Guns (Yawn)

[seemslikeadream]

The Teens Are Coming For The NRA, And They Can’t Be Stopped

We are witnessing history.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/th ... 55731ca1ba

and if anyone does not understand this they were not a teen in 1968 or do not understand 1968

[DrEvil]

@Karmamatterz: Just for the record: I do have an interest in how Americans live (and die). I have lots of family in the US, including high school and college kids. My brother is married to an American and my niece has dual citizenship and might very well end up in an American high school when she gets older. I would really like it if some fucktard didn't shoot up her school.

And yes, I was being a dick because you're defending the American way of doing things when it's obvious that you're doing something very wrong. We both agree that there's a problem, we just disagree on the roots of the problem.

Just so I'm perfectly clear on your position: what exactly do you think is the reason you have so many school shootings, and what do you propose doing about it?

Btw, this list:

Divorce
Foster care
Single parent families
No good role models in their lives
Societal changes with more focus on extreme validation (social media)
Shaming boys for being aggressive

None of those issues are unique to the US, but the US is still the only country with regular school shootings. There's obviously another factor at play.

Oh, and that youtube video. Seriously? PragerU?

[JackRiddler]

Flag for Rhetoric:

Strident positions...

From the arsenal of meaningless blanket adjectives. Used by those who seek to signal that their own position, regardless of its validity, should be described using words such as reasonable, moderate, sober, mainstream, consensus, open to compromise, calm, modest, etc. By contrast the positions of those who disagree, no matter on what grounds, are to be described with words such as emotional, strident, extreme, extremist, angry, fringe, minority, uncompromising, doomsaying, mean, etc. Favored among TV pundits who speak very softly while calling for violence, e.g. Richard Perle.

Flag for Bullshit:

It's incredibly difficult to have a discussion with people who haven't fired, been trained or exposed to guns.

Leaving aside the peripheral issue of the incompetence in writing implied by the word "exposed" - to which end of the gun? - let's illustrate the fallacy here with some modest, reasonable analogies:

"It's incredibly difficult to have a discussion about whether or not to refrigerate bananas with people who haven't repaired or been trained in repairing refrigerators."

"It's incredibly difficult to have a discussion about the possible social effects of pornography with people who haven't wanked off expertly and furiously to all of the various forms of pornography available."

"It's incredibly difficult to have a discussion about the merits of nuclear war with people who haven't learned the physics, built, fired, or been exposed to atomic bombs."

"It's incredibly difficult to have a discussion about wealth inequality with people who haven't made or managed a few hundred million dollars."

The move is ineffective in argument, but it can work to win sympathy for the speaker in cases where anyone who hears it finds it incredibly difficult not to call the speaker an utter solipsistic moron. That would be strident and might also be flagged for Vocabulary.

This particular case almost makes me wish this version could actually apply: "If you didn't professionally study Sociology and Political Science, in adversarial university environments, and if you have not read a lot of (actual, scholarly) History relevant to whatever the fuck kind of political issues you want to talk about, you should just shut up." Of course I don't and have never believed that, but it's the same fucking argument and one sure wishes it applied to people who don't even have real stakes (golly gee, he might not be able to buy another murder-stick one day) and can't deploy the least logic or relevant fact, but still think they big-brained.

Flag for Actually Worth Arguing With:

America loves guns. It is part of our national identity, for better or worse. I'm not sure if it stems from the wild west frontier bullshit, or just the narratives that have glorified the idea of the gun-wielding hero, but it isn't disappearing. Any improvement must be measured by its ability to stop would-be murderers from gaining access to tools that aid them in psychotic rampages while not overly frightening reasonable people who wish to own guns. It must find a balance, some medium, to have any chance of gaining currency. And it will only be an improvement, not a complete solution.

Clearly, I speak as one who has not been personally impacted by gun violence. I think this detachment can be an advantage in some cases.

Except you do not. You have been personally impacted by gun violence, because we all have. It otherwise would be impossible for you to write a statement claiming that an abstract collective imaginary entity "feels" a personal bond to a weapon of killing, like, "America loves guns," or to invoke (impose, actually) a putative "we" to that feeling, a "we" that includes you and somehow implicitly owns the nation, as in the sentence, "It is part of our national identity, for better or worse."

I am not part of your "we" on this matter, and yet I am as American as anyone who ever lived. Varying a bit, of course, depending on how this extremely loose and incendiary concept is defined.

