Mass shootings an American Problem

Corduroy

Senate Member
Feb 9, 2011
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No.
WTH? Stupid thing won't let me post just 3 characters. It wants 4.

That is exactly why I say that it isn't guns, or knives, or pipe bombs, or ...... atomic bombs, etc. that is the problem. The problem is our attitudes. There is simply a gross disrespect for life. Period.

erm, "gross" as in "gargantuan".


We can't blame it all on one thing. Obviously guns don't cause mass shootings but attitudes that enable mass shootings need guns to work. The example you gave of atomic bombs illustrates this. Obviously atomic bombs don't cause atomic bombings. There are thousands of atomic bombs and only two examples of them being used in war. But the attitude around them during the Cold War was "if the enemy is going to kill everyone on the planet, we'll be ready to do it first." This mass murder of the entire human population was the policy of the United States and the USSR and rationalized with what seemed to them as impeccable logic. There was an anxiety that the war to kill everyone must be won. But it would have been useless without the actual weapons.

The attitude the article explains is not so much a disregard for life, although I'm sure that part of it, but American society's ideology of success and how the pressures drive people into marginalization and alienation. We talk about these people as having mental problems but what do we do to prevent it? What do we do to get them help? I'm sure people seem quite satisfied when they can easily explain how these shootings happen after the fact. They can call them crazy. They can blame them for being "bad guys". They can call for harsh punishment. But people are still dead and it's going to happen again.
 

AnnaG

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Jul 5, 2009
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It's attitude; or societal personality if you wish. It's what our politics, religions, our greed, and whatever else we feel strongly about develops us into.
 

Corduroy

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Feb 9, 2011
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More laws and more gun free zones won't solve the problem, that's what's funny.


I'm going to wash this plate with a pine cone.

Walter:
 

Corduroy

Senate Member
Feb 9, 2011
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Good question. What is the difference between a bad person and a sick person. One I have no answer to. So, I don't know. Maybe no one does.

They aren't mutually exclusive. A person can be both sick and bad.

I guess if we really wanted to work it out, a sick person presumably has some kind of physical problem that manifests in uncontrollable delusion, hallucination or paranoia. It could include things like depression, anxiety, compulsive disorders etc., the basic stuff of mental problems. This can result in violence, but also in unhappy people, or sometimes even in highly motivated and accomplished people. A bad person could have nothing physically wrong with them but be the product of a society that allows for hate, racism, a disregard for the well-being of others, sectarianism and easy justifications for violence and injustice.

There's a saying among atheists, and I can't remember who coined it, but it's that good people will do good, bad people will do bad, but for a good person to do bad that takes religion. This is unfair to religion (religion can make bad people good and good people better). It's not religion but the expression taps into a wider truth. It's ideology and the values of a society. And like religion it works both ways and are not monolithic. These are complicated forces. American society creates good people and bad people. But it's clear that there is a kind of bad person, the mass shooter, that is not exclusive to America but a particularly American phenomenon.
 

Curious Cdn

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Feb 22, 2015
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Maybe, we need to scoop up all of the sociopath psychos who own guns "just for the fun of it" and put them in camps up in the high Arctic.
 

Scooby

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Mar 22, 2012
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The " American Dream " is the problem. The concept that it's a wonderful place, contrasted by the recurring evidence that it's not, somehow shocking and upsetting people.
 

Curious Cdn

Hall of Fame Member
Feb 22, 2015
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The " American Dream " is the problem. The concept that it's a wonderful place, contrasted by the recurring evidence that it's not, somehow shocking and upsetting people.
The American dream is still somewhat alive in this country but in America, it is a sort of mocking parody of what it once was.