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Okay, but seriously... GUNS


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I wish I could cite the source, but a few days ago I read something that stick with me: Conservatives in America tend to believe that their rights and natural laws aren't something given or inherited, they're something that have to be constantly defended.

If they're not defended, they're in danger of being lost. They tend to perceive their ownership of whatever gun they'd like to have as something that is a God-given natural right, which is typically why they become so defensive in this same cyclical national conversation we always go through after a mass shooting.

This is totally personal anecdote from what I've seen in the very rural parts of one of the reddest states, but I think many of that crowd overly fetishize that scenario too. You hear conversations in person and see memes online from these types who seem to actively wish for and provoke situations in which they can defend those rights. They appear to want some Wild West scenario in which they're picking people off from their front porch. It's usually within the guise of "defending property and family" or "standing your ground," but they're typically transparent enough for it to be clear that they just want to enact some apocalyptical fantasy of killing others without penalty.

I personally don't see anything changing anytime soon unless there's a huge culture shift that reframes and shifts this whole line of thought. If Sandy Hook wasn't the thing that triggers that shift, I really don't think anything ever will be.

On another front of this whole thing, I personally believe that there has to be another form of societal shift that goes along with stricter gun measures if anything is going to be done. It's not just the obvious factors of young incel radicals being overly influenced by horrible rhetoric from the top, but it's a lack of societal care too. Media and popular portrayal are stigmatizing young people who are introverted, who have a hard time making friends, or who fall through the cracks of society. Instead of trying to help them through issues and include them, we often adopt a "not my problem" attitude and just cast them aside and perhaps even ridicule them from a distance. Often times these young people who feel they have no way out of the shadows either develop abhorrent attitudes or had them already, but casting them aside just makes matters worse and pours gasoline on an already volatile fire.

 

Also, mental health care is an absolute joke in our country. We tell people to see professionals or check themselves into a hospital if they're having a hard time or are suicidal, but doing just that can send someone into a death spiral of debt. It says a lot about our country when becoming a packing psycho killer is far more easy and cost-effective than getting help and bettering yourself.

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Democrats are as guilty as Republicans when it comes to the lack of movement on anything. The rhetoric alone doesn't desire movement.

 

Democrats care as much about guns as Republicans care about abortion.

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For those who support bans for the mentally ill, how do you define it, and how do you square that with a majority of mental health professionals saying that mental health has nothing to do with most shootings and that a ban would likely have negative impact on people seeking treatment?

 

20% of the US is struggling with mental illness each year. Should all of them be banned from getting guns? Are you okay with fewer people getting treatment in order to do something that professionals say won't help?

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My point was that we throw a label at vast groups of people because of one characteristic. Fair or not. I'm Republican and I support the right to choose. Though as I've gotten older my reasons have changed at to why I support it.

 

For some reason these things have become team sport politics. A cop shoots a black man even if he just committed a crime and half the NBA talks about injustice. Someone shoots up a school you don't hear a peep from LeBron. It's because he owns guns. People that open guns don't want to see these tragedies happen. They just don't want someone coming for their guns.

 

Nothing will get done because the truth is everyone knows there is not one cure all solution for this. Instead they used it to bash one another upside the heads.

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My comment was influenced by yours, but something I've believed for years. And when I say Republicans and Democrats in this case, I mean politicians. They're wedge issues that the politicians use because actually trying to compromise and change things doesn't really get votes.

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Well there is a cure-all-- ban all guns. The math of every country with weapons bans and their amount of gun related deaths is incontrovertible.

 

But at it's core-- this is 99% a white male problem. Pretty much everyone else in this country has to overcome some sort of hurdle, minor or major, to get anywhere close to power. Our politics, or pop culture, and our laws teach our society that white males are the norm and have no hurdles.

 

So when you get a young white man with fringe ideals or weird beliefs that is (rightfully) deplatformed or marginalized by society for said beliefs, he has the chance, especially if he's been poorly educated and has grown up in some sort of insular situation, to lose his shit and wonder why the world isn't being handed to him when that's what our culture has taught him.

 

Then he gets radicalized by some group of online asshats with the same ideals, or is idiot enough to listen to Trump, and takes an action that he thinks is justified.

 

People are mislabeling having a low IQ and being easily manipulated as having a mental health problem.

 

It's not a mental health issue, they're just ****ing morons.

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Well there is a cure-all-- ban all guns. The math of every country with weapons bans and their amount of gun related deaths is incontrovertible.

You're not wrong. But implementing that in your country is a bit of an impossible task no? Even if guns were banned by some miracle, how the hell would the authorities be able to collect and dispose of every firearm in ownership and existence today? And how would they even know who has what? I mean don't you have more guns than New Zealand and Wales have sheep? Like 30 to every person or something ridiculous.

