18 of the dead are reportedly children, some as young as second graders. It’s just fucking horrific.
Details of the shooting are still scarce. The shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, was apparently shot dead by police. He didn’t leave behind a manifesto or social media posts shedding light on his motives, at least as far as we know now.
Here’s a thread for discussing the shooting and related topics like why the fuck we don’t have adequate gun control. Add links to any stories/posts/whatever that have more information or a useful perspective.
As a Texan and especially as a Texan with a young nephew I am terrified.
Re: RJ Dragon
You just get used to it after a while. It’s surprising how these things blur together and nobody except the victims’ families really cares after the news cycle moves on
Re: Cynthia
I agree! Republicans these days are less “we must preserve the sanctity of life” and more “we must preserve the sanctity of the gun lobbyists’ paychecks.”
Republican: Hey, fetuses! We’re going to prevent your parents from ending your life before it’s born, even if you were concieved by your own grandfather. But once you get out of that womb, f*ck you for having the temerity to be born. You’re on your own now.
My mother always tells the story of how she had a C section with my birth because I was sitting down in the womb and refused to be born. Now that 2022 is in full swing I wonder if baby me was actually smart to try not to get born. At least the Republicans would protect me there…
As for my own position on abortion I do believe it ends a life and ideally should never be done, but the problem is not “is abortion legal/illegal” but “are parents supported enough to be able to choose not to abort the baby?” In Switzerland where abortion is legal there are 6.8 abortions per 1000 women 15-44, and in the US the figure is twice that, because if you decide to keep the baby you had better be rich. It’s almost like the Chinese one child policy just not in law. And if they’re going to illegalize abortions AND squeeze the poor… Now teenage/rape/incest pregnancy is one thing, having a baby and not being able to afford to keep it is another. But yes let’s kill the poor. Jobless millions whisked away, no more welfare tax to pay (and no more tax period thanks to our pet politicians).*
*If nobody gets it, I will post another comment for clarification.
@Alan Robertshaw: No Money Mark’s Varieties of Variousness actually airs live on http://ihatefreespeech.db8.ca , not WCSB. We record live on Tuesdays starting at 10pm EST; the show is then archived. We take calls at 216-306-0216. Thanks for the plug and for being a regular caller. And David: I’d love to interview you.
The Federalist just posted a piece arguing that parents should respond to school shootings by… homeschooling their kids. (It’s here if you really want to torture yourself.) Prize quote (content warning for ableism): “There’s no telling when a crazy gunman might open fire in a movie theater or a grocery store.” Yeah, and whose fucking fault is that?!
Well, Beto O’Rourke decided to cause some good trouble at Gov. Abbott’s press conference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST8rKQOPDII
He challenged Abbott’s side to actually do something, was escorted out of the convention center, and proceeded to speak to the press that followed him out:
http://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1529525108838121472
Naturally the GOP is complaining that Beto is politicizing the tragedy. Y’know what? It’s a fucking political issue. Abbott is choosing to take the political stance that he doesn’t want to hurt the NRA’s feelings, and Beto thinks that we should try to stop Texans from getting murdered.
I keep going between being angry and being sad, and the angry is winning, a lot.
@Crip Dyke:
Realistically, it’s doubtful any of this can happen until after the US hits the nadir of its structural-demographic crisis. On the far side of that should be what some have referred to as a “Jonbar hinge”, a point of leverage where very different alternative futures are possible, and one person (if they can organize a lot more behind a shared vision) can have a major impact on steering that future.
One thing must be avoided at all costs, and that is a repeat of the mistakes of Reconstruction. There was too much compromising with the defeated enemy, among other things. The model to follow must instead be the deNazification of postwar Germany — unlike Reconstruction, that actually seems to have worked. But this time all structural privilege must be eliminated.
I’d go so far as to suggest that a) positions of power or authority be minimized; since that number is not zero (there needs to be a “the buck stops here” desk somewhere), b) those positions should be rotated regularly through the subset of the populace whose education and skills make them competent to do the job, by lottery akin to jury duty. That way no-one can claim that their ascension to such a job is evidence of some sort of inherent superiority or greater deservingness, nor should any one person occupy such a position long enough for it to go to their head. “Power corrupts”, but it does not do so instantly.
Rooting out anti-egalitarian propaganda from the culture is not going to be easy as it gets deep and subtle. That’s not all: zero-sum thinking must also be targeted, for if one believes the world to be zero-sum, one believes one’s decisions won’t affect the aggregate joy or aggregate suffering, and thus one may as well make them in such a way as to maximize their own joy and minimize their own suffering, and band together with like-minded folks to hoard the good things and dump risks and negatives onto everyone else … and bam, you have conservatism appearing again.
The zero-sum propaganda runs extremely deep. All the way to childhood board games, which almost universally are competitive and winner-take-all. Digging all of that out, root and branch, will be a project for a generation …
Fuck. Why do people even need guns?
I hate these conservative murderer-enablers.
Nothing else to say there. Can’t and won’t.
@Victoroious Parasol
Bluntly, why should anyone give half a shit? Calling on fascists to do the right thing is useless at absolute best. Talking to the press is also not an accomplishment. Nothing O’Rourke says to either group will ever accomplish anything. If he’d broken Abbott’s nose or something, that might be worth caring about.
The thing about his “girlfriend” (who was explicitly not his girlfriend) is a very old script. When a man acts badly, blame the nearest woman.
@Surplus to Requirements:
I’ve been saying for years now that the U.S. has been trying to do Reconstruction right for generations; they failed after the American Civil War, they failed after WWI, and they finally succeeded with the Japanese rebuilding after WWII (mostly because they were sitting there with obvious shows of force and the negotiation was handled by the folks on site rather than bouncing around political processes first). And the U.S. has only given lip service to the idea and has never really tried to do it properly again since WWII, in that case I suspect mostly because American Exceptionalism really took hold post WWII (and especially the second Red Scare of the 1950s) and the level of condescension that has been in every American intervention since then hasn’t let them treat other countries as places to do work with rather than to.
German de-Nazification was helped by the fact that rubbing the faces of the average German in exactly what sort of horrors were being done in their names broke through a lot of the wilful ignorance that had been going on and got them to want to turn away. Unfortunately the modern American Nazi has had a few more generations of propaganda and deliberate dehumanization of their opponents since then.