Gun Control

[Crni Vuk]

Sociology matters? I thought this was a running joke

Call it nature vs nurture then if you want.

I could as well say the way how your parents raise you has an effect on you as an adult person just as how some of it is depending on your biology and genes. What ever if that is a part of sociology or not, I don't know to be honest. I am just saying it's not a controversial point to say that your environment does have a a measurable effect on how you as a person act and develope even as an adult. When you take a very large poplations and conduct randomised tests and questionnaires based on a good scientic basis then you can make some qualified statements. And the longer you conduct those tests the more accurate and more quality the statements will have. Like statements about public health.

The point is we are more than just automatons that merely consume stimuli. We as a person and society change over time. Particularly when we experience very serious events which cause strong emotions from fear to excitement.

It's not only that each generation is shaping their environment the enviroment is also shaping them. It's symbiotic. And this is also true on a more individual level. Take cancer for example. There can be extrinsic and intrinsic factors. A genetic disposotion for example compard to let us say radiation. Some people developer easier skin cancer from being exposed to the sun than others. And we can experience similar situations with traumatic experiences where some people are genetically more likely to developer depressions than others. There have been studies on those things for decades.

It was even a runing joke in one of the best games ever created.

Hyperbole doesn't suite, (and a grudge bearer would most likely want them to know it was them). In either case having recourse is better than not having any; to either stand there and get shot, or to shoot back. Just having a visible gun might be enough to dissuade.

It's not hyperbole when it's actually happening. Like the example you gave with your neighbour where some person is shooting his house without anyone knowing who it was.

and a grudge bearer would most likely want them to know it was them

I don't think so. Not when the grudge bearer knows that murder gets him in to jail. Some people do all sorts of crazy stuff when they hold a grudge even to random strangers.

I am sure we all had sometimes this thought where we wanted to 'hurt' someone either as revenge or due to frustration. That's a normal human reaction particularly if we feel that we're right. But most of us control those impulses and don't act on them out of a rash and purely emotional decision. But most of the people that do it actually don't want the victim to know they did it because that means they would get in trouble.

And how do guns apply to this? People can kill with playing cards, and even thrown bolts. They don't need a gun for that.

I see.

Maybe you should become a military advisor. They could save a lot of money with the next war when you can explain to them how guns are not effective tools in killing things compared to playing cards.

Yes I do know about those examples where a trained shaolin monk can throw a needle trough a glass window. However as impressive as that is there are decades of rigerous training requied, a physical and mental fittness that most people don't have to achieve such a thing. Here I would always chose the gun. Why spend a decade training when I can just merely pull a trigger. I'll give you that one for sure.

 

[TorontoReign]

Only shoot when your life is in danger. Even then expect to have your day in court.

Why were you there?
Why were they?



A rapist was shot.
Time to riot.
Oh no my arm is gone.
End of poem.

 

[Gizmojunk]

I am just saying it's not a controversial point to say that your environment does have a a measurable effect on how you as a person act and develope even as an adult.

Does this explain twins in the same house, where one is a nightmare problem child?

It's not only that each generation is shaping their environment the enviroment is also shaping them.

It's not hyperbole when it's actually happening. Like the example you gave with your neighbour where some person is shooting his house without anyone knowing who it was.

I would bet a fortune that the guy knew exactly who it was, and why they were shooting.

*They moved away the following week.

I don't think so. Not when the grudge bearer knows that murder gets him in to jail.

Then you mistake the meaning; the grudge bearer wants them to know it before they die.

If you meant anonymous harassment by bullet, sure, but that was not what I meant when suggesting that having a gun at the time might keep them alive.

I am sure we all had sometimes this thought where we wanted to 'hurt' someone either as revenge or due to frustration.

Last week I was stung on the inside of my mouth by a carpenter bee; that bee is still flying around the yard—I am the one who was hammering a nail near its burrow. I simply got it out of my mouth and worked around it.

I see.

Not by that picture... certainly not thrown.

Maybe you should become a military advisor.

They wouldn't like me; see further above.

