22
votes
Plymouth shooting: Six dead including child on a devastating night for the city
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Six killed including child after shootings in Plymouth
- Authors
- Carl Eve
- Published
- Aug 13 2021
- Word count
- 376 words
This is only the 4th mass shooting in the UK - ignoring the Preston Strike of 1842 as it was arguably legal. For better or worse that also completely excludes the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The other 3 were in Hungerford 1987 (16 fatalities) and Dunblane, Scotland 1996 (17 fatalities) and Cumbria 2010 (12 fatalities)
I mention this because it might not be obvious just how shocking public shootings are in the UK.
Edit: Corrected to include Cumbria 2010.
It's also worth noting that after Hungerford the ownership of rifles was drastically restricted, after Dunblane the ownership of handguns the same and after Cumbria shotgun ownership rules were reviewed but iirc not significantly changed (because they were already quite strict). In 2019 the laws were reviewed again and tightened up even more. It is very, very hard to get a gun in the UK. Many people here live their entire lives without even seeing a gun in person (the police don't generally carry them), let alone firing one.
The UK has one of the lowest rates of firearm deaths in the world. Gun control works.
Do you think the British government will further restrict firearm ownership? Witnesses said the gunman used a pump-action shotgun, which is currently not prohibited in the U.K., but is in Australia.
It appears that his permit was revoked after an assault accusation, but was reinstated in July - no doubt there are going to be some very hard questions about how that happened, whether procedure was followed, and how to further tighten the permitting process if it turns out this was within the guidelines.
That said, as someone who lives in the UK but has no specific expertise, it does seem like the firearms laws as they stand are broadly fit for purpose. How this specific permit fell through the cracks is something the authorities will need to learn from, but thankfully it already is a once in a decade tragedy - there may simply not be that much that can be productively changed.
Our current government? I doubt it. Call me cynical but they don't give a fuck. More realistically, farmers like having shotguns (with some justification, at least) and the conservatives like to support "country people" because rural constituencies consistently vote for them. So limiting access to shotguns will probably cost them votes.
What I think might be more likely is that the police will review their procedures for issuing firearms licenses to make sure a kid living in a town who pretty clearly didn't have a reason to own a gun doesn't get given one again. Which he should never have been.
The exception to the rule was around late 2017 and for 2018 where there were police with guns at most major stations after the 4 Islamic extremist attacks in 2017 but for most of the time it's only at the airport and palaces.
Must be weird living in a place where they are not a regular occurrence.
In the vast majority of the world there isn't the extreme level of firearms related homicides seen in the US and a few other countries scattered around the world. E.g. When a shooting happens here in Toronto, Canada (even police shootings), it almost always makes the local and sometimes even National news, simply because they happen so infrequently. So overall, I would say it's actually more "weird" living in a place where there is a high level of gun violence.
Mass shootings are so normalized in the United States we don't even hear about most of them. There have been over 500 this year so far.
Mass shootings are so normalized in the United States that over 95 percent of schools implement active shooter drills.
Mass shootings are so normalized in the United States that a quarter of a million students have experienced gun violence while at school.
We should be far more ashamed of this than we are.
For America, they're probably so desensitized to the issue that a shooting won't make the news unless there's at least ten fatalities.
Here is a list of the deadliest mass shootings in the US since 1949. Nearly all of these have been at the hands of lone gunmen aside from Columbine and the deadliest by far was the 2017 Vegas attack with 60 fatalities (including the perpetrator.) It was also the only attack to have injuries approaching four digits.
This is what lone actors are capable of, and I genuinely worry what would happen if people in the alt-right or incel movement banded together for a coordinated attack. I also worry that even if that record gets shattered in future, the Republicans will still block any gun control regulations in their usual manner.
The US is the same color on this map as Afghanistan. Wow.
Plymouth shooting: Jake Davison named as gunman who killed five
BBC News – 13th August 2021
Absolutely bizarre how incels are becoming the top mass murder group. I remember when lonely men online were telling each other it gets better and to go out more rather than making up misogynist conspiracies that made all their problems the fault of someone else. Let alone “showing” society by going around killing people? WTF is the end goal even? Also on a more general level: WTF happened to the internet?
It's a recent and unfortunately growing trend. The percentage of American men under 30 who have had no female sexual partners since turning 18 has more than trebled from 8% to 27% between 2008 and 2018. A similar albeit far less drastic trend can be seen in women too.
Sadly, until things are either done to tackle that trend or to otherwise break the feedback loop that leads to lonely men being radicalised, violent incidents like this will only continue.
One way is that Britain could start labelling incel communities as proscribed terrorist organisations or pressure ISPs to IP block their domains, but that's going to be like playing a game of whack-a-mole. For every community they strike down, another will surface. Another way could be to actually invest in mental health care and make it more accessible, to prevent lonely men from going down that rabbit-hole in the first place. Or... maybe economic reforms are needed to help these people find work and actually live an independent life without being stuck unable to even move out by their late twenties.
Sure, but the communities often get much smaller each time they are shut down and forced to move. So IMO it's still worth repeatedly stamping them out, since it makes them harder to find, harder to maintain, and reduces their ability to recruit more disaffected young men into their toxic ideology.
I agree that preventative measures are the better approach long-term, but they're a much more difficult and costly thing to implement, which makes them a much harder sell... especially to "austerity" focused politicians, who are already working hard to do the exact opposite by undermining what little government socioeconomic support already exists.
Ironically, the austerity measures pushed by the right wing politicians that these people tend to support are exacerbating these problems.
With drug and alcohol related deaths at their highest due to cuts to funding to help them and no sign of any other increased mental health funding fat chance the govt will try and fix that problem.
Expect more austerity over the coming months. Our bill from COVID-19 and Brexit is going to be astronomical; so much so that I'm surprised our national deficit hasn't spiralled to Greece levels.
Boris talks about "levelling up" the nation, yet we know his buzzwords are just full of shit.
He was reportedly an active Redditor on various incel subreddits. His account (u/Jake3572) was suspended by the admins on August 11th after sexually harassing a 16-year-old female user via chat. The PushShift archive reveals a deeply sexist, homophobic, and racist comment history.
Coming from someone in a similar spot to him (29, ASD, living with parents, virgin, currently at a crossroads in life), that comment history was a very difficult read.
You could just sense that man's descent into madness and depravity from the increasing amount of vitriol he threw out about his own mother and how in his mind he scapegoated her for all his social problems. Then there was his heated pro-paedophilic argument with the IncelsInAction community which was an even bigger yikes from me. I would not be surprised if the circumstances which led to his suspension from Reddit was what made him finally snap. It was less than two days before the shooting...
The shooter was active on reddit prior to the event.