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Was she mentally ill? That must be it. It isnât the fault of the gun!!
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So she pulled a Medea.
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Seeking a reason for the unreasonable is called staring into the abyss. There is no line of reasoning that ends in murder. There is no âwhyâ.
The sooner we accept that there are no mitigating circumstances, the sooner we can agree that access to guns is the part of the problem we can do something about.
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That falls into declaring someone âinsaneâ when they commit a horrible act, making it non-understandable. She wasnât insane. She made a horrible decision in her head but still it was a decision.
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Were that true, donât you think there would be more agreement and less disagreement on the gun control threads?
Or have I just completely misunderstood the phrase âpreaching to the choirâ my entire life?
Edit: Oh, I see: there are probably two choirs filled with preachers on any given guns threads.
That said, our own @Mister44 has considerably changed my views on the effectiveness of gun control laws as a result of gun control discussions on the BBS.
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She wasnât a bad guy with a gunâ˘, so perhaps the good guys with guns⢠were at a loss?
Or maybe good guys with guns are mythical creatures, who only exist in the retelling, and not in the moment. Some people just prefer a hero story to reality, and want to leave room for them to be that hero, even at the expense of, well⌠this disgusting mess of a situation.
If she had been drowning them in a kiddie pool in the street I suspect someone might have intervened sooner, donât you?
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I donât have to understand someone to hold them responsible for their actions. YMMV.
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Unfortunately, we can only âdo somethingâ about other peopleâs access if we agree to trust putting some people in charge of others. Itâs how authoritarianism sneaks in through the back door. People who were murdered do deserve their lives, but I think that imposing protection upon this minority at the expense of social justice as a whole would still be anti-social. I know that prioritizing the survival of me and/or my children at the expense of the oppression of a whole population would be more than a bit selfish.
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No. Just no.
People who might be murdered deserve their lives. That failed and now we look at what we CAN do moving FORWARD.
Moving forward we can take guns away from people, because a god awful lot of them abuse their rights. Itâs why we canât have nice things. There are too many of us and weâre assholes. If we canât take their guns, lets stop selling them and restrict the fuck out of ammunition. Letâs create paperwork for shooting your gun. Lets make owning a gun as convenient in the eyes of your home insurer as ownership of a Staffordshire Terrier, AT LEAST.
Fix the antisocial behavior (probably not going to happen, species wide), or take the guns away (or regulate them into oblivion), or just get used to people being murdered⌠but donât play semantic games about authoritarianism and how oppressive it is to not have rights that people have proved they are not responsible with. Thatâs just wordplay, and wordplay isnât appropriate today, in my opinion.
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I think guns are (among other things) a tool of coercion and oppression that cause disproportionate harm to minorities and other oppressed groups. Isnât your idea that there are people out there with guns who could harm you, so you better get a gun to protect yourself just reinforcing the central problem in the first pace (and serving as an ad for the gun industry)?
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I am not arguing about words. What I am saying is that there is never a legitimate reason to put some people in charge of other people. That is my very definition of injustice, and it is not worth my selfish drive towards self-preservation. Others may make this call differently, but that still doesnât make their âtrusted partyâ my âtrusted partyâ, or anybody elseâs. I do not trust people being put in charge over others, and that is not a semantic game.
An approach I put forth is to stop the business of manufacturing guns altogether, rather than continue to make them for access to only a privileged class of people - traditionally, police and military, neither of which are institutions I trust nor approve of. Keeping guns for them only institutionalizes murder and makes it appear legitimate, making the problem more opaque.
So youâre opposed to leaving it to airplane pilots to have authority over flying the plane in principle? What about in practice? How about in classes, should teachers be the ones teaching? If thereâs a fire, should we permit the fire department taking charge, or just leave it as a free-for-all?
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But, if no one is in charge of anyone else, how do you enforce the mandate to âstop the business of manufacturing guns altogether?â
The United States has certainly proved, as a society, that they arenât going to it willingly.
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Sam Harris has pointed out that a world without guns is a world where the biggest, toughest guy gets to coerce and oppress whoever he wants. Iâm not sure itâs quite that simple, but itâs still a valid point, I think. Guns can be a tool of coercion and oppression, but they can also be a tool of defense against the same.
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The only people who are against laws that would work to prevent the criminally violent and the mentally unstable from buying and owning guns are the criminally violent and the mentally unstable.
So instead we get rid of physical strength as the arbiter, and leave it to whoever happens to have a gun. Not really an improvement to me. I donât really want to abolish guns, just radically restrict private gun ownership. In places where thatâs been done, while strong people still can oppress others, there are still laws and institutions in place to prevent it.
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Which ignores three important points:
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Humans are a social species. Big and tough doesnât work when the entire tribe is sick of your shit.
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Humans are an intelligent species. Big and tough doesnât work when youâre brained with a rock while asleep.
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Sam Harris is a fucking idiot.
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There is a bit of that, but I think they function as a value-neutral tool at the hands of ideological and institutional factors. Guns themselves are hardly racist or oppressive. I suspect that people simply find it easier to try controlling an inanimate object through âgun controlâ rather than enacting meaningful ways to eliminate coercion. The problem is how people treat each other, usually by seeking to create power imbalances. [quote=âAcerPlatanoides, post:55, topic:80664â]
Fix the antisocial behavior (probably not going to happen, species wide)
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⌠I think is the only approach which will work. And I think itâs not all that difficult, even. Masses of people are conditioned to exploit each other based upon cognitive defects, but that itself is one possible choice of many.
When have I ever suggested this to be the case? No, that isnât my idea. Protecting myself would be selfish. It does not objectively matter if I am harmed or killed, I am only programmed to instinctively assume that it matters. If I put my well-being before civic duty and long-term plans, then I would be too easily intimidated and trade away better results for short-term gains.
Sure, guns are objects. Do you think guns (even as objects) play any role in institutionalized racism or oppression?
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