A whole classroom just wiped off the face of the earth.

[boston bean]

Our country really fucking sucks. Accepting this absolute deranged bullshit.

Do something everyone who can!

[sarcasmo]

1. Our country sucks, beyond belief.

[Irish_Dem]

2. The Ukrainian people against all odds are fighting like hell to save their children

and country.

Why can't we fight as hard?

[Model35mech]

3. The police did DO SOMETHING, they KILLED HIM!

That's what happens in todays America. We can't prevent but our LE's can react.

What you are asking for is really to prevent these things from happening again.

Generally, that seems unlikely in today's America.

Specifically, we aren't really sure what to fix because we don't understand what went wrong with the gun-buy, what radicalized the shooter, or why that last line of defense, school security, didn't hold the line.

Even so, with little to go on we must try to conjure up a path to tomorrow's America. A place where a solution to a painful personal disappointment can't be resolved with a mass murder of innocent children followed by suicide by cop.

[boston bean]

4. Bull puckey. We know what the issue is. Assault weapons capable of firing off a hundred rounds a

Minute in the hands of nuts.

Oh so we can’t stop the nuts from buying them because other people want a killing machine they just want. They don’t need.

[Model35mech]

5. Yes, but we don't know WHAT went wrong with the gun-buy

relative to the shooter buying the gun. What part of the implementation of the law worked? What didn't work.

Write all the angry tough-guy emotional rant you want. It's an emotion time. But that really takes us nowhere toward the truth. It only gives us insight into what drives your response. Understandable, yes, but not so helpful in prevention tomorrow.

Although you proclaim it, the world doesn't really yet know if the shooter was a "NUT".

Saying he's a nut, is more a statement of confirmation of your inability to grasp what else could have possibly motivated him in this crime.

At this point we have lots of rage, but no real understanding if he was a "NUT" sensu standards of diagnosis for the American Psychological Association.

If he was mentally disordered what diagnosis did he have? An answer to that should be approachable.

Our inability to understand his motivations really isn't proof that he was NUTS and should have been diagnosed previous to his gun-buy or previous to yesterday's shooting.

If he WAS clinically 'NUTS' with a diagnosable disorder why wasn't it diagnosed? Therapists are REQUIRED BY LAW to report if they believe a client is dangerous to him/her self or to others? What happened around Uvalde that there never was a diagnosis that should have happened if he was so clearly 'NUTS'????????

You make presumptions with great certainty about things which are, at this time, very poorly understood. I'm sure that reduces your own uncertainties about what happened. I'm not so sure your 'bull puckey' accusations really takes anyone closer to truth or resolution.

[countingbluecars]

9. What went wrong

is that an 18 year old was allowed to buy an assault weapon.

[Solomon]

10. Thankyou! I was about to say!

[Model35mech]

12. The value of that is it is brief to the point

It's also convenient in being a popular explanation.

The presence or not of the gun is absolutely a critical control point. The same can be said of the bullets. Or the finger of the hand of a person with intent to shoot the gun at school children...

Control at critical points is how system regulation works, but banning these guns from sale to legal buyers has proven very difficult politics for near 30 years. If that's what you want to hang your hat on, go for it. No one will stop you and most people (me included) will at least wish you better luck than previous attempts at that.

Within the system of things that are involved in a legal sale of a gun there are multiple other controllable events. You probably would do better to consider regulation of one or more of those things than bans on the gun itself. The second amendment does suggest guns should exist in a well regulated environment. Something in that vein might someday get past SCOTUS.

[demigoddess]

6. most of these shootings seem to be suicide by cop. The 'shooter' wants to be killed but seems to

think he has the right to take others with him. Why I do not understand. Maybe it is the fame and admiration he thinks he will receive posthumously. Either way I wish they would just shoot themselves and let the others live.

[LeftInTX]

7. Exactly

We need to catch them alive and leave them to rot in jail

[Model35mech]

8. A decade ago I spent a lot of time on trying to understand mass shootings

And I posted a lot of what I found on this very site, and under the username Heresince1628, I suffered very much abuse for pointing out things that many people didn't want to read.

One of the things that stood out to me was that there was a group of mass shootings that often involved the combination of gun-killings of a large number of people followed by suicide by cop. In the stuff I read, and that didn't go back beyond the late 1950's, back then the combination of mass killing & suicide was significantly biased as an American thing. To my knowledge there is as yet no good analysis of why that is.

There could be good reasons for that. Although we think of mass shootings as common, when the individual events are screened carefully so as to match definitions of mass-shootings and mass-killings, relatedness of victims, presence of organized crime/gangs is stratified it turns out they really aren't so common, and they come in relatively small numbers, often under 30, a critical threshold for traditional statistics. That's good in one way, we can breathe because they are sort of rare compared to individual murders, but it's also bad because large datasets really are necessary in order to detect important but small signals that could help explain what's going on.

One of many difficulties I noticed for doing any serious analysis of mass shootings/mass killings was the incompleteness of data. LE organizations didn't seem to pursue these things actively after a month or so but left them 'open' hoping something will pop up and make sense of what seemed senseless. Newspapers rely on LE for facts and are even less patient to develop deeper understanding before public interest wains. Comparisons of trends in mass-shootings/mass-killings is pursued by a well qualified but comparatively small number of experts. If they can produce a book, then a magazine show might pick up and tell the story of that.

It all remains a terrible muddle. The definitions of mass shootings and mass killings vary from place to place and from reporting institution/media to reporting institution/media. Statistics that mix together "apples and oranges" don't really provide rigorous insight.

Obviously, definitions of mass shootings and mass killings are distinguished by the larger number of dead than in simple murders. But the threshold for counting may vary in the number of people dead plus fatally wounded (or not) and some include and some do not include numbers of people with non-life threatening wounds.

Another problem is that there is a tendency for older institutions to not include gang related 'mass-shootings', while younger institutions do. While the FBI and HSD may have good reasons for separating organized crime and terrorism from the general stats, the general public doesn't. And bigger numbers provide more sizzle in stories and get more clicks.

Some reporting centers don't include mass-shootings that involve related family members. This is something of a hold-over from epidemiology and its avoidance of doing analysis when the victims of an illness all attended the same family reunion. The cause is seen as something internal to the family and not a broader threat to the community.

In today's reporting on CBS that stressed there were more mass shootings than days of the year so far in 2022, CBS included gang related shootings, which inflated their count compared to the Mass Shooter Database project, and the Violence project which do not include gang and organized crime related multiple shootings/killings.

One of the most common puzzling problems is the shooters' mental wellness. Although the NRA and it's conservative supporters want to blame the "monsters out there" it turns out that a bit more than 1/3 of the mass shootings (including shootings assumed to be gang and organized crime) are never linked to an identified killer. Consequently NOTHING can really be confidently known about the patterns in 60% of the shooters mental health status. Nonetheless claims that each shooter, known or unknown were mentally ill are made in reports of almost ALL multiple-shootings.

[Solomon]

11. Why would a suicide by cop wear body armor like the killers now are doing?

[demigoddess]

13. to slow it down and give you more time to do your killing before the cops get you. Maybe they just

want it to be harder to kill them than just a cake walk.