How used to horrific gun violence are we here in the US? This used to it:
It’s been up like that for nearly an hour. Some commenters are accusing the Trib of click-baiting, but I suspect it’s an honest mistake.
by Betty Cracker| 108 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment
How used to horrific gun violence are we here in the US? This used to it:
It’s been up like that for nearly an hour. Some commenters are accusing the Trib of click-baiting, but I suspect it’s an honest mistake.
Comments are closed.
BGinCHI
Guns don’t kill people; ferries kill people.
/NRA
Betty Cracker
@BGinCHI: The NRA will probably propose a Firearms Libel Protection Act in the FL statehouse. It would pass too!
OzarkHillbilly
Speaking only for myself, I don’t think I will ever get used to it. Also, if I had read that headline I probably would have assumed Bangladesh was a town in Florida.
MattF
And here I was thinking that them Bangladeshis wuz gettin’ civilized. I’m all kinda disappointed now.
Citizen_X
“Bus plunge in Ecuador; at least 40 shot dead.”
Mustang Bobby
Must be a newspaper auto-correct error to go to “Shooting” instead of “Sinking” because ferries in Bangladesh never capsize.
dmsilev
@BGinCHI: The only thing capable of stopping a bad guy with a ferry is a good guy with a ferry.
(coming soon to a multiplex near you!)
Cervantes
That is sad, Betty Cracker, you are right. Good catch.
So far as I can tell, the ferry was rated for 85 passengers; more than 205 were on board; no one was armed. But then I’m not a journalist or headline-writer, so what do I know?
Elizabelle
I missed the error at first because I’d heard of the sinking yesterday and didn’t read the full headline, having recognized the topic … the “more than 100” was the new news.
But that’s not kosher for editors.
Mustang Bobby
@dmsilev: How about a good faerie with a gun (a guy like me could take that two ways)?
Mike in NC
Bangladesh clearly needs a Stand Your Ground law to be more like that other Third World country called Florida.
boatboy_srq
It’s Florida. Every death (not caused by melanoma or by disconnection of life-saving apparata) is gun-related.
It’s also the Tampa Tribune. Reichwing enough to make the NY Post look like Xinhua. It’s good for fishwrap and for spiking your blood pressure, and not much else.
pamelabrown53
@Betty Cracker: Hi Betty. How far do you live from Inverness? This Saturday there is a meet-up at a private home. Activists, bloggers and politicians will be there…not just kossacks. The organizers are currently working to get a Charlie Crist appearance. Anyway, thought you’d like to know.
Tractarian
We’re so used to horrific gun violence that our newspaper editors subliminally insert words like “shooting” and “caliber” and “close range” into totally unrelated article headlines?
Isn’t it more likely that our newspaper editors are just complete dolts?
srv
@Mike in NC:
What happens in Florida if you’re in a boat? Can you stand your ground on a boat?
Or is that a loaded question?
Betty Cracker
@pamelabrown53: Wow, I grew up just down the road from there and am surprised there are enough liberals in Inverness to fill a phone both. ;-)
Amir Khalid
Maybe the copy editor who wrote the headline has a mental reflex that tells them multiple deaths = spree shooter. By the way, it has still not been corrected.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well, there is a town called Bengal in Maine. (By the way, are the people there referred to as Bengalis?)
Bobby Thomson
@Tractarian: yes.
pamelabrown53
@Betty Cracker: Well, frankly there are people coming from other parts of FL, staying in hotels. BTW, any hotel recommendations?
Paul in KY
@srv: Depends whether you are in the ocean or not. In the ocean, Federal laws apply (no ‘stand your deck’).
scav
Sink Sank Shot. Spelling and Editorial Standards have changed in the brave new world of free-market journalism. Facts Shmacts, Close enough, especially it’s only foreign news aka filler for unsold ad-space.
