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nighttimer

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Another day. Another slaughter at a school.

SANTA FE, TexasThe suspected shooter arrested after a rampage that killed at least nine people at Santa Fe High School this morning is 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the Galveston County Sheriff's Office confirmed.


A second person of interest was also detained, officials said.


Pagourtzis plays on the Santa Fe High School junior varsity football team, and is a member of a dance squad with a local Greek Orthodox church, the Associated Press reported.


A woman who answered the phone at a number associated with the Pagourtzis family declined to speak with the AP.


She said: "Give us our time right now, thank you."


Area hospitals reported at least a dozen others were injured.


The dead are expected to include students and staff, according to a senior law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak about the investigation.


An attacker was armed with an AR-15-style rifle, a pistol, a shotgun and pipe bombs, the official said.


"Officers inside encountered a bloody mess in the school," the source said, adding, "Evidently this guy threw pipe bombs all in there. We don't know if any of them went off."


The bloodshed 30 miles south of Houston is the worst mass shooting in America since February, when 17 people were gunned down at a high school in Parkland, Florida, according to a database of shootings maintained by the Washington Post.



What comes next? Oh, stop. You already know what will come next.

Treat the wounded and bury the dead. Name the killer and tell his story and then name the victims and tell their story, but not too much because that might make them real and not just a number. rump will say something useless and pathetic and not do a fucking thing. Democrats will wring their hands and bang their little tin drums for some new restrictions on guns they'll never get. Republicans will get off their knees and stop fellating the NRA long enough to issue their standard "thoughts and prayers" press release after adjusting the name of the town, the school and the date. The NRA will allow their blow job whores in Congress to take the lead and then after Fux News and the other right-wing weapons of mass distortion will scold Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer for squiring crocodile tears and politicizing a senseless tragedy and that it's "too soon" to talk about that sort of thing (and it always will be).

The air will be full of words. Writers will write words and talking heads will talk. At least for a week or month or so. Then we'll return to our normal forms of empty entertainment and self-medicating with an abundance of drugs, booze, junk food and TV.

Does any of this seem...oh...familiar? It should. We've been here lots of times before.


These are the 10 deadliest school shootings since Columbine (15 deaths):



  • 2007 Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg, Va. — 33 deaths
  • 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Conn. — 27 deaths
  • 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Fla. — 17 deaths
  • 2015 Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, Ore. — 10 deaths
  • 2018 Santa Fe High School, Santa Fe, Tex. — 10 deaths
  • 2005 Red Lake Senior High School, Red Lake, Minn. — 7 deaths
  • 2012 Oikos University, Oakland, Calif. — 7 deaths
  • 2006 West Nickel Mines School, Bart Township, Penn. — 6 deaths
  • 2008 Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, Ill. — 6 deaths
  • 2014 Marysville Pilchuck High School, Marysville, Wa. — 5 deaths

And we'll be right back here again. Same as it ever was.
 

Larry M

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Plus, the survivors will be called "civil terrorists," and "crisis actors" by the *** *** right wingers.

My two kids went to their high school this morning, just like the students at Santa Fe High School.

My kids are coming home. As far as I know, they have not yet been shot dead at school.

Fuck you NRA. Fuck you complicit congress. Fuck you to those who value their guns over human life.
 
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frimble3

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I saw a few moments of a public statement by what turned out to be the governor of Texas, before I even heard about this. (Didn't take long to get the gist.) He, at least, said that the time for prayer is over, and went on to say that he would be doing consultations with local groups. Which will, I imagine, come to nothing, but maybe some politicians are finally grasping that 'prayer' isn't enough.

And, what really got to me in Nighttimer's post is
worst mass shooting in America since February
February! Good God, we're not even half way through the year!

It's one way to slow down immigration, I suppose, 'cause if you've got kids, why not just stay in your own war-zone and take your chances.
 

blacbird

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Let's start with: How in eff did a 17-year-old get an AR-15, and the relevant ammo for it? Let's have Ollie North and Big Wayne and, oh, maybe Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Really and, oh, maybe Sarah Sanders, give us an answer on that one.

It was probably Barack Obama's fault, Or Hillary Clinton's.

caw
 

Brightdreamer

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Let's start with: How in eff did a 17-year-old get an AR-15, and the relevant ammo for it? Let's have Ollie North and Big Wayne and, oh, maybe Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Really and, oh, maybe Sarah Sanders, give us an answer on that one.

It was probably Barack Obama's fault, Or Hillary Clinton's.

caw

Now, now - you know full well that now is not the time to ask for answers. The time to do that is - wait, what's that over there? *politicians scurry away with pockets full of NRA cash*
 

Technophobe

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Let's start with: How in eff did a 17-year-old get an AR-15, and the relevant ammo for it? Let's have Ollie North and Big Wayne and, oh, maybe Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Really and, oh, maybe Sarah Sanders, give us an answer on that one.

