Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri May 27, 2022 12:00 pm

.
Nobody here has presented any firm conclusions to this point. Indeed, everything remains in flux.

Agree that Rex's suggestion to refrain from drawing conclusions is sound, of course, but this platform should (or could) also be a place to speculate (though the -- acceptable, within forum guidelines, etc. -- range of speculation may be subject to debate) or share prelim data points.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri May 27, 2022 1:40 pm

Two things that are pretty solid: they're desperately spinning new lies every time law enforcement holds a press conference, and that video footage of the parents outside demanding that police do something.

The "hold the perimeter and let the massacre continue" M.O. is very Scott Israel, and it's increasingly looking like some Border Patrol agents on the scene decided to blow the op. I'm sure the story will change a half dozen more times: so far today they've further erased the SRO confrontation at the door by blaming a teacher for propping a door open, heavily revised the timeline, and stated that Border Patrol did not in fact engage with Ramos but a "Federal" team who came up from the border shot him 10-20 minutes later.

It's instructive to observe that there is a lot of discourse on Bluebird about "so are we just supposed to ignore the photos of the border patrol guy and his hat with a bullet hole through it" but we, in fact, have zero clue who that photograph is of, or when and where it is from. Between unsourced evidence, active disinformation, and poorly organized LEO spin, it's a lotta quicksand.

It's also attracting a lot of attention from Americans who would never indulge in conspiracy theorizing and making them extremely uncomfortable. Long term outcome here will likely be more public support for a completely Federalized national police force, and public support for overt, legal, official realtime monitoring of all online communications.
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Sure.

Postby JackRiddler » Fri May 27, 2022 1:46 pm

.

WR, on the crosspost: Thanks. I heard "off-duty" border patrol shot him. The bullshit is just gonna flow and flow.

Meanwhile, the message I was posting...

BS: Sure. Let's speculate.

I speculate that 90% of what the coppers say about this, especially henceforth, is bullshit and coverup.

I also speculate that an even higher percentage of POOMA and "connect the dots" posted online as informed speculation won't even have rumor to back it, but will fit certain predictable templates established in very small part (but with distinction and creativity) on this site among thousands of others (well, a couple of hundred I'd guess).

I assert that actual big causes of this constantly recurring bloody drama and sacrifice of innocents are already pretty well-known and evident. A sick, intensely competitive and anti-social society, deep into imperial and economic decay and a related broad process of reaction and authoritarian formation, generates no-future emotionalism and general hatred of self and others; so that down the line, in the mass, a few individuals from the most prone-to-violence demographic of dumb-fuck isolated young males with big senses of grievance are moved to stock up on the ridiculously widely available military-style weapons of mass-killing, which are glorified in the culture and at the movies as the greatest sexual pleasure and solution to all problems. They feel the inspiration of all the dumb-fuck predecessor rampage killers, go after the softest possible targets, and try to hit a new high score. They do so with or without manifestoes or stochastic motivations thanks to various ideologies going around. At this point it's become self-sustaining for something like 20 years already as a copycat mode of killing oneself along with many others spectacularly and going down in infamy. In some, really many cases, this happens after legal institutional grooming in (often) the actual military, or indirectly through the militarized culture. Possibly a few cases are groomed illegally by hidden persons/institutions as part of a strategy of tension, or as future killers who got out of control.

On edit: Where I differ here from WR is that this matters in the ongoing completion of an all-encompassing state-corporate biometric QR-coded surveillance system for every real-world body in motion and every action of any kind on the Internet. That is a function of capitalism, authoritarian statism, and the generally fascist-fearful mood of the institutions, populace and politicians. Compared to the effects of Covidianism in moving this longstanding program forward, the rampage killings are minor and possibly even counterproductive.

Also, the choke-point in the above described process of rampage-killer production really is in controlling the availability of arsenals to potential dumb-fuck mass killers. The weapons should be tracked and limited and subject to registration and insurance, just like cars. And yeah, background checks, so fucking what?

It is not speculation that what's special in the latest case, besides the exceptional horror of it, is the total exposure of the coppers and the copper culture as fraudulent and "part of the problem." Because that's ridiculously evident. And (here is where I'll definitely withhold judgement in the absence of definitive evidence) possibly as a product of intentional participation by one or more of the coppers on the scene.

And the guy the dumb-fuck was in contact with online is an interesting lead.

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Re: Sure.

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri May 27, 2022 2:47 pm

JackRiddler » Fri May 27, 2022 12:46 pm wrote:the most prone-to-violence demographic of dumb-fuck isolated young males (mostly) with big senses of grievance are moved to stock up on the ridiculously widely available military-style weapons of mass-killing glorified in the culture and at the movies as the greatest sexual pleasure and solution to all problems. They feel the inspiration of all the dumb-fuck predecessors, go after the softest possible targets, and try to hit a new high score.


