Gun Control thread (merged many)

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by August

Why does it fall over? Personally i'm perfectly fine with abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy. We have far too many people on this planet as it is without encouraging people to have more of them, but everything i've heard or read on the subject is that an abortion takes a psychic or emotional toll upon a woman.

Are the battle lines on abortion so rigidly drawn that even showing a little regret causes you to dismiss his entire article?

It was the tone, as if allowing abortion equals a decline in morality and leads to mass shootings when there really is no such link.
Aside from that though, it does make good points, especially when it comes to popular music, and the anonymity of social media to 'flay people', I am reminded somewhat of the latest craze of 'roasting' with people volunteering themselves to be humiliated by a host of people they've never met. I don't understand that, perhaps there's some kind of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger' thought behind it, but I don't know.

Of course, in that respects we come to another thread that's up in GT at the moment in regards to the 'Coddling of the American Mind', does exposure to the brutality of the internet create a worse kind of person than shielding them from it? Where is the middle ground?

It's tricky, I mean we've been asking ourselves the question of 'what the hell is up with kids these days' since the 1950s and I don't think anyone has had the answer to that, but I won't disagree that things took a turn for the darker in the 1980s and have gotten steadily more so ever since.
I couldn't put an exact finger on the cause of it, but I would recognise the shift from the 'peace and love' of the hippy movement (for the most part) to the 'screw everyone, push the button we'd be better off dead' of the punk movement of the late 1970s as to where we started expressing the more violent sides of ourselves, and that's also around the time when the skinheads started reviving if I recall correctly.

I dunno...maybe it's all one giant downer from the high trip society took in the sixties.