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Mika

(17,751 posts)
Fri Jul 22, 2016, 02:10 PM Jul 2016

If US media covered US shootings the same way they're covering this one in Germany ...

... would there be time for any other programming? 300 hundred shot every day. 80-90 killed by gun every day.

The US would be on permanent lockdown if we reacted like a civilized nation. Then again, we wouldn't have such a gun problem if that were the case.




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Mika

(17,751 posts)
2. 300 hundred shot every day. 80-90 killed by gun every day in the USA.
Fri Jul 22, 2016, 02:15 PM
Jul 2016

I think we could categorize 300/80-90 every day as mass numbers. Yes?


 

LanternWaste

(37,748 posts)
4. Your rationalization denies neither mass numbers nor use of firearms.
Fri Jul 22, 2016, 02:28 PM
Jul 2016

Your rationalization denies neither mass numbers nor use of firearms.

 

Gabi Hayes

(28,795 posts)
7. that's still a HUNDRED a day, if I can do the math.
Fri Jul 22, 2016, 02:44 PM
Jul 2016

a hundred shootings

problem is, even if all gun sales were stopped today, there are over three hundred MILLION out there.

this is going to end in absolute authoritarian control over every aspect of our lives...not sure how far off it's going to be, but I hope I'm not around, because there are going to be a lot of cold dead hands, clutching their precious 2d amendment, as they fight off the inevitable confiscations that are going to happen in service, not of getting rid of guns, but getting rid of 'terrorists'

it's inevitable, and it's going to happen

I'm not in favor of confiscation, but the bogus war on terror will, eventually, proscribe the private possession of firearms, along with a national police force present in smaller and smaller jurisdictional control, with that workforce being the largest single employed entity in the country, as part of constitutionally amended melding of armed forces/police

 

Eleanors38

(18,318 posts)
11. It is standard controller deception:. Look at the OP headline, look at the use of data.
Fri Jul 22, 2016, 03:03 PM
Jul 2016

Well, beyond your purple prose, I am not as panicked as you are. Ironic, since I and others who support 2A are constantly "accused" (what else is pop psychology used for?) of LivingInFear®.

Igel

(35,362 posts)
8. Taken together, sure. But not as individual events.
Fri Jul 22, 2016, 02:48 PM
Jul 2016

It's not the total that's disturbing, it's the horrendousness of a single event. Each of those 80-90 has its own story--murder when you find your mate in bed with somebody else, a robbery gone wrong, suicides where a gun was easier and less painful than rope or drugs, a gang killing over turf or revenge or road rage.

There were 84000 rapes (legacy definition) in the US in 2014. We don't hear about most of them.

But if one man or a group of men raped and then killed 3 women in a single evening, or if a man held 15 women at gunpoint and serially raped them in the course of 24 hours, that would be news. Even if the suspect wasn't named.

Size matters. Kill one person, it's a blip. Kill 10 and wound 20, it's news. My father's suicide wasn't news. It was a blip for the Phoenix metro area. But if 20 old men had gathered together and committed mass suicide, it would have made the news.

Context matters. If somebody is killed during a robbery, if a teen gang member is shot by a rival gang, if a jealous husband kills his wife or his wife's lover, meh. Unless the murder involves something novel--taking the dying person's guts and making a sack out of them to hold their head when it's cut off, or perhaps if the liver's removed and eaten with fried onions--meh. Background noise. Now, if it's a small child eating her Cheerios when a stray bullet comes in through the window, it's local news. If the kid's cute or there's some sob story to go with it--she suffered from cancer, was home from the hospital 1 day and looking forward to starting school the next day--it might go national. If there's riveting footage of some part of it, it's decent local news. If it's a crime that a majority of a station's demographics can sympathize with, it's more likely news. Young black kid, probably not news; young white kid, more likely news. (Racist? Dunno. Do whites empathize more with whites? Sure. But do we call blacks who empathize more with victimized blacks racist? Not usually. It's how groups work. Note that if the hypothetical white kid was the son of a prostitute and a petty thief, there'd be less empathy from rank-and-file whites.) But otherwise, meh. News is entertainment, it feeds a sense of inferiority or superiority or just plain prurience. You want policy, you look at FBI UCR summaries. Different strokes.

Look at DU. Pretty much every day somebody's shot by police. Most of the time they're armed. We don't much care about them. Every couple of days somebody unarmed is shot by police. We still don't mostly care about them. If you look at the videos posted here, you'd think that 95% of those killed are unarmed, and 90% of them are black. What makes 'news' here? Good video, unarmed victim, black victim, police shooter. That's a very small number of the total deaths videoed every year, but those are the ones that we seem to be outraged over. Yesterday, I guess it was, somebody made a "guess" about the shooting of an unarmed man--that he was black. That supposedly said something about the actual incidence of police killings, but actually it said more about DU's news aggregation biases. (This bias is no surprise. It's in the site's name.)

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