playing with guns

I thought I'd look up this Bill Webb, and it turns out that there is a game designer and a baseball pitcher by that name, but nobody else on the first google page.  I added politician to the search term and came up with Jim Webb, who is a democrat and not likely the guy running against Trump in the republican primary.  I suggest that Beagles write in his own name and got the hypothetical wife to do the same and he may well come in second in the republican primary in Michigan.

So back to the latest mass murders.  It's pretty clear that the El Paso shooter was a racist, but the Dayton shooter is more of a mixed bag, according to his social media he was a leftist guy, hated Trump, and admired the antifa.  But wait, there is more, he was also a violent guy who loved guns, and then there is the curious fact that he shot and killed his own sister who had gone to the bar with him.  I see now that they are also going to invest that garlic festival shooter who I had almost forgotten about, it has been so many murders ago.  I had to look him up.  He had a semi automatic and was able to kill four people before the cops got him a minute after he started shooting.  He was into violent ideologies, but it seems he hated both reps and dems, so he is kind of a mixed bag.

Domestic terrorism they are calling it and I guess they have a point, these nuts have killed more Americans than foreign terrorists have since 911 (https://www.insider.com/more-domestic-terror-deaths-than-foreign-since-911-2019-8)  But does investigating these guys for domestic terrorism do any good?  If you could trace these people to terrorist cells and root out their leaders, that would be useful, but it seems likely that they are all lone wolves.

The Republicans response to the shooting is that guns are not at fault, it is not enough prayer in schools, and abortion, and not giving the rich more tax cuts.  Then there is poor mental health which has been a problem since antiquity and is not going away anytime in the future, not that the reps would pay for mental health clinics anyway.  Then there is violent video games which is ludicrous, but they may have a point there.

A few years back I brought the attention of the ivied halls to an article in the New Yorker that asserted that mass killings were a thing.  A thing in the sense that people kept track of them, rated the various shooters and there was just a whole lore about them.  In the article the author noted the case of some kid who had been stopped before shooting up his school, and the kid was perfectly normal and well-balanced in every way but he had gotten into this mass murder thing, reading about it and comparing stats the way some kids take to baseball.  You may note that just planting bombs (the way professional terrorists do) gives you a better kill rate than shooting, but you don't see that much of it, because well, kids like to play with guns.