Yeah, I think so.

Although I also think the "shooters are disproportionately white" thing is a myth. Especially when you realize that public high schools are themselves microcosms of a hierarchical social caste system, invariably with a down and out segment harboring frustrated expectations of flourishing in that hierarchy.

tbh I think that post is just a dig at the alt. right, so I was too easily predisposed to amused by it.

If that's the argument, I'm inclined to think that it pathologizes whiteness. It seems to assume that the privilege associated with whiteness is corrupting. I don't buy it; it seems like too loaded an explanation that assumes too much.

I suspect instead that the processes that underlie radicalization are ideologically and ethnically neutral (i.e., the same processes are occurring, for instance, when a young person decides to join ISIS as when another young person decides to join a Neo-Nazi group). I think what has to happen for you to radicalize is you have to feel like you belong to a community where certain beliefs and norms are behaviors are acceptable, and that that's your tribe. Whatever those beliefs are, the fact that they require you to do some things that everyone around you thinks are completely irrational -- such as kill innocent women by ramming them with a car -- become acceptable. In fact, you begin to have contempt for people around you, who don't subscribe to the beliefs you subscribe to, and the fact that they disagree with you, in your eyes, only proves you right (hence a lot of this "blue pill" language). Perhaps there are reasons why males are especially susceptible to those processes of radicalization, and perhaps they occur at higher rates under certain social and economic conditions conditions, but I think if you look at radicalization more broadly you'd see that a higher percentage of women are radicalized than you'd expect from only looking at mass shootings (just a hunch).

Yeah, I agree. It seems kind of stupid to me, thinking about it more.

Kind of weird this happens the day people start posting on this thread again.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/18/us/texas-school-shooting/index.html

Not so strange: I posted a screencap from a chan post discussing the news.

But yeah, it sucks.

The evidence suggests that people on the far right in America are disproportonately violent, and the far right in America has serious racist undertones when it's not outright advocating racism.

Regardless of how you feel about how justified rural Americans are in being angry (I believe it's a mix of justified & unjustified), the way red America is choosing to act on this anger is really bad. The disproportionate amount of senseless shootings is a symptom of it.

Not all rural areas are red. Don't lump us in with them.

Oops. I checked before I posted the link, but for some reason viewing the forum on my tablet vs my desktop certain images don't load.

Something that stuck out to me was the rhetoric used during one of the live feeds from CNN. One of the anchors said "this is the 20th school shooting in the United States in 2018."
It seems that any incident involving the discharge of a firearm in a school premise is being labeled as a "school shooting" when discussed by leftist news.

News sources on the right seem more intent to break down what happened with each incident, which feels like they are trying to justify that not all firearm discharges at schools are all so bad. But coverage only really seems to happen for both sides when the death toll is higher.

I remember a decade ago people on 4chan were ranking the shooters based on their "Score" and when the Virginia Tech shooting happened Seung-Hui Cho was praised for getting the "all time high score."
Even when I was a depressed suicidal teenager I couldn't get into the headspace of wanting to kill other people, or "make them pay." But I feel like those who would feel a greater obligation to go big, because shooting only two people only gets a blip on the news radar. And although there have been politically charged assaults, I think a majority of these kids just feel invalidated because they were bullied, or didn't have their entitlements met.

Wasn't there some crap from the GOP that all school shootings were done by liberals? Could anyone even back that claim up?

What's the evidence here? Supposedly there have been 101 mass shootings so far this year. Do we know that a significant portion of them are politically motivated? I'm not actually doubting you here, I just wonder if you have something more concrete than the fact that it sure does look from watching the news that there are more violent politically motivated violence coming from conservatives than from people on the left. It doesn't seem like there is a left-wing correlate to radical far-right organizations (at least now... of course, in the 60s and 70s, most radical violent groups were left-wing).

One thing to thing to consider is that, when it comes to mass shootings, gun owners are more likely to be conservative, which means that people involved in shootings are more likely to be conservative, because people on the left are less likely to have access to guns.

Rofl, yeah, not everyone in rural America is an *******. But there are more there.

Maybe not politically motivated, as in the sole purpose for shooting is advocacy for or against some political cause. But the sorts of people committing these mass shootings tend towards certain constellations of political beliefs, particularly far-right political beliefs. There's no shortage of articles about how far-right terrorism is the most prevalent and dangerous type in America.

Even the LV shooter, for instance, was a Trump supporter. He didn't seem to do the shooting for any particularly political purpose, but I don't think it's just a coincidence that white men who are unhinged and willing to commit mass murder are attracted to the fringe conspiracy theories of the right. There's something about that world view which latches into faults of psychology and amplifies them.

Mass shooting is probably the preferred method because the right in America has that weird strain of wannabe military AR-15 LARPers.

So I decided to review the facts, and I have to issue a correction, here. When it comes to school shootings, at least, two profiles do confirm that the likely demographic for school shootings is white men, at a disproportionate level. However, at Politifact someone did a survey and concluded that most shooters do not have any political affiliation at all. So it's wrong to cast them as right-wing.

That doesn't stop the_donald from creating fake Facebook profiles of the shooters with democrat stuff photoshopped on, creating "it was antifa" rumors, and so forth. Look into that history, it's pretty gross.

Where I made the error is I conflated politically-motivated attacks with not politically motivated attacks, attacks which are expressly politically motivated are far and above committed by right-wingers. But that doesn't describe mass shooters, afaik, nobody's done enough profiling on recent to be sure but the current work suggests no.

Lol, true. I didn't want to stereotype that hard, but...

