Can't think of any semi-personal connection to one myself. The closest thing I can think of it, there was one halfway between my home and my old office, but I didn't know anyone there as far as I can remember and it didn't impact me at all. Maybe I took a detour home that day?
It seems like you have two risk factors for a low mass shooting bacon number that I don't: first, more kids (so a bigger social network in general); second, if you'll pardon the stereotyping about life south of the Mason-Dixon line, living in Texas.
Why not shoot the pools. At the very least, we could eliminate above-ground pools.
I knew somebody who was almost in a mass shooting when I was in college. The shooter fucked up and everybody ran away.
I can't think of any personal connection to a mass shooting. Anyway, I think mass shootings are more analogous to cancer. As more people have personal connections to the victims, more efforts will be made to prevent it, but we don't really know what works.
(I'm in violation of the BAN, but....heebie started it!)
I feel like I can think of a few things that would help with guns.
There's low-hanging fruit, just like there was with cancer (e.g. making it harder to smoke and keeping asbestos out of things).
6, 7: Yes - I support all the proposals to ban automatic weapons, and make it harder for people to get guns in general, but I don't think anyone knows how much of a difference this will make.
Huh. I am realizing that I have two sort-of-first-degree connections to terrorism, but none to mass shootings. A failed bombing took place on my pedestrian route to work, and a family member was held as a hostage.
And yeah, like a lot of folks, I took 9-11 attacks personally in a way that felt like a first-degree connection. I did have a lot of acquaintances with first-degree connections to it, in the sense of having witnessed it directly.
But mass shootings? Here in the People's Republic of Maryland, we've got that sort of thing reasonably under control, I think. And exposure to such shootings where they are more common has only served to stoke the "good guy with a gun" mythology.
Dunno if it's the actual personal connection to mass shootings so much as all the active shooter drills that kids have to go through nowadays, and that parents of school-aged kids get to hear about.
I forgot to change the OP title to "public shootings" instead of "mass" because I didn't want to get hung up on how many people were killed. I just wanted to distinguish domestic violence from public violence.
we don't really know what works.
To 5 and 8: At the risk of Standpiping heebie's 6, I am always amazed to hear this sort of nonsense from smart people. It is in no way a hard practical problem. It's a problem of political will.
It's like saying: Who knows what methods work in improving a society's healthcare?
More coffee enemas and essential oils.
One of my cousins was murdered in public last year by a guy with a semiautomatic rifle, apparently at random, apparently due to a psychotic break. While this only served to underscore my longstanding belief that we should ban (read: significantly restrict) hand guns and all semiautomatics, my extremely right-wing extended family has taken away the lesson that everyone should be armed at all times.
13, 14: See! Even an expert like Moby isn't sure!
Even from over here I can claim a two degree connection to a mass shooting in the US.
The person who connects me was underwhelmed by the first responders: a friend of hers suffered a minor injury (knocked off his skateboard by the perp's car) and they suggested that while the shooter was still at large she should leave the safety of her apartment and come to the crime scene to drive him to hospital.
My question is: what constitutes a critical mass on this issue? Remember that while LGTBQ acceptance expands and creates markets, gun control would tend to restrict the firearms market, particularly given the current business model of the manufacturers.
Here in the People's Republic of Maryland, we've got that sort of thing reasonably under control, I think.
The Beltway Sniper was the one I remember from when I was in Maryland. I didn't have any connection to the shootings, but I did have the experience of working as a sub at a school nearby at the time and being the one who they sent outside to patrol the parking lot watching for the sniper.
I count a 1 to 2 degree separation from 5 mass shootings. WTF. This seems crazy to me.
18: Another act of terrorism that I had a sort of first-degree connection to. All of the initial shootings were near me -- one close enough that I had, not long before the shooting, pushed a stroller past the site on a walk from my house. (I was at that same grocery store yesterday, in fact.) I have always wondered why that strategy hasn't been repeated, and carried out by a more professional terrorist.
I'm fairly immune to that sort of fear. (What are the odds, right?) But I spent those weeks genuinely, if irrationally, afraid of being shot.
