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Mass Shooting Reported at Madden Video Game Tournament in Florida (polygon.com)
Multiple people on live streams and social media reported a mass shooting at a Madden NFL 19 tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, this morning. The Jacksonville County Sheriff's Office confirmed that law enforcement was en route to the scene but had no further information early this afternoon. From a report: In the video, two competitors are playing when someone starts screaming off camera. As the first of nine shots break out, they abandon their stations and others are heard fleeing. Then a man is heard crying out, "What did he shoot me with?" Three more shots are fired and screaming can be heard. This weekend at Jacksonville Landing downtown was the first of four qualifier events for the Madden Classic series sponsored by EA Sports. CNN: "Multiple fatalities at the scene, many transported. #TheLandingMassShooting," according to Jacksonville Sheriff's twitter page, which urged people to "stay far away from the area" as the area is not safe at this time. "One suspect is dead at the scene, unknown at this time if we have a second suspect. Searches are being conducted," according to another tweet from the sheriff's office In a statement issued moments ago, EA Sports Madden NFL said, "This is a horrible situation, and our deepest sympathies go out to all involved."
Top competitor Drini Gjoka, who was at the event and reported the terrifying scene, said, "The tourney just got shot up. Im leavinng and never coming back. I am literally so lucky. The bullet hit my thumb. I will never take anything for granted ever again. Life can be cut short in a second.
Update: LA Times reports that the shooter was a gamer who was competing in the tournament and lost, according to Steven "Steveyj" Javaruski, one of the competitors.
Top competitor Drini Gjoka, who was at the event and reported the terrifying scene, said, "The tourney just got shot up. Im leavinng and never coming back. I am literally so lucky. The bullet hit my thumb. I will never take anything for granted ever again. Life can be cut short in a second.
Update: LA Times reports that the shooter was a gamer who was competing in the tournament and lost, according to Steven "Steveyj" Javaruski, one of the competitors.
Can we finally admit that video games do, in fact, mess with young people's minds and make them more violent?
I don't know about that, but I think we ought to be able to agree that video games are not a substitute for parenting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, going totally bonkers because you lost at Madden NFL? C'mon, guys, we don't really have to have that sort of thing.
Obvious solution: EVERYONE who plays Madden NFL at tournament levels should be locked up, to proactively prevent this sort of thing.
Or, alternately, we just make losing Madden NFL illegal. No losers, noone going postal for losing, Everyone wins, everyone is happy, right?
On a rather more serious note, the bozo doing the shooting killed himself. A bit of an overreaction to losing a game, even without the shooting other people part....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There was one a couple of years ago in TX, but a good guy with an “assault rifle” stopped it. The media does not like to remember that one.
Are you trying to pretend this isn't a "gun-related" mass shooting and instead is "videogame-related"? They don't have mass shootings (or even many shootings) in Korea. Not sure what you were going for there.
Not that one, the (draw mohammed/shoot jihadists) contest.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As opposed to the violence in European football? The ones we hear about every single year, including where a certain group has said women should be barred from the first few rows of a game?
I can guarantee that this happened in a "gun free zone." These shootings always do. You never hear about mass shootings in Texas or other places that allow open carry. The just don't happen. It's almost like an armed populace is a safe populace.
According to the update, the shooter was a competitor who lost. That doesn't sound premeditated: instead it sounds like someone who happened to carry a gun when he flipped out took recourse to the gun.
So this was a case where exactly the case of "an armed populace" was what enabled a guy losing a game to turn into a mass shooter. In Europe, you'd have gotten a few broken noses and a guy under arrest and on line for medical costs.
but as that doesn't align with the anti-gun narrative you wish to project
It also doesn't align with common sense, but God saw it fit to leave that out of some individuals as well.
But looking at statistics per capita is just fine when slagging off America about education, medical care or countless other things.
Hundreds of millions of citizens, hundreds of millions of guns, yet somehow the inanimate object is still held up as the problem. Millions of people living peacefully and owning guns without hurting anyone. I guess if there were no guns, there would be no death right? No stabbing, no bludgeoning, no driving through crowds. We'd be in a peaceful utopia of kindness, right? Like in Europe where nothing bad ever happens, right?
