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Mulva posted:Not really, because I had to read this post like five times just to be sure I wasn't missing something, because even if I were parodying my interlocutor I still wouldn't write something this mind-bendingly dumb and bad faith.
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Jul 21, 2022 00:31
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Mulva posted:Again, don't own guns. Never would. Would make me and those around me wildly unsafe. LOL my mistake for thinking you were actually engaging in a discussion, won't make that error again. Enjoy!
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Jul 21, 2022 00:37
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There ever been a time when people were better off only a gun than not owning a gun
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Jul 21, 2022 00:41
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Harold Fjord posted:There ever been a time when people were better off only a gun than not owning a gun No idea! The fullness of history is full of infinite possibility. In the present US, though, it's a pretty lousy idea. Unless you're planning insurrection in the short term, I suppose, but in that event it's probably best to not post about it. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jul 21, 2022 00:56
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Okay last warning to drop this without anymore parting shots. I'm phone posting and if someone makes me walk upstairs to the 95 degree computer room to push buttons I'm going to make sure it's worth my while.
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Jul 21, 2022 01:13
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  Mod warning: twitter link is a graphic picture of a dead body, view at your on riskhttps://twitter.com/Iraqveteran8888/status/1549872282495066114 So can I take it that the current conversation about guns in America and the complete absurdity of everything is going to die off again because the pro gun side will point to this and pretend that Good Guys With A Gun™ will be available at every corner to stop the mass shooters so that they only kill an acceptable minimum of two or three people at a time? (also, check out the immediate resorting to the idea that mass shootings are intentionally manufactured as part of a wider conspiracy in the responses to this tweet) Somebody fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jul 21, 2022 18:42
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khwarezm posted:So can I take it that the current conversation about guns in America and the complete absurdity of everything is going to die off again because the pro gun side will point to this and pretend that Good Guys With A Gun™ will be available at every corner to stop the mass shooters so that they only kill an acceptable minimum of two or three people at a time? i dunno, the narrative about the rare good guy with a gun stopping a mass shooting is getting way less traction than the outrage over the uvalde cops, a hundred trained armed professionals who took well over an hour to stop a single shooter Mr. Fall Down Terror fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Jul 21, 2022 |
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Jul 21, 2022 18:58
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:i dunno, the narrative about the rare good guy with a gun stopping a mass shooting is getting way less traction than the outrage over the uvalde cops, a hundred trained armed professionals who took well over an hour to stop a single shooter Sure, but the fact that a hundred cops did literally gently caress all even when a bunch of kids were being shot up is going to make a lot of people think that they need a gun, given that calling the cops is apparently pointless.
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Jul 21, 2022 19:15
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JFC, please do not post that poo poo without some sort of warning, and don't embed it inline.
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Jul 21, 2022 19:32
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apologies, i'm on desktop and didn't notice the corpse
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Jul 21, 2022 19:35
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:i dunno, the narrative about the rare good guy with a gun stopping a mass shooting is getting way less traction than the outrage over the uvalde cops, a hundred trained armed professionals who took well over an hour to stop a single shooter Closer to 400 actually. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/17/law-enforcement-failure-uvalde-shooting-investigation/ quote:The report also reveals for the first time that the overwhelming majority of responders were federal and state law enforcement: 149 were U.S. Border Patrol, and 91 were state police — whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks in public places.” There were 25 Uvalde police officers and 16 sheriff’s deputies. Arredondo’s school police force accounted for five of the officers on the scene. The rest of the force was made up of neighboring county law enforcement, U.S. marshals and federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers. Remember too they stopped the one cop willing to go in because his wife was a teacher dying on the floor.
