If it’s easier to get and carry a gun, it’s easier for, whatever you want to call them, I’m tempted to use the word ‘sociopath’, but I’m uncomfortable with how mainline psychology classifies people, additionally not all sociopaths are violent, and not all violence is committed by sociopaths, so I’ll just say violent people (which includes, but isn’t limited to spree killers, anyone who’s sufficiently violent to be potentially lethal), to get and carry a gun.
However, if it’s easier to get/carry a gun, it’s also easier for non-violent people to get/carry a gun, which deters some violent people from acting on their violent feelings, and which makes it easier for non-violent people to defend themselves and others when violent people do act on their violent feelings.
That’s not just my theory, that’s what the data shows, the data supports my theory, it doesn’t support yours.
No it wasn’t a joke, you actually made that idiotic point with no indication of joking and every indication of actually meaning what you said to be taken as you said it.
It’s also easier to kill someone with an AR-15, with an AR-15 or another kind of gun.
You really can’t take a joke. Whatever you say my serious delicate snowflake, whatever you say.
It only really matters insofar as you can use the info to prevent further deaths, if you can’t, it doesn’t matter how murderers are murdering non-murderers.
You have to deal with PR however. I mean, look at what insurgents manage in Iraq. Add in then that the army and police are shooting americans, and you have heavy pr problems. No guns out there and the few who have can be written off more easily as terrorists. A large armed resistance, even with no hope of winning, can cause all sorts of problems maintaining order in the police and army. Not a few terrorists, not over quickly, not just weirdos, our neighbors and people will drop out of the army and not in small numbers. Even more so police. People watching will also get sick and questions the martial law, the military response, official stories.
Just as there will always be bullies and victims of bullying, some victims will always carry out acts of vengeance later on in life.
Instead of spending billions of dollars banning guns, when the data shows it won’t make a difference, we could spend billions of dollars on reducing bullying, or on getting anxious and depressed people some actual help, instead of sweeping their problems under the carpet with experimental drugs, which seem to do more harm than good, or, just live with the 1 out of a million possibility of being caught in a shooting spree, like we live with all the other 1 out of a millions, and give up on the liberal, utopian dream of making things 100% safe,
a dream you’ve wholeheartedly embraced, here at least.
You can cure ignorance, but it’s pretty hard to cure dumb.
African Americans are less intelligent.
I’m not going to speculate on why.
They’re also more aggressive, they have more testosterone, and that’s almost as certainly genetic as their frizzy hair is, at least in part.
They’re also poorer, less educated.
Perhaps we could help lift the African American community out of poverty and ignorance, or perhaps we could give them anti-testosterone and estrogen pills to Asianize/feminize them, or perhaps we could get them more involved in theatre, ballet and classical music instead of break dancing and gangsta rap, I don’t know, but I do know what we shouldn’t do, we shouldn’t allow America’s higher homicide rate to continue to be blamed on guns, when African Americans are several times more murderous than Latinos, who’re several times more murderous than whites, which’s at the very least a very big part of the reason why America has a higher homicide rate than the European mean.
We will never get rid of social inequality as it will always exist however we could in practical terms severely limit it if we wanted to keeping it at a minimum. The capitalist paradigm of society however doesn’t believe in limiting it since in all reality it thrives on social inequality and loves it. In capitalism there is hyper competition in all facets of living where it triumphantly celebrates its winners and loves dragging its losers everywhere in defeat/mockery for public showing.
In such a culture or paradigm the losers are poked and prodded in every facet of existence making sure they can have pride in nothing, their entire self worth is stripped away from them. Their entire sense of self and personal identity eroded into nothingness.
Of course we wonder why people crack up and violently snap on others when we have a culture like this that it’s absurd to even ask why to begin with. No, instead of focusing on socio economic dilemmas which I believe is the real origin of all this pent up rage we instead talk about disarming this portion of the population keeping them well medicated, of course this does nothing addressing the overall issues and will accomplish nothing but for the ignorant along with those that control this society that’s good enough for the status quo to remain in place. In all reality we can throw all the poisonous medications on this portion of society in the world and it will accomplish nothing in the long run.
An anti-gun advocate can easily grant that violence is more deeply rooted than what weapons are available, and that the impetus to commit violence exists is in people whether or not they have a gun. Guns are not part of human biology, they do not affect the limbic system or any other human biological systems that are relevant to violence. Nor do they influence societal factors that are relevant to violence any more than they affect biological factors.
None of this is in question.
What’s in question is that, once guns are available, damage is far easier to cause and the potential to damage more severely and in more numbers is far more present - intentionally or by accident, on yourself or on others.
