The American social safety net fails again. At least this time it was mostly contained.
Condolences to those who will remember him.
No shit. We had plenty of guns when I was a kid (52 now), even AR-15s and the like, and this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.
I’d hold off on my manifesto, :), but mental health has taken a nosedive in this country. It’s far, far worse than kids can imagine. Fox News, Facebook, the internet, etc. has poisoned our collective brains and discourse.
I’m 38, and yeah it’s seriously fucked. I keep saying this and people still want to plug their ears and scream “it’s the guns!”.
I’m a prime example, I have ADHD and hardcore insomnia, and I got laid off a few months ago, my health insurance just ended. In order to see a psychiatrist it’s gonna cost me $300 out of pocket for the visit, and then generic Ambien is like $120 for 60 pills. I got letters that say I could get health insurance via the COBRA Act of 1985, but it’s SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS A MONTH. Healthcare.gov keeps playing commercials that say “enroll now and you can get health insurance for as low as $10/month!”. I went on there to look and it’s only available for 2024 right now and they want to know your income for 2024. I put in 80k and they said I wasn’t eligible, I put in 40k and it said it was gonna cost $350/month.
My dad is 73 and he constantly has to fight with insurance and the pharmacy to get his Ambien as well.
It’s absolutely ridiculous.
Losing your insurance/job is one of those situations that they’ll enroll you early
I get your trying to help but you’re missing the point
Ah thanks for the info, but it will still probably be less to pay out of pocket. The shrink’s follow up is $200 and the Ambien will be $120. IDK how much I can get the premium down to, and even then there’s the deductibles.
If you aren’t working, put in zero as your salary.
That’s what I’m thinking, but the question is “how much will you be making in 2024?” not “How much are you currently making?”
You can’t know the future, what if the economy craters? If and when your salary changes, you update it then.
Exactly, it’s a dumb question, no one really knows how much they’ll be making in the future, but it’s not like 2024 is far away.
If you aren’t working, why are you putting in any salary?
That’s brutal, and I’m very sorry to hear that. No one should have to struggle to find help, especially for stuff like that.
I think this whole system is stupid, even from a business sense. If you want quality labour, “happy employees” are the way to go. If you prevent people from getting much wanted/needed help, you’ll have a lot less of those “happy employees”. You’ll also have fewer taxes being paid, less money being spent, fewer people attending events and buying non-essential things, etc. The current set-up makes no sense to me. Instead of imporving anything, let’s just keep continuing to make things worse and then complain that society is getting worse. That will totally fix things. It hasn’t worked for the past couple of decades, but it will totally magically change tomorrow. Assholes.
I hope things get much better for you and your father soon. Y’all deserve MUCH better than this.
Thanks 😊 The problem is that they have no souls and conscience, and only care about money, so I don’t think anything will change this unless we go with public/socialized healthcare but that will never happen because “socialism” is “the worst thing that could happen” according to some people… my dad is against it because he “doesn’t want to help pay for some low-life’s healthcare which he has worked his ass off to pay into” 🤦♂️
But… what about the shareholders? What about about their return on investment?
/s
almost 10% of your income!? fuck the “hyper socialist” Germany has 6% from my taxes
They took about 30% of my yearly income for local (I lived and worked in NYC for 7 years), state, and federal taxes for the past few years! I may get about 5% or less of that back in my tax return.
Best country in the world! 🤑
If it puts your mind at ease at all, crime (violent and otherwise) had been on a decline from 1993 until 2016 and while it has risen since 2016, it still hasn’t hit pre-'93 levels last I saw. Furthermore despite what you’d expect, those AR-15s are responsible for less than 500 (all rifles) of our 60,000 gun deaths, which is 0.833333333333% of our gun deaths. In fact, mass shootings account for less than 0.2% of our gun deaths per year. So, I mean “any is too much” yes, but it isn’t near as bad as it seems. source
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Yeah and I get that for sure, that’s part of what makes Aneurysms so scary too, can randomly happen at any moment. Tbh I’ve realized best thing I can do is just try to keep myself and those around me safe as best I can and carry one of my own, it’s the only thing that is actually within my power, unlike “fix the entire country” lol.
The vast majority of Mass Shootings™ aren’t random.
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this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.