I don't know my connection to any mass shootings, and I guess 1 degree of separation from 9-11 but no other terrorist attacks, but I have a 1-2 degree separation from three separate instances of murder by random home invasion.
Two degrees from John List, who murdered his mother, wife, and three teenage children in my suburban home town in 1971: A few kids I knew were in the fourth grade Sunday School class he taught (apparently he was a very conventional Sunday School teacher). Some kids in my class had older siblings who knew the murdered List kids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_List
I also knew professionally a passanger on the 9/11 flight that crashed in Pennsylvania, but he wasn't featured in the movie.
18,20 Small world, I lived right by there then as well, I'm still pretty close.
I don't have either a first or second degree connection to violent death caused by a stranger, I guess a reflection of relative privilege. I think I have to disagree with the OP-- I believe that if neither Sandy Hook nor Las Vegas (both sympathetic innocent victims in the mass media sense) didn't cause a change, more personal events won't either, for the reason in 15.
It seems like the NRA is running on fumes right now... I wonder if that will ever translate into a political opening to actually do something about the problem.
if you'll pardon the stereotyping about life south of the Mason-Dixon line, living in Texas.
Don't you also live south of the Mason-Dixon line?
24. Sure hope so, that would be great. I don't see that as a change coming from the bottom up though. I don't know that any of the handful of gun nuts I know or know about are interested in or give to the NRA, but they do have a very firm epistemology.
24: It'll be interesting to see what the fallout ultimately is from the NRA's current implosion (which kicked off when the leadership suddenly realized they'd all been grifting each other for decades). A test-case for how much influence one organization can have on public policy relating to a major societal problem.
24/27: I don't have a lot of confidence in that. I see the current scandals as fallout from them happily and corruptly distributing the gains from fearmongering with Obama and expecting that to continue under Clinton. The minute any Democratic president is elected, they will rebound like anything.
The class that contains any thing does not share a common trait in degree of rebounding.
I also knew professionally a passanger on the 9/11 flight that crashed in Pennsylvania, but he wasn't featured in the movie.
I wonder if it was my distant relative! First name Donald?
"I don't have either a first or second degree connection to violent death caused by a stranger"
This seems unlikely - your grandparents didn't know anyone who died in either World War?
25: It's a moveable feature, like magnetic north, and needs to be periodically resurveyed. No shade thrown at the skills of Mssrs. Mason and Dixon, they couldn't have known.
Only one shooting I can think of, but that's more than enough. Ironically, when the most recent terrorism event here happened, we felt the need to inform relatives we were fine because they don't really get how big London is (and how minor of an event it was, as these go).
To the extent that this changes conservatives' minds, I think it falls clearly in the broad class of things where conservatives only care about progress if they or someone they know has been personally affected. If I were in an unkind mood, I would comment on the ability to consider abstractions, but it probably says something more about desire than ability.
31. You are right, I misoveremphasized the "Bacon number" part of the headline.
I wonder what my Bacon chain with Wayne LaPierre or Ollie North would be, requiring normal greeting by name in a midsize gathering as threshold for acquaintance.
My dad knew a Republican senator, so I bet my number is low.
Separating professional from personal, I haven't got much of a connection to post-WWII violence either.
I seriously thought a similar effect would kill off Brexit, and I even went to the trouble of trying to quantify the likelihood of a given citizen having a friend or family member who was either among the millions of other EU citizens here, or the millions of us in the rest of the EU. This did not develop to my advantage.
33: Ironically, when the most recent terrorism event here happened, we felt the need to inform relatives we were fine because they don't really get how big London is (and how minor of an event it was, as these go).
I had some uncomfortable moments with a relative due to my seeming indifference to their feeling the need to ascertain the status of someone who lived in London.
In the end I think we continue to be ill-equipped to respond to the cherry-picked information stream generated by the daily happenings of a world of billions. And my complaints about it are less than useless. And yet I still do.
Actually, I guess I'm Bacon connected to a number of MMIWG. Not thinking of whom is part of the problem.
25: Heh, true. I was thinking of the higher murder rate in the south, and the fact that Texas is so gun-happy in general. There was probably some better way to express that but I'm not sure what.