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Jul 22, 2022 07:54
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I've been considering that question about how we address and change gun culture, that we can eventually enact useful gun control.We have statistics, but people know that statistics can be used to lie and regularly are. The meaning of statistics is regularly misunderstood and at times deliberately used to deceive. This is a big part of why simply waving statistics is not effective. I still that reaching people (even in terms of collective approaches, this isn't about one rear end in a top hat changing the world through fancy talk) requires understanding where they are, even if you think that they are wrong. For example, the framing of "attachment to heroic fantasies" is quite simply incorrect. People buying guns for protection probably aren't all imagining themselves as heroes. Sure it probably looks that way that way when you are standing on the other side (insert cartoon about Plato's the cave) but it's not an attachment to the idea of being a hero driving gun culture. It's fear. Where is that fear coming from? Capitalist infotainment media driving up coverage of scary events for clicks and views even as the world is getting safer is a good place to start. The fact that the world itself is genuinely being destroyed by humans and we are doing nothing to address it is another. While violent crime is down overall relative to the past, there are risks of increases as material conditions degrade. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jul 22, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 16:20
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Harold Fjord posted:For example, the framing of "attachment to heroic fantasies" is quite simply incorrect. People buying guns for protection probably aren't all imagining themselves as heroes. Sure it probably looks that way that way when you are standing on the other side (insert cartoon about Plato's the cave) but it's not an attachment to the idea of being a hero driving gun culture. It's fear. Heroism, in this case, is heroically defeating the thing causing you the fear. It is the fantasy of being the Good Guy With The Gun, and this fantasy dispels the fear of instead being a victim. The fear is why people attach to that fantasy, sure. But it is still a fantasy, at the end of the day.
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Jul 22, 2022 16:56
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You have to address the fear if you want results.
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Jul 22, 2022 16:59
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Harold Fjord posted:You have to address the fear if you want results. In what way? Your listed causes of fear are so nonspecific that they seem to imply that you can't do anything about guns until you solve racism, climate change, reactionary newsmedia, and capitalism in general. And it ignores gun culture's role in aggravating some of those trends. Is this just another argument that you can't do anything about gun violence until you fix all violence, or is there some more-specific message here?
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Jul 22, 2022 17:04
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Harold Fjord posted:Where is that fear coming from? Capitalist infotainment media driving up coverage of scary events for clicks and views even as the world is getting safer is a good place to start. The fact that the world itself is genuinely being destroyed by humans and we are doing nothing to address it is another. While violent crime is down overall relative to the past, there are risks of increases as material conditions degrade. Do you think that the media should not report on gun violence (or whatever fits your criteria of "scary events") at all? Or to what extent/type of coverage would be responsible, in your opinion? Additionally, do you think that anything would be different if the gun lobby, especially the NRA since their shift in the 70s, didn't exist and/or was much weaker? That maybe people would be less likely to correlate owning a gun with self-protection? Kalit fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Jul 22, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 17:08
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Cease to Hope posted:In what way? Your listed causes of fear are so nonspecific that they seem to imply that you can't do anything about guns until you solve racism, climate change, reactionary newsmedia, and capitalism in general. And it ignores gun culture's role in aggravating some of those trends. Is this just another argument that you can't do anything about gun violence until you fix all violence, or is there some more-specific message here? I'm saying a holistic approach would likely have the best results. It's not that we can't do anything until something else is done it's that all of these things are deeply interlocked. Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jul 22, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 17:13
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Harold Fjord posted:I'm saying a holistic approach would likely have the best results. Can you describe the particular steps of this holistic approach? The argument that we actually need to fix all of society in some sweeping way instead of doing anything about guns is pretty common. It's not just a derailing tactic for any discussion of guns, but it also serves as a thought-terminating cliche: we just can't do anything about [thing we can do something about] until we accomplish [goal described so vaguely that it can never properly be solved].
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Jul 22, 2022 17:21
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Obviously doing the same things we've been doing the past 20 years isn't working. If you want to dismiss doing anything more than that as impossible or off topic that's fine but then there's just no solution.  Sorry I don't have the full detailed plan for the revolution ready to post here for you I encourage you to organize locally.
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Jul 22, 2022 17:23
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Cease to Hope posted:Can you describe the particular steps of this holistic approach? step 1: thoughts step 2:
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Jul 22, 2022 17:26
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:step 1: thoughts If you've got a better plan, post it. I do sincerely suggest that any planning start with thinking.