Was discussing this with some cityfolk friends just yesterday, I think this will be a summer full of spectacular violence for socioeconomic reasons, lots of "gone postal," vehicular attacks, and familicide, but the media spotlight will be focused on The Summer Of The High Score. There are a lot of these kids, it's trivial to justify any demographic or location as a target, and this month has been "a mimetic super-spreader event," as an anonbuddy put it this week.

There will be a lot of column inches expended, digital and print, on how news media needs to do some soul-searching and break the cycle, but they have even less agency than their audience does. Can't stop, won't stop.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri May 27, 2022 3:59 pm

insightful, thoughtful replies - mightily obliged, both.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri May 27, 2022 4:50 pm

Are Criminology and Journalism now equally obsolete, or is any cop, lawyer or media hound going to answer (or even ask) the most elementary questions?

1. MEANS: Where did a boy just turning 18 acquire the $$$$$ to buy those (very expensive) guns? By all accounts, his family was far from wealthy.

2. MOTIVE: Why would he go out of his way to massacre tiny children whom he didn't even know and against whom he could have no possible grudge? As opposed to, say, taking revenge on the people who had bullied him. (Was he even bullied? Or what bullshit "explanation" have the media's Psychological Experts, those profound students of the human condition, come up with this time? )

3. OPPORTUNITY: (This is the only point that's being even halfway-seriously addressed):

Kid shoots his grandmother at home (none of the neigbours hear shots, shouts or screams? the house is anything but isolated),

- then rushes out and drives off (unhindered),

- then crashes his car into a ditch (unnoticed by anyone? unhelped? unquestioned?),

- then clambers out clutching two big bulky automatic rifles (nobody notices, cares, calls the cops?),

- then walks up to an elementary school and wanders around outside it with his "long guns" for 10-12 minutes (unnoticed, though he fires off shots? certainly unhindered. No one in the school hears the shots? No teacher or child or janitor looks out the window and notices Long Gun Guy?),

- then finally walks into the school (unhindered) and spends an hour shooting children at his leisure -- entirely unhindered -- while the (armed) cops, who have arrived, form a barrier against distraught parents and stand around doing nothing but wait. For about sixty minutes.

Of course I missed out the most elementary point of all: Where is the evidence that Salvador Ramos (2004 - 2022) is even the culprit?

Who is telling us that he dunnit? On what evidence? Are these people trustworthy witnesses? Why should we take their word for it? Why, exactly?

Also, of course:

4. CUI BONO? Who benefits? He certainly didn't.

Questions, questions... Maybe someone would care to answer point #1, for a start. If he didn't have the financial means to acquire the guns, he couldn't possibly have bought and used those guns. So precisely how did he acquire the means (if he ever did)?
Last edited by MacCruiskeen on Fri May 27, 2022 5:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby Belligerent Savant » Fri May 27, 2022 5:38 pm

.
On point articulation, Mac.
I offered drive-by links and brief talking points covering your items 1 and 3 and hinted along alternative possibilities. The aim was to revisit when more downtime allowed while opening the floor to others to contribute.

Haven't seen any in-depth exploration, certainly not in the press, covering your key points. Though i've not taken more than a surface-level dive to this point.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri May 27, 2022 7:07 pm

Oh, I wasn't attacking you, Bel Sav. Certainly not. I was attacking other people, though only indirectly and only secondarily, and only because it's unavoidable in self-defence. The main point is that the most elementary questions are not even being asked anymore.

It just exasperates me, this instant acceptance of the Designated Culprit's guilt, every damn time, by the soi-disant critical intelligentsia. They toss off the shallowest and feeblest of "psychological" "explanations" as to why the Designated Culprit (allegedly) dunnit -- "alienation, right? case closed" -- and then immediately go into wordy lamentations about The Soul of America and The Deadly Effects of the Mass Media on the clueless plebs.

Never once do these profound students of society and the human psyche pause to ask themselves whether their own damn souls might have been badly damaged by the same ubiquitous media. They just take it for granted that the cops & the TV & the government & the CIA are always telling them the truth about the one thing that matters most: whodunnit? Is this a sane and adequate response to institutions notorious for lying? Is it possible that a decades-long diet of "quality" thrillers and "quality" horror movies and "quality" TV series has crippled their own understanding of the world and the (other) people in it? It might be worth looking into. And this is to say nothing of the rot that has set into "serious" intellectual activity over the last half-century, especially since 1989, with a vengeance since 2001, and plumbing new depths of credulity (or cravenness) since the launching of COUPVID-19.

Apparently it's now plain common sense to assert that people (those people, of course, not proper people, not people like us) just flip out randomly and massacre innocent strangers, at frequent intervals, for no discernible reason. They simply can't help themselves.

