Comments

1

This is America, you dont need a motive to go on a shooting spree, it's just a way of life, like going to a baseball game. Small price to pay for the illusion of freedom.

4

I'm not really a dog person, but that westminster video was cute. What kind of dog is that anyway?

6

@2,

You mean in reference to gun violence?

If violent first person shooter video games desensitized people to gun violence, China and Japan would have daily bloodbaths. They consume tons more of that than the U.S.

8

@4 - I think that's a Papillon. They get their name from the "butterfly" look of their ears. I would assume, anyway.

11

@9,

There's evidence that consuming media violence does lead to some reduction in sensitivity to violence:

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/violence-media-what-effects-behavior

One of the problems in teasing that stuff out is that it's messy. There's a lot of factors that are hard to control for.

Researchers can test short term stuff by doing controlled experiments with random samples either exposed to violence or not, and then testing their immediate behaviors (and when they do that, yeah, there's slightly higher violence among the group exposed to violent media). But long term? It's just impossible to test. You can't do an experiment where you hold subjects captive for several years and choose what exposure they get. So all evidence in long term effects is correlational... they can't tell what the true causes of violence are because there's so many uncontrolled variables.

12

Do shoot-em-up computer games make people more violent? I like watching "My Feet Are Killing Me" on TV, but it doesn't make me want to be a podiatrist. In fact, it makes me really, really not want to be a podiatrist.

13

A push for gun control is the quickest way to Republican majorities in 2022 and 2024.

14

Videogames aren't a primary cause of mass shootings, and to suggest they are is an extreme case of missing the wood for the trees.

American culture is massively tolerant of violence. This is why Germany, China or Japan, for instance, don't have a similar phenomenon of gun violence, but DO have an roughly similar consumption of violent media (not limited to videogames).

Americans just give many fewer fucks about horrific things happening to our countrymen. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what that says about our culture, but it ain't pretty.

16

In 1994 after the Democratic congress passed the assault weapons ban, their majorities in the House and Senate were completely wiped out in the next election and the Republicans won unified control of Congress for the first time since 1952.

18

If you're curious about the relationship between videogames and violence, you're in luck, there's more than three decades of published research on the topic available:

https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=videogame+violence
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=video+game+violence

Spoiler: after 30 years of study there is no scientific or academic consensus that video games exacerbate violent behavior, or mitigate it, or have no effect at all. But if you're mainly interested in just digging up some studies to prop up whatever prebaked argument you're nursing along, chances are you'll find a few without too much trouble, there's plenty to choose from.

20

"The first hotel will cost $8.3 million to run with full-security and live-in staff from the Low-Income Housing Insitute . . . ."

What?! That works out to just under $60,000 per person annually. That has to be the most expensive temporary housing solution of all time.

Meanwhile, LIHI is building tiny houses for just $2,700. (source: https://lihi.org/2020/04/15/new-tiny-houses-for-60-homeless-people-opens-on-april-15/#:~:text=LIHI%20operates%2012%20tiny%20house,windows%2C%20and%20a%20lockable%20door.)

22

@20 probably a lot more than that now what with the cost of materials lately...been doing some stuff at my POS house lately to fix it and all I gotta say is OOF

23

@17, Mmm, but you've left out the most common form of gun violence: suicide.

And suicide is up about 15% over the past 10 years. Up 30% over the past 20 years, when it really began to take off.

24

There’s as much evidence that the Boulder shooting was religious terrorism as there is evidence that the Atlanta one was racist terrorism, but yet the Stranger is willing to speculate on the motives of only one of the two shooters.

29

@27 I think what our friend means is that the shooter has an Arabic-sounding name and mentioned Islam occasionally on Facebook. And it's totally not racist to assume he's a radical jihadist based on that.

30

@2:
Helpful stats here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/04/mass-shootings-more-deadly-frequent-research-215678/

Summary:
1. Rates of mass shootings have not shown a dramatic increase since the 1980s -- so the common perception that there is a recent "epidemic" in such crimes is untrue.
2. First-person-shooter DOOM came out in 1993. The following 5 years actually show a slight downward trend. If first-person shooter games were a major contributing factor to mass shootings we might expect to see the opposite.
3. As others on this thread have mentioned, studies attempting to link playing violent video games with subsequent increases in violent behavior have shown no such link. There is simply no evidence that playing violent video games makes one go out and shoot people.
4. One reason for the common perception that mass shootings are more common today is that the average number of victims HAS risen since the 1970s. This is one area where hardware may play a role -- maybe an AR-15 is just a more efficient killing tool?
5. However, there is also no strong correlation shown between laws restricting such weapons and a subsequent decline in rates of mass shootings.

Here are the areas of study I would like to see investigated in relation to the noted increase in fatalities-per-shooting
1. What is the relationship between weapon choice / availability and increased fatality?
2. Even if first-person shooters don't make people more violent, do they give those who play them, especially those with a propensity for real-world violence, better aim, faster reaction times, more advanced tactical thinking? In short, are mass shooters using them to "train?"

