Or just indifferent I guess?
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Or just one of us? Just a slob, like one of us? You know, just a stranger on a bus?
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Next at CNN:
Nuclear detonation destroys residence. Villains thwarted
Houston PD deployed Weapon of Mass Crime Destruction bought from federal 1033 program.
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When an industry lobby can dissuade our government from even studying the problem, you know there’s something fishy going on. That’s true for gun violence, and for the shrinking leg room on airplanes. I think the moratorium has now been lifted on epidemiologic studies of gun violence, but the FAA is still being thwarted from analyzing effects of airplane seating arrangement during emergency evacuations.
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IIRC the community guidelines mention not assuming malice. I was merely noting it’s a shame we put them in harm’s way unnessecarily.
And I lived next to a weed dealer for years, he was one of my best neighbors.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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It’s what passes for blogging these days, and increasingly - and worryingly - what passes for journalism, too. Seems no online ‘newspaper’, no matter how august, cannot include a report of a tweet’s content without reproducing the tweet itself right next to it. Worse, I’ve started to see it in newsprint, too.
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What, exactly, has a nithing pole got to do with Iceland’s gun usage?
Did you mean something else, perchance? Perhaps you could provide a citation for whatever statistic it was you were trying to refer to.
And there’s this, too:
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I wish we only ignored problems. In this country, we can acknowledge a problem, agree it’s terrible, insist it must never happen again and then actively make the problem worse. I mean, the only concrete outcome of the Sandy Hook shootings was to relax gun restrictions. (This works for other subjects as well - e.g. looking at income inequality and the declining middle class and giving a massive tax cut to the super-wealthy.)
Yeah. Iceland’s gun culture is obviously very different from our own. No one is buying guns for “self defense” there - the very idea is absurd; there’s a strong social safety net and very low crime. There’s mandatory training and (multiple) fitness tests. It takes multiple years to get a handgun. People have hunting rifles (and not semi-automatic ones, which are effectively banned). There are laws about proper storage and handling of weapons. Which is to say, they have the kinds of guns that aren’t associated with much gun violence in the US and their use is controlled in ways further intended to reduce misuse. Pretty much the opposite of the US, in other words.
The moratorium came about because the NRA got a law passed that said that any researcher taking public money (i.e. almost all of them) couldn’t advocate for restrictive gun laws. But the NRA effectively pushed the interpretation that studying gun violence necessarily - inherently - led to advocating for gun laws. (Which has always felt, to me, like an enormously damaging admission by the NRA…) Obama issued an executive order effectively telling people not to interpret the law that way, but nothing has fundamentally changed.
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So - like - were are still calling this a “mass shooting”? It was a shootout with police serving a warrant. Shit like this happens every year. This really has less to do about “gun culture” and everything to do with “crime culture”. The stereotypical “gun humpers” and “ammosexuals” aren’t shooting cops who come to serve warrants.
In America, yes. In countries with reasonable gun laws, not so much.
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We can look at the total number of rounds police fire in many European countries and see that they don’t have these kinds of shoot outs. I think there is a thread connecting the two, and it runs through some synthesis of:
- a tendency to look to guns to solve problems
- a general recklessness about using guns
- a callousness towards other people’s lives
- a sense of entitlement that you can take another person’s life to serve your ends
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And let’s not leave out
- a legal and social framework that ensures criminals and would-be criminals have relatively easy access to guns
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Aww, c’mon man. You know facts are hard to understand and feelings are easy. If it’s hard, it must be either wrong or not worth worrying about, so…
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Except that those aren’t the typical attitudes of most actual gun owners.
Is it the attitude of SOME gun owners? Sure. Especially those who see guns as a necessity to ply their trade. Live by the sword, and all that.
Hey, I have a perfect nomenclature for that - Toxic Gun Culture. It acknowledges the bad aspects perpetrated by some people, while acknowledging that the majority don’t see it that way. It also can be used to target specific traits that should be excised that some people through ignorance perpetuated - like recklessness with using guns.
Yes - that is a good question. Even before the UK had stricter gun laws, their crime numbers were much lower than the US. I think the main reason for this is how the US looks at handling crime and criminals with a heavier hand. And I think the main catalyst for this was prohibition. Prohibition created a massive illegal market with high stakes that created massive ORGANIZED crime networks. The original National Firearms Act of 34 was a direct result of the increased violence of the times. And once crime ramped up to that level, it was just sort of the norm. Crooks need guns to fight off other crooks and the coppers. Like I said, Criminal Culture.
Australia’s culture was literally founded by criminals and they don’t regularly have mass shootings and deadly shootouts with police officers.
(Well, not anymore anyway.)
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I don’t know about that. Right from the outset, you (the US) have had the whole mythos about the valiant frontiersman fending off bears and indians and outlaws - the whole Wild West myth.