Yeah, the Missouri Compromise line is the one to watch.
Technically, to have a Bacon number don't you need to have appeared in a movie with someone? I'm pretty sure I've never been in a movie with anyone who was involved in a mass shooting.
18: Hi, Teacher Redshirt. Why don't you take point for a while so the regular teachers don't have to?
42. Yes, I'm incorrectly referring to the generalization of Bacon number (significant acquaintance rather than coappearance in a film) with the name of the more specific graph.
Finding statistical properties that let us characterize large graphs as "similar" or not is something I'm trying to keep up with. There are a few groups publishing profligately on the topic with what seem to me very low quality ideas, frustrating. (B@rabasi)
44.2: But he consistently manages to publish in Nature, regardless of any flaws discovered in his previous Nature papers.
I recall that at some point back in the 00s, new "community" detection methods for graphs seemed to be appearing at a rate of about one or two a week.
45: Co-published a mathematics paper with someone involved in a mass shooting?
I thought this meant you had eaten the same pig.
30: no.
I've never been in a movie, But my Bacon number is 3 by two completely different paths: My sister went to summer camp with his (future) wife, and my former law firm represented his father, who was a major Philadelphia politician.
As I've mentioned before, 40 years ago I was invisibly in the background of a shot in a movie that included Jack Nicholson in its cast. And then, six weeks ago, I was in Guantanamo and ordered The Code Red. But it doesn't have bacon.
(For Mossy's benefit, I'll add that you're goddam right that Kevin Bacon is in that movie.)
My grandparents knew the Bacons quite well. My aunt is the same age as Kevin and they were pretty close friends as little kids. My mom is a few years older and didn't know Kevin as well but was friends with his sister. I'm sure I've mentioned this before.
I have no connection with Kevin Bacon, other than that the character he played in Footloose is based on me.
Everyone talks about Kevin Bacon's performance in Footloose but ignores his true master class performance as arrow-through-the-throat-guy in Friday the 13th.
Huh, guess the only thing I knew about Tremors was that Michael J. Fox's dad was in it.
He was really good in Tremors, too.
Yeah. It was a great flick. I made my kids watch it not long ago. They were unimpressed.
That why the new Star Wars sucks. Kids today have bad taste in things that are tasteless.
Also, it's on topic because the Gummer compound had an actual arsenal.
Calling the gun-nut family "Gummer" is a piece of genius I just now appreciated.
I think he was in Animal House too. He's really old.
A HS friend of mine is in an online moms group with a woman whose daughter died in the Santa Fe, TX school shooting. They'd been in the group since their kids were babies.
My friend occasionally shares Facebook posts from this woman with gun control related messages, and assholes I also know from my hometown write terrible things in the comments. Not sorry to have left there.
I had to hide a couple of people from my hometown.
So last night I went to a bar here with a friend and colleague who was in the Canadian Army and in Iraq in the 1980s with UNIMOG. There was a guy who we struck up a conversation with, turns out he's Canadian Army and active duty, in intelligence. He'd been in Iraq in 2016 and 2017 as part of the anti-ISIL operations then. He said he was going to Thailand on vacation with a fellow Canadian Army buddy of his (that dude stayed at the bar, we were all hanging out on the balcony for occasional smoke breaks). We ended up talking for quite a while but at one point as we were about to leave they'd just left suddenly, without saying goodbye which struck me as odd at the time. I wonder if he'd gotten word.
I went to school with Kevin Bacon's niece so my Bacon number is wicked low.
OT: How are the mountain lions supposed to know they aren't supposed to eat near the trail?
That was me, unless it is too soon.
They should try getting the mountain lions some of those cat bibs that my neighbor goes on about.
I'll suggest it next time I'm in Arizona.
I secretly enjoy the cat wars on NextDoor. People have intensely strong opinions about cats.
People are asking for old coolers and straw to make shelters for feral cats to live in over the winter. My neighbor made her daughter (a woman about my age) take a robin with a broken wing to a shelter instead of just saying, "A cat will get it soon."
Or the other robin it owed money to.