Gun Control thread (merged many)

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

That is pretty much what I referred to earlier about determined people that was so well received and taken as apathy. Seems you have made my point for me.

It's all about tools though, if a person determined to create a mass incident is unable to access a firearm then what else will he use? Usually it's a knife or a sword, now compare and contrast how many people an untrained person can kill with a gun to how many people an untrained person can kill with a knife, time how long each incident takes from start to finish.

Here's a good article:
http://harvardpolitics.com/special_features/gun.html

At the bottom of it there's an interesting set of statistics which I will screenshot and post here:



Food for thought.

[Betonov]

Bosnia and Herzergovina: 1
The time frame on that table means the data includes the war period.
12 course meal for thought.

[Buddahaid]

You could drive a car onto a crowded sidewalk, or into any crowd for that matter.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

You could drive a car onto a crowded sidewalk, or into any crowd for that matter.

And people do...but not as frequently as they take a gun into a crowded place and open up.

[Buddahaid]

Originally Posted by Oberon

And people do...but not as frequently as they take a gun into a crowded place and open up.

I'm wondering how many of those school shootings were gang related. The definition used was one dead with more victims intended.

[August]

This is an interesting article which attempts to move past the control debate and get into the heart of the real problem.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...02-column.html

Shooting in Oregon another sign our culture is ill

A madman kills nine people in Oregon and the world seems to stop and gun control is demanded. But in Chicago, the killings are marginalized, as barbarians mow people down, with thousands shot in a town with strict gun laws, and the politicians do little if anything.

There is no national conversation from Chicago. The national political stars stay away. Even the president isn't engaged much. There is silence.
What the president certainly understands, what politicians don't tell the people, is that Chicago political corruption has a cost. And that leaves less money to pay for longer incarcerations for gun crimes, let alone any space to institutionalize the dangerously mentally ill.


So it's a game, here, everywhere. And right now I'm less interested in arguments about competing rights — the right to bear arms colliding with the supposed rights of psychotics to wander freely among us — than I am about the culture.


Because for all the talk of gun control and rights and politics, the one thing I don't hear enough about is that our culture is ill.
Oddly, the political left, which demands more federal gun control in the hope of protecting life, adamantly supports abortion. Over the past four decades or so, some 53 million abortions have taken place in the U.S. Whatever your position on abortion, whether you believe that which is taken is life or just tissue, there is a collective psychic cost to it all.
Our most popular sport, football, is about ritualized, gladiatorial violence. Our most popular movies are called "action movies," but truly they should be called "kill movies" for all the corpses they produce, piles of them.


Our humor is rhetorically violent. Our popular music just as violent. We're addicted to social media, where anonymity breeds a freedom to ridicule others, to peel their skin with venomous fingers from unknown keyboards. And we give our children phones at young ages so they may play, too.


Is there a cost to all of this? Sometimes a tragedy like what happened in Oregon makes denial all but impossible.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

I'm wondering how many of those school shootings were gang related. The definition used was one dead with more victims intended.

Gangs are not a purely American problem.

August, that article was going well until

Oddly, the political left, which demands more federal gun control in the hope of protecting life, adamantly supports abortion. Over the past four decades or so, some 53 million abortions have taken place in the U.S. Whatever your position on abortion, whether you believe that which is taken is life or just tissue, there is a collective psychic cost to it all.

Then it fell over. But certainly there is a more violent culture today than many years ago, although to be honest there has always been a violent undertone in culture, it's just more at the forefront these days than before. Why is this? No idea, current people blame social media, before that it was games, before that it was televisions, before that it was movies, and before that it was music.

[August]

Originally Posted by Oberon

August, that article was going well until...Then it fell over.

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?

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by Betonov

And get your ass to Mars

[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.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Oberon

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

I hope you are joking. Yes?

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by u crank

I hope you are joking. Yes?

