Lewiston, Maine shootings leave at least 16 dead

The guy is white. When do we start hearing something about “mental health care” that nobody will do anything about?

- Well, at least the two of us aren’t okay with this. I’m not desensitized to it. And I never will be. I don’t accept this as “just the way it is now”.
- Sure they will. The millions of children who went to school each day knowing they were the target of domestic terrorists and were not just sold out by Republicans and the gun lobby but spat on by the pro-gun crowd.
  They'll abolish the second amendment, condemning it to the history books with all the other shitty things America did like the genocide of the native population and the enslavement of black people.
Whoa whoa whoa. We haven't even gotten to thoughts and prayers. Then comes mental health. Last is the "it's too soon to talk about this". Then the cycle starts anew.
To be fair, the guy did actually self checkin to a mental facility this summer for two weeks and was released. Additionally, Maine is a yellow flag state where firearms can be taken away via a mental health review. (To be clear, this is NOT enough in my opinion).
One of many sources https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/northeast/ap-police-say-theres-an-active-shooter-in-lewiston-maine-and-they-are-investigating-multiple-scenes/
- When I searched to see if Maine had red flag laws, all the top results were people opposed to them.
  There's a good chance the shooter was one of them, since it looks like he is a "responsible gun owner" that's even more "responsible" than most.
  Of course, the pro-gun crowd will seethe if you call him that, but the reality is that he had their full support when he bought a semi-automatic weapon. He still had it when he started hearing voices. He still had it when he started prowling the streets in open carry. Fuck, they probably would have given him the benefit of the doubt when he raised it to fire on an innocent person, as long as he was staunch Republican.
  But the moment he pulled the trigger, it becomes "Oh that guy? Yeah he was never one of us. Doesn't count".
  Then they'll claim its a mental health problem because he had mental health issues and the gun he used to maximise the number of people he killed and wounded had nothing to do with it.
  Then they'll insist that they'll totally entertain the idea of gun control after a mental healthcare system is built that can cure every single man, woman and child in America of serious mental health problems, even the ones that don't want care, so completely they can be trusted with guns for the rest of their lives because they'll never falter and also fuck you we're not paying for it.
  He had mental healthcare.
  He also had a legally purchased AR-15.
- It's almost like those programs don't work, and we just need a total prohibition on guns 🤷
Just as important, cracking down on capitalists. Recovering the wealth they've stolen, and using it to help provide not just for health care. But housing and food security. So people don't have to live under the dread and constant stress to their mental state. That capitalists have engineered to facilitate their theft.
Do we really need to change our laws because some lone wolf who clearly had no political positions at all totally did not get weaponized by the media and churned through a system that literally hands guns to the mentally ill?

Where are all those good guys with guns!
- Dead, because they're a priority target.
  Open carry is for inch-dick assholes.
- I guess this wasn't one of the 3% of shootings they intervene in, just another of the 99% they enthusiastically enable.
They're saying three locations so far, but I'm only seeing details for two: Schemengees Bar and Grille (restaurant) and Sparetime Recreation (bowling alley).
Scrolling through different news channels, the only update I've heard in the last 45 minutes is the count update from 16 to 22.
They've released an images of the shooter and of his vehicle, a Subaru Outback (kinda silver/white).
- https://www.sunjournal.com/2023/10/25/multiple-victims-reported-following-shootings-in-lewiston/
  Lewiston public information officer Derrick St. Laurent told the Sun Journal at about 8:15 p.m. that another shooting had been reported at the Walmart Distribution Center on Alfred A Plourde Parkway.
- I work in a 911 dispatch center, we had a shooting at a bowling alley a few years ago, it was probably one of the craziest, most stressful incidents we've had since I've been working there. So that hits a little close to home for me.
  The incident we had wasn't a mass shooting, just some assholes who shouldn't have had guns got into a fight and started blasting.
  It was right after shift change, we had pretty much all just sat down and logged in, usually at that time of day there's not too much really going on, and then suddenly everyone in the room's phone went off at once and everything became chaos for the next hour or so.
  The shooting was over by the time we got the first call, the shooter was probably even long-gone, out the door in a car speeding away.
  My first caller was just hysterically screaming, I couldn't really get any useful information from them, but from what I could hear in the background it sounded like they were close to the victims, maybe even had been part of their group.
  We had about 3 or 4 wildly different descriptions of the suspect. Was it one person or was it three? We're they old or young? Black or white? We're they wearing trench coats, hoodies, military style jackets?
  We had a caller who had grabbed some kids and pulled them into a utility closet to hide.
  We had calls coming in for the rest of the night and even the next day from people who were there and fled as soon as it started.
  Just absolute chaos.
- Third location is allegedly a Walmart distribution center
- There’s always confusion with these things. Where? How many shooters? How many dead? It’ll take a while for completely accurate info to come out. There will be a news conference tomorrow, I’m sure.
- Dude looks like Jake Gyllenhall, or is it just me?
- Photo I saw was from the bowling alley. Jesus
They just confirmed 18 during the live conference