Yes I do know about those examples where a trained shaolin monk can throw a needle trough a glass window. However as impressive as that is there are decades of rigerous training requied, a physical and mental fittness that most people don't have to achieve such a thing.

Do you mean about the bolts? No... no.. no

Not these:

These:

 

[Crni Vuk]

Does this explain twins in the same house, where one is a nightmare problem child?

I am not sure. But I think that kind of question is a bit to specific. We're talking mostly about averages here based on very large sample sizes but they can be used to create guidelines or to help in decision making.

Like for example PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Dissorder) which can be quite often found with soldiers which experienced combat. The US army conducted several investigations on the mental and physical capacity of their soldiers in combat situations after WW2 and Korea where they found out that many soldiers would simply stop to respond after a certain amount of time in combat and they had to be reliefed of their post and send to a hospital ward where they could recover and would usually return to the units after they recovered. - A few cases however have been so severe that they suffered even tremors though.

One thing they US army found out in their research if I remember correctly was that the average soldiers can take about 80 days of continous combat before he simply snaps and had to be taken out of combat - they called it battle fatigue at that time, but it was known since WW1 as shell schock syndrome or the thousand yard stare based on the expression that soldiers would often show when they suffered from it, very common in the pacific threatre of WW2. One of the most famous WW2 drawings is even named after it :

Spoiler: Thousand Yard Stare

Based on the research the US army made changes on how long units should be in combat and replaced by fresh units - under ideal conditions.

What I am trying to say is that those are just more or less statistics. They can not be used to make predictions about one specific soldiers and how he will react under combat conditions. Some might experience PTSD already after the first battle. Others might continue to fight for months. So you can not say Private Snafu here will snap on day 76 and private honkydonk there will fight for 120 days. That's not how this works.

But it does help to set a guideline at which point you should rotate a unit to the rear and deploy a fresh one to take up the role because at a certain point in time it is very likely that half of your unit, if not even more might experience very severe psychological and physiological issues lowering their overall combat effectiveness.


So to get back to the point, when you have accurate data and statistics about a population you can create policies and set limits, regulations, you can make changes in the hope to improve a certain condition and so on.

Then you mistake the meaning; the grudge bearer wants them to know it before they die.

Yeah that might be the case with some. I am not going to say I would know how everyone thinks. But I would say that such situations are not the norm. Usually if people are out there to really kill someone? They want it done in a way that no one knows about it. For obvious reasons.

but that was not what I meant when suggesting that having a gun at the time might keep them alive.

I already told you several times that I agree, a gun can be a live safer and equalizer. But it's not a magic button that can or will solve all hostile situations and that it can be very dangerous to see it as such. A gun can not replace the kind of safety you get from a stabile and healthy environment and neither should it. Take Switzerland for example. It has a very high number of guns within the population but most of the gun owners are trained and the nation has a very high living standard. And gun related deaths are relatively low. Of course this is very simplfied and there are definetly a lot more reasons to consider here as well. But I do think there is a corelation between how well the citizens are doing particularly when it comes to stress and the number of homicides and particularly suicides relating to guns.

I am not saying guns are the cause here. I am just trying to explain that if you have a society like the US that is experiencing very high tensions politically and economically where more and more people feel preasure then you will see a rise in gun related deaths if more guns become available to the public.

 

[Gizmojunk]

Like for example PTSD ... battle fatigue ... shell schock syndrome

*Just an aside:

Spoiler

 

[Hassknecht]

When rapists, child molesters, and burglars are out for your blood, accept nothing but the best for your protection:
Smith & Wesson M&P15 Rifles.
Ask your local S&W dealer about the "We The People" limited edition of the M&P15 Sport II rifle.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Interesting how one of the richest nations in the world has more in common with White Russia than a developed country.

 

[Hassknecht]

And what would that be?

 

[Crni Vuk]

Civil unrest, croonism, corruption, violence, poverty. The US has become pretty authoritarian in some respect.

