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Now, now, letâs not invite the howls of âreverse racismâ from the sadder corners of the blogosphere. Then again, if we just canât possibly do anything about super-duper easy access to guns [wring hands here], we just may have to. And also, police. Ban police. At least 1205 more people would be alive in the US today if we had banned police on New Yearâs Eve 2014.
@Daedalus: Either the US public is incapable of multi-tasking, or bags of money are actively driving the discourse away from the really fucking obvious problem.
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Sometimes likes just arenât enough.
I have CPTSD, severe depression and a tendency to dissociate. I am also a pacifist.
Mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence rather than the perpetrators, although you would never believe it if your only source was the mainstream press.
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Absolutely true. Generally it is the headline grabbing mass shooting or serial killers who are mentally ill.
The vast majority of gun crime is ânormalâ people, usually poor. If you read the more detailed statistics some larger cities have put out, you can see that most of the violence stems from arguments. The drug trade and robberies etc are another chunk. Domestic violence is another big one. An interesting part is that, at least in these large city stats, you are likely to know your killer, and both the killer and the victim are likely to have arrest records. (which means in many cases the killer wasnât legally allowed to own a gun in the first place). There are these pockets where the culture and circumstances collide. Milwaukee has some excellent reports on their crime for more in depth statistics. You can see the huge outliers and hot spots in the statistics. The question is, how do you target those most troubled areas.
http://city.milwaukee.gov/hrc/publications#.VsxkGVJYL68
Start with this document. city.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/Groups/cityHRC/reports/2014AnnualReportV.2.5.pdf
As a country, the politicians and the wealthy have miserably failed in their duty to protect the least of their brothers and sisters. Instead, they punish those less fortunate. Start with killing Calvinism, if nothing else.
Slightly more comprehensively, start with better early childhood education, cleaning up all the lead in all those old houses, providing easy access to low-cost or no-cost contraception, punishing police departments that focus on arresting as many black boys and men as they can concoct reasons to arrest, punish police departments that refuse to give up âbroken windowsâ, encourage teenagers to finish high school instead of giving them a billion and one reasons to avoid going to the prison-like atmosphere fostered at entirely too many schools, improve public transportation so people can get to where the jobs are without a car, encourage entrepreneurship in lower-income areas, abolish de facto debtorâs prisons, and few dozen other easy to pretty hard things.
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And by doing these things weâd probably even do a lot of work on the âcrazyâ killers as well. There will always be people who are mentally ill, but mentally ill people in different cultures respond to the same mental health problems in different ways. I one story I recall reading that in the 1800s in Europe people would sometimes go into fugues walk through the countryside. It was rare, but common enough that it was written about.
When people talk about âcrazyâ shooters itâs a cop out, even if they were totally disconnect with reality at the time of their killings. A lot of the âcrazyâ shooters are very racist or misogynist, or at least have a grandiose idea that the world is out to get them. Itâs one thing to have a weak connection to reality or poor impulse control, and its another thing to have a hateful worldview. Take the latter away and the former is still a problem, it just manifests is less destructive ways.
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Oh, look, another mass shooting⌠this one isnât even cold yet.
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