Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

Now the Finns.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7082795.stm

:/

global epidemic spreads unchecked using news media as vector

High school shooting in Finland.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7246003.stm

i mean come on this shit is old now

ffs not again

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7936817.stm

*placeholder for insensitive comment*

I can't get the story to load. Probably for the better. (Sigh)

this one too, alabama

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/10/shooting.alabama/

In summary: At least ten people are believed to have been killed in a shooting spree at a German school. Shooter believed to be a former pupil (oh wait that bit has now been removed). Shooter thought to be in custody.

xpost

10 dead at both shootings on the same day wtf.

15 dead in germany now.
wasnt someone shot at a church in the USA over the weekend too?

http://www.moonconnection.com/moon_gadget.phtml#rt2ig1_1236782715

wait a minute, meant to indicate it's a full moon atm.

wasnt someone shot at a church in the USA over the weekend too?

― Pfunkboy in blood drenched rabbit suit jamming in the woods (Herman G. Neuname)

yep

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090309/ap_on_re_us/church_shooting

Also, the economy. Not meant to be flip, btw, but isn't there usually an upswing in this type of crap when the economy tanks? I seem to remember a bunch of workplace shooting lined up with the 90s recession.

i don't think 17-year old Rammstein fans are motivated by the mortgage bubble bursting, jon

17-year old Rammstein fans

classy

It was a general comment, hadn't really delved in the details of any of the stories. I was just wondering about how trends like this tie in with the global economy turning to shit.

There was that one dude who killed his wife and kids and self because he couldn't afford to take care of them all with two jobs and it was mega-sad.

The idea that a man's worth is in his productivity/success and that if HE can't be "successful" then everyone who was his responsibility must cease to exist, is just..........beyond. I can hardly form sentences when I think about this.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/nursing_home_shooting

A NURSING HOME. What do you have to do to be even worse than your average spree shooter? Murder a bunch of helpless fogeys, apparently.

I'm sure this has been said before, but It's kind of disheartening how these mass murders have become an accepted fact of life. This was the 4th story on NPR's hourly news report today. Yeah, there is a lot of stuff going on in the world and maybe this is the forth most important story of the day, but holy shit we've become accustomed to this kind of violence. It barely registers anymore.

There was also a story today about some 17 year old guy who has stabbed one sister and then cut the other (5 years old!) one's head off, in front of a 3rd sister... he was still hacking at the 5 year olds head when the cops got there.

Just... what.

Perhaps, but then again I believe these things have always happened all the time, everywhere, they're just far more publicized now due to 24-hour-news cycles. It's still a sad thing, but people "randomly going nuts" and doing these horrible things is inevitable in every society.

but holy shit we've become accustomed to this kind of violence. It barely registers anymore.

― Super Cub, Sunday, March 29, 2009 10:36 PM

ya some people even think its great (see thread title)

It's still a sad thing, but people "randomly going nuts" and doing these horrible things is inevitable in every society.

Actually, I think there have been societies where murder is
virtually non-existent. Usually these sort of societies have had a very strong social cohesion and a strict set of shared moralities though, with little room for nonconformism. I would assume there's a lot of variation between different countries of the world in the frequency of murder sprees though. It's inevitable in any society that people will go nuts, but the choices of what you do when you go nuts seem to be at least partially influenced by your surrounding culture. And in most Western societies a shooting spree seems to have become one of the "viable" alternatives for action, sadly. In the first school shooting spree in Finland, for example, it was later found out that the killer had some strong fascist/social Darwinist ideas and that he idolized the Columbine shooters.

Actually, I think there have been societies where murder is virtually non-existent

wanna come up with some examples, cause I don't buy this at all / have never heard of such societies outside of the lyrics to 'cortez the killer'. "strong social cohesion" isn't gonna overpower certain mental/psychological disorders that some people are simply born with.

(sorry)

wanna come up with some examples, cause I don't buy this at all / have never heard of such societies outside of the lyrics to 'cortez the killer'. "strong social cohesion" isn't gonna overpower certain mental/psychological disorders that some people are simply born with.

I remember reading in some sociology textbook that certain Buddhist communities in Asia have had virtually no violent crime at all, but I can't find any information on that online right now. I probably shoudln't have used the word "society", since what I was talking about was small, geographically limited communities. Anyway, I don't really think there are any psychological disorders that people are born with, certainly not ones that automatically lead to a murder spree. Or can you name any?