Betty Cracker
@pamelabrown53: There’s a cute B&B in Inverness — Lake House. Crystal River is about 15-20 miles away and has tons of hotels. You could probably find a deal this time of year since it’s not peak manatee season.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker: We stayed at Lake House recently. It’s on Lake Henderson and near some old trails. It was, as you say, cute.
pamelabrown53
@Betty Cracker: Thanks: D.
Mustang Bobby
@boatboy_srq: “Der Tampischer Beobachter.”
Betty Cracker
@Tractarian: You say that as if it were a mutually exclusive choice. But yeah, I do think associating mass death with shootings is a likely consequence of frequent gun violence. I think the editor would have caught him/herself if the headline error was “More than 100 presumed dead in Bangladesh ferry skiing.”
Citizen_X
@Mustang Bobby: Does Bangladesh let the ferries get married? Because that leads to this sort of thing.
Suffern ACE
@Betty Cracker: As crowded as the ferries are, I having 5th class skiing tickets available is kind of plausible.
Mustang Bobby
@Citizen_X: Whatever floats their boat, I guess.
scav
@Citizen_X: It’s that Homophonic Agenda again!
Frankensteinbeck
@Amir Khalid:
Well, now *I* do.
Corner Stone
C’mon MSNBC. Stop calling him a gunman “wearing” an Afghan Army uniform.
Two-star Maj General shot and killed in Afghanistan.
chopper
“Earthquake in china shoots 350 dead”
El Caganer
@srv: Would you shoot them from a boat? Does your weapon need to float?
pamelabrown53
@Cervantes: In my previous goggling I found lake House and I thought it exuded “cute”. Although I’ve stayed in a fair number of B&Bs, I’m not their biggest fan. I’m on the shy side and they don’t seem private enough and breakfast feels like forced familiarity. My more gregarious friends always seek out B&Bs.
JPL
Oh no, the ebola virus is coming. Actually my news interrupted broadcasting so we could all see the landing of the plane of the second patient arriving from Africa.
Betty Cracker
@Corner Stone: Why are we still there?
Frankensteinbeck
@El Caganer:
Why not ram them with a goat? It adds a certain festive note.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
Wasn’t that the plot to Speed 2?
El Cid
Maybe they were shot with a ferry — I mean, you fire one of those into a crowded space and you could take out hundreds.
Or maybe it was the ferry which was the shooter.
Amir Khalid
@Corner Stone:
The story doesn’t say the shooter has been captured or killed, so it’s quite likely he hasn’t been and his identity is still unconfirmed. Also, a person wearing an Afghan army uniform on an Afghan army base is almost certainly an Afghan soldier, true; but there is such a thing as an imposter. And finally, it may be that the British military, which runs the base, is applying British legal standards which don’t allow the public identification of a suspect before charges are filed — so one would have to wait for that step before any suspect is named.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tractarian:
While it’s never good to generalize in this manner, because there will often be glaring exceptions, but the magic 8 ball says “Abso-Fracking-Lutely”.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck: Could they, would they, with a fox? Could they, would they, in a box?
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker: I think it has something to do with either Nixon or possibly Benjamin Franklin wanting our national bird to be the turkey. I’ll be honest, I haven’t quite put it all together just yet.
schrodinger's cat
Did you guys see NR’s latest screed on Neil DeGrasse Tyson? It doesn’t make much sense, and the guy who wrote it just sounds jealous.
Cervantes
@pamelabrown53: While you do pay for the breakfast, you don’t have to actually attend or eat. We hardly ever do, unless it’s a place we have been repeatedly and know the owner as a friend.
Mnemosyne
@pamelabrown53:
It really depends on the place. When we go to Santa Barbara (about 2 hours north of us), we stay at the Cheshire Cat Inn, which lets you be as private or as gregarious as you want. If you don’t want to eat breakfast with the group, you can have it in your room.
Cervantes
@Corner Stone: President Karzai and his family own an Afghan restaurant here in Cambridge. Food’s not bad but I have not seen turkey on the menu.