But to the main point: You have been personally impacted by gun violence, because we all have. Like you (I presume based on your statement), I have never been shot, nor has anyone close to me. Nor shot at. Nevertheless, all of my peers were impacted by gun violence when we grew up in a big city with a rising murder rate hitting 2,000 a year, 90% of them via gun violence. We feared to walk many streets or after dark, we took all kinds of time-wasting protective measures, we put more and more locks on the doors, we feared for our friends and loved ones when we heard first reports of the latest shootings. Acquiring a murder-stick of one's own would hardly have made a difference, in fact (indisputably) it only tends to raise the risks in aggregate (though I'm sure you all have some anecdote about an Eastwood character saving the day, etc. etc.).

Sorry, am I using a "we" here? At least it's more specific and historically embedded than yours. Anyway, most of us reacted by reaction, as in electing Giulianis and Bloombergs (and even before them, nationally, Reagans and Clintons) and accepting all kinds of associated barbarism that fucked up our collective lives further, though the crime rate did go down mostly thanks to demographic changes. And that political shift toward greater tyranny weren't because of no shortage of murder-sticks, you can be certain! Why, murder-stick owners are exactly the ones most likely to have voted for it!

The history goes back a lot further than the "Old West bullshit" and has indeed been central to the creation of the English colonies and the state and society which arose from them, throughout. That wasn't "founding fathers" nobly assuring the liberty of future citizens who insisted on the Second Amendment, of course. The use of the word "State" makes it clear enough it was advocates of state (as opposed to federal) armed forces, who wanted protection of state militias against possible federal control. Or, say, (not that it could ever happen!) protection against a federal army marching in, defeating the state militias, and freeing the enslaved people, i.e. the ones whom the state militias were appointed to keep enslaved.

Now in our modern and mass society, we have all been impacted by gun violence, and that's regardless of whether we have ever held, fired, or been murdered by a gun. It has affected our lives anyway. Yes, we do indeed live in a territory, called a nation-state, under a particular government, with a particular legal code and economic and social system, whose borders and culture and society and laws were defined largely by the gun, or rather those who wielded it, had more of it, shot first, kept shooting, aimed straighter, didn't mind hitting some women and children if they were red and black enough, etc.

Not all that exceptional, is it?

Today the gun on the one hand is a source of terror that has repeatedly and literally shaped the society and traumatized so many of its people, directly and indirectly, thanks to both civilian murderers and official ones.

And on the other, it is a source of 24/7 entertainment glorifying and celebrating the gun and its use by the ostensibly righteous against the strident on the TV, in the video games, in the movies, etc. Interesting.

Focusing on the first, guess what? I no longer particularly fear the government shooting down rebels against tyranny. You know why? Well, I guess one reason is because they already do, worldwide, daily, and generally it doesn't make a difference whether these rebels are armed or not, they get shot at anyway, and it's unclear in most circumstances whether having one's own gun is part of the solution or part of the problem. (Hmmm, maybe some other forms of politics than mere ownership or non-ownership of murder-sticks might be more central to the outcomes in these conflicts? Hmmm. Hmmmm...)

But more to the point domestically, how does the repressive arm of the state keep expanding its reach (even as the social welfare arm keeps withering) and meeting with popular approval, for the most part? How is it justified that the police and federal forces get more and more militarized, authorized, panopticonned, tank-equipped and armored? The freelance gun violence and the terror it creates in the populace is a major factor. That's a big reason why you've got people calling for no gun regulation and more guns for cops, and people calling for more gun regulation and more guns for cops. Across the spectrum of views on this particular issue, the sides may differ on how many guns the civilians get, but agree on more guns for cops. And no one is more assiduous about more guns for both civilians and cops than the gun manufacturers' lobby (GLM) the so-called NRA. More guns for civilians and double-more and biggerer guns for the coppers. To fight tyranny? Ha! (Oh okay, the coppers' union is probably even more-er for double-biggerer copper arming.)

Domestically, meanwhile, the only large number of armed "rebels" in this country, if it ever happens, are going to be a bunch of people who share the worldview of karmamatterz (except far worse than he has expressed it here, at any rate) and who, in whatever real or manufactured crisis, will be more likely to be shooting at me as deputies of said government (if things roll a certain way) than on behalf of any cause of liberty that they like to prattle on about as if they had a monopoly or a clue about the concept.

