You do understand that some gangs have White members, right? Maybe you’d like to reconsider?
David Brooks gave this some thought.
Seems a reasonable take.
I don’t understand your reasoning here. Shouldn’t that be India and China? Did China get left out because of censorship … or something…??
I suppose what you wrote could have been a honest typo/error but I think you made the same error twice in this thread.
No, it seems to be that he thinks the appropriate comparator to the United States is a communist dictatorship, rather than to other democratic, free-market countries.
There are plenty that are both. Mentally ill doesn’t mean completely incompetent, necessarily. Many sociopaths know damned well what they’re doing is wrong, they just don’t give a shit.
I’m sure he does, but I won’t know since I can’t read the article.
I can’t either.
But I’d guess that he wrote something similar to what he said on Friday’s PBS Newshour. Mass shootings is the opening segment:
Here’s an article from NPR which he linked to in the NYT article:
Two basic points: (1) mental illness is not a strong indicator for mass shootings, although it can be a factor; (2) talk of mental illness to reduce gun violence is just a dodge to avoid talking about the relationship between guns and gun violence.
I’m trying to explain to you why your point makes zero sense. Your whole reason for raising the claim that China, somehow magically hides thousands of spree killings (when they can’t hide thousands of videos of quarantine conditions being leaked) was the implication that America only appears bad for mass killings because China hides it’s data.
But, America’s stats look appalling even when we’re talking about per capita. i.e. when we compare the US to all countries. Therefore, for your argument to hold any water, we need the whole world to be conspiring to make it look bad. “Got that?”
Again, if we throw in the developing countries too, the data look worse for the US and its liberal gun laws.
Because almost all of the countries with the worst gun homicide rates are in North and Central America, countries in close proximity to the US and known to have a large influx of American-made weapons.
Anyone coming at this from just looking at the data, dispassionately and objectively, would find it obvious that gun availability is the critical thing here. But it seems this is the one explanation that will be forever off the table for you.
It seems to me that talking about the relationship between guns and gun violence, and talking about “what would make a person do such a thing” (and is there a way of predicting and preventing it) are both worthwhile conversations to have, and neither need come at the expense of the other.
I think a lot of people feel that anyone who would perpetrate a mass shooting (like the one in Highland Park) must have something wrong with them—they must be broken in some way. And many of them go on to assume that that something wrong must be some form of metal illness, or their personal definition of mental illness automatically includes anyone who would behave in such an aberrant way. We laymen don’t always have a clear idea of what does and does not count as mental illness, or what distinguishes it from other kinds of “brokenness” (do the professionals?).
Yes, his PBS commentary was an abbreviated version of his NYT piece. In a nutshell, he states that mass shootings are an indicator of something in society that has fallen apart and produced a lot of broken individuals, who are unable to connect with others and feel completely alienated and hostile. So they’re not mentally ill, but deeply disturbed.
And given ready access to guns, instead of just jumping off a bridge they take random innocents with them.
If he’s right, the best thing we could do would be to add a requirement that says that in order to purchase a gun you have to bring a friend with you, to prove you actually have one.
I’m not sure which would you live on, but this is not an accurate description of any planet I’ve ever seen.
Are YOU? Do you kniw what Per Capita means?
Please, not this again.
What the fuck does that have to do with it? Yeah, the St Valentines day massacre was not, IMHO a “mass shooting” It was gang warfare.
Do you then, think that if only blacks are killed it isn’t a mass shooing? That’s a kinda racist way to think.
Nonsense. If you think you can trust the “news” coming out of China, that’s fine. Most people don’t.
Nonsense. I am making the point that you can not trust the “official news” out of China. Do you trust it?
Compared to all nations, Americas Murder rate falls almost exactly in the middle.
Oh, and you guys can continue putting words in my mouth, and not bothering to either read pr understand what I posted, but I am done with this hijack.
Firstly you’re being wilfully obtuse here, because I just explained to you why your point rests on not just China somehow fooling the world, but every other country too. So it’s completely a red herring to try to hold focus on China as if it would help your point.
But secondly, while we are all aware how China manipulates and censors the news, there are levels of plausibility here. You can’t say “Every city in China has a Godzilla stomping around, prove me wrong, they censor the news!”. There are thousands of foreign journalists and diplomats working in China (not to mention the vast expat community). The claim that China has a hidden gun violence problem anywhere in the same galaxy as the US is absolutely laughable.
Firstly we weren’t talking about homicide rate.
Secondly, you’re pretending not to get the point. Even looking at just homicide rate (as opposed to gun homicides, or mass shootings) the US is an outlier as being a wealthy country with a very high rate. But when we look at gun violence, all nations (which is the thing we were talking about), we see even poor nations do considerably better than the US. Almost all the places which are worse are…middle-income nations in America’s sphere. IOW they are outliers too, thanks to the illegal trade in American-manufactured weapons.
I think we’ve beat this to death. Thanks for the input; I’m outta here.
Close pending moderation. It will be a while.
Please note, there were multiple flags about multiple posters for this thread.