Oh, no worries about me. It's the deer I'm after.

Just make sure they're not flying reindeer, I want my Christmas presents.

Surely it depends on what that mental illness is? Somewhere in the region of one in four adults will suffer some sort of mental illness or debilitation during their lives.

Do we include depression? After all the work that has been done to combat prejudice and taboos around that common condition. Do we include body dysmorphia in that? OCD?

'mental illness' is a pretty wide category to employ.

Thinking the Unthinkable
 

The mother of a violent 13 year old write about how she's trying to prevent her son from becoming another murderer, and getting no help.

It's worth reading.

The thing is, if you ban anyone with any kind of mental illness, including depression and OCD, from owning guns, it increases the likelihood that some people suffering from such conditions will not seek help.

There is already a massive stigma attached to even run of the mill psychiatric conditions. The more aspects of life which are officially closed off from people on the grounds of mental health, the more mental health problems will go unreported and untreated. Some parents may even be inclined to not seek help for children they suspect of having some mental condition such as mild ADHD or depression, in order not to mark them out in a world which may well discriminate against them on that basis.

This quote is falsely attributed to Morgan Freeman but I think it makes some very good points:

Yes. In The gift of fear" author Gavin DeBecker talks about this, and has suggested (my paraphrasing) that rather than glorifying the shooters, the newspapers and TV should refer to them as "typical losers" as in ...another typical loser acted like a complete loser moron... and then spend all the rest of the time on the people who were killed or injured, barely mentioning the perp's name.

Surely, no payoff for them as regards fame and notoriety.

Also found this excellent site: www.justfacts.com

Supposedly rigorous fact checking about many topics including gun ownership and crime in the us and other countries.

ALLEGED typical losers. :rolleyes:

I hate that "alleged" shit. If you're talking about associating a crime with a real person's name, I get the reasoning, but things like "the alleged gunman," as if there may or may not have been a person pulling the trigger, or the bullets may or may not have been fired via slingshot instead...

JMO I don't think in this particular situation the young man had the inclination to be famous. I don't know what his pay off could be and maybe we cannot know for sure. I don't have enough information but I cannot imagine that his mother thought he would kill anyone or her since she taught him to use the firearms. His brain did not work quite right > gut feeling His mother's either apparently...

You might feel differently if your angel was shot dead.

The price you just paid was the lives of 20 children, and that's only partial payment.

No, he's just a sheep who belongs to a different shepherd.

true

...

There is far too much media fascination with the killer.

I'd like to see a lot more media focus on the teachers.

Many of them successfully hid their classes, misled the killer, and were murdered. Unarmed, untrained for this sort of thing, yet died saving the children in their charge. It doesn't get much more heroic than that.

The school has around 670 students. 650 of them walked out of the building and were reunited with their families. That's due entirely to the teachers and the heroic office staff and all the times they had practiced lockdowns.

I've always thought the locked school doors and lockdown drills were overkill, but this incident shows I was probably wrong about that.

When we first arrived in PA I thought the locked school doors with cameras and the need to be buzzed in by office staff were way over the top. Then we moved back to Ontario for a couple of years and I noticed that drug dealers loitered in the front hall of the high school my kids attended with pit bulls in tow. My second son was assaulted by one of them; had a knife held to his face with the promise that he'd be cut into ribbons the next time the guy saw him.

The school ignored it all, and the police told us there was no use arresting the guy, he'd be out within an hour.

I'm all in favor of locked school doors and secure campuses.

The teachers and administrators were true heroes. They bravely sacrificed themselves to protect those less able to protect themselves.

I wonder if republicans will reinstate teachers' pay and benefits in light of this. Naw.

Some interesting gun ownership facts in this NYTimes chart from exit polls 4 years ago.


Attachment 42178

Obviously there is a huge difference between Democrats and Republicans. But when you look at Republicans, the only places where you see significant different ownership rates are by race, and also by population density. Not many Republicans in the city own guns, and not many Asian Republicans own guns, but when you look at all the other breakdowns, Republicans have consistently high ownership rates.

