We have another mass shooting, killing seven and injuring 21 in Texas again, soon after another mass shooting in that state. But while the El Paso shooting was planned and deliberate (the shooter drove 600 miles to get to his targeted group of Hispanic people) this shooting seems to have been triggered by the most inconsequential of acts.
Soon after 3pm on Saturday a man was stopped by state troopers for failing to signal a turn. The man opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle then fled, hijacking a mail truck and shooting people at random.
…The latest suspect, described as a white male in his 30s, was chased and shot dead outside a cinema more than 10 miles from where he was pulled over.
It was not as though this person was wanted for a major crime and mistook a routine traffic stop for being about to be arrested for it.
Later on Sunday police named the shooter as Seth Ator, from Odessa. Public records held by the Texas Department of Public Safety showed he was 36 and had two criminal charges dating back to 2001, one for criminal trespass and one for evading arrest. He pled guilty and was put on two years’ probation.
Also, why anyone would drive around with an assault weapon is something that only the gun nuts understand. And Texas, on the very same day, made it easier for this kind of event to ioccur since “eight new gun laws came into effect on Sunday, dramatically loosening already lax controls.”
Beto O’Rourke has pretty much has it up to here with these killings and blasted the useless calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ by the state’s governor Greg Abbott.
Thoughts and prayers have done nothing to stop the epidemic of gun violence. Yes, this is fucked up; and if we don't call it out for what it is, we will continue to have this bloodshed in America. pic.twitter.com/Z4jgzpz6Ur
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 1, 2019
He is calling for “universal background checks on all gun sales, a ban on the sale of AR-15-style rifles and a mandatory buy-back of those weapons.”
That sounds like a good place to start.
But until then …
Maybe, since we can’t seem to regulate guns, we can regulate white people.
Mano,
We need to stop talking about “assault” or “assault-style” weapons and enact a ban on all semi-automatic weapons, full stop.
Jeff
(This is a reconstructed cross-post from poopyhead’s current Political Madness All The Time thread here at FtB.)
In the States, March for Our Lives unveils sweeping gun reform agenda: ‘The time is now’:
I myself think that’s too low a bar. Cars are not designed to deliberately kill people, and whilst neither are all guns, too many are. If there is a “need” to possess such an instrument, the (relatively lax) States-side driving licensing is broadly just a start, an interim measure. Admittedly, the details are a bit stronger than the above quote implies, A Peace Plan for a Safer America (see embedded link in first excerpt):
Back to the Grauniad’s article:
One point not specifically mentioned is this one: “Automatically register eligible voters and mail voter registration cards to all Americans when they turn 18.” More details at the links.
I wonder if he’s a “sovereign citizen”.
Marcus Ranum @1
How about just white men? You’ll notice that it’s always men doing it. And not just “random” mass shootings. Also “domestic” violence and street violence. It’s > 90% men doing it. And it’s based on the belief that the proper resonse to anything that wounds their pride or their perception of their status is violence, often extreme and/or deadly violence.
And it’s not an accident. In large parts of society, boys are raised to believe that their very safety and security depend upon their willingness to “defend” themselves. My experience of male socialization was that (male) people who didn’t react with force to any challenge got labeled “wimps” (or “queer”), and they became socially approved targets for any boy (or even any man) who needed someone to abuse in order to reconfirm his masculine “cred” to his fellow males. So if you didn’t want to be the target of unrelenting abuse, you had to learn to be eternally von guard and prepared to react with violence at the drop of a hat.
Viz.: the threads on toxic masculinity.
Allison@#5:
How about just white men?
Where do I sign?
The best explanation I can think of: He was on his way to commit a killing spree what the cop stopped him, and decided to start there. It makes as much sense as his actions.
argh: when the cop stopped him
Intransitive,
Your theory is plausible but it seems like such a tremendous coincidence that he was stopped for a minor infraction when he was on his way to commit a major crime.
Jeff @2,
I just don’t know enough about weapons to make these distinctions but maybe you can help me out. If I wish to refer to weapons that can fire so rapidly that they really have no legitimate non-military, non-mass killing purposes such as hunting or self-defense, what should I be calling them?
