Look, we need to find a solution here.
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How about Elect President Trump?
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Damn it!
Mental health I think would help most âmass shootingsâ that arenât tied to other crimes.
Reducing poverty I think would be the best for regular crime, as the crime rate between lower and middle class alone is startling, and upper class violent crime is very rare.
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You forgot: reduce/end misogyny.
Who gets to decide the criteria?
It has already been decided. Itâs the definition of the term âdelusionâ.
Iâm not saying you are⌠but if heâs mentally ill and not a white supremacist, who IS a white supremacist?
You can be both mentally ill and a white supremacist at the same time (especially if all white supremacists are, to some degree at least, mentally ill!). Itâs deja vu all over again.
How didnât they know that racism was wrong, when people who were the primary targets of racists had been telling everyone that since the early 19th century
Why would they listen to them, they were black? Also, thanks for the unnecessary history lesson.
Which was common knowledge well before the early modern period, of courseâŚ
No, it wasnât. It was known (by certain people, at certain times, in certain places), but it wasnât common knowledge. Delusion relates to the common body of knowledge possessed by society at large, not by the best knowledge available judged by modern standards. No doubt you and I currently hold beliefs that will be viewed delusional in the future btw.
âWhere is âall of the aboveâ?â
Iâm not sure if youâre being flippant, but I agree that âall of the aboveâ is the right answer ⌠or at least much closer to the right answer than any of these three alone.
Reducing poverty/inequality reduces the incentives and motivation for crime generally, including firearms crime. Even with the best will in the world, which is sorely lacking right now, this will take a long time to show results.
Providing mental health treatment/care assists people to find productive ways of coping with their issues (Iâm not a mental health expert, so please forgive me if Iâve phrased that in a crass way). Again this will take a long time, and will only ever involve a fiarly smallish segment of the population.
Restricting gun access reduces the amount of damage that can be done. Of the three this is the one that has the best potential to provide a rapid positive response.
Layered treatments to reduce the likelihood and impact of an event are always going to be superior to singular interventions (see: Swiss Cheese Model). Also, some things are faster to enact and see results sooner than others, even if the âslowerâ interventions will ultimately produce better outcomes. The best is what we want, but something today is better than nothing, and something in the interim is also better than doing nothing while the best is implemented. Restricting access to firearms means that when someone snaps theyâre less able to cause damage. Mental health care helps reduce snaps amongst the most vulnerable. Reducing inequality reduces the number of people likely to snap.
Jon
(Note: I used words like âreduceâ and not âeliminateâ. That usage was not an accident)
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Sure, but not everyone has to take out a mortgage to afford a house. Especially with the trend towards Tiny Houses, which are easily affordable out of savings. The land costs, but whether thatâs much depends significantly on the area.
I needed a license to drive a car on public roads, but I donât need one to drive on my own land, or other bits of non-public road. No one checked anything when I bought my first and third cars. They just asked for cash, and signed over the title.
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Presumably you do realise that electrons arenât a self-organising anarcho-syndicalist collective who all just happen to agree on everything? They obey the law, far more rigidly than any human society ever has, or ever will.
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But in terms of race relations, whatâs delusional?
Sure, but you can be a white supremacists and not be mentally ill, as Iâm arguing Roof was not mentally ill. He knew precisely what he was doing. Holding an unpopular and discredited ideology is not a delusion or evidence of mental illness necessarily.
youâre point was that people didnât know better. They did - the knowledge of anti-racism was out there. It wasnât just WEB DuBois, Ida Wells, and Fredrick Douglas, from well before the end of slavery, there were white anti-racists and abolitionists too. people didnât listen, not because they didnât know any better, but because they didnât want that very thin slice of social space they carved out for themselves via labor and race upset. People made conscious choices to believe in the myth of white supremacy. Some continue to do so today.
Honestly, I think laying to rest widely held myths about the past is important.