Just who decides that you are a reasonable person who's never going to use your murder-stick in anything other than a reasonable way? No, in this city, I do not want every angry person on the subway (most of them! since it's the subway!) who can pass a mental certification get the right to own and carry a murder-stick. I also don't want them getting their murder-sticks illegally here, after they were purchased legally in Pennsylvania or Alabama. I don't have to have my own murder-stick, or be able to build one from scratch, to understand the basics of civilization.

For me, one thing live free means is that even though I haven't and don't want to fire a murder-stick, I still get to take the subway or attend a school lesson without worrying that one-quarter of the riders or teachers are packing. Of course, the latter scenario is what the gun manufacturers' lobby would love, it is the "solution" they are pushing for gun violence.

Everyone gets a gun, at least everyone non-strident, and then of course the coppers have to get even more and bigger guns as a direct consequence of the resulting higher homicide rates, and the gun manufacturers have a windfall, and they use that to market more guns abroad, and there is more and more gun violence, and thus more and more of the official well-armed tyranny that the gun manufacturers' lobby sometimes pretends gun ownership combats. It's sort of like U.S. foreign policy, come to think of it: arming both sides in conflicts. Arm the yahoos to the teeth against tyranny, then arm the government agents even more to keep some semblance of order among the yahoos who find their freedom in owning a murder-stick.

.

[DrEvil]

^^Well said. To contrast with that, I grew up in a country with high levels of gun ownership and every military reservist having an assault rifle at home. We also had strict regulations and mechanisms to take people's guns away if they weren't fit to own one, and, shock, surprise, getting shot at has never been so much as a blip on my worry radar. It has always been a complete non-issue because it just "never" happens. Even the cops are unarmed.

Also, some interesting research:

Guns tend to empower white, financially unstable men—who oppose gun control

Shooting past “gun culture,” researchers hit factors linked to policy attitudes.

Beth Mole - 11/29/2017, 2:00 PM

In the wake of a mass shooting or fresh data on gun violence, pundits and the media often blame the US’ high rate of gun ownership and deaths on a deeply rooted “gun culture.” For many—particularly advertisers—this culture conjures ideas of morally strong, empowered, self-reliant, American patriots bearing arms. And it grazes notions of masculine heroes, protectors, and providers.

But it’s difficult to define a single culture behind gun ownership and the opposition to gun control legislation that sometimes accompanies that. More importantly, blaming something as vague as “culture” isn’t exactly helpful for identifying ways to reduce the US’ high death toll.

Aiming for more useful data, researchers tried to hit on factors behind why people own guns and their attachments to them. Who owns guns and how do they feel about their possessions? And how do those feelings affect their stances on gun policies?

From a survey of more than 1,500 Americans, sociologists at Texas’ Baylor University plumbed the demographics, characteristics, and opinions of 577 gun owners. As expected, gun owners held wildly different perspectives on their guns and gun control, the researchers report in Social Problems. In particular, there was a wide range in how “empowered” owners felt. That is, if they felt their guns made them some combination of safe, responsible, in control, valuable, respected, and/or patriotic.

Still, there were clear patterns.

Gun owners, on average, were more likely to be white, male, married, older, conservative, and from rural areas; they also tended to feel socially alienated, the authors report. Of the gun owners who didn’t feel very empowered by their guns, most were women, who also tended to be politically moderate. In general, the “least empowered” subsection of gun owners tended to clump into people who seemed to use guns simply for defense or as collectors’ items.

Those in the “most empowered” subgroup were most likely to be white men who reported feeling like they were in a financially precarious position. (Conversely, men of color were less likely to feel empowered by their firearms if they had money troubles.) The empowered white males were also more likely to strongly oppose gun control measures, such as bans on certain weapons, and less likely to support mental health screening for gun purchases. They were also the most likely to report that violence against the government might be necessary or justified.

In all, the authors conclude that white men use gun ownership to mitigate economic distress. In other words, “economic distress enhances the extent to which white men, specifically, come to rely on the semiotic power of a cultural symbol... [they] utilize guns as a foundational source of power and identity.”

Moreover, “because a vocal and passionate minority of gun owners continues to feel emotionally and morally dependent on guns,” the authors expect the notion of a “gun culture” to live on and gun control efforts to remain weak.

Gun ranges

For the study, Baylor’s F. Carson Mencken and Paul Froese surveyed 1,572 Americans in the 48 contiguous states in January 2014. The demographics of the bunch more or less fit with those of a general society survey done earlier.