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Jul 22, 2022 17:26
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Harold Fjord posted:I've been considering that question about how we address and change gun culture, that we can eventually enact useful gun control.We have statistics, but people know that statistics can be used to lie and regularly are. The meaning of statistics is regularly misunderstood and at times deliberately used to deceive. This is a big part of why simply waving statistics is not effective. I still that reaching people (even in terms of collective approaches, this isn't about one rear end in a top hat changing the world through fancy talk) requires understanding where they are, even if you think that they are wrong. Statistics are how you understand a problem, and then you use that understanding to craft effective arguments and policy. Nobody should be using statistics alone as a persuasion technique, but they're valid in this forum as part of a discussion. quote:For example, the framing of "attachment to heroic fantasies" is quite simply incorrect. People buying guns for protection probably aren't all imagining themselves as heroes. Sure it probably looks that way that way when you are standing on the other side (insert cartoon about Plato's the cave) but it's not an attachment to the idea of being a hero driving gun culture. It's fear. It's both. People have fear, and they imagine themselves using "gun" to overcome that fear and be heroic. If you've ever been around people who are talking about owning guns, you'll have encountered the extremely common thing where they have a detailed explanation of how they're going to shoot an intruder. There's a whole industry around furniture to quickly access firearms so that they can light up the homestead. Moving away from anecdotes, we know how common the "good guy with gun" and "shoot up the intruder" narratives are, both of which place the gun owner in the place to have solved a problem and defended others with "gun". It's a heroic fantasy based in fear. quote:Where is that fear coming from? Capitalist infotainment media driving up coverage of scary events for clicks and views even as the world is getting safer is a good place to start. The fact that the world itself is genuinely being destroyed by humans and we are doing nothing to address it is another. While violent crime is down overall relative to the past, there are risks of increases as material conditions degrade. It's also a whole lot of racism
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Jul 22, 2022 17:33
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Oh yeah. This is still all rooting out of a "how do we reach gun people" framing which is why I'm trying to set the statistics aside. We know what things we want to do, generally the ones that we know statistics say are most effective in reducing deaths, but we can't get them done over the opposition we want to reach. I wasn't listing all of them though I tried to find a good left-wing fear and a good right-wing fear. Racism is a huge part of the right wing fear of course.
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Jul 22, 2022 17:37
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Do we need to convince the public? They seem to be pretty convinced. I'm skeptical that there's anything that will convince the hardcore owners, or, more importantly, the GOP, without untangling decades of propaganda. e: oh look: Gunman kills 3 at Iowa state park; shooter also dead mobby_6kl fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jul 22, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 19:05
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I think it works better when you can get people to buy in. Especially the voters with all the guns. I wonder if there's any direct correlation between gun ownership and electoral participation. I know untangling decades of propaganda is hard but I suspect it might be necessary
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Jul 22, 2022 19:27
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E: nevermind
Kalit fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jul 22, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 19:37
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We have interventions that work to reduce violent behavior. But we only use them after someone has entered the criminal system. If we had a way to use the risk factors that we know lead to violence to identify people who are likely shooters, and intervene outside the criminal system, there would be a realistic possibility of preventing a lot of shootings in my opinion. ideally we would have sensible gun control but a program like this would still be useful even if we had sane gun laws in the US. Given the high support for mental health funding cited earlier it might be an approach worth considering. The fact that we as a society consider violence solely as a moral issue, rather than a sociological and psychological phenomenon, puts us in a permanently reactive position. I think our current situation makes clear that we certainly can't punish our way out of this problem. What if you could get appropriate therapy, medication, and other treatment for violent behavior the same way you get treatment for anxiety or depression? I don't get why this is such a mind blowing idea inside of psychology but it still is, and it would take some doing. But it might be worth looking into while we pursue the long-term project of gun reform.
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Jul 22, 2022 20:31
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Harold Fjord posted:I think it works better when you can get people to buy in. Especially the voters with all the guns. I don't know if you're going to convince the gun zealots that own an average of 18 guns and built their entire identity around guns that they've wasted their lives. That's only about 3% of people though, but they have all the guns.