It was probably Barack Obama's fault, Or Hillary Clinton's.


caw

From what I've heard on the news, it was his father's "legally obtained" gun. I put quotes around 'legally obtained' because that's the exact phrase the reporter used.
 
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Prozyan

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Let's start with: How in eff did a 17-year-old get an AR-15, and the relevant ammo for it? Let's have Ollie North and Big Wayne and, oh, maybe Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Really and, oh, maybe Sarah Sanders, give us an answer on that one.

Earlier reports of an AR-15 type rifle were erroneous. His firearms were a .38 revolver and a shotgun, along with several home made explosive devices.
 

blacbird

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This, from the manager of the 2017 World Series baseball champion Houston Astros, says a lot:

https://sports.yahoo.com/astros-man...no-reason-schools-combat-zones-020838210.html

It really is past time to confront the gun nut culture in the U.S., direct and head-on, the NRA and all their acolytes and shills, everywhere. There's no reason to be polite about it. If you know someone like this, it's time to call them out, straight up, and without apology. Embarrass them in public, if possible. Make them all as uncomfortable as possible.

caw
 

frimble3

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Good on him. If the people won't listen to victims, politicians or their hearts, maybe they will listen to athletes and coaches. Let's use the 'fanatic' part of fans.
 

regdog

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I really don't think the Republicans give one rat's ass about the Second Amendment, their gun rights voters, or states rights. All they care about is how much money they get from the NRA.


Which we now know is Russian money.
 

LittlePinto

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I wish I could be surprised.

But I'm not.

From the linked article:

One of Pagourtzis' classmates who died in the attack, Shana Fisher, "had 4 months of problems from this boy," her mother, Sadie Rodriguez, wrote in a private message to the Los Angeles Times on Facebook. "He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no."
 

Jolly-Boo

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regdog

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From the "No, I'm not making this up file."

NRA President Oliver North said gun violence in schools is because of Ritilan and video games.

Texas Lt Gov says it was because there are too many doors in the school.


So gun violence is caused by too many doors, Ritilan and video games, and not guns. :gaah

Link Oliver North

Link 2 Lt Gov
 

frimble3

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So you get rid of all the doors to a school, except for one entry/exit controlled, most likely, by a guard on a walkway. What happens when the next killer decides to switch it up to fire-bombing?
 

frimble3

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I've never really given it much thought but lord these people have a stupid flag fetish.

Flag + gun = freedom?
I once saw a Fox News person say that Norway isn't a democracy because police don't carry guns. Which is just ...

:Soapbox:
Some people don't get that a flag is a symbol, not a thing in itself. And, some countries don't need armed police, because the police aren't constantly dealing with people who might be armed.
If so many Americans weren't armed, maybe their police wouldn't approach every interaction as though it was about to be a fire-fight.
 

nighttimer

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Is it there's too many homicidal assholes walking around?

Is it we're not doing enough fast enough to "harden" schools and make them impregnable fortresses to protect our children?

Is it the guns?

Or is it The Best Explanation For Our Spate of Mass Shootings Is The Least Comforting?

On another terrible day, I hate to introduce even more pessimism, but when we discuss mass shootings, one of the first questions we ask is the simplest and also the hardest to answer. Why? Why does this keep happening? Those who advocate for gun control have an immediate answer — the prevalence of guns in the United States. Yet guns have been part of the fabric of American life for the entire history of our republic. Mass shootings — especially the most deadly mass shootings — are a far more recent phenomenon.


Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it’s easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion “riot” of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event. Relying on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell notes that it’s a mistake to look at each incident independently:


But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.


Gladwell then argues that Columbine changed the thresholds. The first seven of the “major” modern school-shooting incidents were “disconnected and idiosyncratic.”


Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.


Here’s the most ominous part of the Gladwell thesis. The “low threshold” shooters are motivated by “powerful grievances,” but as the riot spreads, the justifications are often manufactured, and the shooters more and more “normal.” Here’s Gladwell’s chilling conclusion:

In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.


In other contexts, he’s elaborated further. The preparations for massacres are often extremely detailed. Shooters (and wannabe shooters) will often film videos, mimic the dress and poses of the Columbine killers, and otherwise copy the shooters who came before. Gladwell is hardly an NRA conservative — and he believes gun control “has its place” — but he also shares this grim warning: “Let’s not kid ourselves that if we passed the strictest gun control in the world that we would end this particular kind of behavior.”

Some journalists are starting to wonder if in the name of the "public interest" the news media has made mass shootings "cool" and just as the media refuses to name rape victims and minors accused of committing a heinous crime, perhaps there should be restraint applied to glamoring these sickos with their manifestos, troubled childhoods and bullshit motives.

Might be worth a try.
 

frimble3

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I think you're right, both that it's a reasonable explanation for a new phenomenon, and, it's not comforting. And, that there's less and less need for 'motivation'. The Boomtown Rats' "I Hate Mondays" was prophetic. (And that school shooting was in 1979).