America?s response to shooting | Vital Football

America?s response to shooting

Wayne.Kerr

Wayne.Kerr

Vital Champions League
1. Act surprised and horrified
2. ?Thoughts and prayers?
3. Less guns v. More guns
4. ?Too soon to talk about gun control?
5. NRA releases commercial
6. Americans buy more guns
7. Shoot people

Seen on Twitter
 
I met some older Americans in Thailand last week. Some from Santa Monica and a couple from Washington. Both groups from either side of the US talked about how unsafe they felt in their own country. They were investigating the retirement villages marketed for westerners that are popping up in Thailand and ironically Vietnam. They all felt so much safer in Asia and agreed nothing will change in the US when almost anyone can still buy a new handgun for about 150. All very depressing.
 
Similar to our inability to recognise or admit that something needs to be done about the knife crime in the uk.
The usa have the same issue around gun crime in their major cities.
 
With regard to the NRA's "more guns in schools is the answer". I'm not sure that having the gunfight at the OK Corral in the middle of a High School is likely to lead to a lower loss of life is it ?
 
Therealwaldo - 15/2/2018 16:40

With regard to the NRA's "more guns in schools is the answer". I'm not sure that having the gunfight at the OK Corral in the middle of a High School is likely to lead to a lower loss of life is it ?
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It won't be a gunfight, that's in the films. If someone shoots an automatic rifle at you, you run or you hide, you don't jump out of cover and pop him between the eyes.

Members of the public don't stop mass shooters. I believe that Florida schools have armed guards too.
 
Jerryattrick - 15/2/2018 16:32

Similar to our inability to recognise or admit that something needs to be done about the knife crime in the uk.
The usa have the same issue around gun crime in their major cities.
Click to expand...

Thing is Jerry, our knife problem is so much easier to resolve but, it seems, the youth of today (And some politicians) seem to think it's better being stabbed than being stopped and searched.
 
Depressing as heck.

At our college, we are told to run if we can, hide if we must, and confront only if there is no alternative. I think the verb "hosing" is a good one for what these firearms can do.

We're a gun town. Huge hunting culture with opening days looked forward to and celebrated. Very safe feeling place -relaxed about locking doors and stuff does not get stolen out of garages- but of course, all it takes is one, and the possibility is on everybody's minds.

I expect no change. You assume this is a right/left sort of issue, but it breaks in all sorts of weird ways. The law and order crowd who usually support the police want guns to the despair of the police who want gun control. Some feminist libertarians, blue collar trade unionists, want guns too.

The issue is hugely entangled with notions of freedom and distrust of government, but there is a power fetish at work too and, therefore, money to be made and interests to be defended. American exceptionalism, at least as far as developed states are concerned.

I don't want a gun.

 
Jokerman, you probably know more about this than anyone. I have many friends in the USA and none own a gun; one did just for hunting way back but found it too dangerous as he thought he would become a target.

America is a very young country comparatively speaking, ie mix of cultures and attitudes - look at the hillbillies and those who live an work in silicon valley. To each other they are as far apart as earthlings and martians. A young country in the sense that the wild west, wagon trains and land grabbing are all recent history.

Knife crime comes and goes but how do you control sales if a kid can pick up a kitchen knife at home? In the states, some cities have very strict controls but go into the next county and you can buy a weapon over the counter with no questions asked.

Then the NRA says it's not the gun that kills but the person holding it; well, there would be no deaths if the perpetrator was holding a licensed toffee apple.

A pistol or simple rifle for simple protection if you really must and a hunting gun perhaps but semi-automatics and assault weapons? There is no way on earth that these can be valid except with the military.
 
Firstly, my thoughts and condolences to all the families and friends of those involved.

Secondly, this is the 18th school shooting so far this year in the US, mind-blowing!

Thirdly, how can it be even remotely sane that an 18 year old kid can buy an AR15 assault rifle and an unlimited amount of ammo, but can't go into a bar and buy a beer? :26:
 
This is so far removed from knife crime in the UK as to be from a different universe. I won't quote stats, it would be dreay, inappropriate and somehow pointless but believe me they are way worse than you probably imagine. I would not own a gun in the US, or anywhere else because it would make me feel less safe. You and your own could turn it on you, happens all the time, so could a bad person.

It hurts my head and soul just thinking about it and the points jokerman makes about the pro and anti breakdown sounds very credible. I persuade myself that this is just such a huge divide in thinking, experience and culture that it is beyond my ken. I suspect few Americans would understand our obsession with little known football clubs.
 
