There people who are literally bordering death by hunger and drinking dirty water probably from the moment their embryo began to form. Malnutrition is proven to led to low IQ. But they all don’t go on killings spree, otherwise there would be no-one suffering from hunger anymore.
They don’t all do it, they’re just statistically more likely to. Being born with everything you need to be happy, healthy, educated and wealthy just makes a person less likely to do something like this, but of course there are exceptions to both sides. The overall point is still that funding programs for peope in need would likely reduce some of these events.
fully agree with that. A lot of crime is just desperation. Given the choice of commiting a crime or living in misery or even dying - you’re going to commit a crime.
Are you talking about the type of crime of murdering innocent peope because killer unjustly blames them or type of crime where hungry kid steals bread ? To me at least those those two are not the same category.
Nah you are talking about crimes out of poverty which can be robbing stores and can have deaths as side effect etc.
This case is about killing people to murder them. In term of motive It’s more alongside the serial killers who enjoy their victims suffering , often have high IQ, seems totaly normal for neighbors and are otherwise living quite comfy life. While this dude was no living comfy, if he was despread with money, he could have steal it but killing randoms to make them “dead” is tottaly different thing than crime out of poverty.
But are you saying this person was a high IQ, normally functioning member of society? Because he clearly was not if the post above is to be believed.
The only point I’m trying to make is that we likely could have stopped this if we gave him what he needed early on. Give him mental health support, financial means to support himself through hardship, training and therapy geared towards his personality and low IQ.
Of course he’s still guilty for his crime and the responsibility for his problems is entirely on him, but all those supports could have gone a long way towards preventing this.
Nope you are taking that part out of context. I’m saying he killed because he wanted to kill/ make victims suffer. I never said his IQ was high. I put the pure sadistic nature of his actions in to the contrast of actions taken out of neccesity to survive when someone is desperate.
I compare his actions with serial killers and find them different from crimes out of poverty.
As for prevention, it could or maybe could not work.
Maybe he was simply of sadistic nature regardless of his IQ. We could say that every murder, every crime, any wrongdoing could have been prevented and take a blame for them all. It’s kinda true but also not.
My point is that OP meme seems to indicate sociaity was at fault i say killer is at fault. Which you seem to agree as well.
Most people just accept what is happening to them -> apathy. When people stop being apathetic things start happening, for better or worse. Desperate people usually do desperate things which tends to be bad for everyone involved.
Malnutrition, pollution (particularly lead), chronic anxiety which often manifests as a consequence of abuse, elemental exposure which can happen during heat waves / cold snaps in homes without good insulation or AC/Heating…
It all contributes to degraded cognitive functions, particularly early in life. They also contribute to chronic pain, which can lead to substance abuse. The oxycotin-to-heroin-to-fentanyl pipeline is filled with people who lose access (or never enjoyed access) to traditional medical care, didn’t have access to preventative braces and surgeries (dental being a big one), and who suffered workplace injuries they couldn’t treat.
All this shit is fixable and preventable. But it requires materials, labor, and some degree of competent administration to achieve. Westerners have been indoctrinated into believing none of this is possible. Its all too expensive. It’s all too difficult. There’s no one available who you can trust to oversee these projects.
So the problems persist in some of the wealthiest corners of the world that dirt-poor countries like Cuba and Vietnam resolved decades ago.
I’m not sure if you are trying to agree or disagree with my point that there are people who also are in similar bad conditions if not worse who don’t go on killing sprea.
As for westerns, west is probably biggest propagator of helping poor countries and sending most humanitarian help out to these malnutritioned people of all nations around the globe. Aside from US westerners have solid social systems which is so good it attracts migrants from poor places in hundreds of thousands. So i dont see it as that bad in comparison to other parts of the world.
there are people who also are in similar bad conditions if not worse who don’t go on killing sprea.
There are people who have completely enviable lives and do go on killing sprees. Who can explain what drove OJ to self-immolate like that? Utter insanity.
