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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😀
Many states dont require boating licenses, works out just fine for the boaters. You also dont need a license to fly an ultralight plane, even with a passanger, works out well there too.
As for high rises, same thing, make sure someone is checking the highrise meets code in its planning and building phase, as long as it does its safe to build regardless of ghe credentials of the person who designed it.
We have countless examples of this sort of stuff being very workable and safe without needing licensing by having other mechanisms that ensure safety.
That's all I'm asking: effective collective "mechanisms that ensure safety" enforced by the community, elected government, or whatever, that work for the vast majority of their constituents.
Giving everyone guns and saying that this is for their protection just doesn't work for most people, despite what Jefferson was thinking when he said that having a gun will more likely prevent someone from attacking them.
What we know is that gubs arent the solution, but we know they arent the problem either. Banning them in a violent society makes things more violent. Im willing to suspect in a peaceful society banning them or not has no effect.
The solutions lie in changing our environments to be healthy, and improving access to mental health (which by the way is the exact opposite of what woukd haplen kf we toom away gun rights from people who seek therapy and get diagnosed)
No the right vs privilage argument is secondary for me... im a scientist i care about what works. What i know is the numbers show almost every time, you ban guns it either has no net benefit or, more kften, causes violent acts, especially rape, to sky rocket.
I support guns because banning them takes lives.
And the whole schizophrenic thing... doesnt matter if you thinknifs a privilage or a right. If you tell people they will no longer have access to guns and the ability tonuse it to protect themselves if thry go seek therapy and happen to get a mental health diagnosis, then leople will avoid therapy... you just made things way worse not better.
@freemo @rrb I don’t understand how's having a gun to protect oneself from a sick (or just evil) person is a better solution than making sure those people can't get a gun in the first place.
Using more guns to protect against bad people with guns is only good for gun manufacturers.
And nobody is asking the outright *banning* of guns, just to make sure peoplw that want them have the capacity to use them safely.
This is not in the Wild West anymore. I thought the government as an instrument of a civilized society was responsible for the protection of its citizens, especially the weak.
You say these people would be alive today if only they had guns. I believe some of them may have owned one, and one of the people killed, a police officer Const. Heidi Stevenson had used her and died anyway:
No its not the wild west, and in theory polkce shoukd orotect us... but in practice thst makes little sense. Police come when you call them and there is going to be a delay no matter how well funded. You cant even call police if your being jumped or raped most of the time.
In the end its great to talk about ideals and what shoukd be or shouldnt be. But we have to schknowledge reality, and the reality is that in most incidents the police will never be a reliable security.
For example only 46% of violent crimes in general are reported, i suspect much less for rape. Of those reported only 30% even result in an arrest. Its clear from these numbers very very few, if any, rape cases are acted on by police and prevented.
It is not just the police. Their role is to react to incidents and investigate afterward. I'm talking about #prevention. Gun ownership regulation is a part of it but not all.
The killer in this instance had a history of domestic abuse and obvious mental issues but nobody bothered to check his guns, two of which were smuggled from the US.
The issue with gun registration is that one day thr government may become oppressive and make guns illegal and thrn those registrations can be used by an oppessive govt.
The other issue is profiling. Cops might use registrations to target people as suspected and as such owning a gun, even if you never use it, makes you a target of wrongful arrest.
We already have a "one-way" system that is essentially a registrstion. As long as you have a gun or its serial number you can track it back to who owned it, but not the other way around. Assuming it is all legal of course.
This is a "strawman" argument. You can't base your current safety policies on the remote possibility that the government may one day become oppressive.
All governments are more or less oppressive but the good thing is that they don't survive for too long and inevitably collapse when they become too oppressive.
@pj @freemo While I do not accept freemo's "slippery slope" argument, because that negates any government action, I think you are much too positive about history and governments.
Democracy and rule of law is the exception and short lived to date. Look around you, most governments are oppressive and are not going anywhere. Democracy is also in retreat most everywhere. In decline for the last 17 years:
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2023/marking-50-years
Agree. As I've said all governments are oppressive by definition, because they have to #regulate things that inevitably infringe on an individual's #freedom (e.g. the "freedom" to shoot at whomever they want).
All I'm saying is that guns are not the only and, I would argue, not the most effective tool to get rid of oppressive undemocratic governments.
@rrb @pj agreed, keyword being always.
Guns as a check on government is and should be a last resort after all peaceful options are exhausted... peace can and will work most of the time if the public supports it... but that doesnt change the fact that guns act as a good security when all else fails.
There is a reason the most cruel and injust governments always make disarming the people a priority.
@rrb @pj
Soubds like a good argument to allow civilians to own heavy artillary thrn. You certainly are convincing me ;)