>media really over-estimated this persons competence
It is a bit of psychological blindness where we convince ourselves that random murders aren't as easy as they really are. The truth is that almost anyone -- including people with lots of security theater -- can be nullified by random people. This is quadruply true in the era of drones.
We came within a literal inch of witnessing the assassination of a presidential candidate earlier this year, by a kid with no particular skills and an easily obtained rifle. We are lucky that people are mostly nonviolent.
>547 so far this year. If we had equal justice for all in this country, this CEO shooting would have barely made local news, maybe.
Don't lie at us with statistics like that. The bulk of those so called "mass shootings", normal crimes gone off the rails and other things that are nowhere near what people think when you use the words "mass shooting", which is almost certainly the slight of hand you're going for.
2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition. While what you say and like you reference is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader to portray it as you did. The typical mass shooting on that list consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime (usually a crime for profit gone off the rails or the drug industry DIYing dispute resolution) wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.
Pretty much every mass shooting by the colloquial definition makes the national news. I am unaware of any one that has not.
> Pretty much every mass shooting by the colloquial definition makes the national news. I am unaware of any one that has not.
Now that sounds like obvious selection bias. Also, the Wikipedia article says "specifically for the purposes of this article, a total of four or more victims". But the point about the categorization is well taken. As the article says: "Many incidents involving organized crime and gang violence are included."
And this ‘mass shooting’ list also includes injuries NOT caused by shooting. What’s the point of that?
“ A man was killed and three women were injured when they fired upon in a vehicle on eastbound Roosevelt Road near Cicero Avenue in Cicero. The victims fled north onto Cicero Avenue into Chicago where they crashed, leading to three others being injured in the crash.[16]”
The disparity is laid bare by the fact that this wasn’t even the only murder in lower Manhattan on that day. One gets a multi-state manhunt and the top spot on national news for days. The other got a shrug.
Doesn't it make sense for police to go after high profile killings? If they catch the CEO killer that's more good press for them, and if they were slacking there's more chance that they'll get hounded for it.
Sure. NYPD is doing the rational thing in a society that treats the murder of a wealthy CEO as a much worse crime than the murder of a semi-homeless maybe-illegal immigrant.
And in a society that strongly valued equality before the law, they wouldn’t dare treat the two cases so differently. Thus we can see that we don’t live in such a society.
>And in a society that strongly valued equality before the law, they wouldn’t dare treat the two cases so differently. Thus we can see that we don’t live in such a society.
How would "equality before the law" as you described even work? If some celebrity got killed and people wanted to contribute their resources into finding their killer, is that suddenly bad now? If my son got killed and I'm trying to find his killer rather than doing the Right Thing™ by devoting my time equally among all unsolved murder cases, am I a bad person?
Is a police department that shrugs and says "we'd want to solve this high profile murder that everyone wants solved, but because of 'equality' we have to solve this gangbanger murder that nobody cares about" really what we want? Isn't a government that's responsive to citizen demands also an ideal? What happens if they conflict?
Your concerns about some people being more deserving of a good investigation reminds me why it's great that hospitals will serve everyone, even if they are a gangbanger.
>Keep in mind, for this case in specific, a huge number of people did not want it solved
Where? If you go by reddit, there's a "huge number of people" who want to see society collapse in a socialist revolution, but that's clearly not representative of the overall population. Even the disparity between the support for kamala vs at the polls was stark.
If you go by literally any venue where people talk. There is, at the minimum, widespread 'darn - a completely awful human was killed - what a shame' mentality everywhere, and across the political spectrum.
Justice is not defined by the law, but by personal values. The prosecutor in this case is going to be obsessive in ensuring that none of the jurors understand their legal right to jury nullification, because if they do - this guy stands a very high chance of a mistrial - if not outright acquittal.
>If you go by literally any venue where people talk. There is, at the minimum, widespread 'darn - a completely awful human was killed - what a shame' mentality everywhere, and across the political spectrum.
that's... not the same thing being argued a few comments up? ie.
"Keep in mind, for this case in specific, a huge number of people did not want it solved"
I don't think it's controversial that the CEO isn't well liked, or that some (most?) people thought his death was a net good, but that's not the same as actively wanting the murder to not be solved.
Because it paints the image that normal innocent people are getting shot up in schools and markets more often than they really are, primarily to push the narrative that guns need to be taken from people who have committed no crimes, to stop crime.
In reality, the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other. Whether it be with a legally-purchased gun, an illegally-purchased gun, a homemade gun, a knife, a homemade shank, a baseball bat, a vehicle.
>normal innocent people are getting shot up in schools and markets [often]
>the majority of shootings are done by people who will find a way to kill someone, one way or the other
Both of these things can be true. You can have a rampant gang violence problem, and also a rampant school shooting problem. The fact that the gang problem is worse doesn't make the school shooting problem okay, and to use this to argue against gun control is... odd.
