7 dead, 7 wounded in Santa Barbara shooting rampage

[MisterCreosote]

The kid could've learned something by watching Rogen: "I'm gonna fork you with my pecker."

 

[doctorquant]

The shooter was mentally ill. Any attempt to tease out some chain of logic or causality between things happening in his life and what he wound up doing is just so much b.s. He could have grown up poor, he could have been rich. He could have been ridiculously successful with the ladies. None of that would have changed the fact that he was terribly, terribly sick.

 

[Alma]

Between Hollywood, and the carefully curated, perfect world that people project on Facebook, Instagram, etc., the folks who deal with insecurity that reaches a level of mental illness, have more reasons to hate the wold than ever before.

This kid hated that he wasn't rich, while he was surrounded by it:

"I tried to pretend as if I was part of a wealthy family," he wrote about that night. "I should be. That was the life I was meant to live. I WOULD BE!"

He blamed his parents for his lack of wealth.

"If only my damnable mother had married into wealth instead of being selfish," he wrote. She dated wealthy men after her divorce, giving her son hope and prompting him to "pester" her to marry one, he said. "I will always resent my mother for refusing to do this. If not for her sake, she should have done it for mine. Joining a family of great wealth would have truly saved my life. I would have a high enough status to attract beautiful girlfriends and live above all of my enemies."

His father also failed him, he wrote. "If only my failure of a father had made better decisions with his directing career instead wasting his money on that stupid documentary." The documentary -- a film about celebrities' view of God titled "Oh My God" -- plunged his father into debt when Rodger was a teenager and caused him to stop paying child support, according to court papers.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/27/justice/california-elliot-rodger-wealth/

A particularly virulent strain of affluenza, I suppose.

 

[RickStain]

The shooter was mentally ill. Any attempt to tease out some chain of logic or causality between things happening in his life and what he wound up doing is just so much b.s. He could have grown up poor, he could have been rich. He could have been ridiculously successful with the ladies. None of that would have changed the fact that he was terribly, terribly sick.

But we have to figure out all the ways the people involved screwed up in ways we wouldn't have, otherwise we have to face the reality that it might happen to us or our children.

 

[Alma]

The shooter was mentally ill. Any attempt to tease out some chain of logic or causality between things happening in his life and what he wound up doing is just so much b.s. He could have grown up poor, he could have been rich. He could have been ridiculously successful with the ladies. None of that would have changed the fact that he was terribly, terribly sick.

Honest query: Is there a mass killer or serial killer you'd describe as not mentally ill?

 

[BNWriter]

Seth Rogen is an untalented, obese bum who is of the same value to society as Rodger.

This. And Jonah Hill would also seem to apply, as far as I am concerned.

 

[old_tony]

Because people are going to want, and need to know if these killers are just lone nut jobs or part of a wider reason why they happen.

Hypothetically speaking, say the media doesn't provide publicity to, let's say, four mass killings in a year. Wouldn't people want to know if they are frustrated virgins, terrorists or anti-government whack jobs?

That couldn't be done with my proposed restrictions in place?

What if you were allowed to characterize, but not publish the writings and recordings?

We've seen this, right?

Did any mainstream news organizations show Daniel Pearl's murder? We know what happened, but we didn't need to see it.

Would you be wiling to accept the media's characterization of what someone says, or would you like to see evidence?

As is, there are all sorts of conspiracy theories and media blaming going on now. If you got what you wished for, we'd be hearing about even more media "coverups".

That the media have thrown their own credibility can be blamed on no one but the media themselves.

(It's kind of hard to write that sentence for two reasons: 1. As a member of the media myself, I'm ashamed to see what liberal bias has done to has become of the institution; 2. "Media" sounds like it should be a singular word, so it feels as though I should be saying "has" and "its" and "itself.")

 

[old_tony]

Sure, I thought it was implicit there that it's my opinion.

But I do not know where the "well regulated militia" portion of the Second Amendment exists anywhere right now.

And anyway I was talking more about a new constitutional amendment than a Supreme Court fight, and that's where I was going with the total impossibility of it.

For what it's worth, this has been my understanding of what the "well-regulated militia" clause means ever since we studied the Constitution in high school.