It was certianly common knowledge among the educated of the day. According to a historian of the period:
The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching.(Via a quote on [wikipedia on the flat earth myth][1])
Also, from the same page on the Columbus era:
The issue in the 1490s was not the shape of the Earth, but its size, and the position of the east coast of Asia, as Irving in fact points out.
So perhaps âcommon beliefâ is not accurate, but an it was common amongst the people for whom we have written records and sources from. If that translates to the general population, I donât knowâŚ
Obviously, knowing what the general population knew about the earth is harder to gauge, so we canât say much about that.
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And when they do break the law, we detain them. This is why we hold presidential electrons every four years.
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See? You do believe in the rule of law.
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I believe in disenfranchising the minority by doing this âvotingâ thing.
(That isnât to say what we do is really direct democracy or even a real republic anymore.)
How does registering firearms, or gun owners, prevent violent crime? Itâs pretty easy to see how it makes the gun-ownerâs fears easy: You have a list of where guns are, so when you decide to ban them in general, or a specific class of them, itâs relatively easy to know whoâs doors to knock on.
And beyond that: Isnât one of the parts of the brouhaha over the NSA a result of them having this massive database?
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Ever the NRA strawman.
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But in terms of race relations, whatâs delusional?
That there exists a hierarchy of races, and white people sit at the top. Personally, I believe the belief in the existence of races in general is pretty delusional, but that isnât such a commonly held belief that you could describe it as a mental disorder these days, will be nice when we can say that though.
Sure, but you can be a white supremacists and not be mentally ill, as Iâm arguing Roof was not mentally ill.
And Iâm thinking he probably was, but like Iâve said repeatedly on this specific case, time will tell.
youâre point was that people didnât know better.
Most of the people you point to who knew better werenât considered full people at the time, so their opinion didnât count in terms of consensus forming. Pointing to a few token white people who also knew better doesnât help your argument. And the further back you go in history the more ridiculous racialist delusions become, the modern form of racial categorisation was mainly popularised by Kant (the first modern racist you might say), prior to that races were more readily conceived along national/ethnic lines (something which only survives today as national stereotyping), in fact out-group prejudice could get incredibly fine grained (one village over was probably enough in most places before the industrial revolution). I wouldnât be surprised if the whole thing grew out of an evolutionary strategy related to kin selection in hunter gatherer tribal groups, such an innate character might help explain why itâs so hard to eliminate.
[âŚflat earth]
it doesnât matter when it became common knowledge, itâs enough for my point that it happened at some point (unless youâre suggesting everyone has always known the Earth is spherical?).
Letâs not forget âend the War on Some Drugs.â
This countryâs got a lot of problems. They all combine into the perfect storm for producing violence.
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Yep, January 22, 1973 was a bad day all aroundâŚ
Yeah I know, everyone is tired of hearing me talk, but something that popped into my head last night.
It appears to me that in general these mass shootings are carried out by crazy people. But they are still very rare. But the US is HUGE compared to just about every where else. We like to compare the US to Canada, Europe, and Australia as they are most similar to us - but they are also much, much smaller in population.
So using the rate of 4.4 shootings a year with 319 million people in the US, that means for every 72.5 million people there is one person nutty enough to go on a rampage per year.
Ok - Australia only has 23 million people. Which means by averages they may not even have one person nutty enough in their whole country to go on a mass shooting. Even if we made the assumption that given time one event will occur, it would take 3.1 years before ONE event.
Canada has 35 million people. Again, they have half the number of people needed for there to be one person so sick to go on a rampage. Given time we are looking at one event every 2 years.
Finally the UK is the largest of the three with 65 million people, still shy of the population guaranteed to produce one nut (and you guys have better medical care, right? Maybe they get help sooner). They would average 1.1 years per event.
So anyway - I think I make a valid point. When your sample size is much, much larger than anything else you compare it to, you are open to more outliers. It doesnât mean we are horribly broken.
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The population of Europe is about 740 million people. The EU is about 500 million.
Except that itâs more like 1 every 10 years (recently - any further back and it just didnât happen)
Cumbria, 2010
Dunblane, 1996
Hungerford, 1987
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