Czech media reported that Kozak authored social media posts in which he indulged in fantasies of suicide and mass murders in the days before the attacks.
I don’t want to ruin internet privacy, but who has ideas on how to handle this better? I feel like if someone’s posting “I wanna do a mass shooting” something should happen. I don’t want the state or private enterprise to be able to abuse that, though.
Some of the earliest modern police forces in the US were slave patrols in the south. In the north, Boston was the first city to have a modern professional force. It grew out of a system where private companies were hiring their own security to protect their cargo in the Boston port, and offloaded that cost onto the public.
Professional, publicly funded policing in the US has long been there to protect the interests of the powerful.
I have long thought that the police as an institution in the US is, shall we say, not good.
One time I was walking home from the grocery and I saw a couple having a screaming fight on the street. The guy had taken the woman’s phone from her and was holding it up out of her reach. I thought to myself, “Someone should probably do something… but who? And what?”
If I had called the police, it’s incredibly unlikely it would have gone well. The people fighting weren’t white, for one thing. The cops would probably roll up, throw their authority around, and get violent. Possibly murder the guy. Not what you want. Even if they didn’t do violence immediately, subjecting that guy to the criminal justice system is not what you want, either.
In my imagination there should be a department of deescalation specialists. No guns. No arrest powers. Maybe some snacks.
But yeah, policing in the US is a tragedy at pretty much every level.
Back on topic, responsibility could maybe fall onto the platform. There are suicide prevention services. Maybe there could be mass shooting prevention services.
In my imagination there should be a department of deescalation specialists. No guns. No arrest powers. Maybe some snacks.
As a teacher, I had to do home visits for every student in my homeroom. Two families threatened to kill me. One by siccing their dogs on me, the other by just shooting me. The entire purpose of my visit was just to meet them and let them know I care about their kids
What do you do when these de-escalation specialists go to talk to a person who is crazy-posting, and have their lives threatened?
I don’t ask this facetiously. I think this is a good idea. But these workers will run into situations like this, and more to the point, opponents of these programs will definitely bring this sort of thing up when trying to sway public opinion.
That would help with mass shootings, very likely, yes. I feel like there’s also things we (or various platforms) could do to address the parent category of mass murder
Yes. The solution is not to curb netneutrality and online discourse though. But to have a better social net and family support that can catch individuals like these or prevent them completely.
And Czehia has or had these. Which is why the rate of mass shootings, with a country that actually allows people to own guns, is much lower than in the country where that has virtually no support and more lax gun laws.
Absolutely. I just think that it's silly to draw attention to guns being easily attainable in this context, when there have been so many more mass shootings in other European countries.
Considering that mass shootings aren’t a common thing in the Western world as a whole, that isn’t really relevant. One is more than most countries in the West have had in decades.
The timeline for the shootings seems like it’s that economic fuckery and downturns precede upticks in shootings. It is very alarming that there has been three of them this year.
If you follow the constitution, the right to bear arms is for a well regulated militia. Not for a stressed 18 year old buying an AR-15 at Walmart to shoot up rioters from another state.
Hey don’t cry about unborn babies but be pro school shootings there bud. The founders had single shot musket rifles not semi automatic rifles. If you want to be constructionist then ban the sale of anything other than breach loaders with separate shell and powder charge and have a good day.
First off, I’m pro-choice. I’m just not an ignorant naive tool like you seem to be. The founders weren’t idiots they knew tech wasn’t going to stop, you could also own warships during those days, the equivalent of owning a nuclear attack sub basically. If you think the 2nd only applies to single shot muskets, then the Internet isn’t covered by the first amendment in your mind. Being ignorant of history doesn’t magically make you correct.
Look, there are ways to make this work. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have guns. I own one myself. However, maybe there should be a 30 day waiting period? Mental health fitness assessment? Anything?
If you’re actually wanting to solve our violence problem, you go to the root of our societies issues, not the tool used. All of these things below would curb our violence as a whole 1000xs more than any new gun control can.
