Posts by Billyblobber

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

What more can America do about "gun control"? It's not the 1980's anymore. People can't walk into a gun store, buy a fully automatic Uzi or Mach-10, M-16, etc, fill out a "mail-in" form with a fake ID, and walk out with the fully auto sub-machine gun. Those days are OVER. We have instant background checks. You can't own a fully automatic weapon, silencer, etc without a thorough background check, expensive tax stamps/permits, and without a lot of money, period!!!
I feel background checks should be tied into ones mental medical history though. Currently, because of HIPPA laws, they are NOT. Only if you were "involuntarily committed", does mental illness show up on a background check before purchasing a weapon. That is the ONLY "loop-hole" that I am aware of in this country. Gun Show "loop holes", etc are pure myth, or are being done illegally to begin with. (I've never seen in 20+ years of attending gun shows).

edit: Sigh, the quote button lost my response here, but I was basically agreeing that mental health screening would be a huge help.

21

Theory of Evolution and humanity are moving in parallel, and in opposite direction too!

by iconoclastic in

proponents of evolution theory was comfortable with their easiest method of induction that says something like this: i saw a blind man in the us, then in russia, then in australian, then in africa ..., hence all men are blind.

yet proofs are abundant for the decline (opposite of evolution) we experience globally!.

1) most humans declined into greed, the result of which is climate change which has the potential to wipe out all life from the earth.

Billyblobber

Evolution has nothing to do with making things "better," that's something stupid that's told to religious people by other religious people that didn't pay any attention in middle school biology. Your premise is wrong, thus, the post is kind of pointless.

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

the pacifist liberal pussified call

...this is why nothing can be done about it. The NRA lobbied, politicians politicized the issue, making it an either/or, zero sum, right wing/left wing thing as opposed to a nuanced issue that can be improved to some degree.

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

Owning a gun DOES increase the risk of suicide, because it has an 85% effectiveness rate as compared to 35% for the next highest thing (strangulation). Suicide is also, most often triggered by manageable or curable mental illness (something Simon thinks "doesn't matter" for whatever reason), which is actually even more damning to the pro-gun cause (since many people who have attempted suicide regret it later when their mind is more clear, having it immediately more easy for people to commit suicide is not really a good thing).

edit: While there is a self selection bias in play for those that own guns, that bias does not account for most gun injuries and deaths to happen in accidental/domestic situations as opposed to "those evil people out to get you from outside."

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

Actually, owning a gun makes you much, much more likely to be killed by a gun, as the vast majority of gun deaths in the U.S. are domestic or self inflicted. Fantasy "protect myself from those evil people" scenarios almost never happen, and it's more often that it results in friendly fire. But, whatever makes one feel safer to themselves, I guess.

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

@Billyblobber

Both Dylan Roof and this latest nutcase could have sought help. They chose not to.

Lots of people, sane or otherwise, get fired from their jobs.

Even mentally ill people must take at least some responsibility for their actions.

"Responsibility for their actions" does nothing to fix the core problems. Focusing on punishment is basically a religious/Bible viewpoint that takes any pressure for helping to fix the issues in the world out of the individual while placing wrongdoers in a separate "other" category that removes any relation to them. "The evil must be punished for being evil, don't worry about anything else, God will fix all the problems in the world in the end" is what many people were brought up, and it translates now into them focusing on retribution instead of solving.

A big part of Root's issue was that his particular brand of issues found a nurturing environment in extreme right wing and racist communities and ideology that festers among the Internet. This one is tied into the media glorification and focus on spree killers. Both of these things can actually be addressed and mitigated to a degree to lower the chances of similar things happening in the future. We can also address the lack of mental health system, help people to recognize possible issues before they crop out, and lower the stigmatism around mental health problems. It would be NICE to also be able to address the gun society in America, but, unfortunately, that has become so politicized that anything realistic happening is practically impossible at this point. Those are the things you focus on if you actually want to help fix the situation as opposed to making oneself feel better, which is all things like "pay for their actions" accomplishes.

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

Sure you can correlate emotions with mental health but is it true in every case like this? A thug, who's mad at society and mad about his life, goes out and kills some people. Is he mentally ill?

The gunman was suffering from bouts of extreme paranoia, with management and coworkers having suggested to him multiple times to get medical help, as his paranoia was to the point of apparently hallucinating or imagining things happen that weren't actually happening (see the watermelon thing quoted earlier). Dylan Root's attack on the black church combined with his firing seems to have completely set off his paranoia to the tipping point where the thought a race war was actually happening to him (see his statements), which prompted this. So, yes, it was a large issue here, as documented in the information released about the case.

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

Those of us that talk about things like mental health are not doing it to "make excuses" or whatever strawmen are flying around at the time.

Those are the people that see the nuance to problems on the societal level and then attempt to figure out ways to fix or alleviate those problems. When talking about mental health, it's talking about restoring the infrastructure that was removed in the 80s in America to help those with problems, and also to remove the stigma that centers around mental health so that problems that lead to things like this can be addressed before they turn into things like this, more often.

"Pointing blame" or simply labeling people as "evil" or whatever only serves to make the person who says those things feel better about life and play into just-world fallacy. It's easier to just say "some people are evil" than to think that friends/family/neighbors are just a bad day or a further shift in chemicals from doing something horrible. Thats also why people would rather focus on criminal punishment than the society that leads people to being criminals, clear black and white lines of "good" and "bad" just make the world less scary to them.

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

This is the kind of stuff that led him to kill coworkers:

“The watermelon would appear, then disappear, then appear and disappear again … only to appear yet again. This was not an innocent incident. The watermelon was placed in a strategic location where it would be visible to newsroom employees (and others) entering and exiting the building. It appeared after a meeting during which ‘watermelon’ comments were discussed.”

He says the watermelon was part of “a carefully orchestrated effort by the photography staff to oust me – a conspiracy.”

Sounds like the hallmarks of paranoia, which goes hand in hand with a few different mental issues.

324

VA shooting suspect was raised a JW! He mentions it on his Twitter account

by WingCommander in

jw
friends

anyone in the usa following this morning's shooting "on-air" live tv will know what i'm talking about.

bryce williams (not real name, but on-air name) shot and killed 2 people on live television this morning in roanoke, va. he was wearing a go-pro camera, and uploaded his first-person video onto his social media accounts.

i've seen his twitter feed (before it was taken down), and not very far down he mentions being raised a jw.

Billyblobber

Give his other letters that are coming out, I'd definitely say that he had some serious unchecked mental issues, given his ridiculously high amount of paranoia.

Since we can't "fix" the lack of gun control in this country because of the amount that already exist freely, and the amount of lobbying power the NRA has, the next best option is to focus on the underlying mental issues and lack of mental health in the country if the end goal is "less people dying." This is similar to working on the underlying social issues that cause crime in the first place to solve widespread crime issues. But again, that's if someone's focus is to make things better for everyone.