So fun fact
The reason why it was the deadliest shooting is because the shitstain was using a bump stock, which makes semiautomatics into pseudo-automatics, so he just mag dumped into a crowd
After it happened, the Trump admin of all fucking people banned bump stocks. Broken clock or something.
Now SCOTUS is about to hear a court case to repeal the ban, and they look poised to legalize bump stocks again under the BS reason that "they're not technically automatic weapons"
With the added bonus that now everyone knows about them
Never found a motive? Are you joking? We've got tons of info on the psycho who did it. He was a distraught aging white male with a history of depression, gambling, and firearms who wanted to hurt the world and kill himself.
Sad losers are a dime a dozen but at least most of them aren't as stupid as that guy. There is no reason to discuss this outside of proposed changes to our society as a whole to better prevent these stains on history.
This question was posted with a Wikipedia link. I didn't read it, but let's assume it didn't answer the poster's question.
Now I see in the comments a people saying "we know a lot" (but not Wikipedia I guess) or "it's just what Americans do" or "we got some good laws out of it". It just sounds like "move along, move along" to me.
Nobody answered the question. I don't know the answer, but to say that a person who has never killed anyone before then planned and executed the biggest mass shooting in American history (and that's saying something!) and we shouldn't CARE about motive is just weird.
What makes someone arm themselves and go to a movie theater or an elementary school or a concert should be damned important to a society that cares about mental health and the safety of its citizens. It's SO EASY to say "evil" and put it in the past, especially when the perpetrator is dead. It's much harder to think about how to prevent the next one. Sure, they use guns. But then it's knives. Or hammers. Slower you say? Well then how about sarin gas? Mail bombs? Potassium cyanide in Tylenol? Letters containing ricin?
We need to know more about the psychology of the mass killer. We act like saying "evil" is good enough. Are we all religious now? There's devils out there? Or are they people, people with problems that never got recognized, until it was too late?
It is impossible to type out all of the reasons, but here are a few. Check out Bowling for Columbine btw - a movie from two thousand fucking two, 15 years BEFORE that particular one. We've seen that particular bullet coming for a LONG time, and the ones before it, and the ones after it, and the ones yet to come - we KNOW, yet we do NOTHING. Most especially the "Pro-Life" crowd.
Lobbying. It's a thing. The NRS especially is one of the more powerful ones. More than 80% of American citizens - rising to >90% of NRA members even!!! - want some form of extremely limited gun control. However, we do not live in a democracy, not even one dominated by conservatives or rural Americans - rather, we live in a plutocracy where despite the OVERWHELMING support of the VAST MAJORITY of Americans, we cannot manage to get anything done.
Also, much of that money supposedly flowing to politicians from the "NRA" actually has been found to have ties back to Russia. Many of the politicians receiving that money may not even know the true source of where it came from - nor do they particularly seem to care.
Oh, and then billionaires bought up pretty much all of the major news outlets (a handful of others still exist - did The Guardian escape that? Well, even if they were, they seem to be allowed to talk about other corporate take-overs (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/may/03/billionaires-extra-power-media-ownership-elon-musk).
And hopefully you already know what happened to Google, where SEOs took over the searches so that it is nearly impossible to find things that just five years ago were easily retrievable, with the only lingering hold-out being Reddit, before then that whole thing happened...
BTW, the government is literally not allowed to collect statistics on how many violent gun deaths occur in America. I am not sure if this is the video where Jordan Klepper showcases that, but if not then he has a bunch of others. Or take your pick - there are millions if not billions of videos, of varying degree of quality and relevance. I've never seen one show a truly "unbalanced" take though - that is just not how for-profit corporations work. You just have to educate yourself by watching a bunch of stuff until you know how trustworthy the source is, and also each and every material topic too. It is sad, but we cannot seem to trust any (especially for-profit) advice these days. Though if you want another recommendation, there's John Oliver's whole expose on the NRA. To provide a modicum of balance, on the other side there are series such as Paul Harrell's Mass Shootings: Causes and Possible Solutions.
