naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Even with the US armed to the teeth we unfortunately can’t seem to stop mass shooters. In fact the deadliest shooting in the US was one man firing into a music festival into the busiest tourist area in the country. Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
You believe this because you have been told it - CCW holders and cops stop plenty of mass shootings. The stories are buried at best.
The main point has already been made by @roystgnr . One man army mass murder events are more impactful for the US, that's for sure, but eliminating them is an intractable problem.
Well just this morning I was “told” about 22 more people killed in a mass shooting. The police and CCW holders may have stopped “plenty”, but I think the idea that US gun owners could stop a Hamas attack to be a pure fantasy.
It is funny - I heard about the shooting last night and thought "the guy I responded to on the Motte is definitely going to hold it up as proof he's right"
I think being a firearms instructor and nailing people at a bowling alley may be different than Hamas' door to door executions and roaming through residential areas.
The deadliest mass shooting in the US was the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War battle with 7000 deaths.
The deadliest mass shooting of non-soldiers in the US was the Wounded Knee Massacre, a gun confiscation gone wrong with 200 civilian deaths.
The Vegas shooting was horrifyingly awful, but it's still a factor of three below the lesser of those.
(This does suggest that Israel think carefully before letting the genie out of that bottle too; the plurality anti-mass-shooting position in the USA is probably "do a million gun confiscations, and hope they don't go wrong or start a civil war", and it's not because nobody's looking for good ideas instead)
Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
If mass murderers are motivated and competent enough it's an impossible problem to solve. A guy with dozens of powerful rifles and a hotel room full of ammo killed 61 people; a guy with a rental truck full of fertilizer and fuel killed 168. Your average one-man-army is a lesser potential terrorism threat than your average farmer, if the latter doesn't worry about getting caught.
In the US we track fertilizer sales more closely now (and farmers aren't generally the mass-murdering type), and many would-be bombers range from incompetent (the Columbine killers planted nearly a hundred bombs, which failed to work; guns were their backup plan) to anti-competent (one suspect in any bombing is the victim, because it's hilariously common for murderers and would-be murderers to blow themselves up by accident) ... but even with Gaza blockaded, Hamas manages to manufacture and employ working explosives and even mostly-working rockets readily enough. Not driving truck bombs through the breach this month was a tactical choice, not a tactical necessity.
On the other hand, even reducing a problem with a non-100%-solution is better than nothing. These hypothetical truck bombs might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by an airstrike, and likewise the non-hypothetical gunmen might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by a more-armed citizenry. A more-armed Israeli citizenry might lead to other unintended deaths, but so do Israeli airstrikes.
Not the parent but, to paraphrase, the mass shootings which the media focuses on have relatively small impact compared to state-sanctioned violence. They also have a small impact compared to the garden variety inner-city homicide which kills more than 1000 Columbines worth of people every year.
The media chooses to amplify the mass shooting events because it's great for ratings and it plays to their prejudices about red states.
Sadly, the media is literally™ killing people because the focus on these events makes them more likely to occur.
The OP thinks personal gun ownership might help defend against Hamas terror attacks. YouEssAy is skeptical because US gun ownership hasn’t defended against a different sort of attack. I lose the thread when royst says, uh, enough soldiers shooting back and forth is worse. What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
The second half of my comment was less conclusive than the first. From the right perspective, is that really such a bad thing? The right way to reason is to start with raw facts and hope you can eventually accumulate enough of them to deduce conclusions. If you don't start reasoning until you have all the implications in hand then you're doing it exactly backwards. That's supposed to be an unconscious flaw in human reasoning, not a conscious goal!
Admittedly I might not have chimed in on such a grossly hard problem with a nuanced and inconclusive answer if vague points with varying consequences were all I had to add. But someone said the deadliest mass shooting in the US was Vegas, and it wasn't, and so I gave two counterexamples, but then tried to keep at least partly on-topic afterwards.
If someone says "2 + 2 = 5, therefore you shouldn't kick puppies and you should agree with my politics", then I'm the sort of person who'll point out "2 + 2 = 4" even if I don't have much to add to the rest of the sentence.
