I wonder if this is going to reignite the “debate” over violence in video games? About a decade ago people were trying to ban “murder simulators” because they were supposedly teaching kids how to be violent sociopaths.
The fact this was a football game tournament will be lost on the crowd of course.
To Republicans, scapegoating comes as naturally as breathing and no-bid contracts.
Sooner or later, there will be a little box next to the weather widget, showing the location and casualties for the most recent shooting spree. Writing articles about shootings – much less talking as if things could be different – will be as pointless as writing an article every time it rains.
That sounds like tasteless satire, so newspapers won’t actually do it, but they would if they were honest. When something is rare, it is diligent and proper to examine it as a one-off; but if the same thing happens approximately once a day, that approach starts to sound deluded.
God, it’s even sadder when you put it that way. Well met.
I don’t know about that. One of the reasons these issues are this much of a challenge to solve is they are clearly greater and lesser degrees of very important to a lot of people, and things that are that important aren’t easy to give up.
I grew up in dense urban population centers, so guns were something I encountered, and rarely handled, but never something I owned or used to assuage, cope with, or manage fears and anxieties about the unknown and potential threats from other members of the species. That’s not the kind of thing you spend years grafting into your existence, and suddenly turn around extricate from the tendrils of one’s being.
I’m not quite sure how a nationstate or a generation quickly maneuvers itself through the sort of operation mentioned above without coming apart at the seams — which seems to be happening.
Other regs have already given you the skinny, and personally I’d much rather discuss color theory than yet another tragic shooting.
I’m so sick of the mindless destructive cycle, and TPTB that insist upon perpetuating it for profit.
I hear ya. It’s getting harder and harder to participate in good faith when the experiment feels more and more like an exercise in madness and confusion. Crazy people doing crazy things in crazy times influenced by crazy greed.
Maybe you won’t shut off the flashlight beam before I finish walking across it…
But seriously, I do think it gets better. Just not in the short term. Not with the solutions currently on the table. Can’t wait to applaud the actual solution when it presents itself.
Just say no.
Or grow up. Guys in their 40’s stop all sorts of immature behavior from when they were 18. Clearly- it’s not just possible- it’s statistically normal.
I hope we survive long enough to get to that point.
We both want to live in the same kind of world, but I really do question which guys in their 40s stop which immature behaviors in what numbers?
I don’t see evidence of that in the body politic at large, nor represented in the random encounters I have with other people who aren’t from my own intellectual and political mileaux.
If the remedy is to grow up, how does one force another to grow up? How does one tell an entire subset of adults that they need to grow up without sounding like a patronizing threat to their very mode of existence? Is there an actual incentive for them to change?
Seems to me that neither growth nor culture nor progress are evenly distributed. I’m with you in terms of applying labels to behavior, but if it were that simple, and people were capable of the immediate rapid and radical growth necessary, we wouldn’t be in the middle of this mess.
I’m starting to think we’re all (politically speaking) a dysfunctional couple with irreconcilable differences on a road trip wondering why we’re bickering constantly and can’t even agree on our destination. Problem is we need a divorce, separate houses and separate cars, and possibly a few restraining orders – but we’re too attached to a common surname.
Scapegoating video games for societies ills dates back much further than a decade. I recall that wretched bullshit “Just Say No” being a thing at about the same time.
But, like you, I suspect some vile snake will crawl from under a rock to spout off about our path to Hell being paved with virtual footballs so as to shift blame from the actual problem.
Boring stories of glory days.
Every single important thing to move forward was hard. Whining didn’t make it happen.
God damn ride is stuck on loop again.
Dungeons and Dragons is popular again, and conspiracy theories involving satanists and pedophiles are in vogue. I’m a bit surprised tabletop gaming hasn’t been scapegoated yet. Maybe we are skipping straight to video games, unless we pivot to explicit music lyrics.
(Did Tipper Gore actually achieve Lichdom, or was that scheme thwarted by a band of adventurers?)
He didn’t pick up on anything. I don’t support the second amendment.
As a Canadian that lived in the states for a few years, and someone who has traveled a lot, politicizing things without reason or evidence might not be uniquely American but I have never seen it occur at anywhere close to the same level anywhere else in the western world.
As somewhat of an outsider, American politics seem extremely tribal and political affiliation is much more important to a person’s personal identity than it tends to be elsewhere.
What is this, some sort of hazing?
Neither did saying it was easy and hand waving away the difficult parts. I was trying to have a conversation about the difficult parts.
I wouldn’t classify any of the points of view represented on this thread as winning any sort of culture war or whatever the victory condition is for the sort of progress we are talking about that means shooting sprees aren’t happening at alarming rates and the gun control debate is a historical curiosity – so a discussion of the difficult parts doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Cutting and pasting memes is part of what landed us in this mess. I also don’t get the “glory days” reference at all or think that suggesting that perhaps the solution to polarized ideologies and culture war fatigue could actually be an amicable divergence — is whining, especially when what apparently passes for discourse is tautologies, memes and slogans.
This is precisely the sort of stuff neo-traditionalist types have a field day with…
Well - I worked 25 years on removing exclusions on trans people’s access to healthcare before getting a law passed in my city. Been working longer on nationwide no discrimination law that still doesn’t exist.
Worthwhile things are hard and don’t happen overnight. Sorry - that’s how it works.
Complaining over how hard it is is often a tactic to undermine commitment.
Now, I know there’s gonna be a lot of people wanting to blame either guns or video games for this tragedy.
But–hear me out, now–I think we have a ground-floor opportunity here to demonize football. Maybe even sports as a whole! Whaddaya say?
That is a worthwhile cause. The whole gun control thing should be a piece of cake after that, glad you’ve got it covered. Good to hear it’s an ~25 year plan, and after that I can breathe easy.
Nobody was suggesting that, so an apology isn’t necessary.
I think there’s a difference between giving a realistic opinion of the difficulty of a situation and complaining. Also, trivializing something like achieving significant growth across broad swaths of the population likely indicates that we have a different read on the difficulty part and have different perspectives on the matter.
Feels legit paranoid. I know y’all have good reason to be so, but this whole thread is insanely twitchy. I assure you, I’m not here to undermine your mission or cause.
I know, that’s just what a bot would say. But seriously, no toaster here. 
That’s exactly where I keep mine!