This is why in places that do not have violent people, where societal conditions do not either cause, exacerbate or influence violent tendencies in people, you can have as many guns as you like and people still won’t use them on others any more than they would have used other weapons if guns were not available. These are the freest places and the places most deserving of the freedom to have guns. Places like Kennesaw are such places, places like Chicago are not. But the danger of saying “well in that case let places like Kennesaw have their guns” is that they may escape Kennesaw if people move, steal or trade outside an otherwise safe haven, and unstable or mentally ill people can move into Kennesaw and ruin their track record. So I still cannot be pro-gun for places like Kennesaw for the reason I stated in the previous mini-paragraph.
This is the same reason why we have speed limits even for responsible, capable and well-intentioned drivers. It’s those irresponsible, incapable and ill-intentioned drivers who ruin it for everyone - and that sucks! But we accept it because it’s our reality. Freedom with certain things is practical, and with other things it is not.
This is also why we reserve dangerous things to only the safest hands in many cases - e.g. surgery and healthcare in general. We should do the same for guns being reserved only for the military and (better) trained policemen, and we will hopefully be doing the same for cars once AI drivers are released.
Usually the right are pro-personal-responsibility, which is great for such questions as “what to do with dangerous things?” It is responsible to leave them only to responsible hands and to make it as hard as possible to let them get into the hands of irresponsible people. We already do with many things but for some reason, way too many people can’t seem to move the same mentality to the use of guns. It’s your responsibility to ensure that you are involved in applying these same restrictions to guns as well as all these areas that people generally accept.
Interesting point, here’s what I think: arming some types of people will deter violence, arming other types will entice it.
Prisons tend to be made up of people who’re more risk prone, meaning they’re more willing to risk their lives and the lives of others to attain easy power and privilege, where as the general population tend to be made up of people who’re more risk adverse.
When you hand prisoners guns, they think more about the benefit: easy power/privilege, if I get lucky, me and my homies are going to kill peeps and take their shit, where as the general population will think more about the cost: easy come/easy go, if I don’t get lucky, me and my friends are going to be killed while trying to take peoples stuff.
Prisoners would rather live in a world where there’s fewer survivors/victors, but more (easy) spoils, where as the gen pop would rather live in a world where there’s many survivors/victors, but less (easy) spoils.
In some cases this is more due to genetics (innate lack of will and/or ability), in some cases this is due more to social, and self conditioning, and in other cases this is due more to environment.
The harder people think/feel it is to get the things they want, especially the things they think/feel they need, and the larger the disparity between the haves/have nots, the less likely people will be willing play by the existing rules, or be nonviolent, opting for a different set of rules potentially more beneficial to them and their class, or no rules at all.
And of course this is more true of some people than others.
Desperate times: desperate measures, people are more dangerous when they think/feel they have little-nothing to lose, and this is especially true of many-most prisoners, particularly lifers.
This is an interesting idea.
While I think morality might play a role, if it does, it’s probably secondary to fear.
In the US it may be true that the people (typically more rural WASPs) who believe they have a right to guns are more moral in general than the people who don’t, for genetic and/or religious reaosns, and/or it may be their morality differs, they believe the ends (power/privlege) never or very rarely justify the means (big government/violence).
However, this isn’t just a phenomenon in the US, all over the world, people seem to be at least as safe, if not safer in countries where the gen pop is more armed, rather than less, and personally I doubt this correlation between morality, or a peculiar kind of morality (duty ethics, means over ends) and guns exists across the board in every country.
What kind of rat keeps visiting sewers even though they are sewers, only to continuously complain that they are sewers - even when they are not sewers?!
Dude, you can leave any time you want if you don’t like it. In fact, other than the extra traffic that forums get when easy targets such as you present yourselves (which we probably all appreciate on some level) I don’t think anyone will miss you.
You did? I just had another skim and still only saw graphs with zero correlation, which I have already commented on, so on the off-chance that I still might be missing something, can you please direct me to the graph you mean?
I don’t think anyone was presenting this as a serious idea, but it is a good example of applying something that - let’s say it was rational - to people who are sometimes (if not often) irrational. Sometimes the reasoning that “the other person has a gun” isn’t enough to deter people from using theirs anyway. Hence gang violence never ceasing.
Right, guns aren’t contributing to violence, if anything they’re deterring it, and while bullying and bad drugs are contributing to a particular and peculiar kind of violence (spree shootings), and (radical) Islam is contributing to another kind of violence (terrorism), what’s contributing to general violence in society is the enormous, and accelerating disparity between people of higher and lower (socio)economic status.