The overwhelming majority of gun deaths in the U.S. are drug/gang related. End the bullshit war on drugs and watch them drop. Next up, suicide. Stop gutting mental health treatment and revolving door committals for at risk people. There you go, massive decrease in gun deaths. That would cost money though. Gotta keep the prison industry rolling. Can't waste money on crazies when we need to fund pork. Easier to distract the masses with "guns bad, history bad, group-think good".
They redefined 'mass shooting' about 3 years ago. It's much 'worse' since then.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you count swatting, its not the first.
Good grief. The problem is mentally unstable people that parents, schools, and the judicial system seem to have no idea what to do with. A guy like this just doesn't suddenly get beat at a video game and at that moment start firing his gun at people. This is somebody who almost certainly has a long history of aggression issues. And honestly, what is the answer? Yes, the availability of guns in the US makes the likelihood of a gun as the weapon of choice go up, but the vehicle attacks that have happened all over the world demonstrate that someone sufficiently demented will find a way to kill and maim lots of people. Better mental health services is a start, but whether your country allows easy access to guns or doesn't (and some countries do and some countries don't), there's just a risk to being alive, that some nutcase is going to decide one day to go out killing, and, while statistically very unlikely, it is possible you may become a target.
The fact is that despite the wider trauma that goes along with a mass shooting (whether this kind of spree killer or gang violence), most murder victims knew their attacker. I find it akin to the kind of hysteria that goes along with, say, serial child rapists, very scary, but the fact is that the overwhelming majority of children subjected to sexual abuse are abused by a family member or a family friend or someone else close to them. In either case, something as mundane as a husband killing his wife or a child sexually abused by an uncle doesn't really make the news, and certainly not the national news, and yet those are the situations where violence is most prevalent. It's just that our monkey brains are actually rather poor at prioritizing risk. We'll freak out about the risks of terrorism or airplane crashes, when you're statistically far more likely to choke to death or slip in your bathtub, or really, to die of heart disease, but those aren't sexy enough stories to sell advertising.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
1) Kids should be taught to have a conscience.
2) Kids should be taught self-control. (If you're angry, then count to 10 or 100 before you say anything. If you're losing control, then walk away so you don't hurt someone.)
3) Kids need to see their parents acting ethically, and using self-control, as a good example.
4) Kids should be taught that if you lose a game or a job or a girlfriend etc., then it's not the end of the world. Young people need to be told that; they haven't lived long enough to experience loss and recovery from loss.
When they're extremely upset over something transient, they should be told, "A year from now, this won't matter. Five years from now, you won't even remember it. If you can't see this, then just trust me on this one." That's what my parents told me, and they were right. I remember them reassuring me with these words, but I don't remember what I was so upset about.
5) I wonder if shooters like this grew up surrounded by crowding and/or constant loud music. I can't imagine a kid who plays on swings, makes forts out of snow or cardboard boxes, and lies on his back looking at clouds, growing up to be a killer.
Europe as a whole has more people than the US yet across the board their numbers are much higher.
You, like so many others, conflate the entirety of Europe with the U.S. when you should be looking at each individual country. However, since you brought it up, this article says there were 19 mass shootings in all of Europe between 2009 and 2015 wherein 319 people were killed (the outlier being the shooting in Norway in which 69 people were killed). That comes out to 20 deaths as the result of mass shootings per year in the entirety of Europe, or just over one death as the result of a mass shooting for each European country per year.
During that same period in the U.S. there were 25 mass shootings with 199 people killed (apparently our shooters need more practice). Snopes laid out the skewed statistics and why the U.S. ranks far and above Europe in mass shootings.
Since that time, the U.S. continues to pull ahead of Europe in mass shootings. This article uses 2009- 2016 for their numbers in which they calculated 156 mass shootings with 848 people killed (their methodology is slightly different than above). One thing to note is, according their numbers, only ten percent of mass shootings take place in a "gun free" zone.
As to your other statistics, I said child molestation and rape, not rape as a whole. Big difference. But keep using statistics to justify racism and ignore who the real perpetrators are of certain crimes.
I live in a country with pretty strict gun control. The criminals still have guns.