Ive stopped being affected by these reports. They've become so commonplace as to be part of the background noise of news.
I mentally file these things under the "there's something fundamentally wrong with America and its politics" heading.
#sad
 
Of course an 18 year old can't buy a beer. Guns and alcohol don't mix. Even Americans know that.

Seriously, good points from WK about the US as a young country (although not a young state), the frontier mentality of just going for what they want, rough justice and taking care of things themselves. We all know the downside of this in terms of the war on the native Americans, lynching black people, and robber baron capitalists acting like god-kings. But anyone who knows everyday Americans knows the upside -very little of the deference and caution that used to characterize us. I've told the story before on here of American students of mine hired for a catering event in the UK which was poorly managed by a local. While their local counterparts hung around and took the piss, the Americans decided to own the whole thing, sort it out and got it running right. No pay off. It just annoyed them to see something so fixable not working properly. For them, the world was not a screw. It was a place that's supposed to work.

They're born moralizing about the world. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? And they tend to assume that they're the good guys, if clumsy at times. I find this very hard still after over thirty years, but even though pushing everything into a moral frame leaves them open to charges of spectacular hypocrisy, it does force people into justifying why things are the way they are, rather than relying on saying it's all rotten, must always be so, and thinking we're smart for realizing it.

A big argument over here right now is about how all the things which made American rich, powerful and successful -its limited government, market economy, engaged citizenry, and its sense of exceptionalism- seem to have turned into sources of weakness -political gridlock, economic inequality, social distemper, and plain stupidity (sounds familiar, right?). People ask is it because the world has changed in such a way that America now has the wrong skills set, or is it simply a slow but steady shift in the balance of power, or is it a bit of both.

Thinking big, you can see all this in terms of Anglo-Saxon liberalism as about played out in world where big power concentrations, big thinking and the extensive social control to deliver it (think China, maybe think EU) possess the winning formula in a future of heavy regulation, intrusive surveillance and everyone looked after. Brexit and Trumpism in this view are the symptoms of stress and nervous breakdowns as the Anglos get left behind. Conversely (of course), you can see them as setting the pace in terms of responding to a world which is changing. Neither Donald nor Boris (I've given up on him after yesterday) convey the impression that they know what they're doing in these terms, but that's the point -no one is sure of the world into which we're moving, but if this is right, then we can be sure that customs unions, highly regulated shared markets and railways (even maglevs) from Beijing to Brussels belong to the world we're leaving behind, not the one we're heading towards.

I know people with guns. They make the classic defence argument. We don't want the them, but the other fellow has them/might have them. The police are busy and slow. Just as in international relations, it is a tragically self-fulfilling way of thinking -which is not to say it is necessarily crazy, although the police I know all maintain that guns are far more likely to get people into trouble than save them.



 
official uk gov figures for knife crime (involving a knife or sharp implement) for 2017;
total 37443 in following areas:
attempted murder 373
threats to kill 2,805
asault with injury or intent 18,571
robbery 14,816
rape 449
sexual assault 191
homicide 238

fireams offences recorded in uk same period 6,694 (fatality figure for 2016 was 26)

source - office for national statistics

hard to compete with the us though where FBI figures for 2016 are
homicides 17,250
chicago managed 765 on their own
 
Every crime is a blot but there is no comparison between gun and knife crime.

Knife crime is largely consistent with socio-economic conditions and probably could be stopped through education, appropriate punishment and an improvement in the lot of those largely disaffected youths.

Gun crime is embraced by many of all classes across the USA - primarily away from the coastal areas. The right to bear arms as written in the US Constitution is taken literally by so many even though we think it verges on the anachronistic. There are people in the USA who want to protect themselves against the powers that be in Washington. But with guns so readily available with little or no background checks etc, then some wrong 'un will run amok and now we find the latest perpetrator is a white supremacist sympathiser - that's a very dangerous cocktail.

So, in one country you have a group of people who have a right to legally bear arms because it's written into their constitution and, in the other, groups of young kids mainly who feel it's appropriate [wrongly of course] to carry a knife, which is a felony.
 
There is a direct comparison - there may be different causes but both kill and there is the same reluctance to recognise or tackle the problem.

Its similar to the ?illegal use of weapons in a war? where you are evil if you use gas or fracture grenades but ok if you kill with a nice bullet or missile.
 
Just spent a couple of hours with died in the wool brexiteers in the pub, like them all, understand the visceral and the intellectual arguments. I can deal with that but guns are weird because they carry fantasy and heavy, heavy power. I would never enter a pub, in which people carried guns and if I had one I wouldn't trust myself.

No one knows what comes next, you call that right jokerman. Do you look coldly at the world, accept that and defend yourself against all eventualities, or do you accept a human world and invest in trust.
 
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