The point is that gun control isn't solving anything but eliminating what many Americans perceive as a fundamental right, because bad people do bad things with neutral items. You can stab dozens of people mortally before you're put down. You can mow a crowd of people down with your vehicle. But I carry a gun every day out of the possibility that someone might do one of those things to me, or my loved ones.
Banning a right is the worst bandaid "fix" possible, on top of what is a much more fundamental problem that can't be solved by merely stopping one of its symptoms. Our people are sick in multiple ways. Let's fix that.
Suicide makes up 55% of gun deaths, and the US is literally the only country in the world that counts these as gun violence. The remainder is primarily gang violence. Shooting of non-gang affiliated people is extremely rare, and noteworthy because of this rarity. Murder-suicides are also rare, about 1% of suicides.
Most discussion and statistics about gun violence intentionally obfuscates these facts. We could speculate about the motivations why, but it is largely irrelevant.
You seem to be hinting, by your choice of statistics, that gun violence in the USA is not the pressing social issue it is commonly made out to be. (We could speculate about the motivations why, but it is largely irrelevant.)
Since I disagree, I will offer my own statistic: the leading cause of death in the United States among children and adolescents is gunshot wound.
I would agree that gun violence is a serious issue. However, I think most people are misled/misinformed about nature of the problem, who is at risk, and their personal risk.
I think that the risk is highly concentrated on a subset of people, an individuals can take simple actions to remove themselves from that subset.
Examples would be if you steer clear of gangs, drugs, and abusive partners, your risk is drastically lower than the national average. The same is true for your kids, especially if you don't keep guns in your house.
Now, I still think it's a problem that other Americans are dying from gun violence, even if I don't think I am personally at much risk. I will admit that this does reduce the sense of urgency I feel, and I suspect that this is why the numbers are obfuscated.
The groups that want to reduce gun violence rightly understand that personal fear is a greater motivator then general concern for the well-being of others, so the narrative exaggerates the former and not the letter. This is why you get lone suicide grouped with home invasion for gun violence statistics. It is why you get 2 gang members shot in a drug deal gone bad classified with school massacres as mass shootings.
Not off-hand. Last time I looked into it, tagging homicide associations was a pretty messy business. I think drug related gun homicides and gang homicides two side to the same coin.
I've seen numbers on the order of 10% for intimate gun partner homicide. The percent is much higher for women, but women are a minority of gun homicide victims overall.
I looked at a variety of sources for the above numbers, but it certainly didn't seem like gang- or drug-specific associations drove the majority of non-suicide gun deaths. A decent chunk, but there are other reasons.
One surprising / not surprising other fact: ~50-75% of gun deaths involve alcohol and ~25% meth.
Parent specifically said “shooting deaths”, which technically includes guns shooting the person holding them in any country.
Gun suicide specifically affects white conservatives males and their kids more than any demographic. Either it’s access to guns, or conservatives are particularly more depressed (or maybe they lack access mental health services?). Having a friend die this way when I was in high school (and knowing no one who was shot and killed by someone else), it’s particularly real to me.
True, let me revise. The majority of "shootings" are suicides, which can be carried out in all manner of ways. The second largest contributors are gangs and organized crime. The smallest, by far, is what people actually picture in their mind when they hear "mass shooting".
Guns are an easy way to do it with a higher success rate. It is really hard to stab yourself to death even though it’s possible, for example. Who knows what would happen in Korea if guns were legal.
Because it's mostly business dispute resolution and it dominates the stats if you include it.
It's not like you can ask the courts to use state violence on the guy that shorted you come coke or to kick that other gang's dealer off your turf because he's already been warned once. Illegal industry has to DIY it.
To include it would be like compiling a list of extortion and including government fines and civil judgements. It dominates the stats so much that if you include it and evaluate it you're not actually looking at the thing you want to be looking at, you're measuring by proxy the size of something else. You'll wind up deriving conclusions like "most mass shooters are low level gang members" or "the threatening party in most extortion is the state" that is nominally true but also absurd doublespeak not actually congruent with the meaning of those words.
Why? I'm not in a gang or a mob, so i am safe from their silly little squabbles. I don't care how many gang members kill each other. I also don't care how many people die in DRC civil wars, because I am not in the DRC. I don't care about people dying on other planets and in different galaxies.
We all agree most normal people have an aversion to killing. You're saying that having an aversion to killing stops people killing, which is a tautology. And then you say it's not about consequences. What's your explanation then?
It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence, every day, everywhere. Have you never seen a fight/argument on the street suddenly diffuse when a cop appears? Or eg, a guy drunk at a bar, starting to raise his voice in anger at someone, only to simmer down when he sees the bartender walking over because he doesn't want to be kicked out?