Then you look at the Democrats, and they are all over the map in every category. A rural Democrat is gonna have a gun. An atheist Democrat won't have a gun. A high school educated Democrat might have a gun, but if they went to college, they probably won't. You can make these sweeping statements for each category. It's really interesting.

make of this what you will...
 

I've been thinking along those lines too. Legitimate reasons for owning a gun are self defense and hunting. You don't need automatic or semi-automatic guns for either of those. A revolver holds 6 shots and may require a little more strength to pull the trigger, but they were in common use for a century or more and are perfectly effective for personal protection. A pump action shotgun makes a great home defense weapon, and bolt action rifles are great for hunting and shooting varmints around the farm. I'm a little more lax than you. I think 6 shots is reasonable.

I understand gun enthusiasts may like semi-automatic weapons because they are easier to use, just like power steering in a car is easier to use, but I think the line must be drawn somewhere, and it's in the wrong place now.

Sandy Hook Elementary: what's there to say? Awful.
 

"…the line must be drawn somewhere, and it's in the wrong place now..."

…the obvious opinion of 'some', but not 'others'.


Tomorrow, when the 'law' tightens and the line is where you like, others will kvetch that things are 'too restricted'.

And that's the way it goes: on and on and on.

Power moves from one set of hands to another and what's permissible shifts with it.


Those who want tighter control: no doubt, you'll get your wish.

Those who loath tighter control: don't sweat it...the pendulum ALWAYS swings.

#

Full disclosure: I own one gun (12 gauge coach gun...a man-killer, which is what I mean it to be, though -- in a pinch -- it works for hunting as well). I've no interest in any other firearm, and no interest in giving up what I have.

Vermont has more or less the loosest gun laws. It has very little gun crime.
I think the problem here isn't gun laws or mental health support - it's the death-fetishizing, sensationalist, and destructive CULTURE in this country.

After the Port Arthur massacre of 1996, we (Australia) tightened our gun laws, which were already tighter than those in the US.

The main change was that semi-autos and pump-actions can have a magazine capacity of no more than five shots. You needed to show specific reason for having one, such as being a professional shooter.

Philly is either the current or a recent murder capital of the U.S., and gun laws here are inadequate. Our problems have more to do with illegal guns, but there are plenty of legal gun problems, too. There are shootings practically every day, it seems. A lot of those involve children.

The police make arrests for illegal guns all the time, but complain that the perps are just let back out on the street. Another source of frustration is the Florida loophole. Pennsylvania recognizes Florida gun permits that anyone can apply for via mail order--even those who can't get a PA permit. And then there are the straw purchasers. When and if they are actually caught, their punishments are light even if the guns they bought are used in crimes.

This is exactly what I keep thinking.

Root cause analysis.

Sadly, what can you do? Reasonable voices get shouted down. Our mindset is sickened, diminished by cynicism. I don't know what a feasible solution to the underlying problem would even look like. It's something that the cards are stacked against.

All I can say is that I agree. We can call people out when they're being stupifucks... I actually had a father of a 5 year old emotionally disturbed child using first person shooter video games to babysit his son on his Dad weekends. Shit like that. Maybe letting people know that their gun fetish is part of the problem. We need to look in the damn mirror.

"death-fetishizing, sensationalist, and destructive CULTURE"
 

Hyperbole.

not even a little bit

No. This ("death-fetishizing, sensationalist, and destructive CULTURE") as descriptor for America, is exaggeration taken to an absurd point.


If all you see is one extreme aspect of America, ignoring all others, then you suffer from skewed thinking.

Take a friggin' walk -- with 'open' eyes -- through any town or city you care to name: you'll see all manner of extremisms running along side all manner of moderatisms and all manner of down-right placid, peaceful, and serene-isms.


Hyperbole is the tool of the Sophist (there's more than one of those in this place...are you one?)


Decisions made in the midst of anger or grief are always bad decisions.

Reaction is the enemy of response.

Long past time, I think, for folks to 'stop' and 'think'.

