Mass shooting at bar in Thousand Oaks, CA

The NRA chimed in with their ridiculous garbage. From their idiotic tweet:

Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.

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Imagine that - doctors consulting doctors about medical matters of which they are experts. The nerve of them...

This one surprised me...I was working, took a break to eat my breakfast and check in here, and...why did it take me by surprise? It's *only* been a few weeks since the last shooting. This is just terrible. Those poor people who have now survived two mass shootings are going to end up scared and afraid to go out in public at all. In fact, as I read about the bar where this happened, I remembered being 18 myself and going to the college night parties at bars...and thought about how my 14-year old daughter is close to doing that myself. I'm not sure I want her ever going out anymore. Ever.

This is heartbreaking: "Her Apple Watch and iPhone still showed her location on the dance floor."

I heard about this when my husband's clock radio went off this morning to wake him up.

My first response was, "Oh, another mass shooting..." Then I got angry. Angry that this is becoming so common that every event is "yet another" tragedy that our society lacks the will to prevent from happening over and over and over. Angry that this one will likely be forgotten even faster than the Las Vegas shooting was (and all the shootings since). Angry that people aren't angry enough about all the past shootings to have sent the GOP packing in both houses.

More lives snuffed out in a heartbeat, and all anyone in the party that still controls most of Washington will likely do is suggest that the victims should have been armed too.

The victims aren't red or blue, liberal or conservative. They're gone, leaving behind heartbroken loved ones.

Really heartbreaking. College Night! 18 and over, a lot of very young people in that bar. Cody Coffman's father: https://abc7.com/thousand-oaks-shooting-father-ids-son-as-1-of-12-slain-in-massacre/4647626/

Roxxsmom said:

More lives snuffed out in a heartbeat, and all anyone in the party that still controls most of Washington will likely do is suggest that the victims should have been armed too.

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The thing is, they were, giving the lie to the "armed confrontation can prevent a determined killer" bullshit. These were cops. Imagine a teacher.

I'm so disgusted, so tired of it I'm not even having the appropriate emotional response, which scares the bejeezus out of me.

They lie and we try to make sense of it. What a ballbreaking, futile undertaking.

Just remember, the real threat to Americans is foreign refugees trying to enter the country (that's bitter sarcasm, just to be clear).

Since this guy was a marine, we know what happens next. There'll be some fumfuring about 'mental health' and how we need to do better (we? who the fuck's been stealing all the funding for mental/general health care for veterans and civilians alike?), followed by admonishments not to "politicize tragedy". They'll say now isn't the time, and remain tellingly silent when asked when is the time.

And while I'm venting my anger about all this, let me say something else. People are talking about the gun control debate. But there is no debate, not any more. The country made it's choice after the Sandy Hook killings, when they came right out and said twenty dead children wasn't a good enough reason to rethink the "all the guns, all the time, for everyone" policy.

Technophobe said:

And while I'm venting my anger about all this, let me say something else. People are talking about the gun control debate. But there is no debate, not any more. The country made it's choice after the Sandy Hook killings, when they came right out and said twenty dead children wasn't a good enough reason to rethink the "all the guns, all the time, for everyone" policy.

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This 1000%

Technophobe said:

And while I'm venting my anger about all this, let me say something else. People are talking about the gun control debate. But there is no debate, not any more. The country made it's choice after the Sandy Hook killings, when they came right out and said twenty dead children wasn't a good enough reason to rethink the "all the guns, all the time, for everyone" policy.

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Yep. Because even though the overwhelming majority of Americans say they want more background checks and other regulations that might make it harder for some of these people to get guns, they keep electing people who can't even vote for expanded background checks, let alone to ban high capacity magazines, or bump stocks, or other alterations that make rifles even deadlier than they are already.

The gap between what most Americans say they want and how they actually vote is vast on everything from gun control to environmental regulation.

Some of the victims were students at Pepperdine. How long before some of the students at the college where I teach are victims of a massacre? How long before one of us AW-ers is?

Technophobe said:

And while I'm venting my anger about all this, let me say something else. People are talking about the gun control debate. But there is no debate, not any more. The country made it's choice after the Sandy Hook killings, when they came right out and said twenty dead children wasn't a good enough reason to rethink the "all the guns, all the time, for everyone" policy.

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THIS ^^^

What angers (and saddens) me, besides the whole godawful situation, is the fact that major news outlets focus on the wrong thing. Always. For example--we need more security at these so-called soft targets. We need to know what to do when someone comes to school, a mall, a movie theater or nightclub armed with a gun. We need more active-shooter drills.