Mano Singham@#10:
what should I be calling them?
You can’t define them in that way, because your definition embeds a value judgement. (no legitimate, etc)
When legislators try to tackle that problem, they find they create loopholes when they start to describe what a “gun with no legitimate purpose” looks like, and how it behaves differently from one with a legitimate purpose.
My approach is to say “ban them all in general” but perhaps there should be some special cases where they are available and have a legitimate purpose. For example, I suppose civil war reenactors need something gun-like that will fire powder charges but not bullets. Hunters? Fuck them, they can buy their meat at the grocery store or grow and slaughter their own cows and sheep. Self defense? Against whom? Etc.
The problem with defining anything about guns is that it involves the question of “purpose” which does not work with a general purpose tool. Imagine trying to define the difference between a table-saw with a legitimate purpose and one that was just going to be abused?
Ok, then leaving out purpose, can we define weapons on the basis of how rapidly they can fire and the total number of bullets they can fire without having to reload?
Or put another way, what would be the gun needs of a hunter or someone concerned about self-defense? We could then use those criteria to set limits on the firepower of guns. So yes, we would use purpose to define the characteristics of weapons but then use these characteristics in a neutral way.
“[The shooter] was 36 and had two criminal charges dating back to 2001, one for criminal trespass and one for evading arrest. He pled guilty and was put on two years’ probation.”
$10 (USD) says those charges were related to a domestic incident.
blf — “Cars are not designed to deliberately kill people, and whilst neither are all guns, too many are.”
On the contrary, all guns are designed for killing — it’s their sole purpose!
For reference: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/
“In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.
I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?”
The definition you’re looking for Mano is “Semi-automatic with a box magazine”.
We’ve just had a argument over this in New Zealand and new legislation that I personally think is a bit silly -- it bans rifles with tube magazines that hold 8 (IIRC) or more, but not 7, rounds for instance, why the arbitrary limit?
The real problem is that there are childish twits who get off on handling “battle” rifles -- it’s basically a dick substitute, and the important, easily defined distinction, that also happens to reflect what makes them particularly dangerous, is a replaceable box magazine and semi-automatic action.
I personally also believe a long cartridge should be included (so that short .22 rifles with box magazines as used for varmint control would be legal).
But more important is the culture in which they are owned. NZ does not have a culture of mishandling weapons -- they are treated as the dangerous tools they are (and gun owners are very annoyed and feel badly treated that they aren’t being trusted because of an Australians crime). Pulling a gun on someone is not seen as empowering but instead emasculating (you need a gun to be a man?)
Unfortunately there seems to be a problem with firearms burgeoning here -- apart from the more newsworthy this has also an unusual year for use of guns in crimes in NZ.
9) @ Mano:
He had other things on his mind and neglected to signal? The only surprise is that a white guy was stopped for failing to signal a turn (if he’d been black they would’ve stopped him for suspicious signaling). Must’ve been a general ticket trap area and they were quota filling. Yes, I’ve become cynical. Why do you ask?
11) @ Marcus:
Some hunting is necessary, because we’ve eradicated natural predators. Deer are both survival food in some parts of the country, and overpopulating in others. Nutria hunters in LA make a living off the bounties, and if they’re allowed to run wild the way feral pigs have, they destroy coastal wetlands which are barriers to storm flooding, among other things.
Also, jumping in the car and driving ten minutes to the grocery isn’t an option for a lot of people in Appalachia, most of AK, and other remote areas. I’m not generally a big fan of hunters, but your dismissal seems a bit classist to me.
your dismissal seems a bit classist to me.
I was talking about all hunters, including the wealthy assholes who travel to kill rare animals. So I reject your accusation of classism.
Besides: feed the fucking poor don’t make them eat parasite-laden deer meat and whatnot. And reintroduce natural controls -- which were wiped out by (tada) hunters! Usually for sport.