So, looking at this chart:



https://qz.com/1182778/the-far-right-was-responsible-for-the-majority-of-extremist-killings-in-2017/

...another thing a person could criticize about your claims is your use of the word "disproportionate". Non-hispanic whites are the largest single demographic in the US, making up about 62% of the US population. Muslims make up about 1% of the population. It seems that there are more deaths by Muslim extremists relative to the population size of muslims than far-right white supremacists relative to the population of whites. I mean, obviously there are a lot of whites and there are a lot of muslims out there who are not violent extremists. But there are a lot more whites out there, so a lot more out there to become violent extremists, so in some respects its not surprising that so many of them. Obviously this is a superficial analysis, but it seems that Muslim extremist violence is actually much more disproportionate, but that extremist far-right violence is a bigger problem in absolute terms.

EDIT: Just another thing, going back to this link Reid posted and specifically this chart about school shootings, the distribution by ethnic/racial identity actually isn't far off from the racial breakdown of the country. So I'm a little disinclined to talk about disproportionality there, too, although it doesn't seem entirely unfair to use the word.

I mean, to the extent that this is the psychological profile of mass shooters:



[/I][/COLOR]You'd expect that this psychological profile is fairly evenly distributed across racial lines. I mean, I think there is reason here to doubt an interpretation I'm finding all over the Twittersphere, where the key motivating factor of this violence is white fear of a loss of political status.

Ehh... New Yorkers' stereotypes of the rest of the country?



http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-affiliation/

hey speaking of which,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/schools-are-spending-billions-high-tech-security-are-students-any-n875611


Congrats America, now school shootings are backed by a profit motive.

"We can't stop mentally ill children from getting guns because it would negatively impact the school shooting prevention industry." - Paul Ryan at a Republican fundraiser, probably.

That's just depressing.

Shades of TSA security post 9/11

yaaah they actually make fun of this in the show. A lot. It’s not a joke about rural Christians, it’s a joke about the Republican Party.

It could be worse. Right now rich districts are wasting their money (or deficit spending) on corporate welfare. Poor districts might want to, but they can’t.

Imagine what would happen though if some poor kids from a public school shot up a private school. That actually would be the 9/11 of school shootings.

I'm surprised we didn't hear more from that guy who shot up a bunch of senators here in Virginia. I was pretty sure if America got some new wave of gun control appliance scams, it would be then.

Why? Congresspeople are disposable. There are always more goons and toadies.

Well, it's also a joke about rural Christians. And I think it's also a self-aware joke, written by New Yorkers, about how New Yorkers imagine the rest of the country. They writers were playfully drawing attention to their own prejudices about non-New Yorkers just as much as they were joking about the people they caricatured. At least that's my take.

True, actually, most are nameless goons, the only ones worth anything I suppose are the named faces who actually represent their parties.

Kenneth was an early breakout character and the show treats him very well. Trust me, the joke here is the Republicans asserting priority over rural Christians.

Heh, I watched a lot of 30 Rock back in its day. I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this.

Oh, you mean other than being an unreasonably effective excuse to get people to watch more cable news?

https://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/active-shooter-situation-at-noblesville-middle-school

Jesus ****ing christ America

Normally I don't post but god, that's messed up... it breaks my heart that this happens so often...

Personally I think we really need to solve the problem of shooters being created in the first place, everything else looks like a bandage at this point.. It hasn't really been touched on in this thread thus far, so I'm throwing that ball into your court - though I won't pretend I'm smart enough to engage too deeply.

I'm a little worried that this is becoming more common outside of the US, like the van attack in Toronto or the recent bombing in Mississauga, and other attacks elsewhere (Europe, etc). Guns or no guns these people are clearly angry and out for blood, and there's sure to be a reason for it. To be honest I see a correlation between that and the crap idiots like Peterson empower, but what do I know.



Hah.

Actually that whole topic of demonizing the mentally ill drives me nuts because mentally ill children/teenagers are more likely going to be depressed and anxious than they are violent. And that's easy to mitigate with treatment and support. It's really another scapegoat for people to use to distance themselves from the issue regarding "why did this happen".

It just seems to me that the real issue hasn't been discussed at large/in the media, only the ideas regarding the tools they used (typically guns). "Arming teachers" or "taking away guns" and what-have-you. Seems fruitless in my eyes, but I can't say I'm surprised since I doubt that anyone wants to acknowledge the existence of a bigger problem.

https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X

http://a.co/1yZSOAu

I was more talking about the general population, I don't really expect your average person to be reading these kinds of books.

Edit: went over it again and I'm not sure exactly what you linking those was supposed to mean.

People are going to continue losing their **** as a result of the collapse of global civilization due to complexity and overshooooooooooot

aww kids today are still learning poetry

You know that teacher paid for those markers, too. How generous.

http://www.wbal.com/article/322207/124/5-dead-others-gravely-injured-in-mass-shooting-at-capital-gazette

wtf

Wow, seems like homeboy was legitimately nuts:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/jarrod-ramos-psycho/

Of course, they claim it had "nothing to do with anything", preemptively defending him from, you know, maybe associating him with the president's attacks on the media.

He clearly didn't do it because of Trump, but damn. The weird reactions people get immediately to this stuff is wild.

You could possibly claim Trump's legitimized attacks on the media in the cultural zeitgeist, which made him feel more emboldened, but that's like a 2nd degree of responsibility at best.

He's had it out for those people for a while. Something recently pushed him over the edge. Maybe it was Trump. Maybe it was the crooked media. Maybe is was a bad home life or a broken judicial system or some stuck up prude ***** or the leprechauns in his garden. Who knows. Regardless, the responsibility rests squarely on the ******* who did the deed.