Videogame tournament shooting.

Terrible day for gamers all over the world.

Pray for all the victims involved.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jacksonville-police-report-multiple-fatalities-video-game-tournament-n903996

Awful, simply awful.

I mean what can you say? Wish I hadn't caught the clip of the shooting making the rounds. Sadly this is yet another shooting that will eventually be forgotten, when will they learn.

Absolutely awful, disgusting and hateful. My deepest sympathy to all involved.

@machofantastico: Currently down here right now (visiting.). Place is in pandemonium. They've shut down Jacksonville landing (kind of like an open mall.).

Terrible day for videogamers everywhere.

Terrible news, Ben and Jan's recent Evo video went a long way in making me want to go to Vegas for that event but I'm going to take a hard pass on stepping foot in the USA for the foreseeable future. This hits home a lot harder than the other many shootings that goes on in that country.

Fucking thrilled that I live in the only country this happens constantly. Best part about it is that it's frequent enough that by the time I stopped being scared of public gatherings, another one happens to refresh my constant state of anxiety and dread! It's terrific! Now comes the "thoughts and prayers", "there's nothing we can do", "America is too big", and "Don't trample on my freedoms" part of the cycle before going back to absolutely nothing being done to help prevent tragedies like this.

Another mass shooting in the US, another day of ignoring the obvious gun problem causing them.

Fuck the NRA

Absolutely horrid news. Thoughts and prayers go out to those who were affected from this incident. Though for real something needs to be done with gun control in the USA. All these shootings shouldn’t be happening at such a frequent rate and we need to crack down on gun control to prevent anymore from happening.

Very bad news indeed! Thoughts to those who were affected.

The shooter was supposedly participating in the tournament and the shooting the place up was his reaction to losing and dropping out.
That's a whole new level of pathetic low..

You really shouldn't let fear of gun violence make you miss out on a potential trip to USA.

Statistically speaking, you are much more likely to die in USA by traffic accidents than by getting shot, especially in a mass shooting. It's so statistically rare (although it happens much more in USA than other developed countries).

So don't let fear guide your decision making. You let the domestic terrorists win if you do that.

Also - to the rest of the folks here who already blaming gun control laws (it happens every time after a mass shooting) - there are more number of guns than people in the United States.

There is no way we can possibly create legislation to control and take all of these guns.

As of right now, we don't know what type of gun the shooter used and so we can't make calls to change gun laws.

My deepest sympathies goes out to the victims and their families. And I hope that from this event, we can learn lessons about increasing security measures at large events with many people.

The hell I can't.

@castermhief117: You're part of the problem.

How about we pass a national law that makes it more difficult to get a gun so every weirdo in America can't easily obtain one?

@castermhief117: Maybe it's more in protest than fear? That's my reason. I refuse to support a nation that has this sort of thing happen regularly. I live in a border city, I haven't crossed in almost 7 years now as there are more and more reasons for me to not want my money going there, this regular cycle being one of the top ones.

The common line is SHOOTING -> "It's not guns, it's people" -> "WE need better mental health services to prevent this!" -> "WE don't want to pay to help other people" -> SILENCE -> LOOP

Something has to change and until then I will continue my protest. I'd love to go to a number of different gaming events, but I'm also more than willing to wait until they come to Canada, or they are elsewhere and my vacation can line up.

"The problem is so bad, we might as well not even try solving it and instead just make it worse."

The US is long overdue for a harmonization of gun control laws on a federal level. That's the only sensible way to go about this that doesn't leave massive state-level loopholes to easily bypass any regulation.

Proper regulation is the difference between low-crime, high-ownership countries like Switzerland/Germany and the "everybody gets a gun" US.
That's a fact most US pro-gun people conveniently don't mention when they cite Switzerland and Germany as "high ownership leads to low low crime" examples.

I don't care about letting anyone win or lose anything. or your assumptions of fear, or your statistics. Hard pass.