The survey included questions about whether respondents owned a gun and, if so, what kind and for what purpose (e.g. hunting, protection, recreation, collector’s item). The survey then asked about symbolic aspects of gun ownership, such as if gun ownership made a respondent feel “more valuable to my family” or not. Last, the survey included questions about gun control policies and the source of gun violence in the US. (See slide show below).

The researchers then combined the responses with demographic and other data, including age, sex, religiousness, income, feelings of financial stability and social alienation, political views, and overall life happiness.

In addition to the demographics already mentioned, gun owners tended to report higher incomes than non-gun owners and the same levels of education, economic instability, and happiness.

For an “empowerment” index for gun owners, researchers calculated a score for each respondent based on their level of agreement with eight statements: “Owning a gun makes me feel: (a) safe; (b) responsible; (c) confident; (d) patriotic; (e) in control of my fate; (f) more valuable to my family; (g) more valuable to my community; (h) respected.”

Though some of the empowerment categories were small, those in the low- to medium-empowerment categories tended to use guns as collector's items, for defense, or for recreation. (More than two-thirds of those in the low-medium category used rifles for recreation).

Of the high-empowerment group, 74 percent had handguns for protection. Nearly half of the group thought that violence against the government might be necessary—a 40-percent jump in the number who said the same in the next-lower empowerment group.

In terms of associations, 'feelings of empowerment' was positively linked to lower education levels and negatively linked to higher education. Similarly, empowerment was linked to attending church—but just to a point. Those who reported attending church more than once a month were less likely to be highly empowered by their guns.

The authors suggest this may mean that “religious commitment offsets the need for meaning and identity through gun ownership.”

In terms of policy attitudes, 90 percent of gun owners agreed that they wanted expanded gun safety. But gun empowerment was statistically associated with stronger opposition to gun control laws. It also led to a stronger support for concealed weapons/carry permits and arming school teachers. The researchers did not identify which measures they felt would improve safety.

In terms of perceptions about the cause of gun violence in the US, women, nonwhites, older, and better-educated gun owners were most likely to see the availability of guns as a significant factor in violence. White men, on the other hand, tended not to blame guns. They were also the most likely group to see insurrection as justifiable.

“These findings indicate that a portion of gun owners who feel empowered by the gun form a distinct interest group—one that opposes gun control and feels that social problems and perhaps even personal troubles might be best solved by guns,” the authors conclude.

Though more research is needed to fully understand gun ownership and sentiments, this data may explain variation within the gun-owner population and offer a more nuanced understanding of the cultural context around guns.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11 ... -identity/

[JackRiddler]

White men, on the other hand, tended not to blame guns. They were also the most likely group to see insurrection as justifiable.

Nice view of theoretical insurrection, for people who will never do any such thing. To which I shall oh-so audaciously add: if they had asked, white men would also prove to be the most likely group to support state violence against actual insurrection. The most likely group to join in support of state violence, if called upon.

Long as the head cracking and tank-riding and tear-gassing and private contractor dog-biting and no-bail arresting of hundreds in a kettle and their persecution without evidence and on invented charges is happening in Ferguson, or on a reservation, or at a demonstration against Trump, or to unlucky Mexican and Central American laborers, it is necessary and good. These two videos really underline it, tear the veil off the cant of the GML (Gun Manufacturers' Lobby, a.k.a. NRA) to show the true meaning of its "rebel spirit" echoing with so much all-too American history. You've probably seen'em:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrnIVVWtAag

This just goes on and on with classic Red Scare goodies. The Occupy/BLM stuff a bit after 16, the priceless Karl Marx bit is at 31ish.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3x7uEimEsg

[JackRiddler]

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy who disarms him and is then shot by the cops:

https://m.chron.com/news/houston-texas/ ... 704202.php

Texas police shoot man who disarmed possible church shooter
Jay R. Jordan | February 23, 2018

Police in Amarillo shot an innocent man who helped foil a possible church shooting.

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage.

In the time between when police were dispatched and when officers arrived, a handful of churchgoers wrestled Jones to the ground. One of the congregants was able to grab Jones' gun.

Officers entered the building and saw the churchgoer holding the gun and opened fire, according to the Amarillo Police Department. The churchgoer was hospitalized in stable condition.

The victim, who spoke to ABC 7 Amarillo, has since been released and told the station he would do it all over again despite being shot by police.

"There were other people there," Tony Garces said. "I just took the gun away from him. I got shot. I got the bad part. It's life."

Share Your Story
Jones was booked into jail on six first-degree felony charges of aggravated kidnapping. He's being held on $1.2 million worth of bonds, according to jail records.

