Mass shooting in Texas church

More details coming. On my phone atm.

I'm sitting here trying to figure out how I should feel about this given that I know people won't want to do anything to prevent it from happening in the future. My heart says to cry out for action, my brain says that the nation, hell even the people in the state/city will scream about tyrany for doing so.

Clearly praying won't do anything when this happens to people at church......I don't know.

Sources say 27 dead and 24 injured.

I have no words and while this is just another example of the insanity of our gun laws, i know nothing will be done.

So hopelessness is probably the feeling right now, this is not the first and it won´t be the last mass shooting.

There's not much to do, really, other than hope that it doesn't hit you or your family.

What can you say anymore...

So sad. My condolences to the family members and friends of the victims.

Thoughts and prayers.

We shouldn't bring politics into it.

Guns don't kill people, bad people kill people.

Banning guns means only criminals will get guns.

If the church goers were armed or gave a damn about their lives, they would have fought back.

I heard some Muslim did it. We need to ban all Muslims and eat their Qurans!!11!

It was all faked because the government wants to take our guns. Thankfully Trump is president. #MAGA

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I'm getting numb to these things due to their frequency, and that is not good.

Another day, another shooting, and some more prayers.

Just remember that at the end of the day, nothing will change.

America values its guns more than its citizens.

I think the last month has rather conclusively proven that good guys with guns aren’t really the answer.

There's plenty we can do in an attempt to minimize these events, we just pretend they wont help because none are a one time fix all solution.

Our country, due to our corrupted politicians, has really lost the concept of improving in increments.

Just another day in mentally ill USA.

RIP fallen ones.

Once again....people suck. And more and more it's the NRA and their gun buddies.

My comment was intended to be a reply to Serraph, within the context of his own reply (which itself acknowledged that there's much that can be done, but culturally we choose to ignore those options).

Nothing is going to stop this. We could have another shooting that kills 400 people tomorrow, then the next day, and the next day, and not a thing would change. This is a matter that deals in the Constitution, and there is no way a few dead people (not to belittle their deaths, just relative to the rest of the population) is enough to even begin to bend the needle to any effective measures to stop this. This right to bear arms is so ingrained into the fundamental fabric of our national identity and history that it appears to me to be insurmountable.

It's a sickness in our society I'm afraid we're just going to have to learn to deal with.

It seems to me the general population in this country just keeps getting increasingly more hostile towards each other and psychologically unhinged maybe it's Karma for all the violence the USA inflicts around the world maybe it's our extreme avarice whatever the case I would say the collective sins of our civilization is starting to manifest and things aren't looking like they are getting better any time soon. IDK if there are any answers for these things but maybe we are looking for answers in the wrong places.

Still can't figure out why these guns are legal. Their only purpose is to kill other people. You can't legally hunt with them. Full automatic guns are mostly illegal, so rules can be put in place. The second amendment doesn't say which guns shall be legal. Time to use some common sense. Let the police have them and military. Handguns for protection and hunting rifles seem fine. Hard(er) to commit a mass shooting with either of those and both serve a legit purpose.

While I am sure many people are ready to turn this political, according to recent reports, the shooter was a former member of the Air Force and he was given a Bad Conduct Discharge (one step above a full blown Dishonorable Discharge) following a court-martial conviction for assaulting his wife and child.

I'm sure that more details will come out over the next few days, but if the initial reports are accurate the shooter couldn't legally possess a firearm to begin with (Launtenberg Amendment), so stronger gun laws probably wouldn't have helped prevent this tragedy.

Another tragedy the rock known as America

@ad1x2: it's already been revealed that he got the gun in 2016 from a gun shop after passing the background check.

@ad1x2: This guy worked in logistics readiness while stationed at Holloman AFB during the same time frame that I was there. I vaguely remember him while being assigned gear for my deployment.

It takes a special kind of scum to open fire on a place of worship. What possible reason for this atrocity can the shooter have had? It's not wise to trespass against God's people.

Politics be damned, something is wrong with our country.

Dang, thats spooky.

So terrible and sad. My condolences go out to all those involved.

Holy ****. That's strange.

Yes, I saw nothing wrong about your comment.

If he passed a background check, then they need to figure out why he did and fix the problem when they do. Lautenberg should have prevented him from buying a firearm through legal channels assuming that the reports that he was court-martialed for attacking his wife and child are accurate.

I can say that I was fortunate enough not to deal with any mass murderers over the years (unless you want to count some of the detainees I ran into when I was deployed to Camp Bucca, Iraq in 2007).

I did have the displeasure of escorting a soldier in my unit that was getting court-martialed for brutally raping two female soldiers a week apart while I was stationed at Fort Benning; he had some psych appointments he had to attend at the base hospital and the prison he was doing pretrial confinement in wasn't going to provide security. He is sitting in Leavenworth as we speak serving a 48 year sentence.

so.

1) we learn about the shooter

2) we learn about the victims

3) we learn about the heroes

4) we learn about a vigil that was held for the victims

5) we move on to the next one

At this point, the only course of action is to just ban guns completely. I really don't care anymore, I was centrist on guns, but not anymore. BAN THE FUCKING THINGS!

Okay that's great. If we never had firearms to begin with that would be great too. But what do you do about the millions of firearms in circulation? Simply banning the sales of firearms won't do anything. I've maybe met 5 people in my life that didn't even own a .22 rifle.

