And that’s the other, other side of the issue that I glided over. The focus on mental health when it comes to mass shootings is problematic enough — the mentally ill are not really the main sources of violence in society and are more likely to be victims than victimizers.

Thank you! As much as I would love to see better funding for mental health services, I’m not sure that would help gun violence. This guy’s bipolar disorder may have exacerbated his violent tendencies if he wasn’t taking his medication during a manic phase, but it certainly did not cause him to murder people.

I wish they would stop blaming these shootings on mental health. It’s much more likely that someone with mental health issues will be attacked than someone with mental health issue will attack someone.

Thanks so much for playing and proving my point!

Ha! But New Yorkers are unbelievably nice. The only time I have experienced rudeness from New Yorkers is when they explain to me that people from California are rude and fake, always saying “have a nice day” when we don’t really mean it. I don’t know how to respond to that without being rude back to them, so I just…

I am from Virginia.

As a New Yorker living in D.C., people from Virginia are not fucking nice. People from Maryland are lovely, people from Virgina drive like assholes and are hugely nasty to people from other areas of the country. Come at me bro.

“Byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye, Feliciaaaaaaaaaaa...”

Rude. But not completely inacurate sadly. Also if she’s from DC, she’s from NoVA, and trust me, aint a nice person in sight in NoVA so I’m not sure what her measurement of “nice” is.

Where was it that I read that…Southerners aren’t actually nicer, they just talk more and are more outgoing? extroverted ≠ nice

I feel compelled to share this bit of wisdom by David Foster Wallace everywhere I read anything about suicide in the hopes that it can help people - even one person - understand. (Kinja screwed up the formatting and won’t let me change it, but I feel like it’s kind of appropriate for the message.)

Or... take it back to the real problem, which is that female sexuality is contradictorily both so stigmatized and enshrined by our society that women are either shamed for it or seen as infallible, depending on which side of the line of the virgin/whore dichotomy they are perceived to be on.

This is pretty much EXACTLY what happened to me during my parents divorce. My father was an abusive, selfish, cruel asshole who almost broke my mother’s hand (to say nothing of the years of emotional abuse. My brothers were spared that bullshit, thank god, it was just my mom & I that had to deal with it) & I refused…

Exactly! I have friends and family members who are cops, and every time one of them says something negative about the coverage these incidents get, I’m like, why in the hell don’t you and the other good cops DO SOMETHING about these bad ones? I get that they need to have a certain amount of solidarity and having each…

We know there are good cops. Nobody is saying that all cops are bad. We know. We know. We know. #notallcops as in all things. There are no absolutes.

Because you are grossly overestimating how “good” they are.

It’s so irrational to me though, this Police Brotherhood Over All Else shit. I mean the fucking paperwork alone on a shooting or physical altercation would be enough for me to be like, put the fucking gun away, Fellow Officer Bob! Or, there goes good old Sheriff Larry, roughing up brown people, I’m so excited to lose…

Or maybe, and I’m just going to throw this out there, maybe cops should improve their skills in managing aggressive behavior and not kill unarmed black people. Maybe?

Exactly a year ago I hid my son’s 18-yr-old girlfriend from her abusive father. We called the cops and got the “it’s a he said-she said situation” routine. Yeah, because she obviously inflicted those bruises and scratches on herself while dad had no signs of injury. Fuck the fucking cops.

“It’s just business.”