Nixon, on the other hand, could be called a turkey if one is being generous — to him, not to turkeys.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat: PRK took a look and found it wanting.
H.K. Anders
Hey, man, it’s just the price we have to pay for freedom. Don’t tread, you know what I’m sayin’?
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker: It would appear that Bob in Portland has an answer for you.
H.K. Anders
@BGinCHI: People kill people. With ferries.
schrodinger's cat
With their lates hijinks on immigration I think the GOP is Cruzing for a Bruising.
pamelabrown53
@Mnemosyne: The Cheshire Cat Inn sounds like the best of both worlds. I think I’d enjoy staying there. (Bet it’s gorgeous, too).
Roger Moore
@scav:
Just remember: Ned Nott was shot, and Sam Shott was not, so it’s better to be Shott than Nott.
raven
WASHINGTON (AP) — US officials: US major general killed in Afghan insider attack; 15 injured, half Americans.
SiubhanDuinne
They finally, just now, changed the headline:
ETA: No apology for the earlier headline that was up for at least two hours. No correction of any kind from the paper/site. But the commenters are furious!
schrodinger's cat
@Cervantes: I saw that. Unfortunately, there is only one Krugman for the elebenty BS spewers in the media.
boatboy_srq
@Frankensteinbeck: ewe. Ewe. EWE.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: I was hoping for a rational answer, not random, baseless accusations of being a useful idiot for Exxon or harboring anti-Putin prejudices.
boatboy_srq
@Amir Khalid: In New England they’d be called Mainahs. Further afield, though, it’d be anyone’s guess.
Frankensteinbeck
@schrodinger’s cat:
Oh, yeah! I read that, or at least around the first half. By that point it was clear he hadn’t noticed he got his own argument backwards.
To those who don’t want to read, he’s arguing that liberal smart people (he names Tyson, Maddow, and Silver among others) are pretending to be nerds because everybody knows that nerds know things, so that will give them cred. Unfortunately, his proof is that these liberal nerds don’t look and act like any nerd stereotype, they just know things, so they’re obviously poseurs and should not be trusted to know things. Yes, he actually gets that backwards. It’s in the 4th and 5th paragraphs.
He also quotes that parody video where an awkward guy refuses to believe an attractive girl is a geek, but I can’t tell whose side he’s on. I got the impression, from how he builds his argument off the video, that he thought the point of the video was that an attractive girl can’t be a geek and must be faking. I might just be reading that wrong because the rest of his argument was stupidly backwards.
Anyway, once he establishes that all liberal wonks are poseurs, it’s just ranting about how you can’t trust liberal numbers and NEEEEEERDS!
Villago Delenda Est
@Cervantes: Well, he shows the real probllem…the GOP is anti-science, because science has the audacity to demonstrate that they’re all wrong, wrong, wrong about everything.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
Because it’s a lot easier to get yourself into a war than out of one.
boatboy_srq
@SiubhanDuinne: Furious that the Trib got it wrong, or that the Trib is now saying the 300 dead weren’t shot?
scav
@Roger Moore: She Shot Sue’s Shawls near the Seychelles.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck: The real problem is that all these nerds can think, and dipshits like National Socialist Review hacks can’t.
gogol's wife
The headline on our local rag today is about how Dannel Malloy is using a Newtown mother in a campaign ad, as if that were somehow illegitimate. Guns are only to be used for politics if you’re pro-gun.
Villago Delenda Est
@boatboy_srq: “We’re getting better!”
schrodinger's cat
@boatboy_srq: Further afield, they would Damn Yankees!
Villago Delenda Est
CNN, dolts:
Well, yeah, I would guess that an Afghan soldier would probably be wearing an Afghan military uniform, so sure.
Time to nuke CNN Center from space. Only way to be sure that Leslie Blitzer is among the dead.
