You think he knows those are two different people? He probably thinks “Hunter” is one of Joe’s nicknames.

St. Patrick’s Day in America has always been more of a celebration of Irish-American immigrant culture than it is of Ireland itself.

When the discourse goes in circles and gets nowhere, it becomes a perceived waste to continue it. The people who profit from gun sales – including the politicians who reap campaign contributions from exploiting misconceptions about it – like it this way.

He didn’t exactly need accuracy when there was a sea of targets in front of him, especially if his objective was to hit as many of them as possible before they could disperse.

But it also does raise the question: why did the shooter think he needed a lot of guns?

Be as detailed as possible in your report, and focus especially on any specific threats against individuals or groups that he has mentioned.

People have been studying the psychology of mass killers since the 70s. Without an actual living subject at hand in this case, it’s hard to do anything more than speculate. I tend to agree that it would be useful to know more about what pushed him to such an act, but how do you suggest going about this? Should we round up and interrogate everyone he knew in his life? Would that even be productive?

Motive isn’t as mysterious as we like to pretend it is. All it really required was a loss of fundamental empathy for his fellow humans. We see that everywhere these days. He’s not unique in that respect. What’s unique is the lengths he went to to commit this act. He seemed to want the spectacle of it. Like many serial killers, perhaps the idea of murder gave him a rush of feeling he couldn’t find anywhere else in his life, and so he figured why not get as much of that as he could?

Again, it’s all speculation. And it’s also not hard to trace it back to a sickness eating at the roots of our society. What do you do with that knowledge? What can any of us do but try a little harder in our own lives to be kind to others and generous to those who might be quietly slipping down into the lake of poison seething under the world?

But but but why did he spray bullets at a crowd with intent to murder hundreds? Why, man, why? We need his manifesto, his tax records, the political affiliations of his associates and family! How else am I supposed to fit him into my narrative if I can’t prove why he thought to do the unthinkable?

/s

Even if they could, I don’t know why you would jump to that idea when the guy fucking shot 400 people. He clearly wasn’t right in the head. He also had a history of heavy gambling and drinking. I don’t smell conspiracy on this one. This was just a mentally unwell guy who made a decision to murder; it is, unfortunately, a quintessentially American story that keeps repeating.

Those gun bans weren’t passed until 2023, which really puts the lie to the assertion that we stopped talking about it.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say we ran out of new things to say about it, and that’s why it’s not front and center in the news at this current moment. It’s also a hugely divisive issue and nobody seems to have a solution to the problem that doesn’t just piss off a bunch of other people, so in an election year it’s the last thing policy makers want to bring up.

2 feet of snow is no joke, especially in an area without a sufficient fleet of plows.

Inbred racists gonna do what they do.

Sounds to me like those are shitty safety limits then. Fix your nuke plants, Japan. You’d think this would be a priority after the last time.

Unlukely, given that false widows build 3-dimensional webs with a more irregular look. This looks like a type of orb weaver.

I love this idea. The more we think about the future, the more we will think about how to make it one we might actually want to live in.

Assuming those programs still exist by the time you get to that point.

If the oligarchs continue to get their way, those programs will disappear. It doesn’t serve them to have a class of people whose labor or income they can’t exploit.

Because the system isn’t designed to work for even the upper middle class, or even the comfortably independently wealthy. The system is designed to continue diverting all of that hard work’s rewards towards the wealthiest tier of wealthy.

Nobody is safe from this vampirism, not even those who would call themselves rich. As it is, wealth will always siphon down to the parasites at the bottom. We’ve all been fooled into thinking we’re at the bottom of a pyramid (or, if you’re lucky, somewhere in the middle), but it’s really just a funnel, sucking everything down to a single point.

I hate this “I got mine”/“I’ll get mine” attitude. If I were wealthy, I’d gladly pay higher taxes to support social programs. Shouldn’t that be the whole point of accumulating wealth - to be able to give back? It should be hard-coded into the very structure of society.

The whole point is that it’s not really an old person problem. It’s a poor person problem.

We rag on the boomer generation for sponging up all the wealth for themselves, but what gets lost is that this was also at the expense of large swathes of less fortunate boomers. They weren’t just hoarding from other generations, they were hoarding from their fellow boomers. The exploitation class did not discriminate by age.

Tax the wealthy more, they won’t lose any quality of life whatsoever, and the money they extorted from their fellow humans gets paid back to support them in their old age.

This isn’t actually a hard problem to solve if you take greed out of the equation.