Rights, duties, obligations type stuff.
Price of philosophy class and texts; $475.
Learned crap used in a forum 29 years later; priceless
Price of philosophy class and texts; $475.
Learned crap used in a forum 29 years later; priceless
The Myth of the Good Guy With a Gun
- Thread starter mentalfloss
- Start date
Addicted To Bang: The Neuroscience of the Gun
“If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you get a population roughly the size of the United States, where, last year, there were 32,000 gun death. Those other countries, which all have a form of gun control, had a total of 112.
—paraphrase, Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing, 2001
In the wake of recent tragic events, there have been a raft of articles about new reasons for gun-control and the psychological make-up of mass murderers (See NYT or WSJ), but the authors of this piece (co-authored with neuroscientist James Olds) believe there’s a critical component missing from this discussion: the very addictive nature of firearms.
There are a number of different ways to think about this issue, but a decent place to start is Steven Pinker. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker makes the data-driven argument that violence has been decreasing steadily since the Middle Ages and, across the boards, is now at its lowest point in history. But this isn’t the case with gun violence.
Consider this report (about Oakland, CA) from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle:
Data compiled by the Urban Strategies Council—which works with, and collects data for, agencies like the OPD—shows the overall number of reported shootings rising in recent years, from 869 in 2009 to more than 1,200 in 2011, the highest since 2003, the earliest year for which they have data. Homicides—which are by and large committed by people with guns—have followed a similar trend. As of early December, 2012, the city had already seen 117 homicides, soaring past 103 for last year and perhaps reaching the highest total since 2008 police say, when 124 people died.
So the question becomes why is violence overall declining, yet gun violence still on the rise? The answer, we suspect, might be dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, one of the brain’s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel its presence as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It’s released whenever we take a risk, or encounter something novel. It reinforces exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition, in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure and muscle firing timing, in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well.
But its most famous attribute is as a motivator. It is released when we have the expectation of reward. Once dopamine becomes hardwired into a psychological reward loop, the desire to get more dopamine becomes the brain’s overarching preoccupation. Cocaine, for example, is widely considered the most addictive drug on earth. It does little more than flood the brain with dopamine and block its reuptake (sort of like SSRI’s block the reuptake of serotonin).
But it’s not just drug addiction. Gambling addiction, shopping addiction, sex addiction, porn addiction, coffee addiction, cigarette addiction, twitter and texting too. The list is long. And possibly growing, as now it’s time to talk about dopamine and our current gun addiction.
So what do we really know? Dopamine shows up when we take a risk—and firing a gun is always a risk. It shows up when we encounter something novel and since guns blow things up, well that usually pretty novel. If you’re serious about your guns and use them for target practice or hunting, well that requires pattern recognition and this increases dopamine as well.
Are there direct correlations? Has anyone yet done a PET or MRS scan (the only ways to screen for dopamine in the brain) of people just leaving a firing range? Not that we can tell (though we’ll outline this and a few possible areas of research in a moment). We do know, from copious amounts of video game research, that first person shooter games release dopamine, and this has been linked to everything from learning and rewards to ideas about violence and harm to winning and motivation.
What does all of this really mean? It means that the reason gun violence continues to rise (and the reason gun control legislation remains so hard to pass) is because we are quite literally addicted to our guns.
Two things make this even more alarming. First, because the human brain evolved in an era of immediacy—when threats and rewards were of the lions, tigers and food variety—the dopamine circuitry has an inborn timing mechanism. If the reward follows the stimulus by roughly 100-200 milliseconds, it’s sitting in dopamine’s sweet spot. Firing a muzzle loader—for example—would certainly release dopamine, but it takes too long between multiple firings for a significant reward loop to be created. Firing an automatic weapon, though, sits close to the sweet spot—an assault weapon can fire a round every 100 milliseconds. Meaning not only are guns addictive, but automatic weaponry is far more addictive than most.
