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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.'"
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.
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.
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'
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.
I live in a country with pretty strict gun control. The criminals still have guns.
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.
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?
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.
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
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