There was also a story today about some 17 year old guy who has stabbed one sister and then cut the other (5 years old!) one's head off, in front of a 3rd sister... he was still hacking at the 5 year olds head when the cops got there.

Just... what.

― one art, please (Trayce), Monday, 30 March 2009 03:46 (8 hours ago) Bookmark

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20090330/twl-man-murders-his-sisters-at-birthday-3fd0ae9.html

The policeman broke into the house and witnessed Revelus decapitating five-year-old Bianca, whose birthday cake was on the kitchen table.

Thanks for highlighting that.

Now they're saying two killed? Not sure what's going on

not too unusual, in the midst of a still-developing crisis initial details get muddled...or some networks continue to report outdated info not realizing it's changed

xp you're right, I assumed students but no confirmation on victims yet

i hate this fucking country so much, i really wish there was a feasible/realistic path out.

I'm with you. The USA has always been an unusually violent nation and there's never going to be quick fix now that there are more guns here than total inhabitants. But our shit-poor excuses for leaders seldom try to fix anything at all and even the few and feeble attempts that are made get blocked by the gun lobby at some point in the process of implementing them. Those fuckers are as bad or worse than the UHC CEO who was offed on the street -- with a gun, naturally.

while spree shootings were hardly a new thing when I was growing up, I remember Columbine happening and there being an actual shock, like school shootings prior to then in this country were usually isolated affairs where one kid brought his gun to school and shot someone specific, not like indiscriminately mowing people down.

whereas nowadays, it's no less sad, but it feels weirder when a lot of time passes without one. and that is depressing.

this thread is seventeen years old

precisely. and not one meaningful change has been made in those seventeen years. our overlords have decided, on our behalf, that this is an acceptable price to pay to keep the wheels of capitalism rolling and the right pockets fat.

bump stocks were banned for a little while before the SC overturned it

i do wonder how much of this would've happened if not for Columbine, i don't think anyone ever really considered the idea of shooting up a school before that, suddenly now it was in everyone's heads

xp bump muskets are our colonial birthright

Well there was the infamous University of Texas tower shooting in 1966, but that didn't seem to inspire a pattern

the problem with Columbine was how the media made them celebrities with their coverage. I don't mean "DON'T PUBLISH THE NAMES OF THE KILLERS" type-arguments that always crop up with well-meaning but naive people, but they treated them sort of like enigmatic dead rock stars. they've been a bit better about not doing that as time has passed and we've had more of these, but it was outright grotesque the way the media outright sought out clean narratives to attribute to them, i.e. the Marilyn Manson connection, 'trenchcoat mafia', etc.

A few months before Columbine:

Springfield, Oregon 5/21/1998

Thurston High School shooting: An expelled student targeted his parents and the school and killed four people and injured twenty-five others before being arrested.

and a few months earlier

The Westside Middle School shooting was a mass shooting that occurred on March 24, 1998, at Westside Middle School in unincorporated Craighead County, Arkansas near the city of Jonesboro. 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden opened fire on the school, shooting and killing five people with multiple weapons, and both were arrested when they attempted to flee the scene. Ten others were wounded.

1992 Lindhurst High School shooting: A 20-year-old past student opened fire on a classroom and killed four people, wounded ten others, and held eighty people hostage during an eight-hour siege before he surrendered.

I wonder if it will make any difference that it was at a Christian academy. I tried to quickly look up private vs religious academy shooting data but work interfered. Just considering that Christian schools are typically meant to protect and insulate kids from the the real world, diversity, evolution, seeing poor people, etc, if there's a shift away from the idea that it actually offers any protection I wonder what possibilities that might create.

Sorry, PUBLIC versus religious academy obv

Feels to me like any shift caused by gun violence at christian schools would more likely be toward increased home schooling rather than trying to reduce gun violence.

I mean, it's possible. There are a lot of kids in Christian schools though who are getting "better" than public school educations whose parents are relatively normal people who both work full time and etc who just have the means to make sure their kids don't rub shoulders with non-white people or learn about evolution. It's not all quivverful cultists.

