'No Way To Prevent This'

Since 2014, The Onion has been running the same headline with the same article over and over. ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens uses the same story every time a mass shooting happens, with only the location and number of victims changed. The seventh version of the story was published yesterday, after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.   

In May of 2014, it was UC Santa Barbara, California.
In June of 2015, it was Charleston, South Carolina.
In October of 2015, it was Roseburg, Oregon.
In December of 2015, it was San Bernardino, California.
In October of 2017, it was Las Vegas, Nevada.
In November of 2017, it was Sutherland Springs, Texas.

The headline was originally written by Onion editor Jason Roeder four years ago. Roeder no longer works for the website but his article still comes around. This time struck a little close to home- Roeder lives in Parkland, Florida.  

-via The Daily Dot


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Sorry to make assumptions about your position. You simply made the vague argument that "it's a complicated issue" and deflected about one specific incident that happened in Europe, which tends to be the cry of those who don't want to make any changes at all for fear their precious guns are taken away. I think you have a lot of valid points and you're right, there is no one simple solution. I do believe providing better and free mental health services and instituting some basic gun control laws (background checks, limits on ammo possession, etc.) are a good first step though and from there we can see what's working and what's not.

And for the record, I do like guns and think they're fun -I just don't think we should make something super easy to get and stockpile just because it's fun when it causes tens of thousands of people to die every year.
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I'm not arguing that nothing needs to change, but a bit less arrogance is in order. Virtue signaling and patting yourself on the back won't fix this. It's not an easy problem to fix at all (I think I said that), almost all proposals on offer will NOT actually help much if at all, and perhaps more importantly, most feel-good gun regulations that have been tried have actually made things far worse.

It's not easy to emulate European countries, inter-racial tensions and violence is greatly reduced when you have significant ethnic mono-culture, whereas the US is developing into an all-minority nation. Public mental health institutes were quite a disaster in the US. The kind of control European countries exert is simply unconstitutional, here, and that's not easily changed, or necessarily a good idea to try.

The "Troubles" in Ireland went on for decades, and no quick and easy legislation fixed that up. Neither did the left-wing terrorism so common in the 70s just go away because of a few regulations. Fascism even seems to be coming back strong in Europe as of late, so a few years from now, we might be wondering why they are so screwed up and didn't just simply follow our lead. And France's troubles seem worse of a problem than ours. When you point at other nations, you're cherry picking one single issue (which doesn't actually exist in a vacuum) and ignoring everything else, and pretending this can be easily fixed without causing other problems that are perhaps just as bad in the process.

And just to make some heads explode, I'm not a gun nut. Never owned or fired one.
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I knew someone would come out of the woodwork to argue here. Anders Breivik killed 77 people, the Vegas shooter killed 58 -doesn't really seem "tame" -especially when you consider that he was only one of the 1,624 shooters in the last 1,870 days in America. Yeah, this is the only country where this regularly happens and I defy you to come up with even two more mass shootings in other developed nations without using Google.

But by all means, use the only example you can to argue the fact that America doesn't need to change anything.
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Maybe that's why their headline says "Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens." I don't know anyone who hasn't heard of Anders Breivik. Meanwhile, it's hard to remember any of the perpetrators of mass shootings in the US, because there are so many of them.
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Somebody has never heard of Anders Breivik... American mass shootings are tame by comparison.

Each nation has its own unique problems that look horrible and ridiculous to outsiders. The sad truth is, there are no easy fixes for social issues, and it's actually quite likely this trend WILL spread to other nations.
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