Humans, eh? What an incorrigible species. They must be corralled for their own good (by humans, the real ones, the evolved ones, us and our bosses, whom we endeavour not to displease). Culling may soon be necessary.

Better play safe. You don't want to be caught on the wrong side.

Lessons From History:

Operation Gladio never happened. (It's a Conspiracy Theory.)

Lee Harvey Oswald was the first of many Lone Gunmen.

Nineteen Deathloving Superstudents snuck up on the Pentagon and shattered the three Twin Towers.

The FBI has never entrapped anyone.

No one has ever suffered a miscarriage of justice.

The police and the mass media and our Leaders always tell us the truth.


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Last edited by MacCruiskeen on Sat May 28, 2022 6:36 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri May 27, 2022 7:12 pm

"Journalism" is relaying official statements, no matter how absurd. And this week has laid that uncomfortably bare; but such inconveniences never last. It's not like the news media exists to inform us. Things will get back to normal soon.

As for criminal investigation, it seldom ever happens in the wild. Police are rival gangs at best, a jobs program for obese extortion artists at worst.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby drstrangelove » Fri May 27, 2022 7:31 pm

JackRiddler » Fri May 27, 2022 11:25 am wrote:
drstrangelove » Fri May 27, 2022 1:19 am wrote:Sure the gun issue plays a role. The 2nd amendment is there to ensure an even distribution of weapons to maintain an even distribution of power. This could still be achieved without the need for military rifles etc. The point is to enable a population to effectively carry out a guerrilla war against its government, not win a war against its government. Handguns and shotguns can achieve this.


Not at all. It's there primarily to assure the states entering the republic could maintain their own militias and not have to rely on the new federal government or other states for protection against Indians, slave uprisings, the British, other empires, etc. Madison (for example, not mentioning him as anything like sole cause but he was officially the author of the Bill of Rights) and many others had a militia romance and believed militias were more effective militarily than central armies. The other point (of several) was to enable governments with fast-and-ready forces in case of slave uprisings or Indian/Spanish attacks. The inversion of this that you present here is a modern reading into the text quite contrary to what the framers or the crafters of this amendment intended. I don't see how they could have made it more clear that aside from the slaves and Indians they considered their own free people to be the most dangerous enemy (democracy as "tyranny") and that their intent was to write the first and last constitution ever, extremely difficult even to amend. "Guerilla war" from their own citizens was precisely the opposite of anything they'd countenance. (Note: big-talking Jefferson & co. weren't framers.)

Maybe you should look at the actual history, the first cases when real militias were mustered. First case, to invade the Middle Ground (Ohio Territory) so as to make good on all that delicious land speculation the likes of Washington had led a war to preserve against the British in the first place. It went disastrously, after which a first federal army was organized under "Mad Anthony" Wayne. Second, they were mustered and organized under central command to suppress the Whiskey tax revolt in western PA. Under Hamilton's command, no less. That was a case of "well-regulated militia" called by the government to defend "the security of a free State" against "guerilla warfare" by the people who opposed a genuinely unjust tax. So the opposite.

It's not that your view has no history, it's that it is an anti-federalist history and contrary to any honest originalist reading of the Constitution or the 2nd Amendment. There's no case here on "intent" of the text or the framers.

The reason China turned out the way it is' is because an imperial government around 221 BC built the great wall then eliminated all internal fortifications and weapons, making farmers completely reliant on the imperial army and the bureaucracy beneath it.


Since when were farmers the builders of fortifications that could turn back regular armies? Sadly they'd already been subject to bandits and tribute-takers for thousands of years, not just in China, and your assumption about how they might have felt about the protection of a central government suppressing said banditry and the parasitism of intermediate nobility is debatable. If you're thinking of castles, then most of those are held by competing warrior castes a.k.a. nobilities. If they're busy building castles and piling up weapons they don't have time to farm, they have serfs for that sort of thing. That's whose castles the more ambitious would-be monarchs and emperors among the warrior castes like to demolish, and not just in China but in countless cases around the globe, from before 221 BC down to today.

Also, if you think properly about it, you just described the creation of a large internal market without barriers to the free circulation of goods.

So long as people have the ability to kill government mercenaries, not defeat them, then the gun deterrent will work because the government will get so weak having to fight against its citizens that it will just get invaded by a competing power.


Hilarity. "Killing government mercenaries" (usually labeled "terrorism") in the real world of actual histories you can read provides the pretexts and contexts for escalations and pacifications and build-outs of the government security apparatus. In the absence of such "deterrence", governments seeking to increase their security powers have been known even to fabricate it, a practice the research of which in part is the reason this site exists.