It 'feels good' to be righteous, but righteous is not always 'right'.

I, for one, will not follow you (or any one) down the path of 'good intentions'.

I don't think the intent is to portray American culture as monolithic, but conversely, is it feasible to propose that there are no systemic cultural issues? Don't you think it's possible that anomolies that arise within a culture can indiacte a systemic problem? That is to say, in the simplest form, that a different set of variables will alter the outcome of a complex scenario? More precisely, if one could indentify the correct variables (as I said, Root Cause Analysis) at least the call to action wouldn't risk being made blindly. As you said, stop and think--that's what we're doing here.

As H.L. Mencken said, "There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."

Flint
 

I addressed Ibby's hyperbole (and the skewed thinking it stems from), not "systemic cultural issues", but, since you bring it up...


No, I don't think -- in a country of 350 million individuals (and counting), situated on a planet with 7 billion individuals (and counting) -- it's possible to "indentify the correct variables ".

Every single person is a "variable".

That is exactly the reason I paint with a broad brush.

Cuz you need to get the first coat on by noon?

Especially in this weather.

So we can 1) act blindly, or 2) do nothing. Or, 3) "stop and think" --BUT WAIT, if we to refuse to consider any systemic flaws in society, then what the hell is there to stop and think about??? Sorry, not trying to mince words, I just don't understand. It sounds like you're objecting to people doing what you prescribe them to do. You want people to stop and think, but you don't them to think "wrong" ideas...? As every person is a variable, you also can't just sweep alternate viewpoints under the rug.

This is the most astute observation I've heard in relation to this whole event, and one that cuts closest to the real truth in this, as I see it. This is a super subjective statement and could mean 1,000 different things to 1,000 different people. It meant something to me, and it meant exactly what I've been thinking. In fact, every time the talking heads are talking this issue to death, I think to myslef, THIS, what Ibby has said here, THIS is the problem nobody is talking about. I think this is because it is prohibitively complex, as you've said, as I've said. But as far as identifying the root cause, I can't disagree that the products of a culture are produced by the culture that produced them, therefore therein lies the problem. It's blatantly obvious, isn't it? I don't understand what the disagreement could be. Here, let me rephrase this, the way I read it:

we must not neglect to consider "...the death-fetishizing, sensationalist, and destructive--" (and other, implied) aspects of the "--CULTURE in this country..." when observing events which occur within the aforementioned culture, AS THEY ARE INEXORABLY LINKED

you don't even have to agree with my assessment that it's the nexus of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and the basic belief that straight cis white men deserve to rule the world and always get their way is the root cause of how fucked up America is. I'm 100% certain that Flint, as a right-libertarian (i think that's a broadly fair assessment of your politics, as i understand them, taking into account the fact that I'm a left-libertarian/socialist), thinks that white men (and their systemic exploitation and abuse of everyone else) are the core problem with this country.

That doesn't change the fact that we have a violence problem in this country that kills more people every day than a whole year of soldier deaths in our two wars, in domestic violence situations, in robberies, in murders over sex and drugs and money, in accidental shootings, in escalated fights, in gang warfare in and out of prison.
if you don't believe America has a violence problem, you're fucking stupid.
a violence problem is inherently cultural in nature because we're talking about our culture, in which it occurs.

there is room for a very healthy debate on why we have a violence problem - why our country is death-fetishizing (i bet every one of you can talk about the final minutes of at least one victim of this shooting; i bet almost everyone can name the shooter; i bet almost everyone has had the number of victims drilled into their head... that's death-fetishizing, guys), sensationalist (again...), and destructive (thousands of violent deaths sounds destructive to me) - but to argue that it isn't even a problem is disgusting.