And - yes there is always more - there are other arguments such as: "if someone cannot get a gun they will simply make their own bomb" (ignores how much harder it is to do that), and the whole thing of plastic ghost guns (again ignores how difficult it would be to do that). Ultimately, i think that children being sacrificed is itself merely a symptom of a much deeper cause. People on Lemmy call it "capitalism", which has a LOT of truth to it - but then again, nations such as communist China have their own different issues. But, again, since ~90% of Americans already are in favor of stopping these kinds of mass-shootings, this will not be solved by merely educating yourself or "getting the word out". In fact, this type of issue is precisely the type of thing that Trump leaned heavily on as his route to the White House - "Hillary Clinton is corrupt so you should elect me and I will get rid of all the corruption, everywhere". So realistically, this is just something that we are going to simply have to live with, unless and until people fucking DO something about it. e.g. a responsible gun owner could patrol their own neighborhood schools. However, do note that every time someone does try to do that, they end up shooting innocent people instead, and yet it does nothing to stop the actual shooters, who can pull guns out of a bag (long-ish violin or trumpet case maybe?) and start shooting in mere seconds - not enough time to notice and prevent it. So start by educating yourself, since that's really all you can do, and also it will help enormously to ensure that you are on the correct side of the issue.
For those so inclined, there is a verse commanding the latter point even in the actual Holy Bible, at 1 Thessalonians 5:21: "Test EVERYTHING against what you KNOW to be true". I don't know what can be done, after the education stage, but I know it MUST begin with that.
For the most part Americans are so desensitized to the gain Violence that it’s not something most of us think about much.
I’ve grown up in a post Columbine world, and mass shootings have been a part of my life since it started. They’re just a really unfortunate part of life here that won’t change unless there’s a massive culture shift.
The guy didn't say or post much directly about it. Sometimes people do crazy shit for very little reason. You couple that with the ability to get guns easily, mass quantities of ammo, and bump stocks, you have yourself a bloody stew.
People love patterns, but sometimes there just isn't one. There is no single profile for a mass shooter. The closest you get is male and either 15-24 or 35-44.
Most people shoot others for grievances and having a shitty life. Sometimes not though. Many shooters don't even take their own life. Plenty of them are still on the run.
The easiest answer is that the vast majority of how our society runs is through the fear or threat of death. The moment someone starts wanting it, they're capable of nearly anything.
Most people see the greener pasture of nothingness between the loop of a noose at home. Some decide to kill and maim before they go out.
Unfortunately because of the 2nd amendment, it lets people rampage easily with high body counts before dying
ZERO Fetuses died so why would I care?
-Pro Life Republican making Books Illegal to Save The Children!
There is a 4 part documentary series called "11 Minutes" from 2022.
nobody ever talks about enron anymore. The CEO only got like 5 years for that. Nobody talks about nortel anymore, the CEO got no time for that, and a shit ton of money, all the employees had no pension.
Etc, etc, etc...
In 2024 there have been more "mass shooting events" in the US than there have been days in 2024.
One that happened 7 years ago isn't top of mind for most people.
It was all over the news and years ago. Should we continue talking about it?
This, like any event, comes down to what the family does to keep a case going. There’s many cold cases that are now getting solved by family members rather than police.
There is no agency out there that will keep interest in an issue.
once the media is done with it(they have a super short attention span) and the police will spend all of a few weeks on most things it is the family that keep the interest going. They will pay out of pocket to get attention for it.
There’s even cases where family members that have investigated into commercial air craft incidents because they lost loved ones and helped solve cases on that.
Believe it or not there are people calling the police every day just to keep their attention on a missing person or murder, asking for new leads. These are family members.
Police will not do this on their own.
I feel like most horror movies are preying on deep psychological fears of things that don't or won't happen, or happen only in the furthest reaches of the psyche.
The concept of just leaving your house to get some turnips and getting shot in the face is like a daily thing for every American, so I'm not sure that makes for good psychological horror.