@nethlem said:

The correct take on this situation is that this individual clearly had severe mental health issues, probably un-diagnosed or at least grossly mismanaged, and like with any sort of psychotic episode this was a fairly innocuous trigger that sent the person over the edge and far beyond the realms of rational thought.

Why do I get the feeling that this isn't going to be the narrative?

Please don't try and divorce people's emotions from the situation. The USA is generally a safe country, and nobody is saying that you will definitely get shot if you travel there - unless you do something blatantly stupid or dangerous.

But your statistic about motor related fatalities vs. shooting deaths is true pretty much everywhere else in the world - knife crime is the #1 form of homicide or domestic terrorism here in the UK, and the number of stabbing deaths is a blip on the radar compared to motor incidents.

The problem is, and you said this yourself, this is literally the only Western/democratic country where this regularly happens. You can spend your tourism money in any other country, like Canada, Germany, France, Australia, anywhere, and be pretty much 100% certain that nothing even remotely like this will happen. Even if the odds of travelling to the US without it happening is 99%, that's still a problem.

No, I refuse to accept any of this. And yeah, we fucking can talk about gun control.

At this point, I don't believe anybody that says that you can't create legislation to control guns. What they mean is that they don't want to. Or they're too cowardly to even consider it. And that's fine, and you can live in a country where this keeps happening. And we'll bring it up every time there's a mass shooting, because it's like90% of the entire fucking issue.

Plenty of countries have taken action to control gun laws and been hugely successful - Switzerland has roughly 2 million privately owned guns in a country of 8.3 million people, but since stricter gun control laws were introduced in the late 90s, their murder rate and rate of attempted homicides has cratered. Millions of people still have guns, but it's part of their national service, and they're trained to use them and respect them from a young age. It forms part of their cultural identity of "armed neutrality". People in Switzerland have the mentality that they are defending themselves from foreign invaders, not from the oppression of a government in some absurd, 18th century Hamiltonian ideal of self-sufficiency or a Jeffersonian ideal of freedom from tyranny and rugged individualism. You're not the wild frontier anymore; you're one of the most advanced and industrialised cultures in human history (terrifyingly).

And the Swiss own handguns, pistols, and former service weapon, not a sighted AR-15 designed to gun down a human being from 500 yards. Canadians and Australians own hunting rifles, and nothing like this ever happens. It's only the US.

And we are well, well past the point where a citizenry, even one as large and as well-armed as in the US, could defend itself against the US military. Hell, look at the equipment that your police use, and tell me you could hold out against predator drones, tanks, coordinated missile strikes, aerial batteries, etc.

As someone who has spent much of his youth arguing with anti-gun folks both in person and online, tried to convince others that taking away guns won’t make someone planning to use one for evil any less evil, that they are tools and that you don’t just change the constitution because of a few whackjobs, for the past year or two I’ve realized that I’m done with that stance. In a theoretical world where people can be trusted to do the right thing instead of being evil bastards, I still agree with those ideas in principle, but in the society in which we live we just can’t be trusted with guns.

I work for a City and we’ve had a summer full of events. Fireworks, concerts, and our High school just opened a new stadium. At every one of these events I’ve been growing increasingly nervous as I look around the crowds and think about what could happen. It’s terrifying. We’ve reached the point where terror is a normal feeling in public spaces. This is not how I want to live.

Ugh. Just ugh.

@ltcolumbo said:

It breaks my heart that Americans have had to go through so much to get to this point. That good people have to live in that kind of fear. Nobody wants to have to choose to abandon deeply-rooted beliefs tied to national identity. But you and hopefully more people are realising that as much as it may hurt, the simple truth is this: when confronted with the choice between those ideals and the safety of your people, there is only one choice that is sensible, that is morally and pragmatically justifiable, and that is in line with 21st century ideals.

The people who refuse to see that are siding with the terrorists. They've become the tyrannical minority that Hamilton and Jefferson wanted to repel.

Americans: you deserve better.

And this has already gone way off the rails, as expected.