Cervantes
@Villago Delenda Est:
“Soldier” implies “uniform,” sure, but not vice versa.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
That would be ramming them with a sheep- but not a ram. With a goat, it would either be buck, buck, buck, or doe, doe, doe.
srv
@raven: Qargha!!!!!
Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like Benghazi.
How many two-stars do we have over there?
scav
@Roger Moore: But no Kidding, this is a family blog!
Villago Delenda Est
@Cervantes: I don’t know. Odds are REALLY good that someone wearing a military uniform on a military installation is doing so because they are supposed to be there.
Amir Khalid
Off topic but:
The Washington Post‘s* Marc Thiessen makes an emotional but ultimately unconvincing argument for direct US military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. The kind of engagement he advocates would leave the US needlessly entangled for decades in other people’s domestic quarrels, which it does not need.
*Add fart noises as appropriate.
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: Isn’t he one of the Bush’s torture promoters, now affecting a reasonable conservative persona like a certain Mr. Brooks?
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
But those same rules don’t necessarily apply to somebody who’s doing something he obviously isn’t supposed to be doing, like shooting the soldiers who are supposed to be there. That’s especially true if it’s in an area of active combat against an enemy that is concentrating on unconventional combat because they’re outclassed in a straight-up fight. It’s entirely possible that it’s an actual Afghan soldier who carried out the attack for personal reasons or because he had been convinced to help the Taliban, but it’s also entirely possible that it was a Taliban infiltrator. Reserving judgment until all the facts are in seems like a reasonable decision.
Cervantes
@Villago Delenda Est: Sure. The Afghan MoD is saying that the shooter, now dead, was a soldier recruited a few years ago.
All of that may well prove to be true — but one should not jump to conclusions. Anyone can put on a uniform.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
I feel dumber for having read the link.
Sadly, there are people, who read the NRO that consider this level of writing deep intellectual analysis.
Cervantes
@gene108:
“Mission Accomplished!”
— National Review
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
He was a speechwriter for SecDef Rumsfeld and then President W, before his promotion to W’s head speechwriter in 2008. Per Wikipedia, the torture advocacy is from his 2010 book, Courting Disaster. So yes, that’s him.
srv
I thought we just turned over command of NATO forces in Afghanistan to a German General – oh, he was in the news because Obama’s made him CoS of US NATO forces. The derps weren’t happy about that, no foreignor has ever held that position.
Cervantes
@srv: Among the injured is a German General, reportedly.
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est: While I agree that more information is needed for full verification, my initial reaction when they kept saying, “a gunman wearing an Afghan Army uniform” was to scoff.
“In other news, a vicious attack by an animal wearing a bear uniform leaves one man in the hospital. Now here’s the weather.”
Suffern ACE
@Amir Khalid: All good suggestions. I’m sure everyone would believe we were just doing this for humanitarian reasons to save the world.
It would be very unpopular, but then leaderly leaders have to do unpopular things to show that they are leaderly. Now the thing is, that if you are a leader who is going to do an unpopular thing, the unpopular thing had better be wise. I’m sure Thiessen makes an excellent case why it would be wise.
Suffern ACE
@Suffern ACE: I mean, we have to fight those Russian separatists over there lest we have to fight ’em in Brighton Beach.
Suffern ACE
@Amir Khalid: O.K. Thiessen gets props for bringing up an event related to World War II that isn’t Pearl Harbor, Munich, or Normandy, even though it is one that probably more resembles Gaza (where he most certainly wouldn’t have us intervene) than any of the other places he would like to get some action.
Betty Cracker
@Roger Moore: Not good enough. A competent corporate relocation specialist could have had us outta there by February 1, 2009.
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: D’oh!
Bill Arnold
@SiubhanDuinne:
If it’s any consolation, the url with “shooting” in it still works: http://tbo.com/ap/more-than-100-presumed-dead-in-bangladesh-ferry-shooting-20140805/
Matt McIrvin
The right-wing noise machine is leaning on Ebola panic really hard. We can’t let in any foreigners, they all have the Ebola virus!
