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Liquid Communism posted:War on drugs and systematic racism for 500, Alex. How does the war on drugs and systemic racism lead to something like the Isla Vista shootings?
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Dec 5, 2015 21:18
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Liquid Communism posted:I dunno, how would the experience of being a Muslim in modern America radicalize someone into terrorism? :v Elliot Rodgers wasn't a Muslim though 
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Dec 5, 2015 23:10
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thrakkorzog posted:According to Mother Jones, once you exclude the noise of gang bangers doing a drive by, and look for crazy assholes shooting up the place there has been a grand total of 4 mass shootings in the U.S in the past year. I don't really get this argument. Why would we exclude that? Do gangbangers killing each other not count, and we don't think it's a bad thing that society should work to alleviate?
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Dec 8, 2015 02:37
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:The causes of spree killings are not well understood; the sample sizes are tiny, they're spread pretty evenly across the country, and there's no detectable trends between killers that they don't equally share with huge numbers of non-killers, so this is one problem where 'keep all men with less than three good friends away from anything potentially dangerous' is about as viable a solution as any. Why don't you care to alleviate it? Why are goons changing the subject in this very thread and saying, "well, those dont really count"? Because the real source of the majority of gun violence in the US is gang violence. Gun control can help, but we also need to fix our wealth inequality -- and that message is being ignored over the flashiness of guns. Intelligent people need to commandeer the narrative and refocus on what actually matters, but what I see in this thread is the tacit acceptance of the status quo's myopic focus on arguing solely about gun control.
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Dec 8, 2015 15:48
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Buried alive posted:He didn't claim he didn't care to alleviate it, he claimed "society" didn't care to alleviate it. Ask for clarification on that. But cases like Elliot Rodger are vanishingly rare compared to the whole of gun violence, which is primarily economically driven. If the argument is about "how to stop gun violence", "reducing wealth inequality" seems like a reasonable mitigation with many other positive benefits. Plus it avoids annoying and intractable second amendment debates. It would get us 90% of the way there. We can think about the remainder down the line.
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Dec 10, 2015 16:38
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. Yes, I'm generalizing for comedic value. Deal with it.
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it is posted:This is a good point, I'll reduce wealth inequality over lunch and see how that goes. It seems easier and more socially beneficial than getting guns off the streets and passing/enforcing more gun control laws, so please do. It's like you have no historical perspective of the widening wealth gap and the actually effective things politicians have been able to do in the past that have unfortunately fallen by the wayside, thanks in no small part to people like you.
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Dec 11, 2015 15:49
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Buried alive posted:I agree, but the OP asked about mass shootings, not gun violence in general, so that's what I was responding to. Mass shootings, to me, have a theme of something like "an individual who is not part of an (illegitimate?) group which already pursues violent actions comes to believe that killing a bunch of <target group> is the answer to the world's (or at least his) problems, and then does so in a short time frame with one or more firearms." That belief part might narrow it down a bit too much, but I think that's a fair stab at a definition that includes most of what is generally thought of as a mass shooting while excluding most of what is generally not thought of as a mass shooting. Now maybe it's wrong that some things aren't thought of as mass shootings, like gang drive-by's and such, but if there's disagreement there then that needs to be settled before we can talk about mass shootings at all. Maybe we should have a taxonomy of mass shootings, lone-wolf types vs. those motivated by groups and such. Indiscriminate mass shootings are pretty rare. Statistically there are many other things you should be worried about first -- the current hysteria is more a product of the media than any legitimate danger. I would also like to point out that many of the indiscriminate mass shooters are socially isolated people without much opportunity. They generally feel ostracized from society, and an anger and elitism towards it. A system that has a focus on involving people, getting them to participate in society, and not letting them fall through the cracks could help those situations as well. BF Skinner was right that humans can be pretty effectively conditioned. We can see it in the social differences of countries with more indiscriminate mass killings versus those without.
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Dec 11, 2015 15:58
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it is posted:I was making fun of you for treating "reduce wealth inequality" like an easy problem with a one-step solution. Almost like believing "reduce the number of guns on the street" is an easy/possible thing to do. It's politically impossible. Reducing wealth inequality can at least be spun as protective nationalism and grab some republicans, because there's no ideological consistency to them. I've been suggesting this idea lately and have had plenty of right wingers say it sounds like a great idea because it doesn't touch their guns. That's step one to convincing them to support full socialism without telling them it's what they're supporting.
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Dec 12, 2015 15:19
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waitwhatno posted:Social alienation had nothing to do with Holmes killing spree How sure are you of that? quote:He said, and I am going to read this, because I have a quote, 'I don't have relationships with people. They have relationships with me.' It seems like society failed him here, anyways. The story of James Holmes supports my case: he was telling therapists he wanted to kill people and was obsessed with the idea, yet no one helped him overcome those feelings, notified the police, or at least got his name on a list of people that shouldn't own guns. Edit: looking into the extant gun control laws as they relate to mental illness I do see a couple issues: the majority of states either require a court order (which wouldn't be completely unreasonable if there was also an adequate structure for reporting and investigating people that mental health professionals could access) or they require the person to have been committed to a mental health institution. I don't think that's a terribly hard sale to republicans, most of the pro-gun people agree that access by the homicidally unwell should be restricted. ashgromnies fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 15:24
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