And if you knew your over-armed Americans, you'd know that their imagined revolt against a tyrannical government of liberals on television would likeliest play out as their deputization as loyal militias under the leadership of a tyrannical governor and the LEOs against some fabricated threat of foreign terrorists, immigrants, revolutionaries, race warriors, Black Panthers, etc.

.

100% knowledge 0% understanding. Except the part on Chinese civ. That’s 0% knowledge and 0% understanding. Ch’in empire with its ruler Huang-it and key advisor Li Ssu constructed the Great Wall, not a castle, then removed all internal fortifications that had been built along with weapons, then burnt all the books and buried the scholars alive. They were so repressive that the military stepped in.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby JackRiddler » Fri May 27, 2022 9:21 pm

The one Chin emperor was succeeded after just 15 years by Han, yes, but they maintained the main parts of the system: imperial centralism, subjugation of nobilities, and one big market with civil service and infrastructure.

And it's okay, I don't teach Chinese history, so I'll accept your rating of my Americanist knowledge, although even I would only put it in the low 90s, and that only for teaching purposes. Everyone's ignorance, everyone's unknown unknowns, is infinite.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby drstrangelove » Fri May 27, 2022 11:30 pm

the only thing that should've been taken from my view on gun laws is twofold:
1) That people who are armed(and who can feed themselves) have the ability to say 'no' to central authorities.

2) When weapons become monopolised by small private groups within a society, that society tends to become more repressive.

When Rome had citizen armies which supplied their own weapons the empire was less repressive than when it had private dedicated armies. Feudalism then concentrated arms within small groups of private armies which led to serfdom to support them; and the feudal estates themselves could for a period could say no to the monarchy because the army was decentralized. The nation state, mass citizen armies, and the factory system led to a wider distribution of weapons and less repression than serfdom. Obviously more complex than to reduce liberty to this, but the trend holds up.

The title mentions a root cause for this phenomenon, and i think this is it. To create defenseless societies that must accept escalating austerity. And that the primary driver to these shooting events, which obviously make the wide distribution of firearms more dangerous to society, is the intentional glorification of shooters. Psy ops could be used to start a cluster of copycat events. I don't know. All that is downstream.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby drstrangelove » Fri May 27, 2022 11:51 pm

Also latest Batman movie has villain radicalize minions in online chatroom to orchestrate a mass shooting event.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby DrEvil » Sat May 28, 2022 12:41 pm

drstrangelove » Sat May 28, 2022 5:30 am wrote:the only thing that should've been taken from my view on gun laws is twofold:
1) That people who are armed(and who can feed themselves) have the ability to say 'no' to central authorities.

2) When weapons become monopolised by small private groups within a society, that society tends to become more repressive.

When Rome had citizen armies which supplied their own weapons the empire was less repressive than when it had private dedicated armies. Feudalism then concentrated arms within small groups of private armies which led to serfdom to support them; and the feudal estates themselves could for a period could say no to the monarchy because the army was decentralized. The nation state, mass citizen armies, and the factory system led to a wider distribution of weapons and less repression than serfdom. Obviously more complex than to reduce liberty to this, but the trend holds up.

The title mentions a root cause for this phenomenon, and i think this is it. To create defenseless societies that must accept escalating austerity. And that the primary driver to these shooting events, which obviously make the wide distribution of firearms more dangerous to society, is the intentional glorification of shooters. Psy ops could be used to start a cluster of copycat events. I don't know. All that is downstream.


The simple fact is that more guns equals more shootings. All the research shows a clear connection between ease of availability and homicide/suicide/accidental shooting rates (see here for a ton of links: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05 ... erts-plea/ ), so if you want an armed population then you also have to accept that shootings like this will happen more often. In other words: you have to be okay with daily mass shootings right now as the price for being able to oppose the government at some hypothetical point in the future.

Think of it as an insurance policy that requires daily human sacrifice to remain valid.
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Re: Uvalde (& Mass shooting events - root causes, etc.)

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat May 28, 2022 12:53 pm

.
What percentage of mass shootings are perpetrated by (previously) law-abiding gun owners in America?
More restrictive laws hack at branches rather than striking at root (causes).

Also, how does your premise explain the following:

@ibnDeseretii

London has a higher homicide rate than New York. They do not have guns, and they are working on knife control.

Image
Image
Image

https://twitter.com/ibnDeseretii/status ... PilE8PQrDA

The above involves statistics specific to 2 cities, however, and we know statistics can be tweaked to maximize desired presentation.

All that aside: the root cause of 'mass shootings' isn't guns. Guns are merely tools. Anyone can obtain these tools illegally.

Did making drugs illegal stop or curtail 'illegal' drug use? Or did it open up black/intel ops markets (and lucrative pharma profits; see methadone as one example) while perpetuating continued drug use?

Mac's points above are the key questions to be asking here.
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