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Jul 22, 2022 20:46
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Harold Fjord posted:You have to address the fear if you want results. And, the perfect example of this is the solid gold Yankee lunatic that has gone down in local lore as "the Nose Hill Gentleman." TL;DR: A cop from Michigan was visiting Calgary during the Stampede, basically a giant city-wide festival including pretty much everything from concerts to rodeos to charitable events and everything else. He was walking in a local park with his wife, and some folks from a local radio station approached him and tried to offer him free concert tickets or tickets to the Stampede because they were out giving poo poo away to people. He apparently felt this "confrontation" was a horrible threat and bemoaned that he could not carry a gun to "defend himself" from, I suppose, the threat of... people giving him free things? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/nose-hill-gentlemen-pro-gun-letter-sparks-twitter-frenzy-1.1172624 It's easy to laugh at him (and I do, every time I think about it), but the truth is that if you want to fix the roots of America's rather insane gun culture, you have to address the cultural factors that make a guy like this think some people talking to him in a park could be a threat. That's a perfectly insane thing to think, and that kind of paranoia is driving the desire to have firearms for personal defense. That being said, I absolutely think he believes every word of what he said, and that he thinks there was actually a possible threat there. That's what we need to address. I've been in some... rougher areas of the world in my life, I've seen people get shot, and on no occasion did it begin with a friendly conversation or the attempt to offer free things.
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Jul 22, 2022 20:56
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^ This is where things can get really complex. ^ There's a whole media apparatus driving people to fear. Crime reporting is one such thing, but it's not really feasible to stop reporting on crime in the news. If the media could stop being police stenographers and offer some context for their reports, it might go a long way toward alleviating the way in which it drives fear. Perhaps more insidious is America's problem with copaganda, and the prevalence of uncritical police procedurals that heavily focus on random, heinous crimes and portray police officers as noble fighters for justice constantly constrained buy red tape and anti-police liberal politicians (god if only). Movies and TV both often push a narrative that runs contrary to reality and the perception of media as "left wing" or "liberal." I don't know where to begin unpacking or unraveling all that poo poo. Harold Fjord posted:I do sincerely suggest that any planning start with thinking. This is a pretty good starting position. Maybe a good starting point for the next conversation here? Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jul 22, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 21:15
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PT6A posted:It's easy to laugh at him (and I do, every time I think about it), but the truth is that if you want to fix the roots of America's rather insane gun culture, you have to address the cultural factors that make a guy like this think some people talking to him in a park could be a threat. That's a perfectly insane thing to think, and that kind of paranoia is driving the desire to have firearms for personal defense. That being said, I absolutely think he believes every word of what he said, and that he thinks there was actually a possible threat there. That's what we need to address. a significant contributor to this mindset is media which caters to people's fears, usually blaring from a never turned off screen, driving compulsive use to "stay informed" while also magnifying the worst examples. this media also provides commentary on those examples from pundits and the public alike, biased and catering to the tastes of the audience, which serves to just make this artificially boosted problem look even more dire and ever present. ultimately this leads to a fear that society is on an inevitable downward spiral into collapse and violence, from which the only possible recourse is to be armed for when the dangerous people come to claim you why yes, of course i'm talking about local television news. what else could i possibly be talking about?
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Jul 22, 2022 21:17
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Professor Beetus posted:Perhaps more insidious is America's problem with copaganda, and the prevalence of uncritical police procedurals that heavily focus on random, heinous crimes and portray police officers as noble fighters for justice constantly constrained buy red tape and anti-police liberal politicians (god if only). Movies and TV both often push a narrative that runs contrary to reality and the perception of media as "left wing" or "liberal." This is a huge part of it. Cops are set up uncritically as heros, that do a public service, protect, sacrifice, solve and prevent crimes. It bears exactly no relation to reality. In addition, it sets up criminals as almost always guilty, 2D villains who hurt people because they're evil. Society, economics, class, racism, prejudice, the school to jail pipeline....that is seldom if ever covered. Even on this forum, people describe what cops do in fantasy terms that aren't remotely connected to reality. And these are some of the most popular shows on television. They're massively pervasive in the public consciousness.
