At what point does it become accurate to say the social order has snapped beyond repair and that we are officially in a state of civil war? If all of these headline-grabbing shootings of the past month or so were ideologically motivated I would say we were in civil war without hesitation, it's only the fact that a lot of it seems to be less "motivated" if you will that keeps me from that conclusion. But really, is it the ideology that matters? Or the violence itself? Because we have the violence.
The problem I see with this is that these shootings are primarily suicides with a bang. Their primary motivation isn't their ideology in my opinion, it's their own giving up on life.
I would change that opinion if they start being venerated as martyrs like islamic extremist suicide bombers are/were.
I would change that opinion if they start being venerated as martyrs
Have you seen how 4chan edgelords treat these guys?
There's always going to be small groups on the fringes. I think Awoo is thinking more along the lines of having statues erected by and venerated by large swaths of the public.
I think we could find a few attempts but maybe they haven't be super successful so far.
if these people constitute a faction in a civil war, inter-faction veneration of martyrs is sufficient, and that is clearly the case. The only reason why i'm not viewing mass shootings in the US as a form of civil war (yet) is scale - there is a subset of mass shooters that constitutes a distinct faction, and that faction is fascists. It's just that the number of people murdered by these fascists is (for now) below the number of casualties that are usually considered the cutoff where something goes from "very widespread terrorism campaign" to "small-scale civil war". Such cutoffs are arbitrary, they usually do not take population size into consideration, PoliSci is quackery to begin with etc., so take all of this with a grain of salt, but the usual definition of war i'm familiar with is "armed conflict with at least one organized faction that causes upwards of 1000 deaths per year". Gun violence in the US itself does not fall under that definition, as most deaths are either suicides or accidents, but it's noteworthy that when you strictly apply that definition, cops in the USA are already waging an actual war against their own populace.
We definitely have had some ideologically based shootings but a decent amount of the shootings over the last month have also just been arguments popping off and escalating to violence, like the ones in houston and Phoenix.
But I do think there’s something to the idea that stochastic terrorism has been increasingly the go to for white supremacist/far right people over the past 5-7 years and it’s probably only going to get more mainstream as we go
Warm weather and crowds make easy targets for the increasing number of sick people our disintegrating society allows through the cracks. The economic situation is actually shit and the failure to alleviate that probably doesn't help anything. Also the media is actually covering them right now because they're hot stories.
What changed between 2021 and now? It's not guns. No laws have changed. It's not political climate, there's nothing that significant of difference. What is it then?
Maybe I'm being too superficial but,
There was the beginning of a new US president and their staff, Congress had kinda, slightly, flipped to the Dems. So there was a chance that, maybe, possibly, there would be some "progress". editors note: there wasn't
The failure of the January 6th 2021 riots to actually do anything meaningful, (increasing police/military budgets don't count, that would have happened anyways). Might have proved to a large chunk of the US population that right wingers are just as much about the LARP and internet updoots as much as the sissy liberal soyjacks. Could have sucked the wind out of the sails for random right wing stochastic terrorism for a bit.
The ending of the COVID checks and extended COVID unemployment benefits, etc. I would like to believe that having that financial help, lots of people's angst and fear was somewhat diminished. I'd like to believe that somehow, the collective psychic stress being reduced in this way, maybe could have had a positive effect in the overall number/severity of mass shootings in the US. But I realize that I'm doing all kinds of wishful thinking.
just fewer and fewer covid restrictions/aid until we got back to the mass shooting status quo, america is healing
very silly to gesture to this temporary aberration and discount guns lol
I think it’s an uptick in reporting since the shootings had leveled off a bit during the pandemic, (but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re happening at a slightly higher rate rn from coming out of the pandemic, copy cat stuff, and despair over the economic situation going.)
But even before what passed as lockdowns in the us, we still had an enormous amount of shootings every year they just didn’t report on the majority of then
there have been more than one mass shooting per day for the last year and a half, with only a handful of days NOT having mass shootings.
Yep the other one was in Phoenix, we're doing them alphabetically now
As the prophet Steve Miller doth predicted "Phoenix, Arizona all the way to Tacoma. Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A."
Georgians and Southern Californians be on high alert.
Police Inspector D.F. Pace said during a news conference that shots were fired into the downtown crowd and an officer shot at a suspect. It is unclear if the suspect was hit.
Obviously it's too early to say whether any of the injured people were injured by the cop, but I'm assuming he didn't politely wait for the crowd to dissipate before he started unloading on the shooter...
Wow, I had to check to make sure this was a different shooting than the Phoenix one, just less than 24 hours beforehand
I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of gun control, but I bet we're not even gonna do that, just speeches about how someone needs to do something about this
No form of gun control in this country would ever be done in a way that would address this problem it just gives more power to the cops.
You're not wrong :/
I guess we'll just be clapping every day now, no need to update the "days since last shooting" sign :amerikkka-clap:
I'd be all for gun control if it was paired with free mental health care and massive police defunding and reform. But as is it would just be more reasons for cops to go shoot black people.
Yeah. Even the suggested bare-bones "common sense regulation" and background checks would be used as a cudgel against anyone deemed politically suspect by the state (they're already equating "far left/right authoritarian extremism" with actual mental health conditions). That's if the political apparatus understands there's more to the problem aside from "we need to throw more money to our loyal pigs".
The 2007 Uwe Boll movie, Postal, was very bad... but it depicts a scene that resonates more and more with me every passing year and particularly after the Oklahoma shooting. The scene is a very busy DMV. A patron is finally called to the service window but has to borrow another patron's pen. Ultimately he doesn't have the proper paperwork and must return to the line at which point he loses it and starts shooting the place up. The employees sit calmly behind bulletproof glass and continue to call patrons to the front while this guy shoots everyone in sight. The guy who loaned his pen becomes concerned the shooter is going to steal it and pulls his gun and starts shooting everyone in sight. The protagonist casually hides behind some furniture and waits for his number to get called while cops sloppily/carelessly try to subdue the shooters, but unfortunately the DMV has just closed for the day so he leaves.
Last weekend I performed at a festival and I was kinda on edge the entire time. I mean I guess we’re on to even smaller gatherings now like grocery stores and malls but still felt pretty uneasy
