What would the identical intervention look like against spree shooters? Persuade them to get the assault weapons and arrest them as they're setting up on a roof?
1: Yes! Just think of all the impressionable high school students that could be ensnared!
I think it'd involve taking domestic violence and online threats against women and minorities very seriously, for starters, as risk factors for escalating behavior.
I think you guys need to reframe the issue. Beltway bureaucrats have spent decades pouring taxpayer dollars into the Jihadi bombing sector, which clearly can't compete without government subsidies, while shamefully neglecting the random resentment shootings Real American terrorists actually care about.
Seriously though, how many shooters these days don't signal their intent online? The FBI just needs to hang around the right cesspits, track the the more credible threats back to real life, and watch. They can sneak into their houses and sabotage firing pins, whatever. All that good spy stuff. Complicated with minors, but what proportion of shooters are minors?
Beyond being a form of aggressive intervention, I doubt this kind of enticement/entrapment has anything in common with the kinds of efforts called for, or anything to teach us.
5: Sure, officers can drop a net in the social media sea and pull hundreds of impressionable young people for these stings; that doesn't mean they can make a screen that identifies mostly incipient mass murderers with any reliability. That's a task requiring much more precision.
Granted, it's worth trying, I suppose. Ideally with the interveners being some non-law-enforcement profession. But I doubt in the end it will hold a candle to gun-availability interventions.
heebie is so depressingly right in 3, you could limit it to restricting access to guns based on dv alone and get very, very far. alas, there is about zero chance of getting law enforcement behind this as law enforcement personnel are disproportionately represented among dv perpetrators.
3 is the case because most mass shootings are committed within the family, though those aren't what people think of when they think of mass shootings.
But really Americans are vanishingly unlikely to die in a mass shooting either, so shouldn't the funding me directed not at potential spree killers but at environmental pollutants or obesity or something?
Most mass shooting take place in the family? That doesn't seem right unless you count the guys who start with their wives for their killing spree and then go on from there.
Obviously the answer is the guns, but the US Secret Service's approach to people who start threatening to assassinate the president is interesting, and very very different to the FBI's agent running approach. They triage reports (whether generated by the suspect acting out, or tip-offs) into class 1 (empty threats), class 2 (potentially serious but not urgent), and class 3 (serious). When they put a case in class 3 they visit the suspect, question them, and explicitly warn them off, if they don't call the white coats or hand them to the cops.
Example:
The fact neither GWB, Obama, or Trump has been assassinated despite being some of the most assassinable* presidents on record seems to speak to the strategy's effectiveness.
*if you doubt, look at the 2008-2009 archives around here. everyone was convinced he was going to be assassinated. and the other two, well.
11: asked and answered. Yes, "mass shooting" is (sometimes) defined as four or more shot in a single incident (here, for example https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting), and most of those are exactly as you describe. A lot of the rest are related to organised crime - gang shootings, armed robberies and so on.
Other sources use "indiscriminate shootings in public places" https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/no-there-were-not-355-mass-shootings-this-year/ and come up with different results. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map/ For those, there is less of a link to DV.
And, of course, the authorities use exactly the approach that 12 describes. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/mass-shootings-threat-assessment-shooter-fbi-columbine/
It's simply not the case that the FBI has been washing its hands of the mass shooter threat because it's obsessed with tricking impressionable Muslims into building bombs out of plasticine.
One more way in which the threat is being badly misunderstood and under-estimated: the most likely person for an American to shoot dead is himself. The gun violence problem in the US is, by a substantial majority, a gun suicide problem. Firearm homicide is a small problem by comparison.
"Don't worry, he shot his wife first" is probably not what covenant marriage people want. But it seems like support for the idea that maybe we should try to keep guns away from people who have records of domestic abuse.
11.The FBI has no authority to deal with domestic violence as it is not a Federal matter. Threats of violence online are potentially "interstate," but there is so much of it due to the Wonder of the Internet, and so much of it is just idiots being idiots with no actual intent to harm, that trolling (in the fishing sense) for such people would eat up all their time and resources.
So what they actually do is find weirdos and convert their fantasies into almost-reality. This has bothered me for a long time as being entrapment, and it's particularly terrible because they are largely entrapping people who might get headlines when arrested (to wit: wannabe terrorists). Getting headlines has been FBI policy since J. Edgar Hoover's day.
So what they actually do is find weirdos and convert their fantasies into almost-reality.
The FBI is like Minecraft. Or prostitution.
Too bad we can't make an analogy.
14. Some states have passed or are trying to pass "red flag" laws, which allow guns to taken from people who are a danger to others. MA passed one last year, which allows guns to be removed for a year based on evidence from relatives or friends, I don't know if domestic abuse is considered a "danger to others." Naturally the NRA sued, because of the "lack of due process." In MA to get (e.g.) a anti-harassment order you must go before a judge, but apparently you don't have to do that for a "red flag." Sigh.
Due process seems reasonable and due.
Anyway, a hearing either before removal or within a few days after seems like a good idea.