 

We don't have any (that's a stretch, but hardly any) mass or regular shootings in the UK. But we do have significant knife crime and stabbings. Although it's mostly gang related... or just kids that live on council estates stabbing each other over a beef that started at school over a girl, or drugs. A mass stabbing is a lot harder to pull off than a mass shooting. Get your yout hooked on knives, innit.

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So when you get a young white man with fringe ideals or weird beliefs that is (rightfully) deplatformed or marginalized by society for said beliefs, he has the chance, especially if he's been poorly educated and has grown up in some sort of insular situation, to lose his **** and wonder why the world isn't being handed to him when that's what our culture has taught him.

 

Then he gets radicalized by some group of online asshats with the same ideals, or is idiot enough to listen to Trump, and takes an action that he thinks is justified.

This is where I think a lot of our problems are coming from. We're starting to close the door on one era where just being a white male bought privilege, and it just seems like there's a portion of that population who are losing their **** over it.

 

Take for example another story that was a blip in the news this week. A bunch of young frat-bro supporters or interns for Mitch McConnell posted a photo online where they were miming groping and choking a cardboard standup of AOC. That kind of response is indicative of their real feelings on her, they're threatened. She's a woman of color from a middle class background who worked hard to get where she is, and that directly contradicts everything their country club parents taught them.

 

That same whiplash is way more dangerous in the hands of a young and impressionable individual who replaces shady places like incel groups, /r/The_Donald or 8Chan for the influence of parent figures. They marinate in their helplessness and hate, and instead of finding ways to get out of it and improve, they fantasize about kill count high scores.

 

I don't think anything can be done about the relatively harmless and idiotic frat bros, but I really think it's those younger guys in bad situations that we all collectively have to give more support. In the void of a good network of real life friends, they're being grabbed by radicals online (of either side) and turned into puppet domestic terrorists. That's got to change quickly, or this is just going to happen more and more.

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So two very pro-Trump supporters, Texas governor, Lt governor and leader of our legislator met in El Paso, a primarily Democrat city with the Mayor and representatives in a closed door meeting to see what they can do to make El Paso feel safer and enact some good laws. And nothing came of it. Not even a look at red flag laws. At least nothing has been said. Meanwhile a local place to eat Mexican had a white supremacist caught in his truck wearing latex gloves and brandishing a knife and a gun or two.

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Guns are a problem, but so is the internet. It isn't a coincidence that the era of regular mass shootings has coincided with the internet age, where people can idolize acts of violence, connect to other frustrated and dangerous people, and get encouragement in their hatred.

Excellent. This angle isn't mentioned nearly often enough. Too much online wrangling over the demographics of the shooters, over wording, use of the term "terrorist" etc. All of this just exacerbates the core problem.

 

It isn't just that the internet is a gateway to toxic ideological systems, though this certainly doesn't help. It's that the internet has a naturally isolating effect on people, young people especially. I wasn't on Facebook when I was a teenager or in my twenties. I was out partying and so on. This had a number of effects. I saw and met many different people from different walks of life. Of different political persuasion, race, ethnicity, and so on. So I had real world experience with a lot of different kinds of people. As a consequence, you learn that they're not all monsters, terrorists, they don't all have unearned privilege, etc. You saw and interacted with these different types of people, and so your capacity for empathy was usually, though not always greater. There were tribes, cliques, etc. But not like the tribalism we're seeing on social media. You had your opinions, but learned to get along more cordially with people who didn't share those opinions because you really didn't have much of a choice. Especially if your views were off the beaten path. This had an overall moderating effect on the way people thought. Plus isolated and alienated youth are that much more prone to radicalization to begin with.

 

Contrast this with a kid who doesn't get out much because he's online all the time. His knowledge of people outside his favorite hugboxes is going to be skewed by the prevailing sentiments within said hugboxes. If those views are that all blacks have low I.Qs, all Muslims are terrorists hell bent on demographic conquest of the west, all men are rapists, all whites are Nazis etc, then you damn well tow the line, or you'll get blasted. In the worst cases, dissent is the death of the poor kid's social life. They become trapped in ideological systems that have long since mastered the art of demonizing outsiders as a means of cementing in-group loyalty. You can forget having a rational conversation with them. Interactions with out-groups are almost always exercises in frustration and anger, as different ideologues who insult and troll one another are powerless to really take things to the next level. In the real world, a good old knock down drag out fist fight solved the worst problems like this. Not any more. Anger with some snarky, smug asshat on the other side of the political isle just festers and festers and builds and builds. Hell, prior to the proliferation of the internet, one did not simply join a neo Nazi or white supremacist organization. You couldn't just enter "Ku Klux Klan" in your search engine and actually be a registered member five minutes later. You actually had to know where to look, and be a determined ideological believer in that sort of thing. Which was that much harder due to the lack of access to their ideas.