Unfortunately, there’s a more frightening downside to consider. As Nora Volkow and her colleagues at the National Institute of Drug Abuse have well documented, the first true taste of a dopamine rush is always the best. After that, there are always diminishing returns. What this means in drug addicts is that the first time someone inhales cocaine feel so outrageously good compared to all the following times and, as a result, a junky will keep escalating their use patterns to try to get back to that original high. The same goes for guns. This suggests that for addicts, the desire to do more damage, cause more harm, and generally unleash holy terror will only increase over time.
Obviously, considering the scope of these ideas, a bit more research needs to be done. Besides the aforementioned PET/MRS scan, there are an even simpler tests. L-Dopa, the Parkinson’s drug, increases the level of dopamine in the brain. You could give subjects L-Dopa (compared to people given, say, naloxone, which blocks the opioid reward system) and have them fire guns at a range. After a set period of time, you can then see how much money they’d be willing to spend for another 30 minutes on the range (compared to controls). Our guess, the folks with more L-Dopa are gonna spend far more money.
The larger point is that if we’re really going to have a high-minded discussion more honest discussion about the role we want guns to play in the future of America, then acknowledging (and further researching) the addictive nature of bang seems a critical place to start.
For similar content, subscribe to Steven’s email newsletter here.
*This article co-authored with Dr. James Olds, Director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University.
Addicted To Bang: The Neuroscience of the Gun - Forbes
“If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you get a population roughly the size of the United States, where, last year, there were 32,000 gun death. Those other countries, which all have a form of gun control, had a total of 112.
—paraphrase, Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing, 2001
In the wake of recent tragic events, there have been a raft of articles about new reasons for gun-control and the psychological make-up of mass murderers (See NYT or WSJ), but the authors of this piece (co-authored with neuroscientist James Olds) believe there’s a critical component missing from this discussion: the very addictive nature of firearms.
There are a number of different ways to think about this issue, but a decent place to start is Steven Pinker. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker makes the data-driven argument that violence has been decreasing steadily since the Middle Ages and, across the boards, is now at its lowest point in history. But this isn’t the case with gun violence.
Consider this report (about Oakland, CA) from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle:
Data compiled by the Urban Strategies Council—which works with, and collects data for, agencies like the OPD—shows the overall number of reported shootings rising in recent years, from 869 in 2009 to more than 1,200 in 2011, the highest since 2003, the earliest year for which they have data. Homicides—which are by and large committed by people with guns—have followed a similar trend. As of early December, 2012, the city had already seen 117 homicides, soaring past 103 for last year and perhaps reaching the highest total since 2008 police say, when 124 people died.
So the question becomes why is violence overall declining, yet gun violence still on the rise? The answer, we suspect, might be dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, one of the brain’s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel its presence as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It’s released whenever we take a risk, or encounter something novel. It reinforces exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition, in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure and muscle firing timing, in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well.
But its most famous attribute is as a motivator. It is released when we have the expectation of reward. Once dopamine becomes hardwired into a psychological reward loop, the desire to get more dopamine becomes the brain’s overarching preoccupation. Cocaine, for example, is widely considered the most addictive drug on earth. It does little more than flood the brain with dopamine and block its reuptake (sort of like SSRI’s block the reuptake of serotonin).
But it’s not just drug addiction. Gambling addiction, shopping addiction, sex addiction, porn addiction, coffee addiction, cigarette addiction, twitter and texting too. The list is long. And possibly growing, as now it’s time to talk about dopamine and our current gun addiction.
So what do we really know? Dopamine shows up when we take a risk—and firing a gun is always a risk. It shows up when we encounter something novel and since guns blow things up, well that usually pretty novel. If you’re serious about your guns and use them for target practice or hunting, well that requires pattern recognition and this increases dopamine as well.
Are there direct correlations? Has anyone yet done a PET or MRS scan (the only ways to screen for dopamine in the brain) of people just leaving a firing range? Not that we can tell (though we’ll outline this and a few possible areas of research in a moment). We do know, from copious amounts of video game research, that first person shooter games release dopamine, and this has been linked to everything from learning and rewards to ideas about violence and harm to winning and motivation.