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Jul 22, 2022 21:36
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:a significant contributor to this mindset is media which caters to people's fears, usually blaring from a never turned off screen, driving compulsive use to "stay informed" while also magnifying the worst examples. this media also provides commentary on those examples from pundits and the public alike, biased and catering to the tastes of the audience, which serves to just make this artificially boosted problem look even more dire and ever present. ultimately this leads to a fear that society is on an inevitable downward spiral into collapse and violence, from which the only possible recourse is to be armed for when the dangerous people come to claim you Blaming the media seems like an excuse in my eyes. Media in our country doesn't seem to act much differently than they do in similar countries. But here, after a high profile mass shooting, that fear seems to have people running after guns. This doesn't seem to happen much in those other countries*. So, to me, that implies that this has more to do with how people in the US views guns (i.e. is effective in using them for safety/self-defense), in addition to our lack of gun control laws, and less to do with the media coverage itself. *For anecdotal evidence, I briefly looked at guns trend by year in the UK versus high profile massacres. In 2017, there were 3 massacres in England listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Great_Britain. One of those was the largest massacre since 2005. Those were covered in depth/obsessively by news in England. I cannot find a total gun purchases by year, but I did find gun certificates on issue by year. This isn't a 1:1 on gun purchases, obviously, but they have to renew every 5 years, so I assume panic buying due to media covering these massacres would be reflected in these numbers at some point. However, if we look at this, we can see it remains fairly steady since then.
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Jul 22, 2022 21:37
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I think, as well, some people don't live an interesting enough life, for lack of a better term. I got quasi-mugged for $50 once. gently caress it, it's $50. It upset me, but in the end would a gun have helped? I doubt it. So I'm down $50, and life goes on, the security guard at my hotel that night gave me a pack of smokes for my trouble and offered to call a hooker (I declined). Now, throw some guns into the mix? Well, someone could be dead. Maybe me, maybe the mugger, maybe some random poor fucker. Doesn't matter. Guns wouldn't help.
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Jul 22, 2022 21:52
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Sometimes that fear is justified, too. Because major political parties are platforming violence against you as moral due to your 'deviant' beliefs on gender and orientation, and painting you as part of the one group universally socially approved to commit violence against: pedophiles. Or because the cops on every level up to the federal are heavily infiltrated by white supremacists and acting as their allies openly. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 00:11
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Liquid Communism posted:Sometimes that fear is justified, too. Because major political parties are platforming violence against you as moral due to your 'deviant' beliefs on gender and orientation, and painting you as part of the one group universally socially approved to commit violence against: pedophiles. Sure, it is justified, but left wing gun owners are essentially a non-entity in terms of policymaking in the US. And when we speak of hero fantasies we're not talking about people looking to defend their lives from a very real threat, we're talking about mostly white straight cis privileged people who are imagining how they will use their privilege to justify killing the people you're talking about.
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Jul 23, 2022 00:20
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You're not wrong, but said left wing gun owners are the first ones any gun control with teeth will be weaponized against.
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Jul 23, 2022 00:27
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PT6A posted:And, the perfect example of this is the solid gold Yankee lunatic that has gone down in local lore as "the Nose Hill Gentleman." Here's the guy's letter, if anyone was curious. Cops really do go around looking for excuses to shoot people, don't they? Letter to the editor posted:I recently visited Calgary from Michigan. As a police officer for 20 years, it feels strange not to carry my off-duty hand-gun. Many would say I have no need to carry one in Canada.
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Jul 23, 2022 00:32
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I mean it's probably telling that the folks you mentioned, the ones that actually are in danger of imminent violent threats, are also going to be the folks annihilated by state violence if they choose to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights to defend themselves. Now, I'm not saying that means it's pointless for leftists to arm themselves, just that the current political situation means that using them puts them at even greater risk to state or state-sanctioned violence. Just look at the level of opsec put into joining your local SRA.Liquid Communism posted:You're not wrong, but said left wing gun owners are the first ones any gun control with teeth will be weaponized against. At the same time, this is also true.
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Jul 23, 2022 00:33
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Liquid Communism posted:You're not wrong, but said left wing gun owners are the first ones any gun control with teeth will be weaponized against. True, but also the current lack of gun laws doesn't apply to them either. Permissive gun laws in the US mainly apply to white straight cis folks. A country that allows police to kill people for "we thought he had a gun" doesn't actually have a right to bear arms. It's just a fiction that never included oppressed people in the first place. When the truck of Klan boys comes for you, the gun in your hand might end up being their justification that it was self defense to kill you. Not that I fault you for having it.
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Jul 23, 2022 00:38
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