, and it doesn’t involve the 2nd amendment or a change in gun laws, it just has to expand what already happens in court adjudicated cases to non adjudicated cases.

            Alternately, you push ALL mental health commitments through court to ensure guns are withdrawn and the commitment shows up on background checks.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              And we all know the Supreme Court never reverses a decision. That’s why abortion is still legal nationwide.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court requires neither to reverse a decision. What with other decisions that weren’t Roe taking a lot less than 50 years and what with their not caring about popular opinion.

                  Is this the first time you’ve heard of them?

                  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Reversing Roe took 50 years because it took that long to get enough conservative judges appointed. It could not have happened sooner.

                    In my lifetime, Democratic presidents have only been able to appoint 5 justices to the court compared to 15 for Republican presidents.

                    If we want to change the gun rulings, that needs to be reversed, which should only take, oh, another 50 years or so.

                    https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/members_text.aspx

                    Burger, Warren Earl - Nixon
                    Blackmun, Harry A. - Nixon
                    Powell, Lewis F., Jr. - Nixon
                    Rehnquist, William H. - Nixon
                    Stevens, John Paul - Ford
                    O’Connor, Sandra Day - Reagan
                    Scalia, Antonin - Reagan
                    Kennedy, Anthony M. - Reagan
                    Souter, David H. - Bush, G. H. W.
                    Thomas, Clarence - Bush, G. H. W.
                    Ginsburg, Ruth Bader - Clinton
                    Breyer, Stephen G. - Clinton
                    Roberts, John G., Jr. - Bush, G. W.
                    Alito, Samuel A., Jr. - Bush, G. W.
                    Sotomayor, Sonia - Obama
                    Kagan, Elena - Obama
                    Gorsuch, Neil M. - Trump
                    Kavanaugh, Brett M. - Trump
                    Barrett, Amy Coney - Trump
                    Jackson, Ketanji Brown - Biden

                • User_4272894@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Took 13 years to undo prohibition, which unlike abortion and gun rights, was based on a clear and direct constitutional amendment with no arguments about “framers intent” or changes to technology/interpretations of rights over time.

                  This entire “50 years of cultural shift and overcoming supreme Court decisions” is straight bullshit.

                  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    We don’t have the same environment now that we did then. We can’t currently get an amendment to do ANYTHING at this point. Everything is too divided.

                    290 votes in the House, that couldn’t get 217 to decide their own leadership.

                    67 votes in the Senate, that can’t get 60 to over-ride a filibuster.

                    38 state ratifications where 25 states can’t admit Joe Biden won the last election.

                    It’s untenable, even on topics lots of people can agree on, like, say, term limits for Supreme Court Justices, or barring convicted felons from public office.

                    And those should be the uncontroversial topics…

        • Nudding@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          What’s the number one cause of death for children in America? Is that a rounding error?

    • ThatFembyWho@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      What difference does it make why it happened, think of the impact on the community, neighbors, innocent bystanders, hearing or seeing that crap going down. That’s PTSD material. And the family of all the people involved, even if they were criminals, that’s an exponentially bigger impact than if one or two people are involved.

      IMO you’re thinking of the difference between terrorism and violence. A mass shooting can be an act of terrorism (inflict harm on a large number of people), but it doesn’t have to, it’s the number (mass) involved, not the intent.

      • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The intent very much matters. In the example I stated above, the intent on one side was to buy a bunch of weed and the intent on the other side was to sell a bunch of weed. Nobody walked into that looking to shoot someone, it just worked out that way.

        Compared to someone hauling an AR-15 into a supermarket and shooting indiscriminately, that’s a huge difference in intent.

        In the case of the public at large, the latter case results in “oh, shit, that could have been me!” but the former case it’s “Well, glad I’m not trying to illegally sell a bunch of weed to out of towners!”

        Calling both a “mass shooting” does a disservice to the victims of actual mass shootings.

        • Zoboomafoo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’m pretty sure GVA lumps every shooting together because then the only common factor, and then the only solution, is the gun itself

          • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That and they make money by keeping people scared. “ZOMG! MORE MASS SHOOTINGS THAN DAYS IN THE YEAR!!!” and news orgs repeat it without questioning their methodology.