What does all of this really mean? It means that the reason gun violence continues to rise (and the reason gun control legislation remains so hard to pass) is because we are quite literally addicted to our guns.
Two things make this even more alarming. First, because the human brain evolved in an era of immediacy—when threats and rewards were of the lions, tigers and food variety—the dopamine circuitry has an inborn timing mechanism. If the reward follows the stimulus by roughly 100-200 milliseconds, it’s sitting in dopamine’s sweet spot. Firing a muzzle loader—for example—would certainly release dopamine, but it takes too long between multiple firings for a significant reward loop to be created. Firing an automatic weapon, though, sits close to the sweet spot—an assault weapon can fire a round every 100 milliseconds. Meaning not only are guns addictive, but automatic weaponry is far more addictive than most.
Unfortunately, there’s a more frightening downside to consider. As Nora Volkow and her colleagues at the National Institute of Drug Abuse have well documented, the first true taste of a dopamine rush is always the best. After that, there are always diminishing returns. What this means in drug addicts is that the first time someone inhales cocaine feel so outrageously good compared to all the following times and, as a result, a junky will keep escalating their use patterns to try to get back to that original high. The same goes for guns. This suggests that for addicts, the desire to do more damage, cause more harm, and generally unleash holy terror will only increase over time.
Obviously, considering the scope of these ideas, a bit more research needs to be done. Besides the aforementioned PET/MRS scan, there are an even simpler tests. L-Dopa, the Parkinson’s drug, increases the level of dopamine in the brain. You could give subjects L-Dopa (compared to people given, say, naloxone, which blocks the opioid reward system) and have them fire guns at a range. After a set period of time, you can then see how much money they’d be willing to spend for another 30 minutes on the range (compared to controls). Our guess, the folks with more L-Dopa are gonna spend far more money.
The larger point is that if we’re really going to have a high-minded discussion more honest discussion about the role we want guns to play in the future of America, then acknowledging (and further researching) the addictive nature of bang seems a critical place to start.
For similar content, subscribe to Steven’s email newsletter here.
*This article co-authored with Dr. James Olds, Director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University.
Addicted To Bang: The Neuroscience of the Gun - Forbes
OMG what stupidity!!
Yes, we're all drug addicts.
We're addicted to liberty.
As for the idiotic claim that shooting are rising in the USA, I present to you the murder rate over the past 40 years:
1975 9.6 1976 8.8 1977 8.8 1978 9.0 1979 9.7 1980 10.2 1981 9.8 1982 9.1 1983 8.3 1984 7.9 1985 7.9 1986 8.6 1987 8.3 1988 8.4 1989 8.7 1990 9.4 1991 9.8 1992 9.3 1993 9.5 1994 9.0 1995 8.2 1996 7.4 1997 6.8 1998 6.3 1999 5.7 2000 5.5 2001 5.6 2002 5.6 2003 5.7 2004 5.5 2005 5.9 2006 6.1 2007 5.9 2008 5.4 2009 5.0 2010 4.8 2011 4.7 2012 4.7
Read more: Homicide Rate (per 100,000), 1950–2012 Homicide Rate (per 100,000), 1950–2012
For 2013, the rate continued top drop, to 4.5 per 100,000.
Murder Rates Nationally and By State | Death Penalty Information Center.
Meanwhile, all US states have some form of concealed carry legislation, strict gun control laws have been thrown out by the Supreme Court, the AR 15 "assault rifle" is the best selling rifle in the USA, and gun sales continue to set new records.
The question is a con, gun violence is not on the rise.
May I suggest that you simply refrain from referencing propaganda from anti-liberty lying scum, as it is BULLSHYTE.
BTW, I notice you didn't bother to address my answer to your question on what was wrong with the original OP.
Ladders are almost prohibited in large construction sites now. Can't work off a ladder anymore without fall arrest.
Hey, mentalfloss. I'd love to hear your plan for getting rid of the 300,000,000 guns in the United States. And keeping more from coming in. Seeing as how we're so good at controlling what comes over our borders.
