Our server costs ~$56 per month to run. Please consider donating or becoming a Patron to help keep the site running. Help us gain new members by following us on Twitter and liking our page on Facebook!
Huh. Looks banning guns didn't do shit for England's violent crime situation... But then, I've always known that, and everyone on this forum conveniently forgets that when another school gets shot up.
I'm very tired of repeating myself, but hey, once more with spirit, huh?
Guns. Are. Not. The. Cause. Of. The. Problems.
It is a pipe dream to think you can get rid of all guns in the US. It is a pipe dream to think you could somehow repossess or otherwise get rid of even a fraction of the firearms in circulation in the US today. It is a pipe dream to think that banning guns outright would ever stop anyone from getting a hold of one for the purpose of murder. It is a pipe dream to believe that the gun lobbyists will ever lose their influence. It is a pipe dream to think that we can stop school shootings completely or even mostly by banning guns or putting more controls on them.
Why is it when this happens the first words out of anybody's mouth on this forum "LOOKS LIKE WE DON'T HAVE A GUN PROBLEM LOL SARCASM"? Really? That's the focus.
Sooo...we don't want to discuss why this happened at its root. We wanna look at the weed, and think about how to cut it, instead of plucking the weed, studying it, and determining a way to kill the rest of its species with science, reason, and logic? We want to harp on about guns AGAIN instead of asking the very important question of "why and how the fuck are our students being driven to homicidal tendencies against their classmates?" and finding an answer so that we can kill the weed at its root?
Put some of the lobbying for more and more gun control into lobbying for active, mandatory psychological evaluations and therapy sessions for social misfits in schools. You know, something that'll work and maybe even help address the growing pandemic of mental and emotional health issues plaguing this schizophrenic society of ours? Maybe catch the warning signs and address them directly, instead of focusing our energy on this pithy, ineffective, counterproductive, stupidly divisive, and frankly obnoxious gun control "debate" that we and the nation at large keep supposedly having. All those pipe dreams suddenly are no longer idle fantasies if you kill the problem at its root. All the guns in the world aren't going to be very dangerous if everyone who possesses one lacks the inclination to use it to instigate violence against another human being.
Someone mentioned that USians [I like that title by the way] seem to love killing each other. Given how the baby boomers were largely raised by veterans of war who had seen absolute hell and all suffered from never-treated PTSD, it's not surprising that a bunch of behaviors that tend to translate into a casual, flippant demeanor towards violence were imparted onto that generation, which passed on to the next, and to the next, and then the next through behavioral familiarity being imparted. Like father like son. England doesn't seem to be much better, and in fact they seem to be even worse than we are when it comes to the whole "I wanna kill another human being today" thing.
There's probably many, many, many other factors and causes, but sitting here with our thumbs up our asses going "Durrr guns are bad" and "hurrr I like my shotty" sure isn't doing a fucking thing to improve the situation, and we are simply a microcosm of the nation at large.
School shooting happens, and everyone starts bitching about guns. Nobody bitches about the environment kids are growing up in where murderous tendencies are sparked and allowed to ignite into an inferno that burns everyone it touches. Nobody. I seriously feel like I'm the only fucking person on this forum who ever wants to point that out.
Get the fuck off the gun debate. Everyone. I don't wanna fucking hear it anymore. Every time I do, I start grinding my teeth because I know everyone's about to start getting super defensive or super soap-box-y, nobody's gonna change their minds, everyone's just gonna run around in circles, accomplishing nothing of any intellectual merit or discourse. Let's talk about this shit like intellectuals and look at the real causes of the problem and not like a bunch of political stereotypes whining about their respective stance on firearms. Let's address the disease and not the fucking symptoms.
Fuck's sake, people. Seriously.
This might sound weird coming from an atheist, but amen, brother.
It's as if we're lemmings, all following each other and there's a fire in our path, but everyone just keeps bitching about abolishing fire rather than talking about taking a different route. Until systematic changes that address the psychological issues at hand are implemented in our culture as a whole, banning guns will do fuck all.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