Yeah, don't worry, I was.
I know the 1960s weren't all peace and love, and it's hard to get an unbiased view of it from those who lived through it because of the rose spectacles affect. But I really don't think that mainstream culture in general was as violent as it is now...perhaps that is because of the change of the pace of life, how things have become a lot faster now as we compete against machines, thing has to be done right now, I want to have it right now. Instant gratification, whilst we are constantly reminded by the mass media that another terrorist incident could happen 'any time now'.

Perhaps as a society we have become so depressed after 9/11 that life carries less of the meaning that it once did?

That's one for the philosophers really, it's hard to prove any mood or emotion to a society because of its nebulous existance. You can only state what you think that society is based upon your own experience of it, and there's more society on this planet than one human can take in in their lifespan. So, one has to make generalisations a bit, or build Deep Thought.

This, of course, brings us back to the problem of solving culture and society. I mean, government can barely control its own budget, how on Earth would it go about controlling or changing culture, without just driving it underground, I mean we all know the Streisand effect and how attempting to supress something can just lead to it going 'underground'. The Prohibition is another case that comes to mind.
So clearly, banning firearms is not going to work, I can say that hand on heart that it is my firm belief that banning things will not work. Not once have I proposed banning firearms in America because I know how absolutely impossible such a thing would be.

I can understand why this impassé has come about, I can see how both sides have just gotten more and more entrenched every single time this subject comes up to the point where some sides treat gun owners as a mass murderer waiting to happen, and the other side sees guns as being up there with Jesus, as Torplexed pointed out.
Does this mean that America should just give up on the problem? Stop trying to find a way to make all gun owners as safe and as responsible as the majority claim they are? To make sure that people who contemplate taking a gun into school and opening fire are detected and given the necessary mental health treatment before they can inflict harm on others? To make it harder for people to undertake these acts so that they either do not bother or are forced to use a more difficult weapon to kill others, be it a knife (using which they will be forced to approach their victims at close range, opening themselves up to potential disarmament) or a bomb (gathering and researching the materials for such gives a more than reasonable chance that you'll be noticed by someone).
Of course, you won't stop the really determined ones, those who would be cool and collected enough to fool anyone for years until they snap. You can't get them all, no matter how hard you try, but that doesn't mean that you should not try for the risk of failure.

Time will tell...sadly I think we'll be back here kicking this can around a few more times before this year is out.

[u crank]

Originally Posted by Oberon

Yeah, don't worry, I was.

But I really don't think that mainstream culture in general was as violent as it is now.

On a personal level perhaps not but then our awareness of it was limited in those pre-internet days. But in reality it was probably every bit as violent. Add to that a very different attitude about race, sexual orientation and views on gender equality and you've got a society that most younger people today couldn't contemplate. Talk about culture shock.

Perhaps as a society we have become so depressed after 9/11 that life carries less of the meaning that it once did?

Hmm...I really think that every generation could say that. Just from memory...In America, one President assassinated, one U.S. senator assassinated. The attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate. Two leaders of the Civil Rights movement assassinated. One hot war that killed 58,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese. Almost a nuclear war. American cities burning in race riots. Here in Canada we had politicians being kidnapped and murdered and you guys had that little thing going on in Northern Ireland. All that and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. No wonder people were using drugs.

This, of course, brings us back to the problem of solving culture and society.

So clearly, banning firearms is not going to work, I can say that hand on heart that it is my firm belief that banning things will not work. Not once have I proposed banning firearms in America because I know how absolutely impossible such a thing would be.

I would agree completely. The only possibility for change is one of attitude. In my lifetime I have seen some remarkable changes in attitude in regards to other social issues. I see it in my adult children. Their attitudes towards all contentious issues such as race, gay rights, gender equality, etc. make me cringe when I think about what some of my attitudes were when I was their age. So there is hope.

I have always refrained from joining the discussion about guns for the simple reason that I don't see any possible solution. I don't own a gun so I can't understand that side of the argument and I see no practical way of taking guns away from those who shouldn't have them.

I like where I live.

[Aktungbby]

The question in my mind is when does the 'rapture' start; I'm done with the tribulation.

[Oberon]

I think it's Obamas fault, can't even bring about the end times properly.