Things that are relatively new, circa Columbine
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the 24-hour news cycle
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rage-farming as a genre of syndicated media (think: Limbaugh, Hannity, InfoWars)
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selling fear becomes huge moneymaker for opinion programmers (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, etc)
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politics as a staple on social media comment threads
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offshore groups (like troll farms, etc) posing as domestic political actors, targeting particular demographics
Ready access to guns is of course a problem, but it’s probably made worse when all those folks with ready access to guns are bathed in fear and loathing 24/7 by millionaires making lots of money telling them things to make them or their families afraid or angry. Just a thought
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It always weirds me out that the first school shooting I remember occurred a few bit over a year before Columbine. Heath High School, December 1997.
My high school school had a 1970s state championship banner for rifle shooting up in the gymnasium. It might even still be there.
The media circus around columbine has certainly contributed to mass shootings. Every loser knows how to be remembered now.
I’ll fucking remember him. Kid realized he was going to harm a lot of people and avoided it.
What safety net?
Sounds like America shouldn’t be selling guns until Republicans have finished curing mental health issues.
but if we stopped selling guns, how would we cure those mental health issues?
Sucks that he got to that point, but props for not going through with his plan.
This is almost uplifting. Like, it’s terrible the man was suffering so much, but it’s admirable that he chose the better of the two options he was giving himself. That probably makes me sound like a terrible person.
I don’t think that sounds terrible at all. We can all agree, I think, that we’d rather this whole situation not happen at all, but of the two cases, one with one dead by their own hands, and another case with who knows how many dead at the same person’s hands, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying you’re happy it was the former and not the latter.
Terrible would be saying he deserved it. Or putting someone in that position. Or a variety of other things, but it’s not being relieved at a lower death toll.
“His” plan
Had he gone through with it, we would be hearing how he “was on the FBI’s radar”.
I didn’t kill a bunch of people today, either, so props to me, too, I guess…
You probably weren’t at the end of your mental and emotional rope, with what seemed like no other outs. Context matters.
You don’t know me. McDonald’s fucked up my nuggets order this morning so now I’m a man without anything to live for
Not the nuggies!! Any response to that is warranted
Car bomb McDonald’s!
fbi has entered the chat
It’s not that he’s a good person, it’s that he made the right decision at a critical moment. Still not a good decision, but a whole hell of a lot better than what he was prepared to do.
Sounds like the good guy with the gun was the bad guy with the gun this time.
A message saying, “I am not a killer, I just want to get into the caves,” was written on a wall of the women’s bathroom where the man was found lying on the floor, according to Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario. Nearby, officers found a handgun and explosive devices, some real and some fake, he added.
Geez :(
There are some special caves as park of the amusement park that you can take tours. The caves reference makes sense.
I mean, sort of makes sense? I assume with the overkill in firepower, he expected to meet armed resistance. Way more than a security guard would actually pose irl. So that I can at least get my head around.
But if he wanted to sneak into the actual caves like the phrasing would suggest, why die in the bathroom?
And a bathroom for women. There’s an inappropriate comparison here, somewhere.
(Speculation) Probably some pedo pizza parlor basement shit
Maybe it’s a woosh, but cave == vagina association is easier to incorrectly assume there.
The weapons found on Medina were ghost guns, which do not have serial numbers and therefore cannot be traced. His clothing had patches and emblems that gave the appearance of Medina being associated with law enforcement.
The good ending, I suppose?
No. Good would have been getting him the help he needed before this.
On the positive side, he would never have been in the news if that happened. So maybe it’s happening a lot that way.
Jesus, that poor guy had some issues. I wish he could have gotten the help he needed rather than going down this road.
When someone’s mind allows them to believe the options are to either commit a terrorist attack or to off themself, it sounds like cult behavior more than mental health to me
Holy shit, there’s a mountaintop amusement park?
yeah. you ride up via tram and can enjoy a day of fun. roller coaster, swing over a cliff, alpine sleds (on rail) and caves. I also recall a laser tag area, some lame 4d ride (smells, get soaked, etc) and food. Then head down to the geothermal hotsprings for a nice soak in what i think is the worlds largest hotspring pool.
Yes, Rollercoaster too
“In 2021, $68,000 in fines were levied against the park, where a 6-year-old Colorado Springs girl was killed on one of the rides over that Labor Day weekend.”
Why include this? Word count?
Definitely a tragic event, but yeah it seems kinda irrelevant
Is this like a satire site?
