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The American social safety net fails again. At least this time it was mostly contained.
Condolences to those who will remember him.
No shit. We had plenty of guns when I was a kid (52 now), even AR-15s and the like, and this wasn't a normal thing until after Columbine.
I'd hold off on my manifesto, :), but mental health has taken a nosedive in this country. It's far, far worse than kids can imagine. Fox News, Facebook, the internet, etc. has poisoned our collective brains and discourse.
I'm 38, and yeah it's seriously fucked. I keep saying this and people still want to plug their ears and scream "it's the guns!".
I'm a prime example, I have ADHD and hardcore insomnia, and I got laid off a few months ago, my health insurance just ended. In order to see a psychiatrist it's gonna cost me $300 out of pocket for the visit, and then generic Ambien is like $120 for 60 pills. I got letters that say I could get health insurance via the COBRA Act of 1985, but it's SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS A MONTH. Healthcare.gov keeps playing commercials that say "enroll now and you can get health insurance for as low as $10/month!". I went on there to look and it's only available for 2024 right now and they want to know your income for 2024. I put in 80k and they said I wasn't eligible, I put in 40k and it said it was gonna cost $350/month.
My dad is 73 and he constantly has to fight with insurance and the pharmacy to get his Ambien as well.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Losing your insurance/job is one of those situations that they'll enroll you early
I get your trying to help but you're missing the point
If you aren’t working, why are you putting in any salary?
If it puts your mind at ease at all, crime (violent and otherwise) had been on a decline from 1993 until 2016 and while it has risen since 2016, it still hasn't hit pre-'93 levels last I saw. Furthermore despite what you'd expect, those AR-15s are responsible for less than 500 (all rifles) of our 60,000 gun deaths, which is 0.833333333333% of our gun deaths. In fact, mass shootings account for less than 0.2% of our gun deaths per year. So, I mean "any is too much" yes, but it isn't near as bad as it seems. source
I think what terrifies people about mass shootings is that they're random. They just target random people (or God forbid fucking children).
I mean violence is obviously bad but most of the time it's contained in certain areas of town, and so long as you're not mixed up with the wrong people it's probably not a major concern for most people.
So when they see people get shot up at the mall or at a concert or at school they think "shit that could be me or my kids"
But yeah you're 100% right and they are blown completely out of proportion.
this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.
Things that are relatively new, circa Columbine
the 24-hour news cycle
rage-farming as a genre of syndicated media (think: Limbaugh, Hannity, InfoWars)
selling fear becomes huge moneymaker for opinion programmers (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, etc)
politics as a staple on social media comment threads
offshore groups (like troll farms, etc) posing as domestic political actors, targeting particular demographics
Ready access to guns is of course a problem, but it's probably made worse when all those folks with ready access to guns are bathed in fear and loathing 24/7 by millionaires making lots of money telling them things to make them or their families afraid or angry. Just a thought
The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. The idea that mental illness is largely responsible for the prevalence of mass shooters contributes to the stigma already attached to mental illness.
Know what did happen shortly before Columbine? Reagan dissembled our mental health infrastructure.
I was a teen in the late 80's. Hell, I thought homelessness was a normal thing I simply hadn't heard of until MTv started flogging it.
And if the mass shooting didn't start post-Columbine...? LOL, we didn't have that word in our lexicon.
FFS, we used to able to buy shotguns in the auto parts store. But suddenly, guns and "easy access" are the problem?
Why don't you folks start a fight you have a chance of actually winning? Shut down the right-wing propaganda, hard, yesterday.
And while we're at it, I'd kill for a solid study on how many killers, including suicides, are left/right politically. We both know how that's gonna play out.
I am saying that something else started it. Mental health care has been terrible for way longer than Columbine. And youre going to have to explain why there was a decade and a half gap between Reagan and this mass shooting. Dont get me wrong, Reagan was a real piece of shit but I don't think mental health or the lack of it is the major cause. Easy access to guns OTOH...
Mass shootings pre columbine were more rare but weren't unheard of. Mostly they were belltower or highway sniper style incidents or postal related as they were severely overworked at the time.
Also, while mass shootings were more rare, not only could you get one at the hardware store you could order a full auto directly to your door with no background check or even ID for a while.
Just to add.
Up until 2000, the NRA was actually a big supporter of gun control. At that point they switched to being pretty much zero tolerance for any gun control, and even trying to dismantle gun control.
One could apply the same logic you just did to blame mental health regulations to blame this instead.
It always weirds me out that the first school shooting I remember occurred a few bit over a year before Columbine. Heath High School, December 1997.
I'll fucking remember him. Kid realized he was going to harm a lot of people and avoided it.
Sucks that he got to that point, but props for not going through with his plan.
This is almost uplifting. Like, it's terrible the man was suffering so much, but it's admirable that he chose the better of the two options he was giving himself. That probably makes me sound like a terrible person.
I don't think that sounds terrible at all. We can all agree, I think, that we'd rather this whole situation not happen at all, but of the two cases, one with one dead by their own hands, and another case with who knows how many dead at the same person's hands, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying you're happy it was the former and not the latter.
Terrible would be saying he deserved it. Or putting someone in that position. Or a variety of other things, but it's not being relieved at a lower death toll.
Sounds like the good guy with the gun was the bad guy with the gun this time.
Charles Whitman — Texas Sniper. Killed 14 people in 1966. Autopsy found a brain tumor pressing the amygdala, which presumably caused uncontrollable "fight or flight" response.
I've been wondering if a brain tumor was the Maine mass shooters problem as well. We'll probably never know
And with the effortless access to firearms provided in the US, choosing the "fight" option was easy.
A message saying, “I am not a killer, I just want to get into the caves,” was written on a wall of the women’s bathroom where the man was found lying on the floor, according to Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario. Nearby, officers found a handgun and explosive devices, some real and some fake, he added.
Geez :(
There are some special caves as park of the amusement park that you can take tours. The caves reference makes sense.
I mean, sort of makes sense? I assume with the overkill in firepower, he expected to meet armed resistance. Way more than a security guard would actually pose irl. So that I can at least get my head around.
But if he wanted to sneak into the actual caves like the phrasing would suggest, why die in the bathroom?
And a bathroom for women. There's an inappropriate comparison here, somewhere.
Why was he hanging out in a womens bathroom?
I think that's the least concerning part of this story
To think he had all those guns and couldn't even stop one bad guy with a gun from killing him. Sad.
What are you talking about? All it took to stop a crazed murderer was one good guy with a gun!
But the bad guy with a gun still made a victim out of the good guy with the gun. Idk this is making my head hurt.
The good ending, I suppose?
No. Good would have been getting him the help he needed before this.
On the positive side, he would never have been in the news if that happened. So maybe it's happening a lot that way.
Jesus, that poor guy had some issues. I wish he could have gotten the help he needed rather than going down this road.
Holy shit, there's a mountaintop amusement park?
yeah. you ride up via tram and can enjoy a day of fun. roller coaster, swing over a cliff, alpine sleds (on rail) and caves. I also recall a laser tag area, some lame 4d ride (smells, get soaked, etc) and food. Then head down to the geothermal hotsprings for a nice soak in what i think is the worlds largest hotspring pool.