Yellowstone National Park officials say a gunman killed by park rangers as he fired a semiautomatic rifle at the entrance of a dining facility with 200 people inside had told a woman he planned to carry out a mass shooting
The warning from a woman in Yellowstone National Park came in just after midnight on July Fourth: She’d just been held at gunpoint by a man who said he planned to carry out a mass shooting — a random attack common in the U.S. these days but not in the Yellowstone region, let alone the park itself.
Rangers spent the next several hours trying to find the gunman before he showed up outside a dining area with 200 people inside. He shot a barrage of bullets with a semi-automatic rifle at a service entrance.
The rangers — including one who was wounded — shot back. Their rounds hit the attacker, Samson Lucas Bariah Fussner, 28, of Milton, Florida, who died at the scene in the busy Canyon Village tourist lodge area near the scenic Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.
We seem to have a hard time grasping the idea that if you make it easy for people to obtain weapons that kill with the simple pull of a trigger, there are people who will kill a bunch of people with them.
This is the part where someone replies with how they’re a super responsible gun owner that supports common sense gun control (but never describes what that means to them) and that a majority of gun owners are like that. Then everyone thinks “huh that really makes sense if you compare the number of gun owners to the number of mass shooters” and then we have the same conversation next week.
I’m okay with responsible gun owners…but it should be difficult to prove that you are. The power of life and death shouldn’t be handed out like candy to anyone who wants it.
Baseball bat, knife, sword, a small amount of rope, axe, hatchet, machete, chainsaw, fireworks, gasoline…
Here’s the thing:
You already have to pass a background check.
So what more do you want? After that the criteria start to become subjective and will be applied be racists to disarm minorities and poor people.
Now, I’m actually for some more generalized gun laws, like requiring that the gun or ammo be behind a lock when you’re not in control of it, but that’s not really relevant to stopping mass shootings. Ending mass shootings (a very small fraction of gun deaths) is way more about ending the desire to do such a thing.
We’ve had easy access to guns for a long time, but mass shootings only started in the 90s, when angry white men felt they were getting left behind and had no way to feel valuable in the new society we’ve been working to build. I would suggest this episode of Some More News to get a quick understanding of angry men, and the book Angry White Men by Michael Kimmel to get a much deeper look at who these people are and why they act and feel the way that they do.
False equivalence. When’s the last time you heard about a mass killing using any of those things?
“No way to prevent this,” says only nation where this regularly happens.