No one else, including Jones, was injured.

The Amarillo shooting happened on the same day 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire on a Florida high school, killing 17 people.

Jay R. Jordan is a breaking news reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan.

[Iamwhomiam]

The second amendment was controversial at the time. That's why the Bill of Rights took till 1791 to be added to our constitution. During our early federal period control of firearms were strictly regulated. I've already provided a link to learn more about those early government instituted gun controls.
Here it is once again:
https://fordhamlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/assets/pdfs/Vol_73/Cornell_and_DeDino_November.pdf

Sorry! I have no idea why I dumped this here. Might have meant to respond to an earlier comment, as I'm catching-up on reading missed messages. Pretty useless, being without context.

[Luther Blissett]

I can’t wait to defend the second amendment when the federal government comes to take away all my guns and I am instantly obliterated by a stealth drone, or microwave weapon, or a general dynamics stryker, or an atlas robot.

Why do paper targets at the gun range have illustrations of human beings on them? They look like my fellow humans, who I love, and 66% of those who live in the United States support gun control. Why are the vast majority of voices being ignored?

[JackRiddler]

Thanks Luther. True true.

Almost no one at the GML ("NRA,") including the majority of their mass base, or within the broader 2018 nazi-lite right-wing, believes their own bullshit about insurrection against the "socialist" "big" government. You are lampooning it almost superfluously, because it's too close to the bullshit they actually say. But they do not believe it. It's just rhetorical obfuscation. They will deliver whatever string of words seems to work best in defense of keeping their fetish-murder-sticks without any limits, with less regulation than is required to drive a car or buy stock. Which is to say, none whatsoever.

My favorite dodge, as I've mentioned, is the constant semantical nonsense about how you should know everything about the fetish-murder-stick models and features before you dare to speak their precious names, as if how they work mechanically is more important than their function, than what they actually do by design, which is to kill people. A hammer is called a fucking hammer for a reason, because it hammers, regardless of how many inches width on the head or if it has a little motor or too much kick. No expert carpenter or hammer collector is ever going to complain to me because I say, hey, careful, don't hit me with your hammer. He's not going to swing it at my head and say, hey fuck you clueless, this is my Black-and-Decker nail-assaulting screw-hammer and you don't deserve to speak her name! She is my love!

A fetish-murder-stick murders, so I think naming it by its actual function (since it has the dual function both of murdering others and of providing fetishistic pleasure for the owner/user) should settle the vocabulary nonsense. (Kidding, obviously.)

But the worst of the rhetorical obfuscation lies in the way these dumb complacent motherfuckers try to coopt the language of revolution and freedom and overthrowing tyranny. Since they are as far from giving a shit about putative "socialist" "big" government tyranny as, well, you would expect (overwhelmingly) white middle-class Republican-American (who generally own property) to be. Just cut their taxes and cut their health benefits too, will ya please? Just poison their children, but silently, okay?
Don't you make them worry about the air, too, okay? Feed plentiful cheap oil to their car-beasts and their maws and they're happy. The hypocrisy is so glaring!

There are those who are threatened by the technologies you list, and they are of course foreigners of the kind that "we" don't care about (all of them, in other words) and/or actively hate (many of them). There are those in the U.S. who might be threatened by such technologies, and they are of course the people that the GML-NRA and nazi-lite right-wing designate as "socialist" "big" government enemies, agents of tyranny. If these motherfuckers were the least bit serious about their love of freedom and constitutional rights and their hatred of tyranny, if this talk was anything other than a rhetorical dodge in defense of their precious kill-sticks, they would of course not be attacking but wanting to give arms to BLM, Occupy, NoDAPL, Palestinians, DSA, and the leftist professors facing thousands of death threats because they gave some Twitter boo-boo to White Fragility.

I doubt they believe it. I think Christopher Nolan is more likely to believe in the truth of his 2011 Batman movie (the one where an army of Occupy-style protesters unjustly blamed the billionaires for their woes, and had bigger and more firepower than the NYPD, and imprisoned them, and finally the poor coppers had to stage a revolution against this tyranny with just their fists against the rabble's machine guns, etc. etc.). Which is basically the world that Dana Loesch and Wayne LaPierre describe. But for them it's a business. Every new massacre by murder-stick means it's fundraising season. The name of the game is projection. Those who most favor tyranny of the most thorough and blackest kind -- total state panopticon, flag-waving imperialism, armed exurbs and pacified/incarcerated inner cities, brute police impunity, perpetual war abroad, violence against muslims or latinxs or blacks, censorship and shutdowns of alternative media, movements, and universities, total power for the most predatory of the billionaires -- those who favor the most thorough and blackest tyranny are going to say those with the least power to impose tyranny and the most desire to see freedom peace and justice in the world are the actual tyrants. Fucking students! Always the students (and the gays and uppity mannish women and all those American commies and what not), ruining the world!