I think Humbabella’s points sum it up pretty well:
Particularly the first one. The US (to me at least) appears to have a long-standing fetish for the “gun” as a symbol of manhood and freedom.
Your (again Americans as a whole rather than you specifically) self image (whether you’re for or against guns) is built around their existence and use.
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I certainly think that plays a role in all of this. I was thinking of it when I was writing about a callous attitude towards other people’s lives. That certainly includes the death penalty and egregious (100+ year) sentences in prisons that are rife with abuse. It makes a lot more sense to get in a shootout to avoid the American justice system than it does to avoid the Swedish justice system.
I don’t think that the extreme part of the culture that is toxic (as in it literally kills people) can be completely divorced from the mainstream part of the culture.
[The math I’m about to reference is purely metaphor, not to be mistaken for actual math]
I imagine we could apply a function to people’s personalities and collapse their tendency to get into shootouts and commit unprovoked shootings in a year into a single number and plot that number onto what would presumably be a normal curve. If America has about a mass shooting a day, that would put mass shooting as an activity about 4.5 standard deviations out. Obviously we blame the individuals for their individual actions, but if we want things to change, we can’t hope to change them by simply suppressing that extreme fringe, we need to move the mean away from it.
Like with attacking rape culture, it takes - in part - men who would never consider committing rape thinking about how their actions promote ways of thinking about sex that, in extremes, justify the violent actions of others.
But I don’t even know how to approach that with US gun culture, to be honest. The deadly fringe is fully immersed in false flag conspiracy theory and sees something like the suggestion that we should have sympathy for families who lost children to gun violence as a personal affront.
Anyway, I’m an outsider. What I see is that the situation now is unbearable and one day it is going to crack. I don’t know what that crack is going to look like, but I imagine it will end up looking a hell of a lot better if gun owners are helping to shape a workable change instead of just opposing everything. Polling suggests the vast majority of Americans, including a vast majority of gun owners, would like to see something done as opposed to nothing, but the politicians who “represent” gun owners keep insisting that nothing can be done.
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I’d suspect that it is the attitude of many if not most urban gun owners.
My brother lives way out in the boonies. My wife was rather perturbed at the number of guns on the rack (12- and 20-ga shotguns, .30-06 and a .22 rifles, and a 9mm handgun). But they’re tools, meant to do different jobs. It’s true that the job is to make a living thing into a dead thing, but sometimes out in the country, that’s a job that needs doing. Among the possible applications are:
- fill the freezer. A deer in the fall, a couple of turkeys in spring turkey season, a few ducks. Kinder and safer than factory farming, and deer overpopulation is problem where he is.
- control nuisance wildlife. Unfortunately, if creatures like raccoons have become human-habituated (you work hard to keep that from happening!) they really aren’t salvageable. Trapping and relocation doesn’t really work, so sometimes there’s no alternative but to put them down.
- home defense. There was one year that the guy had a bear sow take up residence in his tractor barn! Again, that’s a habituated animal, and not salvageable. The best thing to do with a bear with that little fear of humans is to turn her into stew and a rug, because she’s going to be a problem forever otherwise.
- comply with job requirements. He does maintenance of alarm systems, and there are calls for which the company’s contract requires an armed response. (Although, to the best of my knowledge, he’s never had his handgun out of a holster other than on a range.)
- stay in practice, so as to use the weapons safely.
In a city, you hire people to do these things. Out in the country, you perforce do many things for yourself. The inevitable outcome is that the guns are readily available to the toxic gun culture in the cities - which is a big problem!
The Europeans, for the most part, have no parallel. The US is extremely sparsely populated. I would imagine that the right solution for one place would not be right for another.
Treating it as a public health problem and letting evidence guide policy is, of course, off the table entirely, by decree. That’s the really unforgiveable point: evidence of what works and what doesn’t is simply suppressed, and the research is defunded or hushed.
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Citation needed. Anecdotally, there’s a direct correlation between the vociferousness of someone’s arguments for “gun rights” and the likelihood that they’ll post a picture of themselves mishandling a firearm. Less anecdotally, it’s under-studied, but from what research I’ve seen, I’d say those are typical attitudes. In part because those attitudes about guns extend to the culture at large, far beyond those who actually own them. Most Americans buy guns for “self defense” (which, in practical terms, amounts to little more than a power fantasy), and only 60% have had any safety training at all. The “self-sufficient” frontiersman mythos is alive and well.
Toxic Gun Culture is alive and well in America because American culture is Toxic Gun Culture.
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Indeed.
We are the only nation so attached to the supposed “right” to bear arms that our laws abet assassins, professional criminals, berserk murderers, and political terrorists at the expense of the general orderly population—and yet we remain, and are apparently determined to remain, the most passive of comparable countries in the matter of gun control.
Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people’s right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy—without being in the slightest perturbed by the fact that no other democracy in the world observes any such “right” and that in some democracies in which citizens’ rights are rather better protected than in ours.
Edit: a better choice of word
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