Some people have enough guns that the sheer effort of moving them will be an issue.
Terrorists also tend to have backgrounds of domestic violence, IIRC.
Right. I think that was the point of 3.
But it would still be a terrible way to find terrorists because 99.999% of people with DV backgrounds don't become terrorists.
Right, 100% of them commit domestic violence and it isn't considered a threat to society (or wasn't considered and still remains less frequently considered so).
Something like 30% of them, IIRC, are also victims of domestic violence.
"Clearly, I remember picking on the boy. Seemed a harmless little ... And the boy was something that mommy wouldn't wear ยท King Jeremy the wicked."
Boy did I have those lyrics wrong.
But it would still be a terrible way to find terrorists because 99.999% of people with DV backgrounds don't become terrorists.
Here in the US there are more mass shootings that are like "Kill my ex-wife and while I'm at it, three of her co-workers" than terrorism per se.
Feminists shoot their own co-workers.
It's odd that domestic violence seems to lead to mass shootings (or indeed terrorism) far less frequently for women than for men. The demography of mass shooters and terrorists are far more skewed to male than the demographics of domestic-violence perpetrators.
It seems true though. I think it very unlikely my wife would ever shoot me, but not as unlikely as it is that she would shoot a bunch of strangers.
Not that there's been any abuse. Just thinking on general of the gender distribution of mass shooting.
I suppose terrorist groups don't generally come from cultures that let women and men work on equal terms. There weren't any (or at least not many) Michigan Militiawomen.
Even the Michigan Militiawomen Dance Review is a drag show.
34: There were a few women suicide bombers that got into Israel from the West Bank at one point iirc.
I think it very unlikely my wife would ever shoot me, but not as unlikely as it is that she would shoot a bunch of strangers.
I am honestly not sure whether it should be this way round or the other way round for a healthy relationship. I can conceive of several scenarios in which the Selkie (or indeed I) would shoot a bunch of strangers, but they all involve some sort of justification or at least provocation.
36: ah, good point. There have been a fair number of female suicide bombers, and they should definitely count.
I bet they teach the answer in counseling school. Just ask any social worker or therapist.
AFAIK almost all terrorist groups are tiny and short-lived, so they never break into general consciousness, but they're actually common as dirt. I doubt there's much correlation with gender relations. Or at least any correlation that isn't swamped by confounds like wealth and law enforcement.
I think you can argue that if somebody provides sufficient provocation that a usually non-homicidal person is willing to kill them, they aren't so much a stranger but an enemy without a backstory.
in ca there are gun violence restraining order - gvro - currently i believe close relatives can apply for one ex parte (i.e., without prior notice to the person proposed to be restrained). the applicant has to satisfy the standards for issuance and then gvro has to be personally served on the person restrained. also, i think at that point a warrant may issue to search the home and remove any guns. there are a couple of problems with the current regime here, including that those seeking a gvro are often justifiably not trusting of police (again - disproportionately likely to commit dv).
the state leg passed a bill last year to widen the pool of folks who can seek a gvro (teachers, school guidance counselors, co workers, mental health professionals - i may have the deets wrong on some of this but it's close), brown vetoed. its back this year amended to allow the warrant to search for guns to be issued so that it is acted on at the time of service of the gvro. aclu and other civil rights groups are pretty hard against it while it is likely newsom would sign what the legislature passes. i only know all of this bc of the kid's lobbying work, i think he plans to work over the summer at seeing if he can start to build relationships with the civil liberties people. he says for so many years only the most anodyne gun control leg had any hope of passing, so the civil lib people didn't really bother with it much, and now that the gun control people can be more ambitious there needs to be a building of consensus.
and his letter in support of the bill actually led with the suicide risk - one basis for a gvro is if you think the person may harm themselves. it was a great letter, said the humble copy editor mum.
There's more cultural infrastructure dedicated to radicalizing men who hate a particular woman to generalize that to hating women in general.
41 is wise. A stranger is just an inadequately provoking enemy with an unknown backstory.
41: Even serial killers are usually non-homicidal. I'm guessing even Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer only killed a small percent of the people they encountered.
Most people I encounter are polite.
Local man protects family with guns.
Surely a spoof. The reporter's name is Jeff Himmler.
One bad apple and you never hear the end of it.
There's a second one right there in your signature. And look, a third!
I didn't even realize there was a Derry Borough separate from, but surrounded by, Derry Township. Guns, municipal fragmentation, and treating kids horribly. That sounds about right for the area, except there's nobody complaining that they are having trouble getting the kids to stay once they are grown.
From 47:
As a condition of Gross' bond, sheriff's deputies confiscated more than 55 firearms from his home Tuesday evening.
Fifty-five guns! I'm trying to think of things that I own 55 of. Books. Items of clothing. Diapers. Uh..., ounces of seltzer? I must be missing something big and obvious.
"Maybe there is something wrong at the root of Derry. Something black and twisted and rotten."
Next time somebody doesn't return a marker to his son, he will just have to stand there and ask for it back, like some liberal asshole.