Just considering that Christian schools are typically meant to protect and insulate kids from the the real world, diversity, evolution, seeing poor people, etc,

Many private 'Christian' schools started out as "segregation academies", private schools set up shortly after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision banned racial segregation in public schools. The ruling did not initially apply to private schools though, leading many white parents, especially in the South, to create whites-only private schools for their kids. A 1972 report on school desegregation found that segregation academies could usually be identified by the word "Christian" or "church" in the school's name. (Racial discrimination in US private schools was ruled illegal in 1976).

Awhile back I looked at several of the websites of former segregation academies listed in the Wikipedia article below just to see if the circumstances of the schools' founding was mentioned in any of the "history" or "about us" links. A few schools amended their initial approach in ensuing years, quickly accepting a percentage of Black and other minorities similar to the overall young population in the area. But most schools glossed it over entirely, and one or two still had dog-whistle code words and phrases implying this was a place your kids could go and not ever have to sit next to a black person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy

I remember as a kid that McDonalds shooting in San Diego being a really big deal. I think Nightline did shows on that a bunch.

Someone made a documentary about that Huberty shooting a few years ago

I didn't hear about this all day and it's in my town. Is this the first female school shooter?

One of the first highly publicised high school shooters was female. She didn't like mondays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(San_Diego)

If you count adults who are school shooter there was Laurie Dann in suburban Chicago as well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Nick_Corwin

working link for above

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(San_Diego)

not that i support anything about shootings in schools -- nor whatever this particular shooter's motives were -- but i suspect our national conversation about guns would be rather different if the majority of spree shooters were women

(apologies for failing to put 'national conversation' in quotes)

The terrible shooting in Nashville last year was also at a Christian school, by a former student. Massive waves of public protest for new gun safety laws, crying parents testifying etc., got zero response. Just pathetic. It's not even fair to say this is what Americans want, even in my super red state polls show big majorities of people who support at least things like safe storage laws and red flag laws. (Wondering if this Wisconsin one is going to be a storage issue, where she just grabbed her dad's or someone's gun.)

One of the first highly publicised high school shooters was female. She didn't like mondays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(San_Diego🕸)

19-year-old woman shot up my old college campus in 1996:

https://www.centredaily.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article281246013.html

One of the first highly publicised high school shooters was female.

And the latest.

"if the majority of spree shooters were women"

The Bojack Horseman episode about this is too bleak to really be funny

Divorced Christians with Guns: An American Love Story

Her mother and father, Mellissa and Jeff Rupnow, first married in 2011, two years after they had Natalie, who had recently started using the first name Samantha.

They divorced in 2014 and shared custody of Natalie, who they agreed would live primarily with her mother.

The couple then remarried three years later in 2017 — just to get divorced for a second time another three years after that, in 2020.

Before Natalie was born, her mom had been married to and divorced from a different man, and also had a daughter with a man she never married. Natalie’s stepsister, now 20, was raised by other legal guardians, the documents show.

Natalie’s dad, meanwhile, is a Christian who shared photos of his daughter and celebrated her achievements — like earning a purple belt in karate — on his Facebook page.

In one alarming post from August 2024, Jeff Rupnow posted a photo of Natalie shooting a rifle at the North Bristol Sportsman’s Club in Sun Prairie.

anyway this girl appears to have just poisoned her mind with the internet, white supremecist/murder/gore websites and chatrooms.

Dystopia

She was born in 2009.

whatever happened to her, it was founded in something more personal than watching the internet

She went to a Christian school but it’s not polite to say that she learned her white supremacy there.

she doesn't seem to have appreciated her schooling very much

One of the first highly publicised high school shooters was female. She didn't like mondays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Elementary_School_shooting_(San_Diego)

― bbq

kind of a hobbyhorse of mine, because of the way people think of it through the boomtown rats song

After her parents separated, Brenda allegedly lived in poverty with her father; both father and daughter slept on a single mattress on the living room floor in a house strewn with empty bottles from alcoholic drinks.[4][5] At later parole hearings, she claimed to have been subject to "total neglect" from her mother and sexual abuse from her father; the accusations have been disputed by the respective parents.[3][6] At the time, she lived in a house across the street from the school. Aged 16 at the time of the shooting, she was 5'2" (157 cm) and had bright red hair.[7][4][8][5][9]

In December, a psychiatric evaluation arranged by her probation officer recommended that Spencer be admitted to a mental hospital for depression, but her father refused to give permission. For Christmas 1978, he gave her a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammunition.[4][5] Spencer later said, "I asked for a radio and got a rifle." Asked why he had done that, she answered, "He bought the rifle so I would kill myself."[12]

the song... i mean, geldof was repeating what he'd been told, doesn't exculpate him, but that was how the story got told. bad seed. motiveness malignity. "the accusations have been disputed by the respective parents".

it's funny actually, the way the song starts out with

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload

do you know about the japanese concept of "denpa"?