.

[Iamwhomiam]

Catching up with older comments.

This country is obsessed with violence. Almost all entertainment--movies, games, you name it--is focused on violence. We worship the military, football players and Rambo.

By design, of course we do. Love It or Leave It. Uncle Sam Wants YOU!

It's nothing new and should be a rudimentary understanding as casual to our present state of affairs. Just ask, and our boys will gladly sign-up to wage war anywhere, no questions asked - For God and Country.

[Iamwhomiam]

Anybody give any consideration as to why these young men develop antisocial personality disorders? If guns were eliminated a person who is hell bent on killing others is going to find a way to do it. What is going on with these kids that at such a young age they develop these mental disorders? Certainly some could be classified as mentally ill, but so often the perp ends up dead by suicide by cop or self-inflicted so it becomes almost impossible to dig into the causes. Not so much interested in the ban the guns discussion, but what are the roots of these problems?

This link explores that the Cruz's parent had died and he was emotional disturb early on.

https://www.newsday.com/news/nation/flo ... 1.16781810

" told The Washington Post that her sister-in-law did her best to raise her troubled son. “I don’t think it had anything to do with his upbringing,” she said of the shooting. “It could have been the loss of his mom. I don’t know.”

"Anybody give any consideration as to why these young men develop antisocial personality disorders?" This topic might be rewarding to discuss in another thread. This is not the thread to have that discussion in.

I find this a surprising remark, much as I would if I had read someone commenting, "She was raped because she dressed like a slut." I'll tell you why. How many bullied kids do you know taking the lead, dancing in the limelight? Any of them football team captains or class presidents? Do they gather friends around them at lunch? Their home their peer's "gathering place"? I often befriended bullied kids, but those like me are a rare commodity. More often, if a group of peers singles a kid out for ostracization, even though one or more may find such behavior objectionable and may not participate in verbally or bodily abusing the targeted individual, they do nothing to intervene. To befriend someone so targeted risks their own ostracization and they'd rather have some friends rather than none.

And you ask why certain kids develop personality disorders? Really, who in this scenario has the personality disorder?

Frankly, there are literally millions of people living with mental illnesses in the united states and only the tiniest number of these act out violently. The percentage of people known to have been mentally ill when they committed mass murder is infinitesimal. The mental health angle is an issue worthy of discussion, but in this discussion it can only be viewed as a red herring.

Causes for developing childhood mental illness are fairly well understood in a great many cases, while others, like identifying disability due to genetic damage are being discovered all the time. Of course, many cases will always remain mysterious as to their cause. Abuse, trauma, neglect in meeting minimum nutritional and emotional needs, IE: isolation coinciding with absence of sensual touch, etc. Only my opinion.

Anyone know what mental illness it is those generals have, those waging war on the other side of the world upon mostly brown people they've never met, and speak a different language, and hold different religious beliefs than they do? What's that? oh, I see. They're not mentally ill; they do it because it's a prestigious position to hold and comes with a snappy uniform, great pay, a sweet pension, but, most of all, because it's great fun to watch stuff explode while bossing people around. (I think they call that "multi-tasking.")

[Karmamatterz]

An interesting article about guns in Mexico and their murder rate.

https://mises.org/wire/stop-blaming-mex ... rican-guns

Mexico has a much higher homicide by gun rate than the U.S. The U.S. has many many more guns per capita than Mexico.

Like much of Latin America, Mexico is a country with strict gun laws, but high homicide rates.

So how to explain the problem?

Well, in the case of Mexico, the answer for gun control activists is to blame the United States: "one way for Mexicans to get around their country's strict gun laws is to simply walk across the border."

The logic proceeds accordingly: The presence of more guns means more homicide. And, although Mexico has strict gun laws, Mexico is unfortunately located close to the United States where guns can be easily purchased. Guns are then introduced into Mexico where they drive a higher homicide rate.