Jesus H. C., man - you have no idea with the meaning of the word regulated means
as it was used in the period that the Amendments were written. That entire line is what
we would call (in today's language) the "duh" line, iows, its meaning was clear and
obvious to the people at the time. A Militia without the right to bear arms is not a Militia;
the two concepts are inseparable. It has nothing to do with laws or "regulation."
It's not the right to bear arms, it's the right for a Militia to legally exist that is spelled out
by the amendment. And a Militia is an "ensemble" of gun-owning individuals. (The right of)
private gun ownership is a trickle down of the right for citizens to form and operate a Militia.
Think about it, what value is there to a right to be armed is you cannot assemble as a Militia?
The founding fathers were no dummies, and the Amendment was purposefully worded in
that way for that reason. This was to prevent laws from being passed that would restrict
armed citizens from forming a Militia. It even goes further than an individual "right" -- it's a
necessity - something that is absolutely required, not a luxury, for the security of a free State.
Think of it along the same lines as jury duty and things will begin to make better sense.
Please, please do some linguistic work before spouting anti-gun rhetoric.
CAP === 'tyranny'
Then read what he originally proposed as the basis for the 2nd Amendment; I quoted it, and you can follow the link. It's that the right to keep and bear arms is unambiguous and explicit, and that a well-armed society is the best way to ensure freedom of governance (given that the US was, at that time, barely 10 years old). Don't take your misunderstanding and extrapolate it - go and learn about it, see what was written in the vernacular of the day, and go forward.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You're missing the point of a gun free zone. People are not retarded and think that it magically creates a place that guns can never enter (I'm fairly certain the above poster was being sarcastic and you didn't get the joke). Gun free zones exist so that the second a gun is noticed the cops can be called. There's no delays wondering about the person's motives are because they are breaking the law just by having a gun in that place.
It also creates an environment where people don't have to feel intimated by others (good business sense for a restaurant). Let me tell you from personal experience there's nothing like being in an open carry state, having a minor disagreement with some one and having them draw attention to the fact that they are carrying a gun in that context.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Then do the correct and right thing and change the Constitution. There is a process to do so - use it. Or do we just decide that rule by executive fiat is acceptable?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Guns don't cause violence, but they do escalate it once someone decides to go that route.
It is notable that Brazil has strict gun control laws, which it actually enforces, yet it has a murder rate per capita that is ten times that of the U.S. It also has a major problem with "leaked" guns -- many of which are coming from the police. Clearly the cause of their problem is systemic, but maybe ours is too.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Gun culture is sick culture.
My father attended grade school in rural Maryland in the 1950's. The boys in his class brought their rifles to school in the morning so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home from school. That was typical in rural America during that era. Fathers judged when boys were mature enough to handle a gun and taught them gun safety and shooting skills. Hunting and shooting were social and communal. There were very few fatalities from rural grade school shootings in the decade of the 1950's, despite the common practice of allowing students to bring guns to schools. Some schools had shooting clubs. Rural American was safe because it had a healthy gun culture.
Gun culture is about advocating and practicing responsibility and safety. Can you name any mass shooting carried out by an NRA class instructor or a competitive shooter? Are the U.S. Olympic shooting teams "sick?" What about those in the armed forces? Someone is willing to risk his life at war for his country and you describe his affinity for the weapons used to perform his job as "sick?"
Study the biographies of those who commit mass shootings. They are not part of gun culture, but usually loners with histories of anti-social behavior.
Where do members of gun culture congregate? At shooting ranges. If gun culture is sick, then where are the mass shootings at ranges??
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
This gun debate is getting really old, and it's never going to be "won" by either side. Just like abortion, women/gay/minority rights. It all just gets recycled into one big round after another. Talking heads will use majority opinion to get elected on these issues for years to come... ..Unless human beings wake tf up and realize they are responsible for their own actions. Period. It's not a "fair" world out there, there are plenty of crazies and just plain evil people out there that want to do harm (I would mostly gather because great harm had been done to them at some point in the past). So you have to be able to defend yourself. But the point is to raise as many children up to be ethical and respectful people.
TL;DR: Respect is what's missing.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
so instead of targeting guns, maybe we should get to the bottom of whats driving homicide. Banning sudafed sure as fuck didnt stop the use of meth. All it did was make it a real PITA for me when I actually need the shit. I have to get my ass to a pharacist between the hours of 9am and 8pm. If something comes up outside this time I have to deal with the problem until then.