Are there direct correlations? Has anyone yet done a PET or MRS scan (the only ways to screen for dopamine in the brain) of people just leaving a firing range? Not that we can tell (though we’ll outline this and a few possible areas of research in a moment). We do know, from copious amounts of video game research, that first person shooter games release dopamine, and this has been linked to everything from learning and rewards to ideas about violence and harm to winning and motivation.
Well, that proves it. It's science. For values of science = arguing by analogy and using big words, without, y'know, any actual experimentation or anything.
Well, that proves it. It's science. For values of science = arguing by analogy and using big words, without, y'know, any actual experimentation or anything.
Let's look at all the countries with gun control that have much lower death rates from firearms.
That should be a good starting point.
That should be a good starting point.
do you really presume to simply equate "gun violence"... "number of shootings", to... murder/homicide rates? Even if you purposely cherry-pick those rates in isolation of all other gun violence related injury/crime, medical advances (if nothing else) speak to an influence on those death rates....... In Medical Triumph, Homicides Fall Despite Soaring Gun Violence
The number of U.S. homicides has been falling for two decades, but America has become no less violent.
Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.
"Did everybody become a lousy shot all of a sudden? No," said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, a union that represents about 330,000 officers. "The potential for a victim to survive a wound is greater than it was 15 years ago."
In other words, more people in the U.S. are getting shot, but doctors have gotten better at patching them up. Improved medical care doesn't account for the entire decline in homicides but experts say it is a major factor.
Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers—which specialize in treating severe injuries—the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn't save even 10 years ago," said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.
"Did everybody become a lousy shot all of a sudden? No," said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, a union that represents about 330,000 officers. "The potential for a victim to survive a wound is greater than it was 15 years ago."
In other words, more people in the U.S. are getting shot, but doctors have gotten better at patching them up. Improved medical care doesn't account for the entire decline in homicides but experts say it is a major factor.
Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers—which specialize in treating severe injuries—the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn't save even 10 years ago," said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Women are the reason for gun ownership rising. Guns are sexy
Cordite by Fabergé coming to a perfume counter near you.
Cordite by Fabergé coming to a perfume counter near you.
Gun violence surges across city compared to last year
Gun violence across the city has surged for the past three straight weeks compared with the same period last year, NYPD statistics show.
Shootings were up by 53 percent, with 26 recorded incidents last week, between Jan. 19 to Jan. 25.
There were just 17 such incidents during the same period last year.
On a larger scale, the number of shootings rose 24 percent this year over last, from 63 to 78.
Murders skyrocketed 100 percent last week, which saw 14 people killed, compared with seven during the same period last year.
Last week’s upswing includes Saturday’s Queens massacre, in which a man shot and killed his baby mama, daughter and mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself — as well as Sunday’s shooting at a Home Depot in Chelsea that left a disgruntled employee and his supervisor dead.
Gun violence surges across city compared to last year | New York Post
Gun violence across the city has surged for the past three straight weeks compared with the same period last year, NYPD statistics show.
Shootings were up by 53 percent, with 26 recorded incidents last week, between Jan. 19 to Jan. 25.
There were just 17 such incidents during the same period last year.
On a larger scale, the number of shootings rose 24 percent this year over last, from 63 to 78.
Murders skyrocketed 100 percent last week, which saw 14 people killed, compared with seven during the same period last year.
Last week’s upswing includes Saturday’s Queens massacre, in which a man shot and killed his baby mama, daughter and mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself — as well as Sunday’s shooting at a Home Depot in Chelsea that left a disgruntled employee and his supervisor dead.
Gun violence surges across city compared to last year | New York Post
And gun violence is at about half of early 1990s levels.
How's the cherry crop looking?
No more stop and frisk, thanks to the Sandinista in Gracie Mansion, equals more shootings.
Last edited:
Define liberal stupidity............and.........citation request. Go back to your classroom and polish the apple.
why so hostile chum? It was a simple request to define a term and provide substantiation to a stated claim. Is that a problem for you?
no problem; your unsubstantiated claim remains firm, strong, intact! Geejaz... asking you lads to actually support your statements/claims brings forward nothing but insults - go figure!