One of my former co workers was a game control specialist for the Viriginia state government. He had a specialized .22 cal silenced tool that he used to eliminate varmints and a tranq dart gun for relocating valuable wildlife. He’d come through at 3am and leave with the raccoons or whatever under a tarp in the back of his truck. His tools were highly regulated. We don’t need amateur hunters wandering about blasting things -- if wildlife control is the problem, it’s easy to solve, no need to make the tools available to non-professionals.
I grew up in upstate NY and hunting is very common here. My opinions regarding firearms have changed quite a bit over the years. These days, my thoughts are “You want to hunt? Fine. Knife or bow, your choice”. Even a year ago I would not have said this but today I say ban all firearms whose design goal was to kill someone or something. That would allow room for reenactors and folks who like target shooting (certainly the projectile could be modified to prevent it from being turned on people). Mandatory buybacks. You keep a gun, you’re committing a felony. Exceptions for collectors whose firearms have been irreversibly altered so that they cannot fire. And I’ll add the police in there, too. No more guns for them. We need to come up with something to incapacitate dangerous people that doesn’t use deadly force.
The bottom line is this: It is simply not true that someone’s so-called “right” of easy access to any firearm of their choosing is superior to the rights of innocent children and adults to not be shot and killed at their school, place of work, church, shopping center, festival or place entertainment. We have the data from across numerous countries (and even between US states, with notoriously porous borders) showing that gun-related homicides are directly correlated to availability of firearms. Essentially, the GOP in particular is making the argument of “2nd Amendment uber alles”. It’s time we once again alter the Constitution, as we have so many times before, to update an anachronism in order to fit a more modern, aware and just society.
WMDKitty@14, I said “deliberately kill people”. Not all guns are designed for that purpose, albeit, just like cars, they can be misused for the purpose. Some examples are tranquilizer dart guns, starter’s pistols, …
This is a very nuanced distinction, which as per Marcus Ranum@11, focusing on the design intent (intended usage) is not that productive of an approach.
@hyphenman
I am beginning to agree with you. All semiautomatic weapons can spray bullets at a pretty high speed, be that an assault rifle, an automatic pistol (which is actually semiautomatic) or even a semiautomatic hunting rifle. Possibly one could allow the later if it had an internal magazine with a very limited capacity. Those are rather slow to reload.
It is the ability to rapidly fire a large number of bullets and to rapidly reload, say with a large capacity clip, that seems to be the danger. These type of weapons are the ones used in most mass shooting. Particularly assault style rifles that are designed for military use.
BTW, I have seen CNN reporting that the NYT says the shooter was fired from his job earlier in the day. The link on Google News is all I have seen about it so far.
Allison @# 5
You should substitute the word “boys” for “all children.” School bullies do not spare girls. They will abuse anybody. I realized that I’m non-cis only when I was already 23 years old. Until then I grew up/lived as a woman, and from a very young age I knew that my security depended upon my willingness to defend myself. Whenever some wannabe bully challenged me, I had to fight back. As a younger child, I used my fists. After puberty, I became weaker and shorter than all the boys my age, thus I had to change tactics—I learned to verbally humiliate wannabe bullies to make sure than nobody ever tried to mess with me more than once. I knew that a failure to beat the wannabe bully (either verbally or with my fists) would result in me getting labelled as fair game for continued abuse. I would become a socially approved target for any classmate who wanted to elevate their social standing (both boys and girls have unsuccessfully attempted to abuse me at school). So, yes, I learned that if I didn’t want to be the target of abuse, I had to fight back against anybody who tried to mess with me. Once I became an adult and finished school, the stakes only got higher. Workplace abuse, sexual harassment, domestic abuse, etc. can be a hell lot worse than bullying at school.
I don’t know, maybe beautiful and cute girls/women can count on gentlemen who will protect them, but I sure as hell never experienced this kind of privilege. Nor did my mother. Nor did my aunt. None of my female relatives have been spared from attempted abuse. It was always up to them to stand up for themselves, to fend off wannabe bullies/abusers, and to protect themselves.
By the way, I joined a debate club and practiced martial arts for several years to make sure than I can always defend myself, either verbally or with my fists. I did all that long before realizing that I’m not even a woman.