JoyfulA
@Amir Khalid: People in Bengal, Maine, are probably referred to as tigers.
PurpleGirl
@JPL: NY1’s “In the Newspapers” feature this morning highlighted the difference in a story about a NYC man who arrived home from West Africa and had a high fever and stomach ailment and went to Mt. Sinai Hospital. NY Times story was on page 18A and was matter-of-fact “man gets sick and goes to hospital.” NY Post makes a screaming headline of Ebola…. is large letters, etc. (Oh, the doctors at Mr. Sinai determined that he probably doesn’t have Ebola but put him in isolation room anyway and are proceeding accordingly.)
Mnemosyne
@Matt McIrvin:
To be fair, the sharks aren’t cooperating this summer, so they need something to panic their audiences about.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Well, not everything on his Recommended Reading list should be dismissed out of hand. Where he loses me, though, is with the seemingly reflexive suggestion that just because the US government/establishment has engaged in far too much skulduggery at home and abroad, we should therefore be inclined to trust its sworn enemies, in particular the likes of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The suggestion is so patently absurd that I still have not concluded that I’m reading him right. (Others who pay more attention, perhaps including you, may be able to judge more competently than I can at the moment.)
Cervantes
@Matt McIrvin: Any port in a storm, so to speak.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Finding bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan might then have been more difficult, yes?
Why not leave immediately afterwards, in 2011? Yes, it’s a question one could discuss.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: If BiP wants to be taken seriously, he needs to overhaul his approach. A raving kook on a sidewalk might occasionally insert a fact into his tirade, but passersby can be forgiven for not noticing, I think.
@Cervantes: From what I understand, people pursuing leads from the US found bin Laden, not the military force in Afghanistan. I agree that 2011 would have been a fine opportunity to declare victory and go home, though.
Mnemosyne
@Betty Cracker:
BiP has the same problem that mclaren does — they both cite actual facts, but then draw fucking insane conclusions from those facts.
Did the US bring Ukrainian fascists from overseas and give them refuge after WWII? Yep, just like the US gave shelter to many prominent German and other European fascists. Does this action of 50+ years ago mean that the US is specifically supporting fascists in Ukraine because We Luv Facists? Uh, no, that’s fucking insane. Our current support of Ukraine has more to do with trying to counterbalance Russia in the region than with actions of 50+ years ago.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker: Did not mean to suggest that the US military in Afghanistan found bin Laden all by itself, but rather that assets in Afghanistan were crucial in the search — and that access to such assets would have been a lot more difficult had US forces not also been present in the area.
Roger Moore
@Betty Cracker:
“Getting out of a war” is not the same as “getting the hell out ASAP”. Even if Obama had made an explicit goal of getting out of Afghanistan ASAP- and remember that he ran quite explicitly on the opposite- it was always going to take months to get the troops and their equipment out in good order. As a practical matter, we wanted Afghanistan to have something that looked enough like an army that it could cover our backs as we got out. That was never going to happen quickly.
Betty Cracker
@Roger Moore: I know Obama didn’t run on getting out of Afghanistan (my support would have been even more enthusiastic if he had), but we’re talking wasted years and lives here. Money down a rat hole, and people dead for no good reason. I expect the army we’ve spent so much blood and treasure to stand up will perform about as well as its counterpart in Iraq once we finally leave.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: I’ve seen zero evidence to support that theory, but even if it were true, I still believe we should have got the hell out of Afghanistan with all possible speed. I’d rather have the 1,600+ Americans killed in Afghanistan since Obama took office alive than bin Laden dead.
PaulW
any regular readers of the St. Pete Times here?
Betty Cracker
@PaulW: I read it sometimes, but it ain’t free online and the Trib is, so I end up reading the Trib more, even though it sucks. Because I’m cheap.
Corner Stone
@Betty Cracker:
*coughs gently*
Soooo…ummm…Rioja, Beaujolais or Cabernet?