There will always be violence, even if society was 100% fair, of course it could never be 100% anything, but we could be taking steps to reducing poverty, instead we’re doing just the opposite.
Neither the left nor the right want to seriously tackle this issue, they’d rather talk about anything else: guns, abortion, gay marriage, radical Islam, ‘white privilege’ *cringes.
At the end of the day what matters most is: are workers starving, or struggling to survive, or can they live comfortably, decently?
It’s peoples needs that matter most, but don’t expect the banksters and bureaucrats to know the first thing about needs.
The right’s solution is to lower taxes for the middle class, or at least that’s what they say, of course they’re more interested in lowering taxes for the rich, and the left’s solution is to throw the workers a few crumbs, or at least that’s what they say, of course they’re more interested in corporate welfare than social welfare.
And when they do throw us a few crumbs, they do it in such a way that it hurts the middle class more than the rich, when it could very easily benefit both the working, and middle class.
And that’s how the left and the right are basically on the same team, they want to keep the classes fighting amongst themselves…and the races, and the religions, and the sexes, so neither of us ever get anywhere save more impoverished, because we think the only way we can emancipate ourselves is by screwing over another group of people that’re just as oppressed as we are.
If we want to understand the elite and their modus operandi, it can be summed up simply as: divide and rule, controlled opposition.
We all know we’re being fucked over.
What we need then is either real, radical socialism, and/or to wait for things to collapse of their own volition.
either way, things are going to change, they have to, there’s a limit to how much the lower classes, and the environment can take, as I’ve been saying the only real question is: when?
Until then, expect a lot more violence, in the long run.
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Some of the places with the fewest guns have the most murders.
This is where your favored democracy fails my friend and why I have chosen my current set of political beliefs. This crude destructive system will continue as long as it can until it can’t anymore, let us hope its destruction will come quickly in our lifetime.
Cognitive dissonance within Trump supporters and his inner circle? Say it isn’t so.
There will be more cognitive dissonance within the next few years that I can guarantee you.
Really not convinced you know how to read graphs.
If you cared to run a correlation between any of these stats, you’d notice very close to zero correlation as I said before. Looking at a handful of outliers doesn’t show a trend or a rule, it shows some anomalies. So back to my ponderings over what the zero correlation could mean to both pro- and anti-gun advocates…
But if you want to go into why about 10% of all countries that have around 10% gun ownership still have high gun homicides, then sure, we can look at them…
Personally I’d rather talk about my post on the previous page about what the anti-gun stance actually is, or at least what mine is.
I agree but it’s a subjective slippery slope on what constitutes “potential to damage more severely and numerously”. If ARs fell off the earth, I’d never notice, but once that’s established, then where does it stop?
Yes, that’s true and it argues for focusing on other causes because you’ll never sterilize the public of guns. All you’ll succeed in doing is driving the market underground like the drug war has with drugs, take people’s rights, and still not guarantee any measurable element of safety. Essentially a 2nd monster will have been created to fight the first and then not only would we still be subject to mass shootings, but we’d also be subject to governmental persecution.
Then it would be like the Texas shooter who was an atheist in a bible-thumping town and consequently snapped. The absolutists and relativists cannot get along peacefully.
Glad you’re around to argue your side of it.
First it’s speed limits and then seat belt laws and then after we’ve gotten acclimated to that tradeoff of freedom for security, now we have banned smoking in the car with children. What’s next? It’s the incremental taking of freedom in effort to minutely control every aspect of humanity, but people still die; if not this then that. Nothing has really been accomplished except an authoritarian wetdream.
I agree, but doctors are the 3rd leading cause of death. cnn.com/2016/05/03/health/m … index.html
Idiots are idiots regardless of accreditation. Those folks I went to school with… who didn’t perform as well as I… they are the doctors and legislators.
Those are the least of who should be armed. No sense in arming trained killers who wouldn’t flinch before shooting someone because they’ve gotten used to it. Also, consider the sorts who pursue that line of work… the ones with few other options in life who decide the military may be the way out and then decide a sense of self-worth may be found in tossing one’s weight around in harassing otherwise law-abiding citizens for trivial seatbelt violations as a career.
Every lawyer in the country will tell you “Do not talk to police!” Police can and will lie to you, entrap you, and are not your friend. Police are immoral by necessity of occupation and these are the sorts you would trust to not kill you? Naive. killedbypolice.net/ You’re FAR more likely to be shot by a police officer than anyone else.