 

[Morgan_]

I wish I could show you guys my home town. Completely wiped out as a result of the opioid epidemic and very few jobs that are geared toward the tech industry. There are a few places straight out of Deliverance if you go on the outskirts. People literally living in abandoned trailers, decades old and no running water. America is a collection of 1st, 2nd and 3rd world conditions. The main hospital was bought out by a private company. they ran it into the ground and a local state hospital was left to pick up the pieces once they bankrupted. There was even an FBI task force in kevlar vests, helmets and shotguns walking up and down our street one night when they did a raid on a drug house that was also making pipe bombs. We had to stop at an armed checkpoint and everything. Shit was crazy.
Apparently it is considered to be as dangerous as Compton in terms of likelihood of being attacked/robbed.

 

[mustadiokeepsdying]

I wish I could show you guys my home town. Completely wiped out as a result of the opioid epidemic and very few jobs that are geared toward the tech industry. There are a few places straight out of Deliverance if you go on the outskirts. People literally living in abandoned trailers, decades old and no running water. America is a collection of 1st, 2nd and 3rd world conditions. The main hospital was bought out by a private company. they ran it into the ground and a local state hospital was left to pick up the pieces once they bankrupted. There was even an FBI task force in kevlar vests, helmets and shotguns walking up and down our street one night when they did a raid on a drug house that was also making pipe bombs. We had to stop at an armed checkpoint and everything. Shit was crazy.
Apparently it is considered to be as dangerous as Compton in terms of likelihood of being attacked/robbed.

This all sounds like something I'd see in Fallout. Jesus.

 

[TheGM]

Civil unrest, croonism, corruption, violence, poverty. The US has become pretty authoritarian in some respect.

Probably giving you a half chub right about now, isn't it.

 

[Hassknecht]

Imagine how authoritarian it would it would if the National Guard would be sent in properly to smash down the riots instead of letting anarchy burn down cities.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Imagine how authoritarian it would be to send in the US army and declare martial law to smash down the riots instead of letting anarchy burn down cities.

I mean this is what a declining society looks like with giant inequality build in to it's very fabric which has been ignored by those in charge for nearly 3 decades after all. It's not like some people didn't warn that something like this would exactly happen at some point if social issues are ignored for to long. This isn't a justification but those riots have reasons and if you don't actually adress them they will happen over and over and over ... I mean you don't have riots like those in Switzerland or Denmark really. But that's most probably because they are socialist hell holes with no freedom I guess.

 

[Hassknecht]

Imagine how authoritarian it would be to send in the US army and declare martial law to smash down the riots instead of letting anarchy burn down cities.

Exactly. Imagine what actual authoritarianism looks like.

I mean this is what a declining society looks like with giant inequality build in to it's very fabric which has been ignored by those in charge for nearly 3 decades after all. It's not like some people didn't warn that something like this would exactly happen at some point if social issues are ignored for to long. This isn't a justification but those riots have reasons and if you don't actually adress them they will happen over and over and over ... I mean you don't have riots like those in Switzerland or Denmark really. But that's most probably because they are socialist hell holes with no freedom I guess.

Yeah, pretty much.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Exactly. Imagine what actual authoritarianism looks like.

What is authoritarianism exactly though? According to a short look at Wikipedia it says

In an influential 1964 work,[4] the political scientist Juan Linz defined authoritarianism as possessing four qualities:

1. Limited political pluralism, realized with constraints on the legislature, political parties and interest groups.
2. Political legitimacy based upon appeals to emotion and identification of the regime as a necessary evil to combat "easily recognizable societal problems, such as underdevelopment or insurgency".
3. Minimal political mobilization and suppression of anti-regime activities.
4. Ill-defined executive powers, often vague and shifting, which extends the power of the executive

I don't know about you but some of that strikes me as awfully close to what the US is experiencing right now. Particularly since the Senate failed completely in keeping Trump in check.

I mean authoritarianism doesn't has to be an outright dictatorship. It doesn't even have to involve a lot of direct force by some kind of military breathing down your neck constantly. In some cases just the fear of the possibility can be enough.

And I think Americans have never been more fearfull - in general - then ever before. And there are more than just one way to put presure on people if you realy want it. Like economically for example. I mean when you listen to Chomsky he even makes the argument that the large corporations in the United States represent a form of modern fascism as they pretty much can pump so much money in to the political system that they basically make their own laws which are often not in the public interest but only their own. You can even put in some sense a measure on it when you look at how much money was spend by pharmaceutical companies in lobbying at Congress and how often Congress has simply directly copied their texts in to laws to benefit those companies.