I do find it interesting to see the responses when I do that, though. Sometimes you get "Oh, so it is; but here are some unrelated good reasons for not puppy-kicking or disagreeing with my politics". Other times you get "those just aren't sufficiently large values of 2!" or "why should I listen to what an obvious puppy-kicker has to say!"
I’ve got nothing against your choice to include musings, but I mistook them for a single argument. Hence my confusion.
I do have to object to calling military actions mass shootings, though. Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare, and some of them don’t even include robberies and terrorism. There are assumptions of asymmetry in number and preparedness.
I understand that you think this is motivated reasoning. That doesn’t justify diluting the term. Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
That doesn’t justify diluting the term.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
If you want to be pedantic, that first sentence doesn’t agree with you, because it specifies a singular attacker and firearm. Seeing as this would rule out central mass-shooting examples such as Columbine, Vegas, or the UT tower, I think it’s safe to say that first sentence is an incomplete definition!
Reasonable people differ. But most of them don’t appear to differ on whether a military or police action counts. Committing violence is literally their job. Responsibility is distributed. In theory, it’s even held accountable via nonviolent processes. The central examples of mass shootings are neither.
I’d have called Wounded Knee a Massacre. That’s a perfectly good term for umbrella of mass-murder-via-shooting. It wouldn’t apply to Gettysburg, of course, since more or less everyone involved there expected to shoot and be shot.
So yes, I’d call that a dilution of the term “mass shooting.” There were many perpetrators, not one. They caused the crime under the pretense of lawful actions. And, perhaps most important, they got away with it and returned to their normal lives, a characteristic which doesn’t tend to apply to homicidal individuals.
Coincidentally, Wikipedia agreed with me prior to last week. There’s at least one user who felt very strongly that “massacre” wasn’t enough, and that it was important for readers to associate the US Government with individual, malicious murderers. I think this was a strategic move rather than a truth-seeking one.
Well, admittedly it's only a Mass Shooting (PDO) if it comes from the Valley of Motivated Reasoning; otherwise it's merely a sparkling mass of people getting shot.
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Notes -
Even with the US armed to the teeth we unfortunately can’t seem to stop mass shooters. In fact the deadliest shooting in the US was one man firing into a music festival into the busiest tourist area in the country. Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
You believe this because you have been told it - CCW holders and cops stop plenty of mass shootings. The stories are buried at best.
The main point has already been made by @roystgnr . One man army mass murder events are more impactful for the US, that's for sure, but eliminating them is an intractable problem.
Well just this morning I was “told” about 22 more people killed in a mass shooting. The police and CCW holders may have stopped “plenty”, but I think the idea that US gun owners could stop a Hamas attack to be a pure fantasy.
It is funny - I heard about the shooting last night and thought "the guy I responded to on the Motte is definitely going to hold it up as proof he's right"
I think being a firearms instructor and nailing people at a bowling alley may be different than Hamas' door to door executions and roaming through residential areas.
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The deadliest mass shooting in the US was the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War battle with 7000 deaths.
The deadliest mass shooting of non-soldiers in the US was the Wounded Knee Massacre, a gun confiscation gone wrong with 200 civilian deaths.
The Vegas shooting was horrifyingly awful, but it's still a factor of three below the lesser of those.
(This does suggest that Israel think carefully before letting the genie out of that bottle too; the plurality anti-mass-shooting position in the USA is probably "do a million gun confiscations, and hope they don't go wrong or start a civil war", and it's not because nobody's looking for good ideas instead)
If mass murderers are motivated and competent enough it's an impossible problem to solve. A guy with dozens of powerful rifles and a hotel room full of ammo killed 61 people; a guy with a rental truck full of fertilizer and fuel killed 168. Your average one-man-army is a lesser potential terrorism threat than your average farmer, if the latter doesn't worry about getting caught.
In the US we track fertilizer sales more closely now (and farmers aren't generally the mass-murdering type), and many would-be bombers range from incompetent (the Columbine killers planted nearly a hundred bombs, which failed to work; guns were their backup plan) to anti-competent (one suspect in any bombing is the victim, because it's hilariously common for murderers and would-be murderers to blow themselves up by accident) ... but even with Gaza blockaded, Hamas manages to manufacture and employ working explosives and even mostly-working rockets readily enough. Not driving truck bombs through the breach this month was a tactical choice, not a tactical necessity.