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Denpa

The term "Denpa" was originally associated with a real-life murder incident, namely the Fukagawa Street murders. On July 11, 1981, a man called Kawamata Gunji stabbed four people to death and injured three others during a stabbing spree. The victims were specifically women and children. Kawamata Gunji suffered from paranoia and during his trial claimed that he was compelled to commit the crimes because he had been getting "electronically harassed" by radio waves for years, and these supossedly created "voices" that told him to kill people.[4] These brainwashing radio waves got known as "poisonous radiowaves", or Dokudenpa (毒電波). The incident and his trial gained significant attention in Japanese popular culture, inspiring documentaries, television dramas, and novels.

in japan, this aesthetic became really prevalent in "otaku" culture after the arrest of the so-called "otaku murderer":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Miyazaki

for decades after that, otaku were thought of, in the west, as being, i mean, basically serial killers. the denpa aesthetic became embedded deep in japanese culture through its influence on "visual novels", a medium with no clear parallel in western culture - the closest thing one could compare them to were graphic adventure games. these works dealt with some really dark and transgressive themes. one could dismiss some of it as "edgelordy" (and some of it is - the anime adaptation of "school days", for instance, is pretty legendarily awful), but to me, there's often a lot more going on - a lot of these works, from what i can tell (i can't read or understand spoken japanese, so i'm reliant on secondary sources for a lot of this) deal with trauma, abuse, isolation, queerness. i'd say the best-known work in the west to touch on these themes is probably "doki doki literature club" (DDLC).

DDLC conforms to the "denpa" idea in one other way - all of the characters are school-age girls. "Denpa" today is generally thought of as "Denpa Moe" - the combination of cute and innocent girls with dark and psychologically troubling themes and aesthetics - isolation, mental illness, marginalization.

While stereotypically this sort of thing is associated with "hikikomori" or "NEETs", people who get stereotyped as, you know, basement dwelling incels, it's not exclusive to (cis) men. There's also, for instance, the work of Sayaka Murata, who wrote "Convenience Store Woman" based on her experience working as a part-time convenience store clerk for 17 years. I've read it. It's a really great book, talking about people who just don't have a place in normative society, what that looks like, what the effects are. Two years after that she wrote _Earthlings_, which I couldn't finish. It deals with some dark stuff, again, to me, not in a salacious manner, but in order to directly confront an experience of reality that doesn't get acknowledged - particularly the absolutely endemic nature of child sexual abuse, or CSA.

It's not as dark, but Kabi Nagata's story "My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness" touches on similar themes. She talks about her mental health issues, her queerness, her alcoholism, her eating disorder... I mean these are all really common experiences for a lot of people. Some of these things have gendered components, but they're not really a matter of simple binary gender a lot of times.

When gender non-conforming people are involved in violent crimes - which does happen, it's pretty routine for them to get misgendered. For instance, one of the school shootings I'm most aware of (there are so many that I'm not aware of a lot of them) was committed in 2023 in Nashville by a man named Aiden Hale. I'm aware of it because there is a tendency for members of marked groups to be held collectively responsible for anything done by any member of a marked group, and Hale was transmasculine. He perpetrated the shooting at a religious parochial school as well, incidentally. I mention this because I saw someone upthread speculating that people might treat the latest shooting differently since it happened at a religious school. Anyway, I've seen people talk about the murders he committed in the same category as "murders committed by women", even though he wasn't a woman.

Incidentally, I personally suspect that this tendency for members of marginalized groups to be held collectively responsible has something to do with why so many mass shootings are perpetrated by white males. If a white male does something, he's judged as an individual. It's not taken as being reflective of some essential nature of all white men in general, not in any _meaningful_ way. Gun violence in America is, in particular, _incredibly_ racialized.

