Another day another mass shooting

The other day I saw this video:



Which isn't directly related at all, but it seemed to offer me a little perspective on the American violence problem from another angle. The tl;dr is that the US is the home to a disproportionate number of serial killers, but since the end of the 90's we've severely reduced the number of serial killers that appear.

The first takeaway is that, no matter what, we whenever going to turn into a neatly ordered homogeneous society of politeness like Japan. Americans just like to kill each other way more than anywhere else in the world.

The second is that through lots of hard work, focused attention, and application of technology we might actually be able to make a difference. My general opinion is that the problem is just intractable and inevitable, given the baseline conditions, but now I wonder if maybe I'm wrong about that. Some of the serial killer stuff doesn't apply, because they involve catching them early in the series, while the public killers kill on parallel, but the general gist of scrutinizing people more closely in certain ways does. Maybe we can come up with a way to divert these people before they snap.

 

Here's where our mistake-in-chief stands on the issue ...

Trump Shut the Countering-Violent-Extremism Program

Read: Trump’s caravan hysteria led to this

Under Obama, the Office of Community Partnerships housed an interagency task force on Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE, that included officials detailed from the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services. Today the task force exists in name only. Its staff members have all returned to their home agencies and departments. “Under this administration,” says Selim, who now works at the Anti-Defamation League, “there’s been a precipitous decline in the dedicated staff and program funding devoted to combatting ideologically motivated violence.”


This decline can’t be chalked up to general budget cuts. Although Trump has slashed funding for many domestic departments, he increased Department of Homeland Security spending by more than 7 percent in his first budget and another 4 percent in his second. The cuts stem instead from two biases. First, in keeping with their law-and-order mentality, Trump officials would rather empower the police to arrest suspected terrorists than work with local communities to prevent people from becoming terrorists in the first place, as the Office of Community Partnerships did. Second, they believe the primary terrorist threat to Americans is jihadism, not white supremacy. The Office of Community Partnerships committed the sin of working on both.


From a public-policy perspective, that’s exactly what the government should be doing. In 2017, the FBI concluded that white supremacists killed more Americans from 2000 to 2016 than “any other domestic extremist movement.” But Trump advisers have shrugged off these inconvenient facts. In an interview in 2017, White House Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka declared that there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot [in the United States] that was unconnected from ISIS or al-Qaeda.” When critics cited the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Gorka responded, “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t.”

J.M. Berger: Trump is the glue that binds the far right

Gorka’s wife, and frequent co-author, Katharine Gorka, shares his Islamo-centric view of terrorism. She has proposed that the U.S. close “radical mosques” and bar Al Jazeera from broadcasting in the United States. “American and Western leaders,” she’s declared, “have preemptively shut down any debate within Islam by declaring that Islam is the religion of peace.” These views matter because although Sebastian has left the Trump White House, Katharine still serves as an adviser to the secretary of Homeland Security. In the months following Trump’s election, according to The Forward, she asked for the names of employees working on CVE. She led a team that proposed changing the mission from countering violent extremism to countering radical Islamist extremism. That didn’t happen. But Eric Rosand, a former senior State Department official, told BuzzFeed that Gorka “played a significant role in denying CVE grant funding to groups that work to de-radicalize neo-Nazis and other far right extremists.”

When Trump supporters insist that he’s a steadfast foe of white supremacy, his critics often cite his history of ambivalent responses—or nonresponses—to anti-Semitism. But Trump’s words aren’t anomalous; he’s put his money where his mouth is.

 

It's not at all fun to blame trump for everything. My preference would be to have him hosting a reality show on cable TV that I don't have to watch. However, having a good president would at least be a start. That and a good Senate and a good House. All with a significant majority, large enough to pass good legislation to make a genuine effort to address this increasingly occurring problem. A Congress under good leadership, and for at least 4 years, preferably 8 years. That would be a good start. I have no idea who those people would be, but surely, if we can keep our democracy safe from outside interference, a country of well over 300,000,000 could find a few good leaders.

Maybe, just maybe, something good would come from it and these acts of madness will be reduced. I harbor no hope of ending them altogether. The current resident in the White House, the current leadership of the Senate, and the current leadership of the House all need to be replaced by people who can actually get good things done. In my humble opinion.

 

Do we blame Trump for everything? The job markets are good, the stocks are higher before today etc, the people can see those, but the dead shooting events have been increased lots since Trump tool the office. Do you want to blame Clinton for this?

 

Senile Joe Biden thought the shootings happened in Houston and Michigan!

glass houses, libs!

 

Wow. Jeez. That's bad even for the mush-brain standard Trump usually adheres to.

 

Honestly, that was the final nail in the coffin of his candidacy for me. He seems very old right now.

 

He should take lessons from Teleprompter King Barry!

 

Imagine having to suffer through 3 whole Biden-Trump debates.

 

"Everything"? No. But we do blame him for saying exactly the same **** as the **** in the mass shooter's manifesto.

 

Remember when Republicans thought Obama saying there were "57 states" was a completely disqualifying event?

 

Or when Czars were an evil foreign invention by The Muslim?

Now everyone is okay with unappointed "interim" cabinet heads who effectively run the government.

 

Remember when Obama made fun of Special Olympians on Jay Leno’s show? Now that was bad.

 

Biden at least corrected himself. The best trump and his people could do is send out the transcript with the word Toledo crossed out.

And, it wasn't even the first time trump screwed up the location of a tragedy, tweeting out the same tweet for a previous tragedy (a shooting at Sutherland Springs Baptist Church in Texas nine days previous)) when tweeting about the shooting at Rancho Tehama Elementary School in California.



trump is such an senile idiot and insincere that he copied and pasted the same tweet, not bothering to change the location. Now, that's next level imbecile.

 

freeloader-in-chief...

 

I blame Trump for his inflammatory rhetoric that if not directly inspired the El Paso shooter certainly mirrors his own rhetoric. Regarding gun control though progress might be possible under Trump. Trump isn't a conservative and has no firm principles except for what personally benefits him and his family. That goes for firearms too. Following Parkland Trump showed some eagerness to address the issue including saying "we should take people's guns without due process." Now that was probably just attention grabbing rhetoric but he did enact a bumpstock ban through executive orders, proposed more background checks and was blocked by the Republican Congress. If new gun control legislation can get through the Senate soon I think Trump would be willing to not just sign them but also take credit for them.

 

It’s not just mass shootings.

11 shootings alone in 12 hours in Houston yesterday.

My friend’s dad was shot in Houston last night and passed, minding his own business. When is it going to be enough?

https://www.khou.com/mobile/article...ston/285-3b7b87b7-75b2-480d-9391-6b334a7f7d4e

 

Sorry to hear that.

 

Spot on.