We can start with:
Single payer healthcare
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren’t 30-40 kids for one teacher.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don’t turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don’t turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
You might not like where that logic goes. The Supreme Court took a stance in United States v. Miller (1939) that the NFA’s provisions on short barreled shotguns could be enforced on the basis that it’s not a weapon that would be used by a well-regulated militia.
That brings us to a conclusion that literally nobody likes. The government could ban shorty shotguns and .22 rimfire, because those aren’t militia weapons. It could not ban fully automatic weapons or even rocket launchers.
We have to come up with something. I am a gun owner. There are legitimate uses for them. But a rifle marksman course requirement? Gun safety classes? 30 day waiting period? Mental health screening? Accountability if you buy it for someone else who uses it to commit violence? Anything?
Something has to stop the senseless violence.
I know that it won’t stop it.
People in Brittain use knives… Acid in the middle east.
The difference there is that the harm is limited to a few people and not these mass casualty events.
If people learned how to defend themselves and then also everyone knew how to use them suddenly gun culture changes and it’s like a tool instead of a status symbol. If you don’t want to serve, there are non-combat roles. If you don’t like it then hey maybe you should invent bullet proof kids.
I wish they’d bring back the draft. Draft men and women over the age of 18 for like two years; it doesn’t need to be for combat roles either. You get job training, you learn self-discipline, how to work in a team, really a lot of life skills. And then when your enlistment is up, you get training on how to find a job, how to write a resume, how to pass an interview, you get to use the GI bill and (in my hypothetical scenario) would keep Tricare. And more people would care about where and when we deploy our military, because they actually have a stake in it now.
Mandatory conscription is probably my most “out there” political belief. I think the benefits would be vast! I don’t think it would prevent mass shootings in America, though.
Conscription doesn’t mean war. It means being prepared. And yes maybe we could be more prepared to deal with this stupidity and remove the gun culture if it wasn’t special anymore.
I think one of the benefits would be less war since every citizen would be personally affected by it. Also all the public works and infrastructure. And healthcare. It could be great! Maybe it would help with all the “lonely men” culture that we hear so much about, and likely plays into some of the gun culture. I guess we’ll never know since that won’t happen here, though.
I would like to hear about the killers psychology and motivation (don’t care about the fuckers name) and what is being done to prevent such motivation from manifesting again.
We don’t often talk about this in the limelight, but it’s important. We need to understand how they got here if we want to have any hope of reducing the odds of that happening again.
I don’t blame USA. I blame European media that keep reporting shootings in USA. If Americans don’t have any interest in addressing this issue why even talk about it here? We can’t do anything about it and all it does is give stupid ideas to our nutters. It’s not like we can send aid or influence policies in USA. I guess it could be relevant to someone who wants to travel there but that’s what travel advisories are for. Let’s just pretend they are not happening, like Americans do.
Police said the gunman was inspired by “a terrible event abroad”. In one post, he cited a 14-year-old Russian school shooter who killed one classmate and wounded five others as an inspiration.>
wow, that one in russia was just a few weeks ago. it’s crazy to me how that event could be inspiring enough to motivate someone in a different country. no target of vengeance or grandiose idealism necessary.
I actually wrote “good” first, but then I realized that left way too much to interpretation, and quickly changed it to “permissive”, “liberal” never entered my train of thought.
Gun laws in the Czech Republic in many respects differ from those in other European Union member states. The "right to acquire, keep and bear firearms" is explicitly recognized in the first Article of the Firearms Act. At the constitutional level, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms includes the "right to defend one's own life or life of another person also with arms under conditions stipulated by law".
I really wish we could get actual apples to apples “mass shooting” comparisons. Everything from the site you linked to Wikipedia has been restructured to help make the argument that the US has tons of “mass shootings.”
