Mass murder in California

Crack house.

D12 and Insane Clown Posse still make me wistful at times.

Where do you plan to do it the second time......

Salad bar at a Wendy's.

Carrie Fisher has admitted to using convention nerds as male groupies.

So, pick the right convention, you can not just bang a ROTJ-cosplay chick, but the actual Leia.

Ever seen the short film Searching for Carrie Fisher? Its about two guys in their 30s who decide to deliver the love letters and tapes they made for Carrie Fisher when they were kids to her.

Yes, I have seen it.

Just so long as you know what you're getting into.

Yes.

100% true.

So we come back around to the key question: How do we keep guns out of the hands of killers?

You can't, just like you can't keep cars from people who DUI, knives from people who get stabby, rope from people who get strangly, or hand from people who get chokey, hammers from people who hate hobos, or anything else.

So then we're back to Dayton's POV that it's all random and hopeless or we're back to the mental health issue again. What combination of bad wiring, poor nurture, skewed worldview, etc., compels some people to kill, and how do we change that?

And to short circuit the lollipops and unicorns speech, I'm not saying it's 100% doable, just that "it's all hopeless and nothing will ever change" is not what brought the species this far.

I've been laughing at the media the whole time.

Reality can't always be a Tracy Chapman song.

Not random, when people kill they usually know who they want to kill and why. Rodgers wanted to kill the "beautiful women" who rejected him. He failed on that badly since 4 out 6 were males. He was a nut who knew who he wanted to go after, and he actually envisioned killing more people with an SUV than a gun. He had planned on driving his dad's SUV down sidewalks running people over.

The more whackos that do shit like this, the more that can be understood about what makes them tick and the more that can learned about to what to look for in people that may have issues. Learn from happens and know what to look for, to blame guns for violence is idiotic. Guns have been around since 1,000 A.D. or so, but it took hundreds of years for them to become mainstream. Even though they were used in the Revolutionary War it still wasn't until the mid to late 1800's that they became more widely available. And since then humans have progressed more in the 150 years than ever before in human history. So one can say that without guns, man may have never progressed.

I certainly wish I knew. Our society is built on trust. We trust that the gun we just sold you won't be used on innocent people; we trust that the car you just purchased won't be driven while you're under the influence. The government can only regulate so much before it becomes more of a stranglehold than a precautionary measure. Look at the War on Drugs. Years of enforcement, and military tactics, using piles and piles of money funded by the taxpayers, have lead to lots of minor drug users in prison, and lives ruined, but a surfeit of drugs still on the streets, with no sign of stopping.

The war on drugs was intended to protect people (and society as a whole ) from being harmed by the consequences of drug use.

Well, people still use drugs and society still incurs the costs.

So, the primary objective is failed.

But our intervention has also changed the economics of the business, giving rise to powerful narcotic cartels and creating low-level warfare in our inner cities.

And the reaction to those unintended consequences has led to militarized police, unchecked federal power, an erosion of civil liberties, and a prison complex that incarcerates thousands of people for doing nothing more than supplying a desired product to willing buyers.

Whether you use drugs comes down to a choice: do you want to do so?

That was true before the war on drugs and it's true today. THAT is what determines whether you will use. And all those negative consequences from the drug war don't change that.

Mejor los Indios.

Nope. Harris never claimed he was killing out of love for violent video games. Lanza never claimed he was killing out of love for guns.

Rodger made it very clear he was killing out of misogyny, and that his targets were chosen on that basis.

Er, no. The people who invented the "War on Drugs" (Primarily G. Gorden Liddy and other close to President Nixon) created it solely to distract the general public from what was going on in politics, and to interfere in the affairs of nations that weren't military enemies, so long as they could be tied (however tangentially) to the "evil" drug trade. It was, from the very start, a political boogeyman.

I think you misread that.

Eh, maybe. But that's not why people supported it.

Politicians can't create policy without public support. If the politicians created the drug war for motive A, but the voters support it for reason B, then B can be said to be the reason for the policy as much as A.

Oh?

Then why'd he kill more men?

He killed out of narcissism, jealousy, and being a sociopath.
He hated everyone who had sex instead of him.
He said as much.

Dumb luck?

If it was just that, he'd have a laundry list of complaints. But he wasn't complaining about how other people got accepted to Oxford and not him, or how other people were rich and famous and not him. He was complaining (along with a lot of other misogynists) about how women weren't fucking him. That's the one thing he thought he was entitled to, the thing that motivated his online rants and videos and manifestos.

Why is misogyny such an impossible motivation here? Christians, Muslims, racists, their rants can all be taken at face value, but not this guy?

"You're being glib, Matt".

Because he failed to get inside the sorority house he targeted. He planned to kill a lot more women than men. In that regard, his plan failed.

He wouldn't be the first suicide attacker to have to settle for killing people at a checkpoint instead of the real target.

Probably the same reason that the Columbine killers supposedly had a grudge against the "jocks" yet they did the bulk of their shooting in the library.

Once a murderer has decided to commit mass murder, I doubt reasoned target analysis tends to take place.

This. Im no fan of anything resembling prohibition, but we have a problem with mass murders that the rest of the free world doesn't have, and it's worth it for gun owners and anti gun owners alike to analyze why that is. Why is violent crime in Japan virtually non existant, for example.

I doubt Japanese and American culture are all that similar.

Maybe they lumped every that wasn't wearing black and blaring Limp Biskit music to be jocks. :/

But again, this smack of throwing one's hands up and saying "welp, done what we could do." We'll never get to zero, but there can be better than once every fiscal quarter.

Eta: and yes, I'm all too aware of Japan being different in a lot of ways. The biggest of which is expecting succes from their children and not settling for mediocrity (see what I did there?)

But Canada is like America Jr., and yet school shootings aren't so common there. Maybe WAB or Doc can pull up a high profile Canunk story, but outside of that Degrassi episode 14 years ago ive got nothing .