I wanted to share an article but after read/scanned ~6 of them - I had nothing to share. They weren't any good. I wish blogs were still a thing. Blogs can be excellent on topics like these. Here's the Wikipedia page - Columbine High School massacre.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
    hexbear
    47
    29 days ago

    I wonder if maybe now people will finally look at the two shooters being neo-nazis and not placing blame on rock music and video games.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
      hexagon
      hexbear
      37
      29 days ago

      the two shooters being neo-nazis

      I don't know if you saw the self text but I read/scanned a bunch of articles and they were weird. I didn't see any mention of Nazism or their hatred. It gave me the creeps. Instead the badly written text was focused healing, grieving, and gun control hopium.

    • MiraculousMM [he/him, any]M
      hexbear
      16
      29 days ago

      I remember reading Dave Cullen's book on Columbine and he basically blames it all on the shooters' mental illnesses. Like it all happened because the psychopath and the extremely depressed kid (both post-humously diagnosed) were codependent in their violent fantasies or whatever. I don't recall any more than maybe a passing reference to nazi ideology in that book, pretty disappointing considering 10 years of research went into it

  • pastalicious [he/him, undecided]
    hexbear
    24
    29 days ago

    I wouldn’t say inured. People seem to care a great deal and feel exasperated over the ongoing situation. There’s a political impotence and lack of analysis revealed by the situation… and I think that impotence and lack of analysis is part of a vicious feedback loop that actually inspires more violence, larger kill counts, increasingly cruel targets.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
      hexagon
      hexbear
      24
      29 days ago

      The Sandy Hook shooting happened in December, 2012. By early 2013 I had entirely given up on any hopes of gun control. If a mass of murdered little kids killed by guns didn't change anything - I knew nothing would ever change. I think that's true for a lot of Americans.

      • CreamarySteamary [none/use name]
        hexbear
        18
        29 days ago

        "Gun control" is a bourgeois talking point. Rifles kill less than 400 people a year in the US on average, the Bloombergs and the Bidens and the Betos are only concerned about disarming the working class. Things that would actually address mass shootings (like affordable mental healthcare) are never even discussed, because those solutions actually cost the rich money.

        • wopazoo [he/him]
          hexbear
          20
          edit-2
          29 days ago

          Rifles kill less than 400 people a year

          Hilarious talking point when literally tens of thousands are killed (homicide!) per year by gun violence. This is like saying that Honda Civics only kill so many people per year, so traffic violence is no biggie.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

          Things that would actually address mass shootings (like affordable mental healthcare) are never even discussed,

          Imagine seriously believing that rampant gun violence, an exclusively American phenomenon, is the cause of anything other than the second amendment.

          THERE ARE NO MASS SHOOTINGS WITHOUT GUNS. Guns, not anything else, are the root cause of gun violence, just like how cars, not anything else, are the root cause of car crashes.

          'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

          • ingirumimus [none/use name]
            hexbear
            12
            29 days ago

            Also love the take that anyone in power in America who proposes gun control is only concerned about disarming the working class, not maybe stopping children from getting slaughtered in schools. Like yeah mental health services would be great but also there is absolutely a connection between the number of mass shootings and the fact that America has more guns than people

            • CreamarySteamary [none/use name]
              hexbear
              4
              29 days ago

              Ok, what gun control measures should we put in place that would stop "children getting slaughtered in schools" while also not giving the government a total monopoly on violence?

              • barrbaric [he/him]
                hexbear
                10
                29 days ago

                The government already has a monopoly on violence and it's a joke to pretend otherwise. In the event of an armed revolution, private firearm ownership won't stop them rolling in tanks or bombing you with jets.

                • CreamarySteamary [none/use name]
                  hexbear
                  4
                  29 days ago

                  "We should just give up since it's hopeless anyway"

                  No. I think you should look to history to understand what happens when a professional military tries to occupy hostile territory. Asymmetric warfare is impossible to extinguish. The Palestinians are holding their own in a tiny city with AKs, tunnels, and homemade explosives. The Taliban now control all of Afghanistan. The Vietnamese pushed the US into the sea. An armed populace is impossible to repress, especially when it's as armed as US citizens are, and when the territory that needs to be held is as massive as the US. There is absolutely no way the US military could indefinitely suppress the US civilian population while still maintaining the production necessary to fuel it's war machine.

            • KhanCipher [none/use name]
              hexbear
              2
              28 days ago

              Also love the take that anyone in power in America who proposes gun control is only concerned about disarming the working class

              He's not exactly wrong though, since gun control historically in the US was a lot more about taking guns out of the hands of PoC. One modern case was in California with the Mulford Act, which came about because the Black Panthers showed off the the thing whites fear the most has and still will be black people open carrying guns.

