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Gun Legislation, Crime, and Events


Tigerbomb13

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11 minutes ago, Tigerbomb13 said:

This reminds me with the discussions I had with my partner on this a week ago. We were trying to think about why this is such a never ending tragedy, and nearly all of these are perpetrated by young males. Obviously guns are an issue, but what more lies underneath all this? How many of these shooters have a history of being bullied and incel type behavior? How many of them go on the dark web and places like 4chan and further go down that rabbit hole of darkness? This is part of our culture now, and I don’t know how we get through it. 

These are the kinds of discussions we should have as adults in this country. I know right now the two words getting a lot of air time are the words, “mental illness.” Right or wrong, I believe these words are becoming a catch-all phrase to some extent. How do we even define mental illness in 2022? Points you made are very deserving of national attention. 
 

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3 hours ago, Shades of Deivi Cruz said:

4chan not required. With the algorithms all the social media apps use, those dark rabbit holes are frighteningly easy to enter. 

Just watch Trump's White Nationalist ass kissers on Fox News like Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham and you don't even have to go on social media to fall down a rabbit hole.

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3 hours ago, 1776 said:

These are the kinds of discussions we should have as adults in this country. I know right now the two words getting a lot of air time are the words, “mental illness.” Right or wrong, I believe these words are becoming a catch-all phrase to some extent. How do we even define mental illness in 2022? Points you made are very deserving of national attention. 
 

I think the other big problem here is that a person can become acculturated to a lot of garbage ideas, and when they then act rationally within such a belief system, the rest of us want to take solace in calling them mentally ill, when what has really happened is exactly that they fell down some kind of 'rabbit hole' that created a distortion of their reality and thus warped what they believed was rational action. We don't want to describe it this way because once we do, the onus falls on society to do more than just fix broken patients therapeutically, the requirement is to fix the broken society whose terrain has become so littered with those rabbit holes, and no-one wants to hear that, especially the 'don't-tell-me-there-is-any-thing-wrong with-America-too-many-immigrants-already-want-to-come-here' crowd.

Edited by gehringer_2
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Every other developed country in the world has those same rabbit holes, without churning out anywhere near the number of mass shooters per capita.  Blaming them is like blaming television or video games, they are just symptoms of, or responses to, a violent subculture that already exists on its own.

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1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

I think the other big problem here is that a person can become acculturated to a lot of garbage ideas, and when they then act rationally within such a belief system, the rest of us want to take solace in calling them mentally ill, when what has really happened is exactly that they fell down some kind of 'rabbit hole' that created a distortion of their reality and thus warped what they believed was rational action. We don't want to describe it this way because once we do, the onus falls on society to do more than just fix broken patients therapeutically, the requirement is to fix the broken society whose terrain has become so littered with those rabbit holes, and no-one wants to hear that, especially the 'don't-tell-me-there-is-any-thing-wrong with-America-too-many-immigrants-already-want-to-come-here' crowd.

Yep. The harder nut to crack, as you suggest, is that to the extent that "mental health" is a problem here or anywhere, it may not be purely inherent within anyone who undertakes one of these shootings... and that the society itself may groom people for these events. 

By that same token, the problems that exist here exist elsewhere as well... the difference is that we add firearms to the mix in a big way. And it leads to disastrous results.

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9 hours ago, casimir said:

I was presented a job opportunity in Fort Worth years ago, but never really considered it as we were too rooted down where we are.  Years later and I don't regret it at all.

You're right about other public places.  Banks still got robbed.  Why have we not heard of arming bank tellers?

Its not a bad place, politicians notwithstanding. Although I'd rather be up north 

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1 hour ago, Jim Cowan said:

Every other developed country in the world has those same rabbit holes, without churning out anywhere near the number of mass shooters per capita.  Blaming them is like blaming television or video games, they are just symptoms of, or responses to, a violent subculture that already exists on its own.

IDK that that is true. Back in the BaaderMeinhoff days Germany had problems with dark subcultures, obviously you had some people with a twisted sense of righteousness in Ireland. The US has powerful antisocial undercurrents running all over the place today. I doubt many other developed countries have such a high level of crazy lurking so close to the surface as the US has in the last couple of decades. Don't forget the gun issue runs both ways, one of the reasons that so many Americans are so attached to their guns is because they are persuaded of lot of terrible things are waiting for them if they give them up. That paranoia is real and it's not the normal condition in most countries. Sure, some of that is racial fear and other kinds of bigotry and xenophobia, but that's the point - guns in America are also a result , not just a cause.

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1 minute ago, Jim Cowan said:

I think that the origins of that violent subculture need to be identified, keeping in mind that they have existed since at least the 1870's.  At what age does a gun nut become a gun nut?

When he finds out he needs to eat?

I couldn't help it, I'll let myself out.

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Tulsa was not alone last night.    Someone was shot at a nail salon in Pennsylvania in a town called Pittston (boy I'd lobby for a new name).   Shots fired outside Grant High school in Van Nuys, CA.  

On average 110 people are killed by guns every single day in this country.  

Great invention.  Right up there with cigarettes and smartphones.    

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Did not know about this.   Irma Garcia was one of the teachers killed at Robb Elementary.  Her husband Joe, died from a heart attack two days later.   They don't count that in the final tally, but they should.  They were buried together.    All she was doing was trying to teach little kids and that piece of shit from that psychotic state in this warped country killed her.    I'm right in line with Gabe Kapler, I'm not standing for a song about bombs anymore.  Fuck that.  Even our anthem has violence.  

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Regarding the mental health discussion, this is an enlightening piece specific to Texas:

Texas was building a program to find troubled students and prevent school shootings. It hadn’t reached Uvalde yet.

One of the takeaways being that, while efforts have been made post Santa Fe to identify troubled kids and get them help through the Texas Child Mental Healthcare Consortium, it's really unlikely to ever be the total solution to this problem. Mostly because, in three years, the numerator (~6,000) is far behind the denominator (~2,100,000) in terms of eligible kids who have been able to access these services. And that more money and time would be required to identify every single kid who could be a problem.

The other takeaway is that this is all happening in a state that has otherwise slashed mental health funding is one of the worst states in the country in terms of mental health.

The problem is always going to require a multi-faceted approach, but one facet (guns) never seems to be on the table.

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