Well first of all, I know you somewhat corrected yourself in a later post, but it really does sound like you’re saying we are completely helpless here, that there’s absolutely nothing we can do.
Second, in every other case where there’s a public safety or public health hazard, we try to make things better. In the two instances you cited, school buses and cross walks are both a lot safer than they used to be, precisely because people figured out how to make them safer. Why should gun safety be different?
Excellent, thank you for the citation. Yes, that prepper/survivalist belief is a little nutty at the extremes (when it goes past the “The power goes out here during the winter on a regular basis, so I need to prepare for that” kind of thing). I appreciate the actual support for a claim that the mother was “nutty.”
Only if you don’t understand the thrust of my argument. Obviously, posting from an iPad makes my posts a bit chaotic, but reading back through them, while they aren’t shinning examples of clarity, I don’t see where the confusion comes from on this. I’m not saying there is nothing we can do…I’m saying that we ARE doing much ALREADY to mitigate the negative impacts, but that in the end by allowing any of these things at all, society collectively acknowledges that harm will be done.
It’s not different. It’s exactly the same. There are laws and regulations in place already, and we are constantly refining them. Violence inspired gun deaths in the US have continually dropped since, IIRC, the 60’s, though they did spike up again in the 90’s for a while. If you look at the numbers, even including suicides which IMHO would be about the same regardless of whether we had guns or not, the numbers are fairly low, especially relative to other things we allow in our society, and as noted continue to drop. At a basic level though, there will ALWAYS be some non-zero number of deaths and harm done, however…and if those levels are acceptable to society then we will continue to allow them. Pretty obviously, the harm done by firearms, as well as other things that cause harm in our society, are acceptable at the current rates however. Just like the number of non-zero deaths due to the current standard of school buses or school crossings is acceptable, despite the fact that we COULD do more…if we were willing to pay the price. Which gets back into the OP…we COULD do more to mitigate school shootings like this latest one, but the reality is the incidence are so small and random and the costs would be so large that we probably won’t.
There are some crimes that are so monstrous, so horrible, that statistics are meaningless – that if it happened once, that is once too many. I think Newtown falls into that category. It’s an opportunity for us as a society to step back and think about our priorties.
IMHO: there are always going to be loonies amongst us, who might snap and attempt to commit random acts of horrific violence. We can do all that we can to identify and help these people. We should also do all that we can to make sure they can’t just open their parents closet and get all the guns they need to kill all the people they want. This is how most of the civilized world works, in a lot of countries that we would all consider to be “free”.
So: repeal the 2nd amendment. Ban private ownership of handguns. Ban semi-automatic rifles. If a loonie takes grandpa’s bolt action hunting rifle with him to shoot up a school or workplace – we have a much better chance of spotting him before he gets too far, and/or stopping him before he’s done too much harm.
Because school buses and cross walks are inanimate objects. Most of the proposals I’ve seen in these threads the past week boil down to “punish the law-abiding for the actions of the criminals”.
The infamous propaganda lie, Protocols of the Elders of Zion claimed that the evil plot to destroy society would proceed as follows: First, tear down all traditional morality, encourage licentiousness, and use the media to feed progressively more lurid entertainment to the public. Then, when violence and barbarity threaten to collapse civilization, declare that the people can’t be trusted with freedom and ban every means by which the will of the state could be resisted. Something’s wrong when reality starts to match paranoid conspiracy theories.
I addressed the alcohol issue upthread - other than from drunk drivers, alcohol is only dangerous to the consumer. I am all in favor of draconian measures to prevent drunk driving, but there is no reason to try to ban general consumption (and good reasons NOT to, as we all know). With guns, once they get into someone’s hands, you are pretty much powerless to stop them from going on a murdering spree with them. Sure, its a small number who do, but it can affect anyone anywhere. There is no protecting yourself. Even if, as in the NRA fantasies, everyone is packing, they can still get the drop on you and take you out before you know what is going on (like the DC sniper proved).
Heavy weapons and explosives have been heavily regulated for a long time. So by your “logic” it’s already too late. Personal firearms don’t help you resist “the will of the state” at all. This isn’t the 1700s, guys with rifles can’t stand up to a modern military; the gun fetishist “guns are for freedom” nonsense is just that, nonsense. If anything it just means that if America does go full-bore authoritarian, the government has plenty of raw material for paramilitary death squads. Under some future dictatorship, we’re far more likely to see gangs of pro-gun people kicking in the doors of accused gun control advocates, liberals, atheists and homosexuals and gunning them down than we are to see them resist tyranny of any kind.