I keep thinking, every time I see the media pundits and armchair quarterbacks rehashing the same, pointless factoids in relation to this latest, inevitable-seeming event, that isn't gun control and/or mental health services, aren't these things a "band-aid" solution to a sick, misguided society, driven by extrinsic happiness, short-term gratification, and completely disconnected from the rich cultural heritage of our evolutionary forefathers, now isolated in a confused, disconnected wasteland of cheap thrills, awash in misdirected neurochemical responses which have no mechanism of purposeful self-regulation, given the novelty of our daily circumstances, and the completely artificial and contrived system of arbitrary moral standards which we must perform constant logic cartwheels in order to even stand living under the thrall of?

Please, "god" or whatever, tell me I'm not the only one drawing a larger lesson from this. This isn't a "quick fix" --we can't shuffle a few resources around to make this go away. Our culture is sick, and dying. Our humanity, in a thousand small ways or a handful of big ones--take your pick--is on the ropes. This is it. We've got to decide what's important.

Why are we here? What's the meaning of it all? These are no longer questions which it is okay to simply say "we may never know" --we've got to DECIDE that there ARE some meaningful answers. It may not be a big black book, or a kind old white-bearded man in the clouds, but it's got to be SOMETHING.

If you don't even know why you're alive, aren't you part of the commoditization of human beings?

Do we intrinsically have value, or not? If so, what is it? To have a good credit score? To go to church on Sunday?

again: clearly flint and i disagree almost diametrically on what the problems are
because i would absolutely argue that a religious or pseudo-religious-spiritual answer to our worldly issues, a "higher purpose", is absolutely part of the problem, not the solution
that "higher answers" is hurtful to the intrinsic worth of human life
that "intrinsic" valuations are a problem on a societal scale
etc
and yet, two people such opposed can agree that the problem is totally that our society IS sick to its core, IS dying, that our humanity IS on the ropes

that implies to me that there has to be at least common-enough ground for legislative-cultural activism to have a broad appeal, or at least a compromise legislative-political-cultural path exists.

we CAN fix this bipartisanly, or at least through a broad political compromise. or, at least, potentially fix.

Anyone seen my thousand round self propelled AR-15 magazine lying around?

Da-gum.

Lemme know if ya do.

Thanks.

SLANG!!! What you up to lately?

Wow, lots of rare visitors dropping by these days.

Oh all right. I can tell you that you're not alone and answer a few questions. Your raison d'être is to learn that there is no raison d'être. Life is as life does. While you're alive you make things. After you're gone, I get to keep your stuff. Somehow stuff is always more enjoyable when somebody else makes it. Your intrinsic value really depends on how much I enjoy your stuff and that won't be determined until after you've gone bye-bye; so, don't worry about it. The violence is there both for people who won't be making any good stuff and for people who have already made good stuff so that I can have it sooner. Oh yeah, only support churches that have good stuff. I don't have time for anymore questions as I'm busy evaluating stuff I've already acquired. All earthly opinions about the meaning of life are a red herring. Bonne chance.

By stuff, include culture. Tolkien made hobbits, and they'll continue in our culture for ages, even though he's long dead.

Culture. Its the stuff you can share and still have.



ETA. Well, that and herpes.

Dude, you left it on the school bus this morning with your bookbag.

This is why I read the Cellar. In one run-on sentence flint has relentlessly circled in on the problem. The modern American man and the modern American culture are incompatible. Our culture is tribal. It became obvious to me while watching the cheering drunken males watching the televised bombing of Afghanistan at a child's birthday party. We can argue about from where this culture is derived. I've read good arguments that it is borderlander (dispossessed Scotch-Irish) expressed through Appalachian culture. We've long harnessed those attributes when killing needed doing but I'd say without a new frontier we're the ones in harness now.

Hello Zen and all the other Cellar people.

I am currently in Florida and will soon be going to SE Asia for another great business adventure which many of the details will be revealed in the next month.

Don't forget to leave some ammo and cookies out for Santa!!

Guns don't kill people, SANTA does!!

Blame the media?

I don't hear claims that coverage of other horrors, such as the jerry sandusky coverage, causes more 'people' to commit such horrors.

Just a thought.

The NRA has finally solved the fiscal and unemployment crisis for the US.

