gallantwarrior
Gold Member
I'm not advocating the "ban-it-all" mentality in either case, firearms or media. While I agree that people tend to be influenced by much of what they see/read/hear, disagree that we have a gun fetish. I believe we have eliminated the concept of personal responsibility for our actions. It's all OK. One only acts out because of one's victimhood. While some may argue that punishment is not the answer, obviously "rehabilitation" has failed society as a panacea for violence. Perhaps we should label the acts as the pure, unmitigated evil they represent and then contemplate why there is such an increase in evil in our society?Alrighty, then...
The suggestion has been made that the root causes driving any specific demographic to commit these atrocities be identified. If we were able to do that, we'd have a greater chance of averting them. I venture to suggest that these causes are complex and multiple. I think we can safely identify the primary demographic as young, white males, most who are currently or had previously been treated with psychotropic drugs.
Unfortunately, politicians have highjacked the issue in order to advance their ideological agendas. This turns the issue into a hot button item and both sides of the bab/ don't ban dichotomy fail to consider any other discussion.
They have indeed so hijacked. It's pandering to the simplistic, because it's easier to bicker over "ban guns!!" versus "No, Second Amendment!!" than it is to dare touch the foundation of what drives it.
You're close here, but they're not necessarily young -- the latest one was -- but Spengler in my example was 62; Jim David Adkisson (Powell church shooting) was 58; James von Brunn was a month shy of 89. Psychotropic drugs appear some of the time -- but none of these above examples IIRC. So trying to pin it on drugs is another deflection.
What all of these shooters and pretty much any you can find, have in common is a power problem. Whether drugs are involved or not -- Harris and Klebold, the Luby's guy, Jared Loughner, these three men above, countless workplace slayings --- and the latest racist fuckbag in Charleston --- all men who felt themselves deprived of some kind of power and pervertedly saw the gun as the instrument that would fix that.
THAT idea is the root of the problem.
That they take the firearm to be their vehicle to power is of course dead wrong. But we can hardly act surprised that they would come to that conclusion -- they've been told that since birth. We all have. Our daily/nightly television says so. Our childhood comic books say so. Our movies and video games say so. Our childhood toys told us that, as soon as we were big enough to hold one in our hand. And of course our history of conquest, first our own continent and with that secure, our own planet. Check out our icons: war heroes, Indian killers, the cavalry "clearing" the Indians. We grow up from earliest childhood playing "cops and robbers" and "cowboys and Indians". Always the dichotomy, always the endless battle. And anyone who's any age from newborn to their mid-60s lives in a country that has been, for his/her entire life, at war somewhere. Continuously.
If all that ain't drumming in the continuous relentless message that you deal with a problem by shooting at it, I don't know what is. What would be shocking would be if NO ONE took that message to heart.
In a nutshell you could say these killers are simply doing what they've been told to do all their lives.
My question is --- why are we telling ourselves that?
First, without access to firearms, people like these would find some other way to assert their "power" some other way.
Of course they would. That's what I said in my clown comparison.
So the problem does not lie with their chosen tool, but rather in the reason why they feel powerless and needful to assert themselves.
?? Huh?
Does not follow. If the way to deal with one's power issues were to dress up like a clown, those issues wouldn't be resulting in mass slayings. Or ANY slayings. So the chosen tool is exactly the point here.
You have a point about the saturation in media and entertainment that glorifies violence as a means to express oneself. But if you dare propose reining in the media/entertainment industries, the same dichotomy that hijacks the ban/don't ban argument inevitably drag out their First Amendment protections.
Again, it does not follow that "reining in the media/entertainment industries" is the only way to address it. That's just reverting back to the same old "let's pass a law and ban it" mentality as the "let's ban guns" mentality.
Nobody reaches for a gun because it's legal or illegal. They reach for a gun because they want what it delivers. That desire is what needs to change. And you don't legislate desire. Can't be done. Think more originally than that. Laws are not the answer to everything. They just ain't.
Seventy-five years ago smoking cigarettes was pervasive. It was everywhere. People did their TV shows smoking. They smoked around their kids. They smoked while eating. Doctors did it, and then recommended a brand. It was "cool" because some movie action figure did it.
That cultural "coolness" is gone now. No doctor will tell you what brand you should be smoking. You won't see the practice on T or in a move except in a rare exception of a very bad guy character. It is in short socially disapproved.
That happened outside the realm of the Law. And it's more powerful than the Law.
So we come back to the problem, how do we identify people with these violent, destructive tendencies before they act on them? And having identified them, how should we deal with them?
I see it as two separate questions. Do these people need to be identified? Of course they do, and they deserve addressing in whatever way is effective. But simultaneous with that we've got this value problem, which applies to everybody whether they're mentally ill or not.
We have violence because we have (certain) violent people. That is true everywhere around the world.
But we have GUN violence (specifically) because we have a collective gun fetish.
And that needs to go, yesterday.
We'll still have violence from violent people. There's no way around that basic human flaw. But we wouldn't have an epidemic of Rambos and copycats mowing down people out of a love of carnage.