I won't be contributing to a mass shooting fund anytime soon

I had planned to rant about this a couple of weeks ago and it seems especially timely now.

So we live in the age of, "something bad happened to you, therefore the Internets want to give you money." A couple of weeks ago I was watching a "donation chairman," discuss the dispersion of funds collected to help the Virginia Beach shooting victims. He said the funds were being dispersed based on "need." We all know what that means.

I get it that certain situations call for a calculation of someone's life, say in an individual wrongful death legal action, based upon lost earning power, etc. But I cannot see why people who are dispersing donation funds want to go down the slippery slope where broke breeders with a bunch of kids who overextended themselves a la the "broke breeders thread" get more money than a couple with no kids or the next of kin to a single person? Is a single, 22 year old person or a 58 year old person any less dead than a 30 year old dud with three kids?

I realize the WTC fund went down the same slippery slope and I thought it was all kinds of wrong then. Why should some pampered Westchester County housewife get more money than waitstaff at Windows on the World? I'm sorry, if your Alpha Male husband didn't give you a bunch of life insurance money to live without him, (probably because he didn't trust that you wouldn't blow it on Marc Jacobs boots) that is personal marital problem, not a government or donation problem. Term life insurance is CHEAP.

(I realize the WTC fund is government money, but the same applies.)

If I ever got on one of those donation committees, I'd probably be everyone's enemy, but the only truly fair way to do this is to take X funds, divide it by X # of dead people, and disburse the result equally.

I totally agree with you. I don't know much about Westchester County but the mass shooting is nothing new for El Paso.

I knew someone from El Paso. She said it is the true murder capitol of the United States. She claimed authorities push the dead bodies over the border to keep statistics down. And people come from across the border and commit crimes in El Paso. And this was in the late 90's. Lots of organized crime there but most manages to fly under the radar.

I'm not making any kind of judgement call on the people in El Paso who died, they may have been innocent or they could have had ties to organized crime or family in crime.

The World Trade Center (WTC) 9/11 terror attack money was mostly Red Cross money IIRC. The organization hired outside help to administer the billions that rolled in. I don't think the feds contributed directly to those funds.

There was separate funding from the feds for first-responders who were injured or became diseased from the 9/11 response, and that was just renewed in Congress.

Westchester County is a very well-to-do area of New York where some of the higher-paid victims who worked at the twin towers lived. Bell_flower is correct that some of their widows got a lot more from the fund than did childless/childfree people working at much lower pay who also died in the attacks. Some of those widows complained that the hundreds of thousands of dollars they received wasn't enough, to the point that right-wing political pundit Ann Coulter justly criticized them. The WTC funds were supposed to account for life insurance payouts and reduce amounts accordingly, but you know how that works.

This reality makes me agree with Bell_flower about these fund raisers. My understanding of El Paso as well is that it has been a cesspool.

I don't contribute to individuals or to organizations that distribute to individuals. It feels like pissing money away. Giving money without fixing the systematic problems that contribute to the issues means that you can keep donating and nothing will ever change.

Of course it sucks for individuals affected, but I'd rather give my money to an organization that is going to fight for free abortions than to one which is going to fund abortions for people who can't afford it within the existing system. Likewise, I'd rather fund a group that is going to address misogynistic white supremacy, than one which is going to give a payout to a subset of its victims. And so on.

Governments might sometimes be able to do both: help disaster victims and improve cities so that the same thing doesn't happen again. But as an individual, my funds are limited, and I think helping one person is usually the least effective way to go about solving a big problem. So even if the funds were fairly distributed, I still wouldn't donate.

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freya
I knew someone from El Paso. She said it is the true murder capitol of the United States. She claimed authorities push the dead bodies over the border to keep statistics down. And people come from across the border and commit crimes in El Paso. And this was in the late 90's. Lots of organized crime there but most manages to fly under the radar.

I'm not making any kind of judgement call on the people in El Paso who died, they may have been innocent or they could have had ties to organized crime or family in crime.

I think it's fairly clear that this incident had nothing to do with organized crime. I know nothing about El Paso and the other homicides that take place there, but the shooter's manifesto makes it clear it was racially-motivated violence.

I only donate money to animal charities and I usually visit thrift shops that help support hospices, the homeless, etc. That's good enough for me.