MOAR GUNS!!! LESS GUNS!!! GUNS KILL!!! PEOPLE KILL!!! sorry... I just thought I'd get the yelling done with so we can look for an actual solution...
It was posted in sadness and frustration. I agree that it's serious. I wasn't trying to make light of the issue - but indeed to draw attention to how silly so much of the rhetoric around the issue is. The arguments (I'd prefer discussions) around the issue do matter a great deal. The senseless shouting doesn't. I'll agree that my original comment could have (and perhaps should have) been more thoughtful. I'll stand by my apology for offense, as none was intended. I hope that we as a culture, country, and people can move past the shouting and get to the discussion.It's a serious issue and I think that making light of it in the way you did is inappropriate.
You are making Steve responsible for your own emotional reaction, which isn't cool. You're effectively arguing that satire, frustration or sarcasm are inappropriate responses to the discussion of tragedy or politically-charged events, which is a great way to ensure that nobody engages you in discussion. Your entire response is couched in "I think that" and "I feel like" without acknowledging that your interpretation of Steve's response is one of many possible justifications. In other words, it's clear that this is a fight you want to have and Steve is just the unfortunate bystander whose time has come up.
this is the part where i eat shit for a couple responses then i apologize, so i'm just going to skip right to the end and delete both comments steve: sorry about the antagonism. there's no point in it.
we're tripping over ourselves to apologize. No sweat Q. It's a tough and nuanced issue. It's still fresh and I think that we're all pretty sensitive right now. I could/should have been more sensitive (or at least more thoughtful) in my original post. PEACE. I mean it.
I am too. Lots of people aren't apparently. Even if those ends require means that you don't like?I'm tired of the news cycle and the people who start shouting after these events.
I'd like to try to find solutions instead of yelling from some position of supposed righteousness.
the more I think about it - I think that issue I'm wrestling with is gun violence in general. Either of the two examples you listed... or the other examples from the article. Do we melt all the guns? maybe. Do we arm a bunch of other people? probably not. Is there some solution that can bring about solid change? Hopefully.
The more I study the problem, the more I'm convinced it's a symptom of "The American Dream." Ours is a country where children grow up being told they can be anything they want, then hot-dropping into an economy where an English degree is required to make coffee. They're told it's the land of opportunity but 1% of the population controls 99% of the wealth and always has, always will. It's a country where a boy's life can be ruined forever for receiving a naked text of his age-appropriate girlfriend, where white males are demonstrably on top of the food chain but young, middle-American lower-middle-class white males are bereft of the promises and opportunities that they've had for generations. Can't get a job, can't get a date, can't get a break, but fuckin' A AR-15s are cheap. Throw minority membership into the mix. Young black men? More likely to go to prison than to college. Muslim? Can't even bring a clock to school without the Sheriff staring you down for an hour. Yet ours is a society that respects money and fame above all else. Don't got money? Don't got fame? At least you can get even. Inequality breeds violence and the disconnect between what young men are promised and what young men receive has been growing for 40 years. This drives almost none of them into homicidal rage... but for that tiny asymptotic percentage, we've got discussions such as these. There has never been a socially-fulfilled, economically-stable mass shooter. The people who pick up guns and shoot at strangers are the ones with nothing to lose.
Nope. People who are committed to causing violence will do so. Getting rid of guns will produce a quantitative but not qualitative change in interpersonal violence. How much scarier would a series of well placed mustard gas bombs be than a kid with a handgun, or even an AR-15? Imagine entire schools filled with blinded, dead and dying kids rather than a few dozen at most. We can't agree in this country on the proper role of police, so I won't touch that one.Do we melt all the guns? maybe.
Do we arm a bunch of other people? probably not.
I'm totally down with quantitative change, thanks. Your argument presupposes that there's no spectrum of violence and no gradient of difficulty. Gas attacks are extremely rare, despite the methodology for committing one being easily-learned and the materials necessary being simple to acquire. Fertilizer bombs aren't difficult to make yet the Columbine killers failed. Any kid that has ever leafed through The Anarchist Cookbook has fantasized about mass destruction via innovative materials but none- zero, zilch, nada - have succeeded. On the other hand, any chucklehead with a pulse can pick up a gun somewhere in these United States and ammo is the simplest thing to procure. Somehow, this always becomes a "yes guns/no guns" discussion without recognizing that neither the problem nor the solution is likely to be binary.
Many a successful campaign against mailboxes has been and will be waged. Also tin cans and junk cars. We made thermite in one of my middle school science classes, though I'm betting the whole common core thing has stopped that. Many DIY explosives get made, they just got deployed for mischief rather than murder.Any kid that has ever leafed through The Anarchist Cookbook has fantasized about mass destruction via innovative materials but none- zero, zilch, nada - have succeeded
I agree that people who are committed to causing violence will still do so, but then the question is - why do we not see levels of this recurring violence in other comparable developed countries? Many countries have strict gun laws and, I suspect, do not succumb to mustard gas bombs on a regular basis. Maybe you can argue that the US has a unique problem with citizens and violence but I'm not sure. If we can prevent people from killing people easily, perhaps we should. Or maybe you are right and they will turn to bomb-making and etc. If that is the case (and I dunno how convincing that argument is), what fundamental changes can we make to our education or healthcare systems that could prevent such outcomes?