There are some problems with this logic. Even if we account for all the black-market guns in Mexico, gun totals are still much higher in the US. That is, according to the 2007 Small Arms Survey, it is estimated that there are around 15 million privately-held guns in Mexico, on the high end. Even accounting for an additional increase since 2007, we're looking at a rate of fewer than 20 guns per 100 people in Mexico. In the United States, on the other hand, that total is around 100 guns per 100 people.

So, if one is going to pin Mexico's violence problem on "more guns," they have to account for why there are more than five times as many guns in the US, with only a small fraction of the homicides.

Moreover, the often-quoted statistic allegedly showing that as much as 70 percent, or even 90 percent, of guns seized in Mexico come from the US is not true. That statistic is based only on seized guns that are also traced by the ATF. How many of all guns seized in Mexico come from the US? According to Stratfor, "almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States." Nor does the Mexican government ask the ATF to trace all guns seized in Mexico. This is because many of those arms can be traced back to the Mexican government itself.

After all, it's not as if Latin America has no locally produced firearms. The 2012 Small Arms Survey notes:

Latin America has a long tradition of gun production, with some manufacturers tracing their history back many decades. Brazil has the largest arms industry in the region, followed by Argentina. Firearms are also produced by private or government-owned industries in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. While most of the production is intended to equip the military and law enforcement institutions, some of the production is for private use."

[Karmamatterz]

Iam,

You're not suggesting these shooters are sane are you? Please explain. I don't want to misconstrue what you mean. If these killers are not mentally ill then what are they? What sort of person commits murder on that scale and is not mentally ill or at the very least experiencing extreme antisocial behavior?

Of course only a tiny fraction of people with mental illnesses commit violent crimes. The number of mass murder shootings are also a tiny fraction of the total number of people murdered.

And you ask why certain kids develop personality disorders?

No. I'm asking why do they seek to kill? Why are there more of these incidents in the past few years? There have been piles of guns available for a long time. Access to firearms is not new. Kids have been able to get hold of guns for a long time. My parents didn't allow guns in our home, but my neighbor buddies had them neatly racked on their bedroom walls. They were extraordinarily safe and wouldn't allow anybody to handle the weapons, per their father's rule. I knew several other kids in my youth who owned rifles. Schools did then, and still do, allow students to take time off at the beginning of deer hunting season. These kids didn't go out and shoot up anybody. Why?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... ted_States

Please check out the link. Holy crap, there have been dozens and dozens of school shootings going way back. Things started getting massively out of control in the late 1990s. Prior to then most school killings were 3 or less people, with the exception of the 17 killed at Univ. of Texas in 1966.

Gun control is necessary and not a bad thing. There is control in place right now. Claiming gun owners are against gun control is more cognitive dissonance. Just as we license the ability to drive vehicles and other dangerous equipment. There is nothing wrong with restricting firearms for people who are mentally ill, having age requirements etc.... A few posters here seem to think just because someone is having a rational discussion that you're a rabid alt-right, neo-nazi monster. Funny how that thinking is so knee-jerk with some. Ideologues are triggered and puke up a bucket of chum they think is rational discourse. This is not an all or nothing situation. Rage filled emotional tantrums laced with ideological tropes only shows a willfulness to be ignorant. Iam, obviously I'm not referring to you.

[American Dream]

Reframing The Question Of Gun Control In The Context Of A School Shooting

I can only speak for myself when I say that I'm not a mystic and I don't believe that brains do unexplainable things. So now that that's out of the way, you should know that I reject the idea that an impulse can spontaneously bubble into a person's brain without conditioning. Before a kid decides to do mass murder, either because he hates black people, or Jews, or because women won't fuck him, or because he just has inexplicable hatred directed at everyone around him, he has to be conditioned.

I'm not going to claim that I understand exactly when or where in a classroom, on a news channel, or on a fishing trip with your dad's friends that the seed is planted. And I can't claim to fully understand the thought process that clicks into place that tells a brain what it needs to know about the worth of a human life that would enable a school shooter or any other kind of mass murderer. I will, however, say that all of us know that schools resemble prisons at worst and office buildings at best, in order to prepare kids to accept their shitty futures in one of the two, depending on your tax bracket. I did grow up in a household, like a lot of us did, that had the news on at least one T.V. at all times. I would see how they portrayed poverty-stricken criminals in this country, or people living in a country the US was dropping bombs on, as subhuman. I could go on, you get the idea.