"Militia" refers to the army of the government. Government powers being something the Founding Fathers wanted to rein in, the Second Amendment was designed to keep the government from being able to wipe out any insurrection simply because the government had all the guns. So the Second Amendment is designed to give the average people one more way to fight back against government aggression. It certainly doesn't mean that the people have the right to bear arms so they can join up and fight in the government's "well-regulated militia." The people having arms is what keeps the government's militia well-regulated.

Yet gun-control nuts always seem to read that as though it means only the militia should have guns. Then again, those are the same people who foolishly see big government as a benevolent being.

 

[Jake_Taylor]

It must be terrible to go through life with no sense of humor.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Sure, I thought it was implicit there that it's my opinion.

But I do not know where the "well regulated militia" portion of the Second Amendment exists anywhere right now.

And anyway I was talking more about a new constitutional amendment than a Supreme Court fight, and that's where I was going with the total impossibility of it.

For what it's worth, this has been my understanding of what the "well-regulated militia" clause means ever since we studied the Constitution in high school.

"Militia" refers to the army of the government. Government powers being something the Founding Fathers wanted to rein in, the Second Amendment was designed to keep the government from being able to wipe out any insurrection simply because the government had all the guns. So the Second Amendment is designed to give the average people one more way to fight back against government aggression. It certainly doesn't mean that the people have the right to bear arms so they can join up and fight in the government's "well-regulated militia." The people having arms is what keeps the government's militia well-regulated.

Yet gun-control nuts always seem to read that as though it means only the militia should have guns. Then again, those are the same people who foolishly see big government as a benevolent being.

Your high school teacher should be taken out back and shot -- by a well-regulated militia; that is if anyone actually injected that tripe into your noggin.

First, militias in those times simply meant the group of able-bodied men who weren't part of the army (which was a centralized institution). A militia that gathered arms was a body of people from the same town or state. They existed for the exact opposite reason of what you wrote. People couldn't rely on a centralized authority to maintain order in their locality, so militias were important to the colonists as a social institution, for public safety reasons and to provide defense if necessary. Stay-at-home militias, for example, kept order as police forces, while the continental army was fighting the American revolution.

What you wrote is just not true. The founders of our country didn't want to "rein in" "government powers." To the contrary, they set out to create a constitution that defined the powers the government had -- they imbued the government with a lot of power, even if they tried to put limits on that power. What you typed basically states that the founders of America were trying to undermine what they created by encouraging anarchy. With one hand creating a government and with the other telling people it was legit to fight the institutions they were forming. That is not true. They didn't create something and then tell everyone to arm themselves so they could "fight back against government aggression."

I'd call that revisionist nonsense, but it's so ridiculous that no self-respecting revisionist could even say it with a straight face.

 

[Alma]

Sure, I thought it was implicit there that it's my opinion.

But I do not know where the "well regulated militia" portion of the Second Amendment exists anywhere right now.

And anyway I was talking more about a new constitutional amendment than a Supreme Court fight, and that's where I was going with the total impossibility of it.

For what it's worth, this has been my understanding of what the "well-regulated militia" clause means ever since we studied the Constitution in high school.

"Militia" refers to the army of the government. Government powers being something the Founding Fathers wanted to rein in, the Second Amendment was designed to keep the government from being able to wipe out any insurrection simply because the government had all the guns. So the Second Amendment is designed to give the average people one more way to fight back against government aggression. It certainly doesn't mean that the people have the right to bear arms so they can join up and fight in the government's "well-regulated militia." The people having arms is what keeps the government's militia well-regulated.

Yet gun-control nuts always seem to read that as though it means only the militia should have guns. Then again, those are the same people who foolishly see big government as a benevolent being.

Read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/opinion/nocera-right-to-bear-arms-means-this.html?_r=0

 

[LongTimeListener]

Great link, Alma. So tony, now that we have a pretty solid case that the Second Amendment interpretation you cite is a perversion of history, let's go to the other point: Do you really believe that citizens with guns are going to rise up and stop the United States military in that paranoid fantasy world where the military invades our own people in the first place? Is that what we're clinging to now?