Its time to dig deeper and ignore the tool. Take guns away and IED's will just rise in their place just like israel. Its like getting rid of spiders in your house. You cant spray for them because they walk above the poison. Kill the other bugs and the spiders will die off all on their own. Banning guns based on statistics would easily justify revoking drivers licenses and mandating public transportation due to the massive amount of traffic deaths every year. In the end its still just another tool. Something has changed in the last 30 years that makes people massively more likely to commit homicide than in previous decades. It certainly is not proliferation of firearms. I the 70s and 80s you could go into a gun store and there would be an AR15, and an M16 side by side. The difference was the M16 required a $200 tax stamp and you waited a few weeks to get approved. That was a _real_ assault rifle. How is it in the 70s anybody could buy every form of weapon, including fully automatic, and the homicide rate is much higher now than its ever been; despite decades of gun control laws.
Thing is, "real capitalism" has been tried. And it leads to hellholes that are even worse than Maoist China.
A good measure of "real capitalism" is the Ease of Doing Business Index which measures capitalist principles and the amount of government interference in starting and running a business.
Here are the top 10 for 2018:
1. New Zealand
2. Singapore
3. Denmark
4. South Korea
5. Hong Kong
6. United States of America
7. United Kingdom
8. Norway
9. Georgia
10. Sweden
Here are the bottom 10, which lack basic capitalist qualities of property rights, efficient enforcement of contracts, rule of law, and fair regulations:
Haiti
Congo
Afghanistan
Central African Republic
Libya
Yemen
South Sudan
Venezuela
Eritrea
Somalia
Which are the hellholes?
[Citation needed]
Did you forget that Chris Kyle wasn't the only person killed there? His friend Chad Littlefield was shot 7 times.
Afterwards the killer left and drove to his sisters house where he confessed, and she called 911 to report what he had done.
Are you suggesting that all of those '2nd Amendment activists who were all responsible gun owners' who surrounded him simply... froze, and didn't attempt to engage the killer... or call 911?
Being armed doesn't guarantee you are going to be successful in defending your life, however it does significantly increase the odds.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
That's bullshit and you know it. The Texas church shooter had already done his deed and was fleeing the scene when the citizen intervened. Also, the citizen's choice of weapon had squat to do with ultimately stopping his escape. But - Hey! Keep living that Rambo fantasy!
1. He was heading to another target to shoot more people.
2. He was wearing body armor and the citizen with the AR-15 recognized that the type of armor he was wearing doesn't cover the sides. He specifically aimed at his sides for this reason. While behind a truck at a reasonably long distance. Yes, the choice of weapon made a big difference.
See, in those countries other than America, where we lack guns to protect ourselves, if one in three hundred of us needs to "defend" ourselves every year, we'd be dead by now. Or homeless because all our stuff was stolen. But it doesn't work that way. The threat isn't present for us. The need-to-defend isn't present.
Because other first world countries are bigger on the concept of social safety nets for people who fall on hard times. Here in America, we have this prevailing conservative attitude that if you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you should just starve to death.
Problem is, these people aren't content to sit in a gutter and slowly starve - instead, they turn to crime. Consequently, people with guns end up having to defend themselves from them.
Bigger problem is, to sell "fixing" this to the American public, you'd have to tell them you're going to take some of their money and give it to deadbeats (you're not going to be able to shake that stigma), and they'll have to give up their guns too. That's why it's a tough sell.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Well, I stopped reading when you started painting your rhetoric opposition as crybabies.
Do you expect to be taken seriously when you are unable to actually deal with some arguments your opposition has?
Now I'll be the first to admit that the pro-gun side has a lot of idiots and mind, I'd rather they didn't have guns either. Frankly, half the NRA shouldn't have guns. However, that is my personal opinion which is not valid enough to base legislation on, especially considering I'm not even American.
The fact remains, though, that there are enough statistics that show that the availability of guns alone isn't the factor that determines violent crime. Any halfway sane person, at that point, should go "Well, gee, perhaps there are other issues as well?"