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1819576527

Should have linked this instead:
[theonion.com/search?q="No Way To Prevent This"](https://www.theonion.com/search?q="No\ Way\ To\ Prevent\ This")
Edit: Effin hell, Liftoff or Lemmy keeps butchering the URL
Edit 2: Had to escape each space in the URL to make it work
Edit 3: Jerboa users try this link instead:
https://www.theonion.com/search?q=No+Way+To+Prevent+This
(Loses the quotes enforcing the word order in the search matches)
Looks like spaces are not standard per W3 schools. Either have to use pluses or %20.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1211229/in-a-url-should-spaces-be-encoded-using-20-or
The Onion search does not seem to like %20
https://www.theonion.com/search?q=No%20Way%20To%20Prevent%20This
Liftoff attempts to "correct" the URL with %20s for spaces.
- Lol, no, this definitely doesn't work

The shooter is still at large.

Three locations have been attacked so far.

A large chunk decided to pretend gun laws were never a thing.
Maybe it's because western movies went out of style, where refusing to turn your guns over to the sheriff was the entire plot point.
- Pretty much the ruling class decided they'd be richer if more people bought guns, so guess what people did?
It's not really as complex as people make out.
The gun lobby profits from gun sales. Mass shootings increase gun sales, which in turn increase mass shootings, giving them the growth they demand.
But mass shootings also increase demand for gun control, so the gun lobby spends millions of dollars openly bribing Republicans, millions more in courts fighting progressives, and undisclosed amounts astro-turfing and seeding talking points online.
The spreadsheets say that's the path to maximum profits, so that's the path they take. They simply don't care about these 22 people or the 220 before that or the 2,200 before that. It will never be their kids expensive school.

So is it not on Reddit because conservative down votes, shitty algorithm, not enough people compared to bots, or a combination of the above?

Going there for the first time since the migration, and not seeing it anywhere on the top of anything (/Maine had it but couldn't get a sticky) while not logged in made me very satisfied I've made the correct decision sticking around lemmy.

They screwed with the algorithm years ago. It took about 4 hours for it to show up on /r/all via /r/Maine.
- I remember when I got breaking news on reddit almost immediately. 4 hours? What a joke.
It's been front page of reddit for many hours now https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/17gjs8e/suspect_at_large_after_2_active_shooter_incidents/
Reddit is a censorship hellhole.
There's so much secretive bullshit going on there it isn't worth taking seriously.
Having a public modlog is necessary to keep mods accountable.
Reddit does absolutely nothing to combat shills and vote manipulation because it all looks like ad impressions to investors.
They're probably here already, since the buy in is so low. But realistically they'd be focused on the bigger sites for something like this.

Wait a shooting? Quick someone get the Constitution back out after we shelved it to stop women from driving on roads and other religions to exist!

It’s up to 22 dead now. Jfc.

Guns are for killing people and semi-automatic guns are for killing lots of people.

And nothing will change.

https://newrepublic.com/article/176042/ar15-gun-culture-unmade-america

The gun that unmade America was built to address a secret, long-suppressed problem: The American fighting man just wasn’t that good at fighting. And if the AR-15 is so feared these days, it’s because it’s brought that sub-competence to the civilian world, where now literally any idiot can use it to unleash mayhem and death.

Tell me you don't know shit about guns without telling me you know shit about guns...
- That is so original and funny. Have you tried reddit?
- Yeah! I mean look at this former responsible gun owner in Maine! He has a AR-15 and is clearly very good at killing innocent people.
  So they're not just for morbidly obese middle-aged men, with neither combat training nor the discipline to undertake it, to parade around with in a poorly articulated tantrum about masks, posing at a sloppy attention for the Fox News cameras.
  The only thing these damn gun-grabbers seem to know about guns is how many innocent people they kill and how seldom they deliver on their promises.
- I know shit about guns. That article is fairly accurate.

Damn video games at it again!

/s

I thought it's all the drag queen's fault these days?
- These fuckin men dressin' as ladies, minding their own business! Destroying this great country!
  I have a teacher who's a super trump supporter anf says shit like this unironically. One of his favorite movies is Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I think that's just one of the funniest things.
- And the ssri drugs the liberal doctors give you that turn the frogs gay.
Got damn pokey mans and tick tacks

Such sad news. I wonder what triggered/motivated him.

Fear

My buddy grew up there. Fucking sad

Stormtroopers have been dispatched and instructed to exercise extreme caution. They will engage the suspected perpetrator only if absolutely necessary. Priority is to capture and bring the suspect to trial, if possible

Make sure to get him some McDonald's first though.

I don't understand why this is even news over there at this point

News networks profit from covering mass shootings. Mass shooting coverage sells more guns which is profitable for the gun lobby. More guns sold means more mass shootings.
It's the circle of "profiting off innocent peoples deaths"