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I just want to say two important things..
First the recent school shooting is a tragedy and we should all be sad about the death of any children, especially as a victim of muder.
Second, we have to realize, for the sake ofperspective, how unfathomably rare it is for a child to die in a school shooting in america. It seems common because america is huge and the news makes this stuff public. But the numbers are more telling.
To put some numbers to it the chance of a child dyingin a school shooting in a public shool on any given day is 1 in 614 million. For comparison the chance of a person getting struck by lightening on any given day is **less** than 1 in 370 million.
In other words a child is more than **twice** as likely in the USA to get struck by lightening as they are to die in a school shooting.
Should we still mourne and be outraged by it... sure.. does that mean it is a problem that is common enough to be a huge concern... not really. We should probably put more effort into addressing the "lightening problem" than we should be about addressing school shootings.
I'm a little bit confused here.
Are you saying that school (or other mass) shootings are as "natural" as lightning?
@pj i am not. I am saying it is half as common as lightening to get killed in a school shooting.
@freemo
I do not agree with this statement:
“We should probably put more effort into addressing the “lightening problem” than we should be about addressing school shootings.”
The question is: “What can we do about it as a society?”
You can see the storm coming and you can choose not to go outside or you may try to find shelter and protect yourself in some other way, but a child who has to be in school supposedly safe under adult supervision doesn’t have such a privilege.
How can we consider ourselves a civilized society if we don’t have the means to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of individuals that should not have them?
You need a license to drive a car and you can’t buy cigarettes and alcohol under a certain age but you can carry a gun or even an army-style assault rifle no questions asked.
Interesting theory about why guns are so loved in the US:
White Southerners started cultivating the tradition of the home arsenal immediately after the Civil War because of insecurities and racial fears. During the rest of the 19th century, those anxieties metamorphosized into a fetishization of the firearm to the point that, in the present day, gun owners view their weapons as adding meaning and a sense of purpose to their lives.
@freemo @pj Sources for my comment:
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers-the-racist-roots-of-the-2nd-amendment\
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-slavery-james-madison.html
I take that view from the publications of these historians.
The often stated view of individuals being armed against the government seems to me to be a bit shakier in view of how the fledgling US government responded to things like the Whiskey rebellion. If they sincerely wanted individuals to be able to shoot federal agents, they would not have responded so strongly to those attacks.
@freemo @pj Slavery was definitely not the only factor in drafting the 2nd amendment.
Also, the colonies were more rural at that time than most of the USA is now and the country as a whole was in a more precarious state.
I feel that a lot of the division on gun rights in the USA is a rural/urban divide. Living at my uncle’s ranch in West Texas, you really need a gun for pest control, etc. In the college town where I live now, a gun really has zero utility. So residents of those two regions will have a legitimate difference of opinion.
Finding that guns provide a “sense of meaning to your life” as stated in the Scientific American article is not something I would be able to accept anyway. Neither do I get a sense of self from my car, house, etc.
Many, especially younger, people get a sense of self from things such as guns, cars, and boats, but that’s not the point.
A “well-regulated militia” doesn’t mean everyone can simply buy an assault rifle at the nearby grocery store. You can’t do this in Switzerland or Israel where I believe everyone that is supposed to, have a gun, but, afaik, there are no mass shootings like in the US.
Something is wrong with a society where you can’t drive a car without a permit or even a medical exam if you are of a certain age, but you can own a gun without any restrictions.
Yes. Let the bad drivers expunge themselves naturally, either by dying after hitting a tree or being killed when they hit someone having a gun.😀
If you take this stance then requiring proof of competence or professional credentials from let’s say, engineers, medical personnel, and similar jobs where one can do lots of harm if they don’t know what they are doing is also an attack on their freedom.
Everyone should be allowed to build and sell highrises and airplanes using whatever or no standards, as they like. That’s their freedom. If people die when one of those fails, who cares, they should have known better and protected themselves.
Alternatively, their families (with guns) can get such bad actors permanently out of business so only the “good ones” will remain.
Actually, this may work😀
What? This argument doesn’t hold.
There is a right to bear arms, there’s no right to drive. Furthermore, I admit even as a fan of the #2A, with both gun use and car driving, you’re not the only one who can be harmed in these scenarios, so to say that bad drivers will just die out in darwinian fashion and all the bad drivers will be gone with minimal consequences just isn’t true.
I am not claiming there is a constitutional right. I am claiming that i consider it a right based on first principles.
Rather interesting. I don’t know if that would effectively hold (for example, “assault weapons” are a type of gun, and have been banned, and similarly cars are merely one form of travel, so I’m guessing they could be banned also), but I didn’t even know this was a constitutional right.
It absolutely would not hold up in court. But just as i think any bans on assault weapons is unconstitutional i am free to feel the same about banning access to vehicals. My interpritation of the constitution doesnt have to match that of ghe supreme court of the day, just as todays supreme court interprits thr constitution radically different than earlier supreme courts.
@realcaseyrollins @pj @rrb
As a side note there is the constitutional "right to travel" which garubtees a citizen the free movement between states. One could argue restricting ones access to conveyence is an infringement, albeit indirect, on ones constituional right to interstate travel