I will say though, that I am interested in sharing an anti-mass-murder stance with both state sanctioned parties. I'm against mass murder via school shootings. I'm against the mass murder of 1,187 people formally murdered by police in 2017. I'm against the softer, less direct murder of 45,000 people (according to a study out of Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance anyway, I'm sure it's higher) a year in this country due to denied access to medicine via poverty. And I'm against the mass murder of between 19 and 30 million people in wars the US has waged in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sudan, during the Korean and Vietnam wars, and between two Iraq wars.

I think it's essential and right to be against mass murder and I'm suspicious of any claimed anti-mass-murder stance that thinks that it’s not a problem when it's done by cops, soldiers, or by artificial scarcity. I think you would have to believe that criminals, non-Americans, and poor people are less human to also believe that legal mass murder is an exception to your anti-mass-murder position. I think the imposed dichotomy between gun laws and no gun laws misses the point of any anti-mass-murder position which has got to first answer the question "Why does a mass-murderer decide to mass murder" and that we have to be genuinely interested in what the answer to that question is if we are going to claim to genuinely want solutions that can change more than just a law.

I believe that schools, as they are, are people-factories that breed the next generation of school shooters, army generals, cops, wife beaters, etc. I think we can create something better than what we now know of as schools, something that eliminates the line that modern schools draw between learning and living, for instance. I believe that nuclear families, as they are, promote isolation and foster some early and basic "us and them" thoughts that are dangerous. I think prisons should be abolished and people should no longer be policed and that our education system and other clunky institutions shouldn't operate with the intent to separate people into criminals and home-owners. I see that positions are taken by people after school shootings that non-coincidentally mirror exactly the positions of major news anchors and non-coincidentally only pose questions that risk keeping things basically the same. And I understand that it's tempting to reject the idea of fundamental change in favor of making some more laws, because that route doesn't require responsibility on our part over our own lives and it really is just an easier path of lesser resistance.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... -english-2

[DrEvil]

An interesting article about guns in Mexico and their murder rate.

https://mises.org/wire/stop-blaming-mex ... rican-guns

Mexico has a much higher homicide by gun rate than the U.S. The U.S. has many many more guns per capita than Mexico.

Like much of Latin America, Mexico is a country with strict gun laws, but high homicide rates.

So how to explain the problem?

Well, in the case of Mexico, the answer for gun control activists is to blame the United States: "one way for Mexicans to get around their country's strict gun laws is to simply walk across the border."

The logic proceeds accordingly: The presence of more guns means more homicide. And, although Mexico has strict gun laws, Mexico is unfortunately located close to the United States where guns can be easily purchased. Guns are then introduced into Mexico where they drive a higher homicide rate.

There are some problems with this logic. Even if we account for all the black-market guns in Mexico, gun totals are still much higher in the US. That is, according to the 2007 Small Arms Survey, it is estimated that there are around 15 million privately-held guns in Mexico, on the high end. Even accounting for an additional increase since 2007, we're looking at a rate of fewer than 20 guns per 100 people in Mexico. In the United States, on the other hand, that total is around 100 guns per 100 people.

So, if one is going to pin Mexico's violence problem on "more guns," they have to account for why there are more than five times as many guns in the US, with only a small fraction of the homicides.

Moreover, the often-quoted statistic allegedly showing that as much as 70 percent, or even 90 percent, of guns seized in Mexico come from the US is not true. That statistic is based only on seized guns that are also traced by the ATF. How many of all guns seized in Mexico come from the US? According to Stratfor, "almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States." Nor does the Mexican government ask the ATF to trace all guns seized in Mexico. This is because many of those arms can be traced back to the Mexican government itself.

After all, it's not as if Latin America has no locally produced firearms. The 2012 Small Arms Survey notes:

Latin America has a long tradition of gun production, with some manufacturers tracing their history back many decades. Brazil has the largest arms industry in the region, followed by Argentina. Firearms are also produced by private or government-owned industries in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. While most of the production is intended to equip the military and law enforcement institutions, some of the production is for private use."

Mexico also has what to amounts to an all out war going on between the cartels and the government.

It's also not a surprise that countries with more poverty and more dysfunctional institutions have higher levels of crime, including murder. That holds for pretty much all developing countries. Fewer opportunities lead to more crime as more people see that as their only option.

I also find it somewhat ironic that the guy complaining about ideologues is the guy posting stuff from far right anti-feminists and anarcho-capitalists. You have gone out of your way to blame everything except the kitchen sink and guns for the epidemic of gun violence in the US. Maybe you should consider your own ideological blinders.