So yeah, I think American mass shootings do indicate that there are some problems in America above and beyond the ready availability of firearms. That said, the, like, really clear, obvious takeaway from this is that means reduction is kinda, like, fundamentally necessary. The inability and/or unwillingness of the American state to implement means reduction, well... personally, I think it tends to undermine the perceived legitimacy of that government, particularly as pertains to the state's monopoly on violence. I mean clearly this isn't a monopoly the government can effectively enforce at this point. There's this atmosphere of pervasive terror, particularly among the most vulnerable and marginalized people - this sense that they could be killed at any time, for any reason, and the law would not protect them.

I'm sorry, wait, is the the dystopia thread? #onethread I guess.

I think American mass shootings do indicate that there are some problems in America above and beyond the ready availability of firearms.

We can't eliminate things like paranoia, depression, violent fantasies, sociopathy, bullying, machismo, and so on and on, from society. But it feels to me like eliminating easy access to firearms could reduce the death toll from all the dystopian dysfunction in US society and that would be a good starting place for fixing what actually can be fixed.

this is a good piece: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/the-madison-wisconsin-school-shooter

this is a good piece: https://shatterzone.substack.com/p/the-madison-wisconsin-school-shooter

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm)

sigh. "good" as in "otm", unfortunately.

this kinda shit is what scares me. you get a cis woman doing a mass shooting and this gets claimed to be some manifestation of trans stuff. the way patriarchy views gender is so fucked up. of course the right claims she's trans... only _boys_ are supposed to be allowed to be violent or even, like, _angry_. sometimes there are even specious "biological" claims around reasons boys are violent. like oh, it's testosterone that makes boys like that. personally - and i'm sure somebody somewhere will find cause to take this statement out of context - not having testosterone in my body has not made me one whit less violent or angry.

and yet, i'm a much lower risk for violence than i was before (in my case, the only act of violence i ever would have committed would have been suicide). i have different _choices_ now. i was bullied as a "boy" and people told me "if you don't stand up to them they'll keep doing it". i was viewed with disgust for not standing up to bullying with physical violence. i was blamed for being bullied because "it takes two people to make a fight". it's not like amab boys are the only people who get bullied. i know from experience that cis women aren't incapable of violence. i know from experience that there are lots of ways to hurt someone.

all of this fearmongering, all of these lies, and what i get most from it is the expectation is evey single trans person is supposed to be immune to violence. more than that, what aiden hale did is somehow taken as a judgement on _me_. that i react with particular horror and revulsion to what hale did, that it's appalling to me _beyond_ what any cis male shooter has done... that doesn't matter. because he was trans, and because i'm trans, the assumption people make is that i was _in on it somehow_.

i know plenty of women who were raised in gun culture. some of them are ex-military. i don't like it. i don't like being around so many guns when trans people are constantly being told to kill ourselves. i don't think it helps.

brenda ann spencer said that her dad handed her a gun with the expectation that she kill herself. should she have?

We can't eliminate things like paranoia, depression, violent fantasies, sociopathy, bullying, machismo, and so on and on, from society. But it feels to me like eliminating easy access to firearms could reduce the death toll from all the dystopian dysfunction in US society and that would be a good starting place for fixing what actually can be fixed.

I was reading a book about the so-called "Wild West," and I came across a couple of passages partly explaining what historically made/makes America a particularly (gun) violent country. Here's a snippet:

First off—absolutely essential to western violence was the fact that post–Civil War America was awash in cheap guns. Why? It’s tied to the history of American industrial development, and to the transition from an artisanal mode of production to a system of mass production.

Not long after it became an independent nation, the United States emerged as a leading global innovator in firearm design and firearm production. In part, this was born from the experience of fighting two wars against Great Britain: the Revolution and the War of 1812. Britain at that time was the world’s foremost producer of firearms, which necessitated a homegrown American arms industry to challenge them. Therefore, in the early 1800s, the growing industrial cities of the U.S. Northeast became hubs of firearm innovation. Yankee manufacturers deserve credit for several “firsts” in the history of weaponry. They pioneered the first breech-loading rifle, in 1811, but perhaps most important for our story is the patenting by Connecticut gunmaker Samuel Colt of the revolving pistol, or revolver, in 1836. This firearm, also known as the Paterson revolver after the New Jersey city in which it was designed, was a handheld weapon that could be fired multiple times without reloading. It was a weapon that had little use in hunting game or wildlife, and was primarily designed for efficiently killing humans.