And when you look at who Trump has appointed at to sit at the EPA, secretary of the treasury and other regulatory branches and the decisions they have made? They have even rolled back some regulations that go as far back as Nixon and have been put in place by the likes of Reagan - the undisputed hero of the republican party. And why? Because they they are >bad for business<. Words like public health or public service have very little meaning to those people. We also see it again with the USPS. It's the oldest neoliberal trick in the book.

First you defund a public service to the point where it can barely function.
Then you explain everyone how inefficient it is and how it's only creating deficists - despite the fact of being a service I mean no one says the US army creates deficists.
And then you go and sell it and privetise it.

We've seen this with many other areas in the US already and not with very huge benefits for the public. From the infrastructure to prisons even.


In my opinion the US was never as authoritarian as it is now. At least since the 1980s. Economic opportunities in a de-facto capitalist society (for the lack of better words) are equal to liberty and freedom. And less and less Americans simply have a chance to participate in the society. And not just minorities but also the larger groups start to feel that effect there is virtualy no middle class anymore present in the US.

 

[Hassknecht]

Hm.
1. Seems reasonable, but it's established from both directions, with political pluralism heavily limited by the media as well, and very little suppression from the actual government.
2. Happening weakly, but not to degrees stronger than elsewhere. Certainly not to a degree comparable to actually authoritarian regimes.
3. Given the riots and massive political mobilization going on with little federal response, I think that's quite clearly not an issue.
4. Not really happening to any degree unheard of.
The USA is as authoritarian as always, it's just that this time it goes into a direction you reaaaaaally don't like. The nature of the american government system makes it a normal occurence that key positions are switched out by more momentarily politically conforming candidates. It's not a Trump thing, and when Trump is gone, things will turn around again.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Hm.
The USA is as authoritarian as always, it's just that this time it goes into a direction you reaaaaaally don't like.

Your assumption. I am not having a >direction< here. I am not in support of those riots and I think it does hurt also many conservatives as well. There are many bipartisan issues - like higher taxes on the rich - which still never get passed trough the Senate/Congress because the US is de facto an oligarchy at this point. And that is something which won't change if Biden is elected by the way.

Like I said, I think Chomsky is right on this one. And yes the fact that this isn't the firs time doesn't change anything in my book.

 

[RangerBoo]

I wish I could show you guys my home town. Completely wiped out as a result of the opioid epidemic and very few jobs that are geared toward the tech industry. There are a few places straight out of Deliverance if you go on the outskirts. People literally living in abandoned trailers, decades old and no running water. America is a collection of 1st, 2nd and 3rd world conditions. The main hospital was bought out by a private company. they ran it into the ground and a local state hospital was left to pick up the pieces once they bankrupted. There was even an FBI task force in kevlar vests, helmets and shotguns walking up and down our street one night when they did a raid on a drug house that was also making pipe bombs. We had to stop at an armed checkpoint and everything. Shit was crazy.
Apparently it is considered to be as dangerous as Compton in terms of likelihood of being attacked/robbed.

You just described my hometown. Opioids crisis has created shanty towns everywhere in my town. There are over 2000 homeless people in my town. I can't walk down the street without running into piss, shit or vomit. I can't tell you how many times I have be accosted by a homeless man high as a kite wanting a 20 for drugs. We are worried about our town defunding the police force as the Western Washington police force has what is called a "Expedition Crew", a group of cops and volunteers who go to homeless camps and clean things up there. If the cops get defunded they so will the Expedition Crew and they may have to disband. Many of the people here have also been trying to get a 24 hour shelter to be made. It isn't a perfect solution but better for these homeless people to have somewhere to go then create shanty towns around the town. Out council refuses to have any money go to something like that and instead has the money go to BLM or Trans Inclusion training. Everyone, if you ever wonder what a city would be like run by incompetent hippies, look no further then Olympia, Washington.

 

[Morgan_]