UPDATE: Now there has been a second mass shooting in less than 24 hours, In Dayton Ohio, leaving nine dead. Shooter was wearing body armor.
Another mass shooter, this time in and around a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Reliable information is hard to come by at this early stage but we know that the shooting suspect is in custody and that there have been 20 fatalities.
The shooter left behind a manifesto, posted shortly before the shooting on 8chan. He said he was inspired by the Christchurch shooter, and declared that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Post your thoughts and any reliable information you have in the thread below. No trolls.
UPDATE: Updated with # of fatalities and a few changes in wording about the manifesto allegedly written by the shooter.
UPDATE 2: Updated with news of the Dayton shooting and to make clear that the el paso manifesto has been definitively tied to the alleged shooter.
Hexum7: in the wake of the tobacco lawsuits, the gun industry lobbied for and eventually won immunity from such a lawsuit at the federal level (thanks Bush!).
So you have to go at them at the state level, though they might be covered there as well through pre-emption (states rights advocates will of course … be in favor of the fed on this one).
@Naglfar
At this point she’s pretty much lost any claim to being less vile. She’s actively aiding and abetting his crimes, she carries the guilt of them as well.
I live in Austin. First thought I had about El Paso, after checking in with friends who live there, was “racist terrorist.” Last night, when I first heard about Dayton, and the neighborhood where the shooting took place, was “incel.”
What a world we’ve allowed to be made.
Please, if you are on twitter, spread this post of mine – or even just the text – as far and wide as you can. Even people who aren’t citizens of or living in the US can make a difference by putting these words in front of others’ eyes:
The text is its own link, but you can also copy this link, if you want:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2019/08/04/the-28th-amendment/
NOTE: I really don’t care about attribution. Mostly I just care about getting the text out. If people use that blog post as a hub to talk about these things, great, but I have a tiny blog. People will talk about it lots of places (and lots of places more relevant than my blog) if the text just gets around.
Everyone we know in TX is OK.
I got up this morning, I saw that it happened again?
So I went to the liquor store again.
Just curious: were any of the mass shootings in the States this year not carried out by white men?
@ crip dyke
Hi!
Didn’t want to distract from the topic at hand here with lawyer talk; but posted something to your blog.
@Rabid Rabbit:
I haven’t checked specifically, but I’m certain that there have been. “Mass shootings” are defined as FOUR OR MORE persons shot in more-or-less the same incident. There’s a technical term about “no cooling off period” which you don’t need to know the full details about, but basically it means that if you shoot two people and then walk acrosss the street, open up a business’s door and shoot two more, that’s still supposed to meet the definition.
If you shoot two folks and then drive for an hour to where your next victims are, that almost certainly meets the definition, because the entire time you were engaged in activity that was part of the process of trying to shoot the people you intended to shoot.
If you shoot two people and drive 8 hours with a stop for lunch before shooting two more… probably not, but ultimately the “no cooling off period” definition is about state of mind and not getting distracted by other things, so even this might qualify.
That out of the way, it turns out that the most common mass shootings are when someone decides to kill all the people in their own families (often but not always during a divorce/breakup and a dad kills his own kids rather than let his ex have custody of them, this is typically followed by an attempt to kill the ex – who is shot after the kids so the ex has to witness their children die and feel that horror – and then a suicide attempt).
Depending on the number of people in the family, when someone attempts family-annihilation murder, it can easily qualify as mass murder (four or more murders, whatever the weapon) or a mass shooting (four or more people shot, even if they don’t all die). Men of color do commit these family-annihilation crimes of mass murder and/or mass shooting, and there have almost certainly been some this year, as there are every year.
HOWEVER, there are other categories of mass shooting and mass murder. In particular, there is a type of mass shooter called a “pseudo-commando”. These have been typed in the psychological literature and subsequently studied. This is the type of killer that gets a huge magazine and a fast-shooting gun and sprays bullets around a targeted area as much as, and often even more than, spraying bullets at any particular targeted person or persons known to the shooter that they previously decided to attempt to kill.
These pseudo-commandos definitely skew white, and I don’t know of any in the US who haven’t been white in 2019. The last I remember clearly was Elliot Rodger (who was multi-racial and IIRC appeared aggrieved that he couldn’t access full-on white privilege as a young man who was half-white), but of course there could easily have been quite a few that I missed. For instance, I’ve never been clear on the race of the Parkland, Florida shooter.
===================================
@Alan:
Thanks for the heads-up! Sometimes someone’s first comment will go to spam, and yours did in this case. But I rarely ever check the spam trap, so it would have gone unnoticed without your note.
I’m happy to geek out later, but in general, you’re correct that the wording of the proposed amendment is more about what I think can get done (and thus is affected significantly by my pessimism) than about what I personally think the best policy would be.
One of his murder victims was his own sister.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dayton-ohio-mass-shooting-1.5236046
Good news and bad news both: It’s summer. You see more killings in the summer. Supposedly the heat subtly increases irritability and decreases inhibition. That means that any apparent jump in mass shootings is weather related, and the good news is that it will eventually go back to “normal”. The bad news is that it’s only for about 8-9 months, and also global warming.
(I am not claiming the heat is the main cause. Bigotry, stochastic terrorism, toxic masculinity, and extreme entitlement are still big problems.)
@Crip Dyke:
Thanks! After the mockery, this is the sort of thing one come here for…r
Uh, also, just so you know, there are also “spree shootings” and “spree killings” which are similar to, but not the same as, “mass …”.