One might imagine that Colt’s 1836 invention of the revolver was a milestone that, overnight, changed firearm history forever, but that wasn’t true. These were expensive weapons, and Colt had significant trouble finding a market. His business floundered in the early years. Why? Because this initial revolver was still an artisanal product, meaning that it was made not by machines but by individual workmen, who crafted each part by hand. Every single weapon was different. If a firearm broke in use, there was no quick or easy way to repair it, because there were no standardized parts.

Colt’s dream, along with many American mechanical engineers, was to pioneer a system of machine production that would produce identical goods built from identical, interchangeable parts. The firearm industry was not alone in this; manufacturers of sewing machines and bicycles, in particular, wrestled with the same challenge. After investing tremendous resources in research and some espionage on the British, Colt ultimately cracked the riddle in the early 1850s. By the time of the 1851 “Navy” model of the revolver, Colt’s company had pioneered a system for transcending artisanal production and manufacturing interchangeable parts. His firm then opened a massive factory in Hartford, Connecticut, for the purpose of mass-producing these weapons. The eruption of the Civil War soon thereafter delivered Colt cushy government production contracts that would supercharge the business. Thus, by the 1870s, Colt revolvers were affordable and deadly firearms that could be found across the U.S., and particularly in the West. Competitors like Remington and Winchester soon followed Colt’s lead with interchangeable parts. The firearms industry would be one of the first to be thoroughly transformed by this engineering revolution, but hardly the last. Henry Ford’s affordable automobile of the 1910s was built on the same principles, as was nearly every manufactured consumer good that followed.

So the evolution of American manufacturing, which filled America with cheap guns, is a key part of understanding western violence. After all, without guns, there’s no gun violence. But equally vital is American legal culture—the laws on the books that regulate violence. As a general rule, humans aren’t always great at getting along, and in any given time or place, folks will come to hate each other bitterly. One of the main reasons these people don’t kill each other is the fear of legal punishment: they don’t want to be prosecuted and imprisoned for murder. But what if you are provoked and act in self-defense? When does the law allow you to kill as a means of self-preservation?

For a point of comparison, let’s consider the British legal system. On the question of violent self-defense, the British were quite clear. Basically, if you were threatened by someone who meant to do you violence, it was your duty to flee the scene in whatever way possible. Only when you were literally “to the wall”—those words are drawn from the text of the law—with no realistic way of escaping, did the law grant you some right to commit “excusable homicide” in self-defense. This law had been formulated to make sure that the British Crown maintained a monopoly on violence; the British ruling class did not want to deputize regular people in defending themselves.

“To the wall” is the legal code that the U.S. inherited as a young nation, and it was the dominant statute regarding violence in self-defense at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But in the following decades, American courts at the state and federal levels reevaluated this doctrine, arguing that unsettled frontier conditions and American distaste for retreat made a shift necessary. By the 1870s, most states had instituted codes stating that a party threatened by violence had “no duty to retreat.” What did these words entail? In essence, if you “reasonably believed” that you were in “immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm,” then you were not required to retreat “to the wall,” as earlier laws had required, but could use force to respond to that threat, and you would have a reasonable chance at acquittal in a subsequent murder trial.

The turn from “to the wall” toward “no duty to retreat” was fully institutionalized by the Supreme Court in 1921, in Brown v. United States, though it had long been state-level practice in much of the country. This marks a profound transition. It would ensure that the United States would become a far more violent place than comparable western European nations. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how many homicides have taken place because of this legal transition, and we live in its shadow today. The controversial “stand your ground” laws of recent years are an even more muscular outgrowth of “no duty to retreat.”

Can’t help but wonder what role race played in that transition in legal thinking.

Yeah, especially post civil war. makes you think...

What’s the name of that book josh

that's super interesting Josh, thanks

On a related note, I just happened to watch an interesting film from 1983 called Handgun, aka Deep in the Heart of Texas which deals with this very theme of Colt's lasting contribution to American culture. The film's fictional but has a distinct cinema vérité feel to it and is uncannily contemporary in its concerns.