By putting a armed guard in every school, that would be about 100,000 new jobs,
and since a single guard per school just won't due it could easily up that number to 150,000.
But that's not the end of this very imaginative job creation program.

Just as we need armed federal marshals on planes, we need a armed "good guy" on every school bus.
Now the multiplier would be different for each school, but let's assume 10 buses/school.
That is at least 1,000,000 part time jobs... without having to pay medical benefits !

But then, the insane shooters are not only active during weekdays.
There are the churches where children gather on weekends.
Those 1M part-timers can even have 1 more day's work each week on Sundays,
and in some communities even on a few on Saturdays,
and for the Baptists, there are the Wednesday night Prayer Meetings.
And don't forget all the summer-time church socials, VBS's, summer camps, etc.
This means year-round employment, not like the vacations school teacher get.

But maybe individual armed guards are not the complete answer,
so private companies (the job creators) would be have to be formed.

Also, we certainly can not create all these jobs without some sort of official organization and oversight.
Relying on local resources would create a hodge-podge of programs, and certainly leave gaps in coverage.

The NRA has volunteered it's resources, and Wayne LaPierre sounds as though
he would not refuse the job of Under Secretary for Domestic Defense in the Dept of Homeland Security.
For such an important division, it would take a least 100,000 new federal and state and city employees.
Although that would increase the size of these governments,
it is such a brilliant idea and of such importance, and the federal government
has "so much money", there could not possibly be an significant political objection.

Once this program is fully implemented (next week) we could expect to discover gaps in coverage,
such as charter schools, private schools, public and private libraries, etc.,
and the program can be expanded to a fully, effective force. (by Easter).

Unfortunately, such a large force of armed guards would eventually be seen by many as an Obama conspiracy.
But don't worry, the NRA can establish and provide a separate and independent,
armed and trained force to protect America from an Obama-guard take-over.
They even can have a program to train boys and girls for future needs... and call them the "NRA Youth Guards"

ETA: I failed to include movie theaters... sorry Colorado, how soon we forget.

We'll never have an itty-bitty government at this rate! Spend, spend. That's always their solution.

Irony, it's what's for dinner. And midnight snack. Maybe a quick breakfast.

NRA chief: If putting armed police in schools is crazy, 'then call me crazy'

Well... There you have it.

I understand it's all about lobbying but their rhetoric makes it sound like they are the ones who decide what the laws are going to be.

Of all of the leaders of 'mainstream' political organizations in the US, I've always considered LaPierre to be the most batshit crazy. He's like the Ahmadinejad of the 501's.

Maybe the NRA should swap leadership with NAMBLA. At least then it would be in their best interests to stop the massacre of children.

[translation in bold mine]

That's the price of being sheep.

Mutton, it's what's for dinner. And midnight snack. Maybe a quick breakfast.

Srsly. Chock FULL O' Nuts!

...he said sheepishly.

It was said modestly. That anyone can live as long as you have and not recognize the difference is disconcerting. Lamplighter, not one brain left in his poor old head. Maybe Santa will bring you one!

Went to the range today with my son and daughter to do some shooting. Place was absolutely packed! Not sure if paranoia or holiday time off was the reason.

They had nowhere else to go. The local mental hospital had just had to discharge them all, because of funding cuts.

Sexobon has been insulting people across multiple threads, and not in the poke-fun-at-you way. Apparently, if you don't agree with him, you're broken.

We're you a tattle-tale in school, also?

that would be funny if it wasn't so fucking true.

If I were a gun owner, I could have just shot him and 25 other people, but I'm not.

I guess I was just wondering, in a discreet way, why Ibby gets shit, but Sexobon doesn't.

I didn't understand why it was ok for him to shit on me, not in a pokey fun way, when i expressed sincere horror in the immediate wake of the shootings. Shit on for feeling, for caring, for expressing? Fuck that, I am human.

And I also don't get Flint's constant need to check in seemingly just to admonish dwellers in a tsk tsk 'at children' kind of way. I'm insulted FOR the targets of that crap.

I liked his Amish
Better than his admonish