31

@25 Nothing more motivating to the Republican voter base than gun control.

32

@31 And ONLY the base. 25% of Republicans favor stricter gun laws.

33

Suicide rates are going up in the U.S., but declining in the rest of the world.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-02-07/global-suicide-rate-declines-while-us-rate-rises-study-finds

It's almost like living in this country is becoming increasingly more and more unbearable.

I wonder why...
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/

37

I blame Marilyn Manson

38

@21:

He's also leaving out the fact - to which you allude - that while there are more guns out there, the overwhelming majority have been/are being purchased by the same terrified, paranoid, xenophobic white people who already own huge numbers of guns. These people are so fucking afraid - of literally everything that doesn't look, sound, believe or behave exactly the same as themselves - that they're convinced (with help from the national gun lobby and their sycophants) having more guns is the only way to protect themselves from whatever Armageddon/race war is surely going to go down ANY DAY NOW.

39

@30 The hypothesis that practicing aiming a video-game gun will make a person better at aiming a real gun seems unlikely to merit much in the way of research grant money. The head and hand movements involved are radically different; it's not just a matter of locating and interpreting various guages, as in a flight sim.

And as for tactics... I'd hesitate to call mowing down unsuspecting people in an everyday environment a "tactical situation." You don't need to graduate from West Point to kill a whole lot of people that way.

50

Just carve out an exclusion for private sales, and Joe Manchin will be aboard for new gun control legislation on background checks -- and maybe a few R senators.

It's a start.

51

@35 Atlanta went after prostitutes posing as massage therapists who were Asian. If such establishments were as frequently staffed by white women, and he nevertheless sought out those staffed by Asian women, that would be evidence of racism. That’s not the case and isn’t what happened. He certainly targeted women as a misplaced assault on his own proclivities, which I agree is an effect of his religious extremism that I previously overlooked. We might infer he was motivated by racial hatred since he’s white and most of the victims were Asian, but inference isn’t evidence. In the case of Boulder, as opposed to Atlanta, there’s no confessed motive yet; but if we’re cool with publicizing inferences, why not infer that a mass shooter with a Muslim name (it is a Muslim name, whether or not he is) in a world where Islamic extremism has been the confessed inspiration for a significant number of recent mass casualty events might have been motivated by religious hatred? I’m not advocating that we should - I’m saying we shouldn’t, in both cases, because (a) the deniability is plausible in each, (b) arguments to the contrary evidence only the sad, ego-driven desperation of so many to perform anti-racism.

53

"410,000 counterfeit oxycodone pills containing fentanyl": what a sobering, terrifying statistic about that bust. The annual rate of deaths in King County due to (usually unwitting) ingestion of fentanyl has soared since 2015, and it is STILL rising. Whatever you do, don't ever trust "oxycodone" not to be laced with fentanyl. And seek help if at all possible. COVID-19 understandably dominates health care crisis news--but it's not the only crisis. And shame a billion times over to anyone who would knowingly sell anything laced with fentanyl.

57

Nice reference to pussy stuffing Nat! How many pairs of panties(or octopi if Japanese) can that dirty slut Suez get up there?

58

@54 is out of touch. Fentanyl is as ubiquitous as COCAINE AND MALT LIQUOR.

59

@58

Ok... that was pretty good.

60

@54 Fentanyl is typically 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Its extreme potency makes it cheaper to produce drugs to which fentanyl is added, such as heroin, cocaine, and even legal drugs like Percocet. Fentanyl can be used legally, most often as a patch, to help minimize the pain of cancer patients and in a few other cases. But legal use needs to be very carefully administered. Illegally produced fentanyl, especially when mixed with heroin, often proves fatal. It is nothing to mess with recreationally. Help a friend or family member find help if that person is addicted to any drug often mixed with fentanyl. Fentanyl is dangerous, and these days, often--often--mixed with other drugs.

61

How many pairs of panties(or octopi for our Japanese friends) can that dirty slut Suez get up there? Wait. Am I the only one who read the Suez post and picked up on the "stuffing" metaphor?

63

@52 Game over

64

@13, @16, @31: Getting bored in your private, gated little Bellevue Archie Bunker hole, again, Swifty? Tired of Gunsmoke reruns? And the pizza guy won't be there for another hour......well, shit. What to do. What to do. What to do....
Hey--here's an idea: maybe by applying a little adhesive you could...stick to your GUNS! You could be a real blast at parties! Become your own trophy!
But I dunno...you might still be tested at the Pearly Gates, Swifty. What will you do if Saint Peter is in the form of a lion and you suddenly have Hell to pay?
And you can't take your GUNS with you, either, regardless of where you're permanently laid to rest.


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