I bring this up because I might have misrepresented the “spree shooting” thing about “no cooling off period” as the same thing in the definition of “mass shooting”.
IIUC, they’re similar, but not the same. Spree also allows decidedly more time to pass while still qualifying as a “spree,” but not as a “mass”. That’s really not my area of expertise, and now I’m worried I got something wrong.
Of course, all that is at least probably irrelevant to your question, because you almost certainly were talking about “pseudo-commando” type killers and/or terrorists. The pseudo-commando stuff I have done pretty well for a lay person, and I’m not confused about that much, at least, b/c it’s been relevant to some past research and writing I’ve done. Because of that I’ve actually read several original research articles on the pseudo-commando killers in both the psych literature and the criminology literature (which overlap, I admit). I haven’t done the same amount of reading for spree-killers and for non-pseudo-commando mass shooters (like family annihilators).
I think the mental illness line that gets trotted out aggravates me more than anything else with these murders. It’s been brought out and countered so many times now that I imagine the only people still doing it are the kind of people who define mental illness as anything deviating from what conservatives believe is the “correct” state of the human mind. i.e. LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent people.
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who’s still entertaining this argument has a very high chance of being an ableist homophobe trying to find any excuse to justify their bigotry. I fear that conservative governments everywhere, not just in the U.S. but also in those who admire the U.S. right, are rushing headlong toward the conclusion of turning this narrative around to justify policies targeting such groups for oppression.
“My heart goes out to kids with autism. But no one told me they’d be leaving the house.” – a goddamn provincial premier who needs a police escort to attend a suburban pride parade
I was away for the weekend. Friday was a no-media sort of day, but yesterday I heard about the shooting.
Because the whole thing is too big to take in, I’ll just say it’s ridiculous that the Texas shooter’s (apparent) manifesto talked about Latin(x) people “invading” Texas.
I felt like saying:
1. Look up the meaning of “invade”. (Moving someplace peacefully is not “invading”.)
2. Look up the history of Texas.
On the TV in the background, there’s a recording of Trump saying, “There is no place for hate in this country.” OK, good. Then get out of it.
This talk about an “Hispanic” (or “Latino”) invasion particularly bugs me. Native people have lived in Central America for many thousands of years, the Maya being probably the best known of the tribes. A few hundred years ago they were conquered by invaders from Spain who had horses and firearms, who murdered many and subjugated the rest, imposing their language on them among other things. The ethnically Spanish people have always constituted most of the ruling class — people like senators Cruz and Rubio — are European(Spanish)-Americans, descendants of the invaders. So now we have an ironic situation where people who are largely the descendants of native peoples who have lived here for millennia are being described as “invaders” of a country which is largely populated by the descendants of actual European invaders who have been here no more than a few hundred years.
Describing descendants of native tribes by terms for the people who invaded and conquered them is not just insulting, it ignores the fact that they were here before we were and thus are by no means invaders.
I’m guessing…Ford?
Good news, it seems 8chan will be getting what it deserves and will lose support at last, maybe it will end up being shut down (for now, until a Russian site picks it up probably)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/cloudflare-has-had-enough-cutting-off-8chan/
I guess 8chan finally racked up too many bodies. Except, don’t they have an IPO coming up?
Good news, everyone! Geraldo Rivera has the solution! He tweeted this entirely practical suggestion:
Condolences to all the families and close relatives and friends.
According to the journal i read, the one in Ohio was the 250th assault with 4 or more injured / dead persons this year. And we are, today, the 217th day of the year. That makes it more than one assault a day. This is hopeless.
I live in the Dayton area (one of the suburbs) and have been in the shooting area several times before (though I was nowhere near there during the shooting-I was home watching a Law & Order: SVU marathon after having spent several hours at a family reunion a few towns west of me). I can attest that it’s definitely a party/gallery/indie/queer-friendly district as @Weasel-Rah said, but overall it’s pretty safe and violence like this is incredibly rare-usually the most that ever happens in that district is drunk-and-disorderlies. Since it’s a party district, police were already on the street and killed the shooter before he could kill anyone else. I’m sad and angry, but I’m also grateful that it didn’t get any worse than it did.
@Weasel-Rah
*sad and angry wave to a fellow Daytonian*
Hell’s bells.
Just posting from the UK to say I’m really sorry. I hope everyone is OK, but – in the nature of things – we can’t be.
Just a light cast on Trump’s stochastic terrorism, someone’s done a run-down on the Facebook ads he’s been paying for which use the word “invasion”.
All of them are about “immigrants”. The ones cited certainly look like a call to arms.
Though, as people commented above, many Hispanic people all over the South Western states were there long before the white Europeans actually, y’know, invaded.
https://twitter.com/natijomartinez/status/1158049182877458433/photo/1
@Aleph
It’s funny. Free speech warriors are complaining about “censorship” when it comes to 8chan, but when ISIS websites and accounts are shut down, you don’t hear a single word of protest from them.
Anything that makes it more difficult for 8chan to find new recruits is a win. People worry that the dark web will make it harder to monitor this sort of activity, but a) it’s not like law enforcement lifts a finger to prevent these shootings, even when the threats and hate-filled manifestos are issued right under their noses b) white supremacy needs to be driven underground and made to understand that it is not mainstream or acceptable. It should take a lot of effort to find them.
@ Crip Dyke
Have put Amendment XXVIII somewhere a lot of people will see it. Let’s hope it gains traction. It’s a start.