Evidence suggests limiting gun availability helps - from the article: As for the bomb example, bombs are difficult to make and often require testing, which means these people usually break the law before the attacks and police have a chance to find them. Columbine, for example, was primarily supposed to be a bombing, but most of the homemade bombs failed. It seems people who wanted to cause damage on that scale would use bombs regardless of gun laws, all evidence points to restricting gun access as helping.More than 60 percent of the attackers were not prohibited from possessing guns because of prior felonies or other reasons. But the organization still found there was less likelihood of mass killings in states that require background checks for all handgun sales than in states that do not — and even less chance of shootings by people who were prohibited by law from possessing firearms.
It's harder to make a bomb than pull a trigger, but it isn't hard to make a bomb. Bombs and other methods of mass attack aren't used because they aren't as viscerally satisfying as gunplay is. How many first person shooters are there? How many "unibomber simulators?" The use of explosives in killing is largely perpetrated by assassins that wish their actions to be ambiguous, while the use of guns in killing is largely perpetrated by amateurs that wish their actions to be legendary. It's not like Harris and Kleibold planted a bunch of bombs and waited; they planted a bunch of bombs and waded in with trenchcoats full of assault weapons. The bombs were icing on the cake, really, an impetus to launch screaming victims into their line of fire. James Holmes could easily have walked into the theater with pressure cooker full of nails and fertilizer and then walked out again but he didn't - he waded in with a shit-ton of guns and started shooting. Bombs? That's the Tsarniev brothers and they wanted to get away with it. They didn't intend to martyr themselves. Our fascination with guns and shooting is related to personal experience and personal powerlessness. A bomber doesn't have his ego on the line. A mass shooter does. Somewhere in there lies the solution.
If bombs are too impersonal, that seems to support my point, that guns are not correlated to bombs. If we restrict one, I don't believe we will just have equal amounts using the other. They are different tools and appeal to very different people. This is an untruth perpetuated by the media after Columbine, largely because it took time to discover all the bombs and for the public to have access to the boys diaries. They planned it as a bombing, they wanted to beat the record of the Oklahoma City bomber. The guns were the icing, not the bombs. My source on this is David Cullen, who wrote an in depth history called "Columbine" after 10 years of research.The bombs were icing on the cake, really
Your broader point on correlation, yes. I read Columbine. Yes, they had grandiose ideas. They also had a shitload of guns. Tim McVeigh had none. Kleibold and Harris, like every school crazy before and like every school crazy after, wanted to go down in a blaze of glory with their fingers on the trigger. They singled people out. They were very much down with individual killing. Tim McVeigh blew up a building full of people because of what it represented and because that's what he was supposed to do. Tim McVeigh tested his explosives. Klebold & Harris?
They tested them remember? That was the whole issue, they'd been caught with pipe bombs before Columbine but the cops lost the paperwork and never followed up. I'm not even anti-gun, and some of this gun control stuff that comes up is incredibly insulting to anyone with mental health issues. I'm not pretending I have a solution for this kind of violence in my back pocket (ban guns! arm everyone with rocket launchers! ). Besides we are getting to a point where the determined will just 3D print them. Books like Columbine help though, going back and taking a fact-based look at how these things happen, then trying to use that real data to make changes.
They didn't really, though. Every chucklefuck with chemistry curiosity has built pipe bombs. Ain't no thang. Problem is, the way you build pipe bombs precludes going bigger than pipe bombs. Bomb squads hate pipe bombs because you can get grains of smokeless in the threads and opening them up makes them go bang. You're never going to commit mass murder with a pipe bomb. It's basically a grenade that sucks. The leap from a pipe bomb to their propane adventure was fantastical. They may have flirted with explosives and mass destruction, but they were about the guns. Which is something I didn't like about Columbine - there's an agenda to these things. See, I was those kids. The Trenchcoat Mafia was my posse. Different school, but only a couple hundred miles away. We listened to the same bands. We shot the same guns. We wanted the same mass-destruction to befall our fellow students. Difference was, I didn't want to give the bastards the satisfaction of writing my story. I could have walked into my social studies class and fired a clip of 5.56 into the ceiling. Woulda been impressive. Woulda ended my academic career, though, and I cared. Was I going to kill a bunch of people? No. But I know I could have. And it kept me warm inside. So you read a book. But you don't know. You've never done the calcs on what it would take to knock over a mason block wall. You don't know what 5 20-round clips in a bag feels like. You don't know what 30 quick rounds of chinese steelcore feels like under your index finger. You've never blown the harmonic balancer off a small block chevy with an assault rifle; "spall" is a triple word score to you, not a bullet going sideways through meat. You think that guns can be 3d printed, without understanding that a nail, a rubber band and a piece of brass tubing from the hobby store is more than enough while the cheez whiz available for 3d printing is really only useful for the grips and other shit that doesn't matter. People that kill people with guns want their victims to know. They want to feel the effortless volley under their fingers, like Counterstrike but louder and with more recoil. They want to see blood and surprise and know that in that moment, they are godlike, life and death over the mere mortals assembled around them like so many Non Player Characters. The "whole issue" with school shooters is they're willing to trade their futures for a few minutes of godhood. The reason they're willing to do that is they feel powerless and trapped and if they lose enough perspective, it's fuckin' over. If you can't relate to your fellow human being, and if you hold your fellow human being responsible for your lack of opportunity, you, a gun and a persistent slip of perspective can add up to tragedy. There but for the grace of god go I. I know you appreciate that book, but appreciate that you may not have gained a conclusive understanding of the issues simply by reading it.