“A Georgia man who opened fire on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, shooting dozens of rounds into the sprawling complex and killing a police officer, had blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Saturday.
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“Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC’s workforce through his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust,” said Fired But Fighting, a group of laid-off employees opposing changes to the CDC by President Donald Trump’s administration.
A common Republican response to a school shooting is mental health is the problem. A few years ago, members of both parties passed a mental health bill and school therapists were paid for. The Trump administration cut that funding because of a line about diversity hiring; Republicans who voted for this funding are silent.
U.S. murder rate is way higher than other developed countries. Our non-gun murder rate is normal, but our gun-murder rate is huge.
Much gun violence is not rational. It’s not clearly motivated by money or lack of fear of the justice system. It’s just two guys getting into an argument who fail to solve it peacefully and someone pulls a gun.
Parts of certain cities are overwhelmed with crime, so children are often left to fend for themselves. This develops a culture and an intuitive sense that if I don’t respond to provocation with violence, I will be taken advantage of. This leads people to instinctively respond to perceived provocation with deadly force.
Although gang violence is a big problem, most shootings are not gang related.
Israel leader Netanyahu has been saying Iran is weeks away from a nuke for over a decade.
Many Republicans called for the violence in LA to be crushed with military force and for Democrats to be removed from office, even though the violence and vandalism were contained and the Los Angeles Police Department had it under control.
When an immigrant kills someone, Republicans want to move and spend Heaven and Earth to limit all immigration and deport all illegals, devastating the lives of many people, but when Americans repeatedly murder, massacre, and assassinate fellow Americans with guns, they offer simple condolences.
“The shooter entered the store the afternoon ofMarch 22, 2021, and opened fire, killing 10 people – including the first Boulder police officer to arrive on the scene.
While families agonized for hours waiting to learn the fate of their missing loved ones, several survivors described the surreal attack.”
“We do know that he was 20 years old, and male.
Those two facts — and his role in Saturday’s shocking crimes — put him in a small but frightening group: He’s now among a handful of young American men who, driven by psychological distress, hatred, or something else, commit highly public acts of violence with powerful guns.
He joins a list of young men that includes the two high school seniors who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999; the 24-year-old who killed 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012; the 19-year-old who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018; the 18-year-old who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket the same year; and, unfortunately, many more.
“Across the board, young men are responsible for the vast majority of gun violence in this country,” said Jillian Peterson, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center. That’s especially true for public mass shooters, 98 percent of whom are male and a growing number of whom are in their late teens or early 20s.
The reasons young men turn to public violence are many and complicated, but experts say that common factors include access to guns that has grown even easier in recent years and a sense of social isolation deepened by the pandemic. That isolation can lead young men to seek out community in dangerous places, including a growing number of online communities that glorify violence.”
“The shooting that claimed a life and injured more than 20 others last Wednesday in Kansas City started for the most ridiculous reason possible.
Someone was looking at someone else.
Via NBCNews.com, court documents show that the shooting stemmed from an argument sparked by the stupidest form of testosterone-driving peacocking.
“Four males approached Lyndell Mays and one of the males asked Lyndell Mays what he was looking at, because they didn’t know him,” the paperwork contends.
“They began arguing about why they were staring at each other.”
Are we that insecure as a species that we can’t tolerate the fact that someone else looked at us? It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.
Insecure men, too thin-skinned to tolerate someone else’s gaze and too stupid to not start waving around guns and too impulsive to not pull the trigger resulted in the death of a woman who had nothing to do with their stupid-ass macho head games. Others were physically injured, tens of thousands were emotionally impacted, and millions of others must now take a serious look at whether they should avoid attending games or parades or other sports-related gatherings.
How can anyone even begin to combat this? It’s a combination of excess hormones and insufficient intelligence. Along with, of course, access to weapons that can be brandished and activated by someone who otherwise can’t be trusted to tie his shoes properly.”
“So why did U.S. life expectancy trends slow and then peak in 2014? And what, if anything, can policy makers and politicians realistically do to make increasing it a priority? As noted above, the big recent dip largely resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2023 Scientific Reports article “estimated that US life expectancy at birth dropped by 3.08 years due to the million COVID-19 deaths” between February 2020 and May 2022. But let’s set aside that steep post-2020 downtick in life expectancy resulting from nearly 1.2 million Americans dying of COVID-19 infections.
A 2020 study in Health Affairs chiefly attributed the 3.3-year increase in U.S. life expectancy between 1990 and 2015 to public health, better pharmaceuticals, and improvements in medical care. By public health, the authors meant such things as campaigns to reduce smoking, increase cancer screenings and seat belt usage, improve auto and traffic safety, and increase awareness of the danger of stomach sleep for infants. With respect to pharmaceuticals, they cited the significant reduction in cardiovascular diseases that resulted from the introduction of effective drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure.
So a big part of what propelled increases in U.S. life expectancy is the fact that the percentage of Americans who smoke has fallen from 43 percent in the 1970s to 16 percent now. Smoking is associated with higher risks of cardiovascular diseases and cancers, rates of which have been dropping for decades. In addition, the rising percentage of Americans who are college graduates correlated with increasing life expectancy.
However, since the 2004 peak, countervailing increases in the death rates from drug overdoses, firearms, traffic accidents, and diseases associated with obesity contributed to the flattening of U.S. life expectancy trends.
A 2021 comprehensive analysis of the recent stagnation and decline in U.S. life expectancy in the Annual Review of Public Health (ARPH) largely concurs, finding that “the proximate causes of the decline are increases in opioid overdose deaths, suicide, homicide, and Alzheimer’s disease.” Interestingly, the U.S. trend in Alzheimer’s disease prevalence has been downward since 2011. In addition, the ARPH review noted that “a slowdown in the long-term decline in mortality from cardiovascular diseases has also prevented life expectancy from improving further.” So enabling and persuading more properly diagnosed Americans to take blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering medications would likely boost overall life expectancy.”
“”A 2017 task force report on the involuntary referrals of children under Florida’s Baker Act found that one-third of them were not necessary,” according to a recent article by Kaitlin Gibbs of the University of Florida Levin College of Law. “Many children are Baker Acted more than once, which shows the initial Baker Act may not have successfully treated children with mental illness. At least thirty percent of all children Baker Acted will have a repeat Baker Act within five years.”
Nor is throwing people into mental wards likely to reduce the number of mass shootings. As Ragy Girgis, a clinical psychiatrist at Columbia University, wrote in 2022, “Serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder.” And while 25 percent of mass shootings “are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression,” he notes that “in most cases these conditions are incidental.”
In the case of last week’s murders in Maine, the shooter, 40-year-old Robert Card, was hospitalized during the summer. But officials say there is no evidence this hospitalization was involuntary. And Card’s history of mental illness makes him unusual among other mass murderers.”
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“If DeSantis’ plan were enacted, the likely result would be a rapid increase in the unnecessary institutionalization of mentally ill individuals—and a negligible impact on criminal violence.”