@Serraph105: Yeah, the military is a small world.

Silence from the other side indicates that there is no care in the world.

The ease of access to the guns has led to greater mass shootings, a likely chance of officers getting shot and higher crime rates, yet nothing. Nada. Can't talk about it because it's "political" unless it's a Muslim who did it.

I guarantee you if BLM or antifa armed themselves to the teeth and started a "revolution," calls for gun control would ring out, even from the NRA and self-proclaimed "patriots," even though they're living out the wet dreams of these faux patriots. Nothing more than frauds and fakes, and I'm suppose to believe that guns are the answer to gun violence.

Gun culture is a cancer in this country and we're avoiding the bitter pill to satisfy our addiction.

Ban guns, and have a government buy back program. I have never owned a gun, and never will.

maybe the church was fully of tyranny and the shooter was just protecting 'murica

How do you enforce this without triggering a sharp increase in violence? America can't even ban weed or beer without facing everything from casual disobedience to violent resistance. In the end law enforcement just has to back down. The war on guns would go about as well as the war on beer and drugs. You know, if beer and drugs could be themselves be used to kill the folks trying to take them away.

This is without going into the fact that many of the folks you will be asking to enforce the ban are often enthusiasts themselves. You can not just pass a law and change people's minds. If they think your law is dumb they will ignore it, and often shoot you if you try to force the issue. That is one of the kind of neat things about America. Stuff like this can never happen unless everyone is already mostly on board anyway.

Anyone who is so ready and willing to shoot you for forcing the issue should NOT have gun in the first place. And the vast majority of americans are atleast in favor of much tighter gun laws. Guns are usless to the average citizen, and people who make the argument of "We need guns to protect ourselves from government tyranny" are only kidding themselves, because the government has already taken away there rights.

I will make you a deal, take them away from the folks doing the forcing first. Until then it is silly to pretend you have some sort of moral high ground. If you are fine with supplying folks with guns so that they can use them to enforce your will, you don't have much room to complain about people having the ability to defend their own.

Oh, forgot to add: You never did explain how you are going to enforce it without a truckload of violence.

There is absolutely no way the anti-gun lawmakers would get enough support to repeal the Second Amendment. States like California and New York may vote yes to ratify a repeal, but states like Texas, North Carolina, and many of the other red states (as well as the swing states and some of the right-leaning blue states) would laugh at the idea. Only 13 states need to refuse to ratify for a new amendment to fail, and far more states than that wouldn't be on board with guns being banned.

But if we go into a fantasy land and say that a supermajority of Congress adopts it, and they manage to convince at least 38 states to ratify it, good luck collecting all of those guns. I wouldn't put it past the states that refused to ratify to demand the right to secede before they let ATF and whomever else they gather to help enforce the new ban come in their states to start collecting guns. Even if the state governments decide not to resist, there is nothing stopping thousands, if not millions of gun owners to bunker down like Waco to defend their gun rights they will insist were wrongfully taken away. Many would probably assume a conspiracy to take the guns was organized behind the scenes and use it as justification to ignore the new Amendment and subsequent ban on guns. The bloodshed from people resisting would probably kill more people than all of the mass shootings we had in the past 50 years combined.

A buyback program is unlikely to help anyway, because in the case of people that purchased their firearms legally, we're not talking about a poor family that needs the money. We're talking about people that already spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on their collections being told that they have to give them up for what would probably be only a fraction of what they paid for it and at the end of the day they no longer have a way to shoot an intruder. Your personal feelings of guns being abhorrent is irrelevant, since a pro-life person that feels abortion is abhorrent isn't going to change the fact that someone that is pregnant and wants to end their pregnancy is still going to use their legal right to get an abortion to end their pregnancy no matter what the pro-life person tells them.

I've met maybe 2% gun owners. There aren't as many as you're leading people to believe. They're just loud and vocal.

We have to be loud and vocal? Why do I never get the memo on these things? (points at gun made sometime in the 1800's)

Look at something else beside guns?

It's really just a problem of scale, with no overnight solutions. The US can't just copy Australia by banning guns one year and being totally fine afterwards.

If politicians were willing to commit to a long-term goal of phasing out guns over the next 10-20 years, they could easily halve gun deaths in that timeframe.

@horgen: Ha bet you have one of those bumper stickers on your car about not giving up your gun until they pry it from your cold dead fingers too. ;p

On my car? God no, it's on my electrical bike(pedal bike). Get with the times man :P

Unfortunately, the USA has a very particular situation that makes banning of guns pretty much a non-starter. Tighter controls maybe, but when it comes to the majority of mass shootings, these wouldn't generally help. There is also that matter that gun production is a rather large industry in the USA, so it not only has quite an influence, but also acts as a bit of a control internationally. If guns got banned, another producer for weapons is going to take over all that lost USA production. It is just a giant mess of a situation.

According to The Hill, the Air Force failed to report his court-martial conviction to the NCIC database, which most likely contributed to him passing a background check when he should have been prevented from doing so due to his domestic violence conviction. Assuming that it is true, it was an epic failure on the Air Force, but definitely not the first time a court-martial conviction didn't make it to the civilian world.

Honestly, chance of dying in a mass shooting is similar to being killed by lightning. Most gun deaths are more from domestic violence or gang crime - hand guns, e.g.