          • @assyrian
            hexbear
            9
            edit-2
            29 days ago

            Hilarious talking point when literally tens of thousands are killed (homicide!) per year by gun violence. This is like saying that Honda Civics only kill so many people per year, so traffic violence is no biggie.

            why are suicides always left out of this conversation? that's a huge portion of gun deaths that would otherwise just not exist if guns weren't so easy to get.

          • CreamarySteamary [none/use name]
            hexbear
            6
            29 days ago

            THERE ARE NO MASS SHOOTINGS WITHOUT GUNS. Guns, not anything else, are the root cause of gun violence,

            We've had guns in this country since the beginning. You used to be able to buy machine guns out of a catalog and have them shipped to your door for 200 bucks. The mass shooting thing is a recent development. Obviously there are other factors at play.

            • Dolores [love/loves]
              hexbear
              5
              edit-2
              29 days ago

              mass shooting thing is a recent development

              i think you will find this list has entries throughout most the 20th century

            • wopazoo [he/him]
              hexbear
              3
              edit-2
              29 days ago

              Do you think the Columbine shooters would've gotten anywhere as far as they did if all they had were a kitchen knife and a machete? Guns enable mentally ill individuals to commit acts of mass murder in a way that is impossible in gun-free societies.

        • duderium [he/him]
          hexbear
          16
          29 days ago

          Enforcing gun control laws also means relying on the police, whose ideologies are identical to those of school shooters. European countries manage to moderate rightwing rage with the kinds of concessions you mention here, but the USA is a settler colony and also requires its settlers to be armed more or less all the time in order to stave of their inevitable defeat for as long as possible. There is no way out of this situation for as long as the USA exists, and I say that as a parent with kids in school.

          • barrbaric [he/him]
            hexbear
            7
            29 days ago

            Honestly we're at the point where I'm surprised the liberals aren't calling for a mass purge of police forces. If the people upholding the "law and order" they supposedly care about so much overwhelmingly support Trump, you'd think that'd be worrying.

    • ped_xing [he/him]
      hexbear
      16
      29 days ago

      Growing up in the US, you just hear about people getting shot and killed. That's part of the 6:00 news along with sports and weather. There's no time to emotionally engage with what happened; you get maybe 5 seconds with a distraught family member and then it's back to the studio where nobody's showing any reaction, so, from a child's perspective, why should the viewer? So the jarring thing about Columbine for me wasn't that it happened, it's that people decided to keep caring about it unlike the hundreds of other shootings that we just immediately forgot.

    • barrbaric [he/him]
      hexbear
      13
      29 days ago

      Eh, it's anecdotal but when I saw the image in this post my first thought was "wait, only 13? That seems low for how big a deal it was back in the day".

      • Blep [he/him]
        hexbear
        9
        29 days ago

        The mass shooting meta is has advanced significantly in the last 25 years

  • citrussy_capybara [ze/hir]
    hexbear
    11
    29 days ago

    Why Do We Get Columbine So Wrong?

    Two popular bullies try to blow up a school and then shoot people when the explosions fail.

    They were not geeky, picked on, trenchcoat-wearing, Marilyn Manson fans, bent on revenge, who asked people if they believed in god. Everything most people think they know about Columbine is false.

    • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]
      hexbear
      6
      29 days ago

      Anything informed by Dave Cullen's book is trash and they really weren't very popular.

      Regarding music:

      Some of Eric's references/purchases include: KMFDM, Rammstein, Ich Bin Ein Auslander by Pop Will Eat Itself, Closer by Nine Inch Nails, Guilty by Gravity Kills, Fly (the album Bombthreat: Before She Blows), Lights of Euphoria, The Electric Hellfire Club, Funker Vogt, Loreena McKennitt, Orbital, Trip Factor, Front 242, Nosferatu, Die Krupps, The Prodigy, Marilyn Manson, Enya

      And some of Dylan's: Nine Inch Nails, The Chemical Brothers, White Zombie, They May Be Giants, The Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains, KMFDM, Americana by The Offspring, soundtracks from The Doom Generation etc, Autechre, Rammstein, Ceiba, Prana, DJ Spoon, Atari Teenage Riot, Marilyn Manson

      They did wear trenchcoats but only in their home films. https://youtu.be/4bvH5VHsddg?si=Q8gnlpUBf9BHoSU6 around the 1 hour mark you can see them hanging out in the cafeteria (one in a KMFDM shirt). There's also ~11,000 pages of investigative documents that were released.

      The asking people if they believed in god is obviously bullshit, and the NYT made up a student who they attributed quotes to (Bob).

    • @assyrian
      hexbear
      15
      29 days ago

      the gun lobby and gun manufacturers are too powerful to allow that