 

Someone above mentioned incels. Another thing you have way fewer chances to do online is meet prospective dates. The US political spectrum is EXTREMELY gendered and fueled in large degree by sexual and romantic frustration. The left is very gynocentric and misandrist, while angry young men thus drift to the far right, with its fetishization of restored macho masculinity. Sexual frustration is easily channeled into acts of political militancy. Read Orwell's 1984 for a more detailed look at how this happens.

 

Add to that everything else we've already discussed, ease of access of firearms especially and I'm surprised there isn't more politically motivated violence than there is at present.

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I was just explaining to a friend who grew up in Panama that it used to be that community used to form shared values, but now shared values form community. Now there are positives and negatives of each, but never learning how to make peace and develop friendships with people with different beliefs has weakened and divided us.

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For those who support bans for the mentally ill, how do you define it, and how do you square that with a majority of mental health professionals saying that mental health has nothing to do with most shootings and that a ban would likely have negative impact on people seeking treatment?

 

20% of the US is struggling with mental illness each year. Should all of them be banned from getting guns? Are you okay with fewer people getting treatment in order to do something that professionals say won't help?

The mentally ill are not the problem at all. It is-as mentioned before--a boogeyman designed to shift the blame / not identify the true types of people who kill or are most likely to kill with the weapon.

 

In fact...

 

Mass shootings not caused by mental illness, experts say

 

As long as that BS comes from the mouth of Democrats and Republicans, any sensible measure regarding guns will never see the light of day.

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So when you get a young white man with fringe ideals or weird beliefs that is (rightfully) deplatformed or marginalized by society for said beliefs, he has the chance, especially if he's been poorly educated and has grown up in some sort of insular situation, to lose his **** and wonder why the world isn't being handed to him when that's what our culture has taught him.

 

Then he gets radicalized by some group of online asshats with the same ideals, or is idiot enough to listen to Trump, and takes an action that he thinks is justified.

This is where I think a lot of our problems are coming from. We're starting to close the door on one era where just being a white male bought privilege, and it just seems like there's a portion of that population who are losing their **** over it.

 

Take for example another story that was a blip in the news this week. A bunch of young frat-bro supporters or interns for Mitch McConnell posted a photo online where they were miming groping and choking a cardboard standup of AOC. That kind of response is indicative of their real feelings on her, they're threatened. She's a woman of color from a middle class background who worked hard to get where she is, and that directly contradicts everything their country club parents taught them.

 

That same whiplash is way more dangerous in the hands of a young and impressionable individual who replaces shady places like incel groups, /r/The_Donald or 8Chan for the influence of parent figures. They marinate in their helplessness and hate, and instead of finding ways to get out of it and improve, they fantasize about kill count high scores.

 

I don't think anything can be done about the relatively harmless and idiotic frat bros, but I really think it's those younger guys in bad situations that we all collectively have to give more support. In the void of a good network of real life friends, they're being grabbed by radicals online (of either side) and turned into puppet domestic terrorists. That's got to change quickly, or this is just going to happen more and more.

 

Gun violence will continue as long as a part of the ever-dishonest, national echo chamber rushes to hang gun violence on white males / white male "culture" yet ignore the daily or annual gun violence / gun trafficking occurring all across the nation, amongst every demographic. Profiling white males would not have done a damn thing about the kind of neighborhoods I grew up in, where all of the bans and gun show legislation in the world would not have stopped the methods used to keep the access & distribution of guns of every type from flowing freely. It sure as Hll would not have stopped the man who murdered my brother from getting his rifle.

 

Small caliber arms to military grade were everywhere, and that remains the case in regions/cities where certain "lawmaker's" focus would--typically--gloss over, usually for opportunistic, sociopolitical reasons, not a genuine concern for the preservation of life.

 

Ah, but 2020 is on the horizon, so suddenly, some of the same "lawmakers" pounding their chests now say next to nothing about numbers dying every year (for example, the CDC records some 39,773 Americans died from gun violence in 2017), surpassing any mass shooter in history.

 

We know the reason why. Some of the same ideologues scream now, yet were short on grandstanding/calls for sweeping profiling in the wake of the 49 who were slaughtered in Mateen's Pulse nightclub shooting. There's always a reason why, and its that dishonesty that will keep gun violence in the "business as usual" category moving forward.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Walmart suddenly decided to stop selling guns in their stores along with bullets. But what I'm shocked that is that they're still selling rifles SMH. What a contradiction.
AMERICAN SURE DO LOVE THEIR GUNS WATCH THIS VIDEO...

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