The 4 people shot, there’s no context as to whether that was random, gang violence, stray bullets in a conflict, etc. This sort of thing almost definitely happens outside of the US, e.g., forbes.com/…/swedens-brutal-gang-problem-heres-wh…
In this particular case it’s something that happened at 3 in the morning outside of a bar… Gang or not it was probably more drunken brawl where someone pulled a gun and things went bad fast.
That’s pretty different from some person going to a university, a school, a public event, and unloading on anyone they see with intent to inflict as many casualties as possible on someone that they’ve never even spoken a word to … which is what I remember a “mass shooting” meaning up until recently. And that shit doesn’t happen 23 times in a single month. It happens a few times a year which given the size of the US is much more comparable (granted I think still elevated) when compared to European mass shootings.
Quit making bad faith arguments to defend the US, our gun crimes are super preventable.
It’s not bad faith unless it’s actually bad faith. An argument you don’t agree with and you have evidence against isn’t automatically bad faith.
I’d forgotten Sweden in general has such a low murder rate. But I mean, the closest state in terms of population is North Carolina.
In 2021 they had 991 murders of any kind, with 748 of those involving a gun, that’s 243 without a gun. Sweden had 113 murders total. Even if nobody died by a gun, North Carolina had more than double the murders.
The point was comparing apples to oranges “mass shootings” that count any shooting with more than 1-2 people involved in the US vs “mass shootings” via the “traditional” “mass shooting” that involves a random gunman in a public place shooting a crowd or a school … isn’t really a helpful comparison.
If we want to keep diluting that point. Of all of the gun deaths involved in homicide, handguns make up nearly 2/3 of the gun deaths. Nobody in the conversation is talking about doing anything about handguns.
In all of these cases though, you know what Sweden has that the US doesn’t? Universal healthcare… Which probably plays a role.
The US also has states like New Hampshire where with a population of 1.4 million there were 9 murders involving guns in 2021. Hawaii similarly has 1.4 million people and had 1 murder involving a gun in 2021. What’s especially interesting there is New Hampshire has very permissive laws while Hawaii has more restrictive laws.
I’m not saying gun crime isn’t preventable but the conversation about how to prevent it is missing a lot of nuance. The right needs to at least back mental health measures and the police need to make sure they’re enforcing the laws already on the books (which might have prevented the Maine shooting). Having no guns in the country at all would certainly remove the gun crime problem as well but it wouldn’t necessarily remove the murder problem. Mass shootings are a special case of the US violent crime spectrum that may or may not need special treatment.
I just want to stop comparing apples to oranges. If the case is “US mass shootings are out of control and we need an assault weapons ban” make the case without distorting the statistics and inflating them to include conflicts that the average person wouldn’t consider a “mass shooting.”
There’s one every few years in almost every country.
The difference is it’s not a mass shooting per week… This doesn’t help your argument as much as you think it does.
Edit: also the joke is most developed countries are allowed to own guns to some extent, a total ban is only what your side tells you to keep your support.
Here’s your spoonfed quote literally pulled from the article to go with your dipshit comment.
Czech Republic has some of the most liberal gun laws in Europe. There are more than 800,000 firearms of all categories registered among 300,000 gun permit holders in the country, which has a population of about 10.5 million people, writes Ella Nunn.
It is one of the only nations in the world - and the only one in Europe - that provides the constitutional right to bear arms.
Concealed-carry permits for self-defence can be obtained by Czech citizens without presenting specific reasons and recreational shooting is one of the most popular sports in the country.
I’m sure if you had the patience, literacy, and weren’t currently struggling with your mental capacity to make it this far down my comment to read this much, you’d probably feel a bit like an asshole to try to make this nightmarish story into your opportunity to talk about needing more guns on the street. Alas, I’m currently speaking into the void cuz your head is likely still buried just far enough up your own ass for you to enjoy the smell of your own farts while searching for your next astounding comment. The people you hear crying aren’t the ones you triggered with your unhinged comment, it’s the sound of everyone who cares about you. We’re all really concerned about you and are worried you’d suffocate were it not for how much you laugh at your own heartless comments.
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