Awareness of consequences is a necessary precondition for people to course-correct. That's an essential feature of people: we are able to notice when we're on course toward a bad outcome (whether that's harm to oneself, or harm to someone/something we care about, or any undesirable situation), and so take responsibility for our actions in advance so we can change course. Without that we'd be amoral creatures. This is what makes us moral beings – that we can take responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. This is a good thing. It's what makes us people, and it's the basis of having a civilisation that is mostly peaceful.
It’s not a tautology. The aversion to killing is an inherent psychological thing. Some things are just fundamental to a person’s psychology. Some people have such a strong aversion to spiders that they can’t go near one, even when they know for certain that it’s harmless and there would be no consequences. And psychologically healthy people have that sort of aversion to killing another person. It’s inherent programming.
How often do fights end without police intervention? How many times do people get angry and decide not to escalate it to the point of murder even when they could get away with it? People do sometimes end up in situations where they could get away with killing. They rarely take advantage.
You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
When you mention “a bad outcome” you include harm to someone we care about. The vast majority of people consider a person’s death to be a bad outcome even if they don’t care about that person in particular.
I think you’re conflating two very separate ideas here. There’s the idea of the natural consequences of an action, and then there’s the idea of consequences imposed by some authority. The original comment I replied to was talking entirely about the latter. Here you discuss both but you treat them the same. But someone who refrains from killing because they don’t like the consequence of someone being dead is very different from someone who refrains from killing because they don’t want to go to prison.
There are really three different things here: 1) people don’t kill because of the legal or physical consequences to themselves 2) people don’t kill because they don’t like the outcome of a dead person 3) people don’t kill because they fundamentally don’t want to. There are examples of all 3. The vast majority of people aren’t in category 1. I think they’re almost all in 3, but there’s no practical difference between 2 and 3.
> You’re probably familiar with _The Lord of the Flies_. We need order and authority, otherwise we’ll descend into savagery, right? Except this scenario has actually happened, and in real life the boys worked together peacefully to survive until help came.
There is a difference between a bar fight and killing someone with intent. A bar fight is a fight for dominance, like you see in animals, the outcome is rarely fatal as the point is just to establish who is stronger and who should submit.
We have an aversion to killing that goes further than the fear of consequences. It can be seen in the military, where soldiers naturally don't want to kill their enemies, even when they have incentives to do so. To be effective, soldiers have to be desensitized to killing through their training. Enemies are dehumanized, they train on human shaped targets, etc... And even with all that training, after a few years of active service, many start questioning their life choices. It is common for military pilots, who enlist for the love of flying, until they realize what they are really doing, i.e. killing people. When that happens, it is time to retire to a noncombatant job.
Punishing crime is not useless, but I think saying that consequences are the cause of aversion for killing is backwards. We have a natural aversion for killing, especially when we are in a prosperous situation like we (the first world) are now in. And that's why we take murder so seriously.
And speaking of murder, our natural aversion for killing shows when we see how we treat the death penalty nowadays. The death penalty is (generally) for the worst people humanity has to offer, their killing have been approved by the highest authority, and there is still opposition. We even have rituals to offload the responsibility of killing from the executioners. For example by having a random person in a firing squad fire a blank round.
>You're saying that having an aversion to killing stops people killing, which is a tautology. And then you say it's not about consequences. What's your explanation then?
It's a fairly straightforward understanding. If I said I have an aversion to the taste of steak, would you require additional information to why I don't eat steak? Or, to put it in your terms, eating steak causes a negative internal state for me and doesn't require any external consequence to make me avoid it.
>It seems intuitive to me that the awareness of consequences plays a central role in preventing anger from turning into violence
There's a problem with relying on "intuitive" understandings in some cases, especially when there is contradictory evidence. I think the term for your stance is "deterrence theory/effect." In this case, I believe there are plenty of studies that show harsher consequences do not reduce crimes rates (or at least have marginal effects). People are not rational actors, especially in highly agitated emotional states.
One can have an aversion to the act itself without considering the consequences. People who have never gotten in a real fight before don't understand that its actually quite difficult to throw a full-strength punch at someone if you've never done so before. It's not the consequences that you're considering in that moment, but an aversion to the violence itself.
I did say almost. Putin is kind of the extreme example.
If someone is willing to live like an absolute hermit in basically a police state, hiding behind layers and layers of security apparatus, engaging lookalikes and only allowing the loyalty-tested anywhere near him, survival odds improve quite a bit.
But for anyone trying to live anything remotely approaching a normal life, or with any real freedom, your continued survival is completely due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in your world have a personal breaker against murder.
It is a bit of psychological blindness where we convince ourselves that random murders aren't as easy as they really are. The truth is that almost anyone -- including people with lots of security theater -- can be nullified by random people. This is quadruply true in the era of drones.