I mean, reading the Wikipedia article is seems like there’s a lot known about the killer and a pretty clear motive of him wanting to kill a bunch of people…
they decided not to talk so much about perpetrators after the serial killer craze of the 1970s
It's because something like 2 mass shooting occur EACH DAY in the US. It's impossible to keep track and that's why this has faded away.
You hear about mass shootings (random public ones that are committed to generate news stories, not ones where it's crime, usually gang related, with multiple people shot due to poor aim) when the media wants to leverage it for a specific angle. Shootings that play into the desired narrative linger for a very long time, shootings that go against the desired narrative disappear in a few hours to a few days. It has nothing to do with how many people were killed or what questions have or have not been answered; it is simply a function of how much it works towards the desired narrative.
The desired outcome of a gun ban was achieved and the fact that there are still unanswered questions means that continued discussion hurts the desired narrative, so it isn't discussed. Not only has it "served its purpose" but bringing it up now could have a negative effect for those that control the media so the media never brings it up. No, we don't know why he did it, we don't even know for sure if he actually used bump stocks, but none of that matters; the headlines got the immediate response they were designed to get and then they moved onto other headlines before questions outside of their narrative were asked.
Whenever I see posts like this, I wonder about the benchmark being set.
I don't know what OP wants... a weekly news story: "VEGAS SHOOTING STILL NOT SOLVED, NEWSPAPER EDITORS SEEK ALTERNATE HEADLINES"
DB Cooper was one of the most mysterious hijackers of all time. Still no motive, why don't we hear about it more often?
Zodiac killer, active for years on the West Coast. No known motive... why don't we hear about it? Why does no one mention it?
Jack the Ripper, killed women brutally, unsolved, no known motive. Why isn't he mentioned more often?
This line of thinking drives me crazy. Our current news ecosystem thrives off cheap clickbait and manufactured outrage. Barring some radical new information, they won't get that out of the Vegas shooting, hence it doesn't make headlines routinely.
We don't hear about it because we don't live in the USA
Couple different factors there, but it mostly just comes down to some easily explainable things. A shooter without a motive isn't a story that sells well, and it isn't a story that people generally want to read. Your highest profile american crimes tend to be perpetrated by extreme weirdos. I think it's probably just that this guy was kind of a sad old dude, and probably a pedo to boot, so it doesn't really make for a nice, harrowing story. It's just depressing, mostly.
Most readers, I think, want a kind of, narrative, or meta-narrative, around their media consumption. You can see people in this thread, trying to stamp one onto this shooting with the whole bump-stock thing, which I think is mostly just a minor aside, but for the fact that it kind of ties into a larger narrative about gun control, a larger meta-narrative, that serves political ends. Even in that, though, it's not a very good grafting subject for those stories. The fact that it was passed by a republican president means that it can't really serve mainstream political party end-goals, and bump stocks aren't really a significant concern, despite how people might want to make them out to be. Basically their only tactical use case is something like this, otherwise, they're mostly a toy. They don't really have the same use-case for gang violence, like you might see with glock switches. So they don't really present a highly defensible instance of gun control going wrong, and they don't present a high-priority target in terms of gun control legislation.
It is almost impossible for most places to do reporting in a way where you are ever given the full scope, the full picture. It's hard to report sobering data which might give you the larger picture, because it's uncertain, up for contestation, boring, and unrelatable. It's hard to report on everything in an indiscriminate way, if you're just reporting everything without any bigger picture questions, then you're liable to simply serving stories with no external context that would ground the reader, and you lead the reader to only ground themselves. If you do this enough, in combination with the A-B testing that might tell you what to actually report on, you'll just end up becoming 24 hour nightly news, where you just report on murder and rapes and serve political agendas without any real knowledge of what you're doing. Things have to inherently be passed through the filter of a meta-narrative in order for them to make any sense, to have any meaning at all. If you can't really do that, if all you're left with is meaningless violence, you will probably just see people ignore it.
