I was reading the NYT front page while I waited for coffee on my way to work yesterday, and according to it one of the first things the police id when they arrived on the scene was order everyone to put their cell phones away. Because even in an active shooter situation in a school, covering their asses from any kind of citizen reporting is top priority.

What I'm worried about/expecting is that once the DNC returns to power they'll actually finaly capitulate and enact some kind of effective common-sense gun control, gun violence (or at least media-friendly gun violence like mass shotings of white people) will decline noticeably, and then they'll declare job well done and not even acknowledge the much deeper, systemic social and economic problems that are actually causing all of the gun violence in the first place.

Gun control without economic justice isn't a real solution.

Economic injustice caused this/these?

Anyway, I think a noticeable decline in mass shootings is an okay thing to work towards, and doubt anyone will declare society's problems solved at that point.

It's more than just covering their asses, though I'm sure that is a consideration.

Police don't like live coverage for a lot of reasons, some of them completely reasonable. It increases the chances of interference by non law enforcement actors, it increases the chances of suspects being able to spy on attempts to apprehend them, and with mass shootings specifically, it plays right into what a lot of these guys want: attention and notoriety. If you can, shutting down the potential for information to escape takes out many variables that can exacerbate the situation.

Also, I have been saying for awhile now that gun control is straight up political theater. The situation you describe is really a fantasy best case scenario. We're more likely to get something completely worthless like arbitrary model-specific bans, feature restrictions, magazine capacity limits, etc. These types of restrictions do absolutely nothing (as opposed to federal background checks and waiting period laws), and when they're passed you get politicians doing the things you mentioned above.

Gun control of a responsible and substantial nature is not possible in this country. Even within the democratic party and intelligent members of it's base, nobody has the patience or foresight to make it happen. It would take decades of passing substantial legislation, media campaigns, and a considerable amount of taxpayer money for programs to peacefully get guns out of citizen hands.

As with a lot of left-leaning causes in the US, people want results right now and they refuse to accept anything less. The results of this vary from "making things worse" to "tricking yourself into thinking you've solved the problem, only to have it come back worse than before a few years later." I completely understand why in the face of all these shootings, but emotional responses are rarely helpful.

The question I have is why we see the shootings primarily in this generation (post-millenials).

I agree that the gun-control laws need to change but there are some very real social issues at play that nobody seems to want to tackle.

We aren't the only nation with lax gun laws, but for some reason we are the nation that seems to have the biggest issue with this sort of thing.

Most school shootings aren't reported and you never once see them on the news.

Guess why.

"crojo
Economic injustice caused this/these?"

It's not the only factor obviously, but it's a big one.

For clarification, the state of mental health care in this country falls under the umbrella of economic justice (inability to afford it, economic pressure on caregivers to provide minimal treatment and use medication in place of more comprehensive solutions, even among the more well off there's economically driven status anxiety, etc. etc.).

People are accountable for their actions, but that doesn't mean their actions happen in a vacuum.

Also I was talking about gun violence in general, of which mass shootings like this are just a tiny, tiny fraction.

Here's a good NPR piece about the evidence for a causal relationship between poverty and mental illness.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/10/30/499777541 /can-poverty-lead-to-mental-illness



As far as filming the police, I've had too many friends who have been beaten, jailed or both over the years simply for turning the wrong corner and seeing a cop beating someone in the street (or, for example, stopping an attempted rape happening in their own basement only to find out the rapist is a plainclothes cop who was down there assaulting a woman while his partner was upstairs punching random partygoers in the face and then putting them under arrest if they retaliated - the bass player in my band spent the night in jail and suffered some minor injuries for being the one who stopped the rape, and one of my roommates also spent the night in jail for trying to break up a fight between the other cop and one of the people he punched). Back in 2013 just a few blocks away from where I'm sitting right now a grad student from Brown who was unlucky enough to be black saw two cops beating a stranger in his front lawn, started filming it from his front door on his phone as evidence, and the cops chased him insie, broke down the door, smashed the phone and beat him in the front hall so badly he was hospitalized for days and suffered long term injuries.

The ratio of black to white incarceration in my town is worse than Ferguson was the year of the mass protests (we're a bit over 7 to 1).

A friend of mine (who happens to be black) was ousted from the parole board for "being racist" after he refused to grant the daughter of a wealthy local businessman parole after serving 14 days for being caught red handed embezzling $300,000. He didn't even vote to deny her parole because he knew that was politically impossible, he simply excercised his legal right to abstain from voting, but that was still racism because ehe's a blac man and she's a rich white woman. He's writing a book about it right now but I don't know what the time frame for it being finished and published is.

I've got no sympathy for the whole veil of secrecy that cops want.


Still not as racist as Boston cops, though.

If all the kids in this video brought a loaded glock to school everyday this never would have happened!

You are so right.

Because having a stowed iron is magic bullet repellent when someone with a high RoF weapon is intent on racking up the body count and has the drop on you.

How could we have ever been in denial of this?

You fucking putz.

I think DQL was being facetious, but I could be wrong.

You're right. For a moment I forgot I was on poetv and not at the office. My apologies. Carry on.

You talk like this in your office 😂😂

That gun of peace needs to check its privilege and stop appropriating the truck of peace's culture.

The solution to absurd hyperbole is more shitposting

Yeah, just because gun control, you know, WORKS everywhere in the civilized world, doesn't mean it could possibly happen here.

The first step to repairing a flooded house is turning off the faucets.

The people who say gun control doesn't work are the same people who say government is ineffectual; they're the ones who vote in the politicians that make it true.

This was also really hard to watch as a parent, not to mention just as a human being.