On the other hand, even reducing a problem with a non-100%-solution is better than nothing. These hypothetical truck bombs might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by an airstrike, and likewise the non-hypothetical gunmen might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by a more-armed citizenry. A more-armed Israeli citizenry might lead to other unintended deaths, but so do Israeli airstrikes.
That…neither of those is a mass shooting.
I’m not sure I follow what you’re proposing. Or dismissing.
Not the parent but, to paraphrase, the mass shootings which the media focuses on have relatively small impact compared to state-sanctioned violence. They also have a small impact compared to the garden variety inner-city homicide which kills more than 1000 Columbines worth of people every year.
The media chooses to amplify the mass shooting events because it's great for ratings and it plays to their prejudices about red states.
Sadly, the media is literally™ killing people because the focus on these events makes them more likely to occur.
What’s the implication for the Israelis, then?
The OP thinks personal gun ownership might help defend against Hamas terror attacks. YouEssAy is skeptical because US gun ownership hasn’t defended against a different sort of attack. I lose the thread when royst says, uh, enough soldiers shooting back and forth is worse. What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
The second half of my comment was less conclusive than the first. From the right perspective, is that really such a bad thing? The right way to reason is to start with raw facts and hope you can eventually accumulate enough of them to deduce conclusions. If you don't start reasoning until you have all the implications in hand then you're doing it exactly backwards. That's supposed to be an unconscious flaw in human reasoning, not a conscious goal!
Admittedly I might not have chimed in on such a grossly hard problem with a nuanced and inconclusive answer if vague points with varying consequences were all I had to add. But someone said the deadliest mass shooting in the US was Vegas, and it wasn't, and so I gave two counterexamples, but then tried to keep at least partly on-topic afterwards.
If someone says "2 + 2 = 5, therefore you shouldn't kick puppies and you should agree with my politics", then I'm the sort of person who'll point out "2 + 2 = 4" even if I don't have much to add to the rest of the sentence.
I do find it interesting to see the responses when I do that, though. Sometimes you get "Oh, so it is; but here are some unrelated good reasons for not puppy-kicking or disagreeing with my politics". Other times you get "those just aren't sufficiently large values of 2!" or "why should I listen to what an obvious puppy-kicker has to say!"
I’ve got nothing against your choice to include musings, but I mistook them for a single argument. Hence my confusion.
I do have to object to calling military actions mass shootings, though. Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare, and some of them don’t even include robberies and terrorism. There are assumptions of asymmetry in number and preparedness.
I understand that you think this is motivated reasoning. That doesn’t justify diluting the term. Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
If you want to be pedantic, that first sentence doesn’t agree with you, because it specifies a singular attacker and firearm. Seeing as this would rule out central mass-shooting examples such as Columbine, Vegas, or the UT tower, I think it’s safe to say that first sentence is an incomplete definition!
Reasonable people differ. But most of them don’t appear to differ on whether a military or police action counts. Committing violence is literally their job. Responsibility is distributed. In theory, it’s even held accountable via nonviolent processes. The central examples of mass shootings are neither.
I’d have called Wounded Knee a Massacre. That’s a perfectly good term for umbrella of mass-murder-via-shooting. It wouldn’t apply to Gettysburg, of course, since more or less everyone involved there expected to shoot and be shot.
So yes, I’d call that a dilution of the term “mass shooting.” There were many perpetrators, not one. They caused the crime under the pretense of lawful actions. And, perhaps most important, they got away with it and returned to their normal lives, a characteristic which doesn’t tend to apply to homicidal individuals.
Coincidentally, Wikipedia agreed with me prior to last week. There’s at least one user who felt very strongly that “massacre” wasn’t enough, and that it was important for readers to associate the US Government with individual, malicious murderers. I think this was a strategic move rather than a truth-seeking one.
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Well, admittedly it's only a Mass Shooting (PDO) if it comes from the Valley of Motivated Reasoning; otherwise it's merely a sparkling mass of people getting shot.
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