[insurancesucks]

Apparently we need to say it a little louder. We have multiple threads in this comment section of people trying to figure out how the US can have > 500 "mass shootings" a year and do nothing.

I won't be satisfied until we change the definition. Including gang violence from people with multiple felonies is not useful to the conversation.

[paulryanrogers]

> I won't be satisfied until we change the definition. Including gang violence from people with multiple felonies is not useful to the conversation.

Why should we not count gangs and felons killing 4+ people at once as "mass killing"?!

Because their victims may know them somehow? It's still a serious incident which would be much less likely if guns were illegal. And all we'd lose is some sport shooting and ego points.

[potato3732842]

Because these are fundamentally different crimes with different motives, people from mostly different walks of life doing them and different preventative steps.

The stuff you do to "solve" drive-bys and targeted drug industry violence won't solve school shootings and vise versa.

To lump them together serves no non-evil purpose. The people doing so are exactly as deserving of marginalization, and ideally legitimate state violence following due process (but that's just a pipe dream of mine), as the people who use a slight of hand to include prescription abuse in stats about cross-border drug smuggling or the people who try and act like literally every instance of domestic violence is the fault of alcohol or whatever. Nobody with even a shred of decency would stand behind those latter two examples. It speaks volumes about HN that the mass-shooting slight of hand is fine though.

And this isn't just a mass shooting crime issue. This is a "people feel emboldened to lie and be shitty because there is no consequence" issue. Bad people perform comparable dishonest slights of hand on all sorts of issues.

[paulryanrogers]

> The stuff you do to "solve" drive-bys and targeted drug industry violence won't solve school shootings and vise versa.

Are you sure about that? There are probably some differences in prevention and response, but also plenty of similarities too. Like better mental healthcare, outlawing private gun ownership, and teaching non-violent conflict resolution.

> To lump them together serves no non-evil purpose. The people doing so are exactly as deserving of marginalization, and ideally legitimate state violence following due process (but that's just a pipe dream of mine)...

So you're advocating for violence in response to speech?

[potato3732842]

>Are you sure about that? There are probably some differences in prevention and response, but also plenty of similarities too. Like better mental healthcare, outlawing private gun ownership, and teaching non-violent conflict resolution.

Targeting the overlap (mental health, guns, etc) is stupid and inefficient unless your goal is to take some action that can be done under that pretext and you don't really care about resource expenditure toward results. There's only so much political capital and surplus wealth round to be directed toward such ends. Something like gun control is massively political expensive. There's cheaper ways to get the same result.

I think the suggestion of addressing non-violent conflict resolution is a great example of that sort of "well I want to do a thing and this is my justification" because while it would certainly address the "traditional crime" end it's perhaps a generally good thing to do but it's not going to affect the mass shootings much because those people typically have little to no conflict with who they're shooting.

>So you're advocating for violence in response to speech?

Yes, and just to be clear I'm also advocating for all sorts of marginalization under the law short of violence leading up to that. Like all matters of law and social norms such marginalization is necessarily backed in violence though perhaps circuitously. The way I see it speech makes us all fractionally responsible for the results of what our words endorse. If society is willing to pay a bunch of cops to levy violence upon people over fairly petty misdeeds then I think it's at least arguably justifiable to direct the same kinds of violence at people who's speech greatly furthers tings and riles up people toward ends that are huge negatives. Politicians, news people, internet personalities ought not to be able to rile people up and then wash their hands of it saying that they were not there when the bricks got thrown or people to get shot.

I'm also aware that this is bad for freedom and human rights but that ship sailed so long ago. If we're going to have prolific law enforcement and subject as many things as we do to it, allegedly for the betterment of society, then screw it, lets' do speech too. If we're all gonna get stomped by the jackboot like this is singapore we might as well enjoy the upsides.

[paulryanrogers]

Disagree, violence should be a last resort, even within the justice system.

That said, I do agree that people who incite violence in subtle ways--say yelling "fight, fight, fight" to an armed mob then sitting by for hours as they storm the capital--should share in the blame and suffer consequences for their incitement and the neglect of their oaths to protect.