No, as I said it is my example of a country that doesn’t have functional police forces but does have lots of guns. In that situation local warlords tend to find a way to fill the power vacuum.
It wasn’t called the “Wild West” because it was so gosh-darned civilized. The only places that didn’t have much crime were the places that didn’t have many people.
You can get away with “everybody just agree to treat each other well” when your society is a few dozen people living in a tribe. But when you’re dealing with thousands, millions or billions of people you need to have slightly more complex rules and mechanisms to make sure everyone can peacefully coexist.
The idea of shooting up a school or a cinema is now an option for the crazy and bitter. The Idea is out there, and it will go through the head of anyone with some anger to express.
That’s an ill-advised idea in the first place. That many people will never agree as to how to live, so it guarantees that a considerable segment of the population will be oppressed. The functional description of the contemporary nation state is basically to control a population and territory by force, unfortunately, not no peacefully coexist. The pretense of a civilised liberal society with personal agency is not really compatible with state as subjugating force.
@Mister44 Sir! You sound like an unconscious spout for weakly dilute propaganda when you talk about guns. Otherwise an intelligent purveyor of actual thought. Which leads to my sternly annunciated and prevaricated dumbfoundedness when thoust draw from that well.
OK, how many of the 7.1 Billion people on Earth do you propose we kill off so nobody has to be oppressed anymore? Or do you just think we should just build a bunch of walls to section off the global population into fully autonomous groups of a few dozen or so?
The delusion that people need walls, fences, or other artificial borders in order to live with autonomy is why things are this way now. I don’t think either choice sounds realistic, nor desirable. In the real world, groups are not sectioned, they overlap, and interpenetrate. Territory is the ultimate boondoggle.
Anyway, @caryroys forked some relevant discussion here (edit) so I will not discuss it further in this topic.
ETA: Sorry, I thought it a new topic, but it was a PM
yes. Full stop. Yes. Dude was racist. Let’s not give him the “mentally ill” pass. He was nothing like Holmes, or the guy who shot that Senator in Arizona… they were actually mentally ill. Hating black people is not a mental illness.
This is a key idea that only now some people dare to even consider. hopefully it will catch on.
The follow up is to ask what purpose all this violence serves, I mean, people don’t just start shooting into a crowd for no discernible fucking reason, and we have no reason to believe that it was for no real reason at all, I mean, just saying the person was crazy doesn’t even begin to describe that there is a problem where so many people are crazy in the same specific way.
(Note that my use of “crazy” was meant to mock the very idea of mental health being used as a scapegoat, if I failed I apologize)
I posit that a society that cannot conceive of letting go of its guns when they are turned on them is a society that breeds this type of violence. So I ask again: What purpose could this type of violence serve that so many people are drawn to it?
If these people really are mentally ill then the expression of that illness should tell us something about the society they live in. And I risk belaboring my point, I know, but at this point we can forget that these acts of violence are random. And if there is a pattern, then there is a reason. That it doesn’t get addressed isn’t just the thing that’s allowing the violence to continue, its got to be integral to what breeds the violence in the first place.
Why can’t this be part of the violence we’re talking about here? Aren’t cops members of this society as well? Trusted members even! Yet they are responsible for quite a lot of shootings, taken as a whole, one huge, distributed mass shooting every day. But I’m only half serious here.
I’ll come at this two ways.
Mass killings are barely a blip and are sensasionalist.
That’s several blips on the radar now and as time goes on they don’t stop, if there is a frequency to them, a pattern, then there is something to know about them.
If we stop talking about them, there will be fewer of them
It seems that no one really talks about them, after every shooting you hear people talking about everything but the shooting, they can’t wrap their heads around it of course, what else can they do but talk: About guns, about videogames, about violence in movies, about flags, and you’re running out of things to talk about so maybe soon, you’ll talk about the dead, the blip in the radar.
i would say that if it happens reliably 4.4 times a year and the answer is do nothing then I’m less surpised that it happens 4.4 times a year and would in fact be much more surprised if it ever went down at all.
You made a good point here, one I agree with, I would only suggest that the things to watch out for are:
The corollary: Neither did crazy non gun owners, or crazy gun owners for that matter.
The slippery slope: Overreaching and claiming their right to keep firearms is more important than people’s right to live, that is, making a display of how their personal rights are above those of the victims of violence. (They do this by claiming this isn’t that big a deal in the larger scheme of things)
Directed at @Mister44, yes, I’d like to interject this sentiment here before things get too charged I generally like the people around here, even when we disagree!
No, I really don’t think he was. I honestly don’t. He knew right from wrong, and still shot 9 people dead because of the color of their skin. His manifesto was sane, in the sense that it made sense, was coherent, and was drawn from a long line of racist literature going back decades.
I really don’t think we should go down the road of assuming that a mass shooting must be an act by a crazy person, because then we never figure out any real solutions to the problem.
There are different types of mental illness, he doesn’t need to have an incoherent rambling manifesto written in blood in order to qualify. He was clearly delusional, and almost certainly has a strong narcissistic personality disorder. The psychiatrist who interviewed John Holmes also said he knew right from wrong, but also said he was delusional and suffers from mental illness.
How was he delusional? Because he spouted racist things? Because he shot 9 people after spending an hour with them? What gives you an indication that he had strong narcissitic tendencies? And if he is mentally ill, do we fix him and send him home? Or do we put a needle in his arm?
Are people who still believe in communism mentally ill? Is ISIS mentally ill? Are fascists? When does an ideology become a mental illness and when do we hold people accountable for their actions… Even if we punish him, which I’m sure we will - because all sorts of mentally ill people are often punished - legitimately ill people, too.
I only rarely go to a movie theater, would be even less likely to go if they deployed metal detectors.
[quote=“Thebarton_Gamer, post:139, topic:63165, full:true”]
So, which cinema chain is going to be the first to install metal detectors and ban all guns on their premises? Probably none, because that would be an attack on “muh freedomz”! [/quote]
Carmike Hickory 8 theater in Antioch, Tenn., had signs up banning all weapons, not just firearms, didn’t stop this hatchetman from bringing weapons and pepper spray (he didn’t shoot anybody, media continues to call him a gunman).
Mentally ill =/= more likely to kill someone.
Mentally ill =/= more likely to kill someone.
Mentally ill =/= more likely to kill someone.
Mentally ill =/= more likely to kill someone.
I generally like the people around here, even when we disagree!
[/quote]