You’ve mentioned this in a couple of previous threads and I just don’t understand where you’re coming from. Members on this board have posted that they’re liberal AND believe in owning firearms. Does owning a gun mean you’re a wannabe Brownshirt?
As for the “it’s already too late” argument, this in fact worries me. I fear we’re still a democracy purely on inertia; that to use a historical analogy, we’re the Roman republic just after the end of the Punic wars. At a minimum I’d prefer to see the USA get out of the superpower business, cut our standing army to a fifth of what it is now, and reform the National Guards so that they really are citizen militias again and not thinly disguised state armies.
Being pro-gun generally does. Support for gun ownership is overwhelmingly a right wing issue, something the gun fetishists themselves point out all the time when bashing the Democrats. It’s not the left or middle that talks about “Second Amendment solutions” to political disputes. And while guns are terrible for opposing the government, they are great for terrorizing the populace; so it’s only the “wannabe Brownshirts” who actually matter.
A local radio interview show had a NRA guest who brought up the Warsaw Ghetto as an example. Frankly, I don’t find it one ounce convincing. Let me know when Waffen SS Divisions start appearing on our frontiers…and even then, I think the regular military can do a much better job of resisting them than unorganized people with handguns. The comparison is dopey. The enemy isn’t fascism any more; the enemy is lone-wolf lunatics.
I’d also find it slightly more convincing if people were targeting police chiefs, judges, Congressmen, etc., rather than – schoolchildren. Yeah, there’s a grave danger to our freedom; they might let a toy roll out into the street in front of our cars!
I see nothing there that would qualify her as mentally ill. She had a few guns, and she stockpiled food. Not a bad idea. Blizzards, storm, extended power outage…lots of reasons to keep some non-perishable food around. Hell, she might have been Mormon for all I know. I think they stockpile food.
Um…then how do you explain what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan? A local insurgency put up a pretty good fight against the U.S. military both places. Hell, in Afghanistan, they drove the Russians out decades ago, and they’ve battled us to a stalemate.
With US supplied weaponry, IEDs and looted military armories; not rifles. And they have mainly done as well as they did against us because we are bullies & cowards; a mere few thousand casualties and we run off because we were looking for a cost-free conquest with no casualties and everything paid for by their oil money. The evil dictatorship the gun fetishists are always ranting about would take that many casualties without blinking.
One of the most important features of those insurgencies - a point that has been studied, dissected, and discussed by every person doing serious analysis on them - is how the rifle is far LESS important to the insurgent than expected. The weapons they have used to great effect are hidden bombs and RPGs.
I didn’t jerk my knee. In fact I’ve reread the post, read other analyses of it (both generally agreed with my interpretation) and read your clarifications. I guess I am just not getting the “ban-it” mentality in the suggestions that I’ve read. I think many of them are constructive. I think each successive shooting enhances support for effective gun control measures, either by focusing on access to firearms or trying to rid ourselves of some firearms. Just as importantly, as much as many of these ideas may work to prevent school shootings or the lethality of shootings that, as you rightly point out, will inevitably occur, they may also reduce shootings or the lethality of shootings in other contexts.
Only fretful people possess weapons of death. ‘Gun culture’ is a byword for ‘fear culture’.
Address the fear Americans have that propagates the desire for the power to end life with a mere squeeze of a trigger and you’re well on the way to arresting the so-called gun culture.
There’s already fairly strict gun control in many states, so the second amendment is not an obstacle. And there’s no reason the court couldn’t interpret it even more strictly in the future. It has evolved on plenty of other issues. You can argue about whether or not this is a good thing, but it’s still true.
The idea that you cannot permanently and completely solve a problem is also a non starter argument for taking no action at all.
I think the strongest argument that gun control will ultimately need to be replaced with other solutions is that ubiquitous 3D printing is inevitable and virtually unregulatable.
So our focus needs to shift to two main areas:
Change had to come from within. The NRA and gun folks need to take ownership of the problem in a grassroots way. They need to change the general attitude about guns so that there is a very strong stigma within their community to treating guns irresponsibly. And they should be heavily investing in resources to educate people about respect for guns and making the process of obtaining a gun one that inherently requires some integrity and character.
There should be more resources for mental health, especially for the poor, and a campaign to make some of those resources considered to be maintenance resources for “normal” folks.