In other words--placing the responsibility on all the wrong people. The potential victims.

The only commonality among these shootings is easy access to assault weapons. Ban them. It's at least a start.

After the last school shooting weren't the NRA apologists touting the idea of putting armed vets into schools? This guy could easily have been one of them.

In response to this shooting, the NRA produces the most idiotic tweet of all time.

Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.

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I had to read the tweet twice to be sure I had not misread it the first time.

The US has proven repeatedly that it values the right to weaponry above the right to simply live. We could easily solve this problem, but we prefer to pretend that it's terribly complicated, that it's never a good time to talk about it, that it's strictly a mental health issue (which we'll also do nothing about), and that it's what our musket-toting founding fathers truly wanted.

Sandy Hook was not a national catalyst for gun control. Nor was Parkland. The only thing that will get the U.S. gun nuts to change their minds if we blow their brains out. But then we become them, so that's no solution either.

The US will not solve this problem. Good luck everybody in the daily US mass shooting lottery. May the odds be ever in your favor!

Devil Ledbetter said:

The US will not solve this problem.

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Not in our generation. But it will be solved one day soon.

By those very kids getting shot at.

-cb

Larry M said:

In response to this shooting, the NRA produces the most idiotic tweet of all time.

I had to read the tweet twice to be sure I had not misread it the first time.

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Loesch then quoted a Daily Mail article...

“PTSD gunman 'fired a bullet through the wall of his mother's home in April and spent hours holed up inside before police coaxed him out' but he was cleared by mental health specialists”

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...to which Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand, said...

Dana Loesch, an @NRA gun saleswoman who makes a living ensuring dangerous people have easy access to guns, blames the Thousand Oaks shooting on police because they didn’t arrest a dangerous man who had easy access to a gun.

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The NRA is a Gordian knot of absurd accusations, justifications, and nonsense words strung together to obscure the fact that guns, do in reality, kill people.

It was reported that some of the victims of the shooting were survivors of the Las Vegas attack last year. I can't imagine experiencing one mass shooting. Two in thirteen months? Some did not survive this one. The guns are part of it, the media is part of it, the mental health problem is part of it, and maybe more. I won't get into the gun debate because I don't know what the answer is but something has to change and soon.

RookieWriter said:

It was reported that some of the victims of the shooting were survivors of the Las Vegas attack last year. I can't imagine experiencing one mass shooting. Two in thirteen months? Some did not survive this one. The guns are part of it, the media is part of it, the mental health problem is part of it, and maybe more. I won't get into the gun debate because I don't know what the answer is but something has to change and soon.

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What specific kind(s) of "media" are shown to be part of the mass-casualty gun violence epidemic in the U.S.?

SWest said:

What specific kind(s) of "media" are shown to be part of the mass-casualty gun violence epidemic in the U.S.?

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It probably starts with TV news but is not limited to that. They make celebrities out of the mass shooters. The FBI has asked the media not to put the names and faces of the attackers on TV because it gives encouragement to other sickos who want to be famous. It's the copy cat effect. Despite that the media continues to do it anyway. For example, news media will rarely report a suicide (unless maybe it's someone famous) because they don't want to encourage others to do the same. Yet when it comes to mass shootings followed by a suicide, such as in Las Vegas, they cover the shooters story in great detail. The shooters name and face is all over the news for days and sometimes weeks.

RookieWriter said:

It probably starts with TV news but is not limited to that. They make celebrities out of the mass shooters. The FBI has asked the media not to put the names and faces of the attackers on TV because it gives encouragement to other sickos who want to be famous. It's the copy cat effect. Despite that the media continues to do it anyway. For example, news media will rarely report a suicide (unless maybe it's someone famous) because they don't want to encourage others to do the same. Yet when it comes to mass shootings followed by a suicide, such as in Las Vegas, they cover the shooters story in great detail. The shooters name and face is all over the news for days and sometimes weeks.

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This is certainly a valid and compelling hypothesis, but we have to be careful about conflating professional news reporting in the public interest and sensationalized, for-entertainment harping on isolated details.

Suicide contagion has been somewhat established, but experts do not suggest that news blackouts are in the public interest. Though 24-hour-everywhere-you-go repetitions may not be healthful generally or to specifically susceptible populations - in short, it's complicated -- news media can specifically help alleviate likelihood of suicide clusters.

If you have citations (from the CDC or FBI, for instance) that support a news media blackout, we would love to scrutinize them.

Larry M said:

In response to this shooting, the NRA produces the most idiotic tweet of all time.



I had to read the tweet twice to be sure I had not misread it the first time.

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Plenty of doctors firing back, like this tweet.