Let's say America creates a prohibition on guns (I'm not even going to go into how bad America is at handling prohibitions...). What do you expect will happen? Violent crime using guns MAY go down. Abuse of legally owned guns will vanish, sure, because there won't be any more legal guns.
Do you think there will be fewer robberies or murders? How well does it work out for countries like Great Britain?
If you have a high rate of fucked up people in your country, you don't need to idiot proof the world. You need to take a long, hard look at yourself and admit that you, as a society, are doing something terribly wrong. Your rate of incarceration is astoundingly high while your crime rates are puttering on along the same lines as those of most other countries that don't have such draconian laws.
Maybe start there before you go paint tens or even hundred's of thousands of law abiding citizens as potential murderers? It would have the advantage of bringing tangible benefit to all of society, too, even if you don't care about ever owning a gun yourself.
Or are you actually trying to get fifty percent incarceration rates? Is there some kind of competition you're trying to win?
I just can't understand how it's somehow more worthwhile to take something away from good people that they love instead of making sure you have a populace you can trust with those things. The latter may be harder but in the long run would have so many positive effects on all aspects of life I don't even know where to begin listing them.
https://slashdot.org/~_Sharp'r_ quoted RAH thusly:
"An armed society is a polite society."
Y'know, I've been a fan of Robert A. Heinlein's literally since I was six years old. I've read all his fiction, and much of his non-fiction, as well (Grumbles from the Grave is pretty darned entertaining, believe it or not). And the thing is that, even when I first read Beyond This Horizon - from whence that quote is taken - at the age of eight or so, I knew enough to take it as a premise for the world RAH built to set that story in, rather than any sort of universal truth.
And that, in turn, is because there is ZERO real-world evidence of that proposition's truth - nor was there any such evidence available to Heinlein when he made that statement. Instead, as a writer of fiction, he set out to explore a world that was based on that proposition, as a source of the conflict his protagonist must resolve to move the book's plot to its resolution.
The inescapable fact is that in the present day, there are quite a few armed societies we can study to provide evidence for or against the truth of RAH's proposition - and, frankly, it doesn't hold water.
Heinlein imagined a world in which a formalized code duello made it possible for people who choose to go armed to fight to the death over insults, but that specifically exempted those who choose not to arm themselves. In that world, challenging, menacing, or targeting anyone who is NOT visible carrying is automatically treated as a felonious criminal act to which all armed bystanders are obligated to respond with deadly force. In the actual, phenomenological world in which real people live, that kind of social firewall just doesn't exist. Live in, say, Afghanistan, or the DRC, or Iraq, or Somalia, or - well, anywhere other than the USA where some significant portion of the local population routinely goes strapped, and another percentage does not, the unarmed ones are simply not, as a rule, routinely provided protection by the civilian folks with guns. (Or by local militias, for that matter.)
Instead, the armed population essentially does as it pleases, and the unarmed ones keep their heads down and their mouths shut - from fear for their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, against whom retaliation is to be expected, for those who are foolish enough to make themselves targets by, for example, standing up to armed teenage bullies, professional predators, or adherents of a different belief system than those locals who go armed.
The same was true of the American West in the 19th century. That's why one of the first institutions that arose in any newly-settled area was formally-constituted and empowered law enforcement: local constables, county sheriffs, U.S. marshalls, Texas Rangers, and so on.
In point of fact, all the evidence is that an armed, non-fictional society is a polite one only when its armed members are forced by laws and law enforcement personnnel to behave themselves. Because people - and especially young men - are, by default, basically assholes when they suddenly acquire the means to impose their will on others with impunity.
It has nothing whatever to do with self-defense. It's about self-aggrandizement, and the addictive pleasure of forcing others to bend to your will. Everything else - everything - is post hoc rationalization.
Note that I'm not talking about rural folks who use firearms to control the local varmint population, nor am I talking about those who use guns to hunt for food, or strictly for target shooting. I'm talking here about urban and suburban Americans who fetishize gun ownership and fantasize that they are somehow capable of effectively resisting government authorities, should they feel the need to revolt against authority - despite the fact that small arms are essentially worthless against trained military personnel armed with everything from satellite-directed drones to B1 bombers to tanks to RPGs and ...
You get the p
Check out my novel.