But that’s a separate issue from cognitive decline driven by social factors. If you want a crime wave, you introduce lead into the environment. Its been proven out time and again to spike local crime rates within the next 5-10 years.
west is probably biggest propagator of helping poor countries
The primary form of western aid is military hardware. And this “aid” is often delivered on behalf of a dictatorship attempting to quell a restive populace. Case in point, the top five recipients are:
Afghanistan, under direct military occupation (we clawed back all the “aid” the moment we lost control of the government and kicked off a massive famine as a consequence)
Israel, one of the wealthiest nations on earth and also consistently in our top-five military hardware importers
Jordan, one of the wealthiest nations on earth and also consistently in our top-ten military hardware importers
Egypt, a military dictatorship
Ethiopia, currently in a civil war with its province Tigrea, and home to CENTCOM’s African HQ
Number six on the list is Iraq, ffs.
To claim we’re “helping” these countries is to imply the demolition of their neighbors and decimation of restive populations is a charitable endeavor.
Aside from US westerners have solid social systems which is so good it attracts migrants from poor places in hundreds of thousands
The primary method by which the US attracts immigrants is our education system. The plurality of US long-term migrants are here on student visas. As foreign countries ramp up their public education spending, migration from these communities falls. Japan used to be a huge source of US immigration, and now its down to a trickle. China used to be a huge source of US immigration, that’s also fallen off. India is peaking, with year-over-year migration shrinking since COVID. The Philippines and Indonesia are picking up, but we’ll see how long that lasts.
It has nothing to do with our social systems, overall. We have a massively overpriced health care system, which is why medical tourism to India, Taiwan, Canada, Spain, and Mexico remains common place. We don’t have good public transit. We don’t have good criminal codes or policing, as evidenced by the chronic surging of local crime and the endless exodus to gated remote communities by anyone with the money to afford it.
We’re a failing state. Cost of living continues to outpace wages. Speculation is locking larger and larger portions of the population out of home ownership and trapping more of them in medical debt. Elder poverty has been rising year-over-year since the 80s, despite the promise of 401ks and market-based retirement accounts yielding returns consistent with a rising rate of profit. Look at what’s happening to the UK. We’ll be there in another five to ten years. Some corners of the country - New York, Miami, Chicago, Austin, San Fransisco - are already there.
What this means for our future is anyone’s guess. But it ain’t gonna be good.
That’s not how statistics works. “Not all drunk drivers kill people” is a bad argument because drunk drivers are way more likely to kill people. Same thing with crime. If you’re arguing that his shitty situation isn’t the main reason why he resorted to a killing spree, then you kinda have to argue the same thing for all crime, and there’s research that disproves that logic for various forms of crime.
Because the CIA/FBI Agents supplying all these hopeless kids in the white ghettos with fire-arms they can’t feasibly afford on their own don’t want them going after the elite.
Bro, this is an impoverished child living in the ghetto, in states where you need to be 18 or older to buy a gun that cost a couple thousand dollars. Somebody is supplying these kids with arms
I think @ParsnipWitch want to say that those murdered people were thought by the killer to be at fault for killer’s problems they had nothing to do with.
They claim it’s 100% societies fault. So even while trying to defend they remove all agency from this guy. Yes, let’s work to improve systems to give everyone a better shake, but don’t discard his own horrible actions.
He is morally innocent though which is the point, even if he’s criminally guilty. The strawman is hearing “we can’t be surprised and we can still feel bad for him” and equating that to saying “he should be let go!”. He can still be guilty for his actions even though it’s almost entirely society’s fault.
No he’s not, because once again the vast majority of people who have bad childhoods and mental challenges don;t go murdering people. He is in no way morally innocent.
Post itself suggests its somehow excusable I disagree.
To me makes sense to stea money but to kill other just for sake of killing them is closer to serial killer thinking than desperation .
Cruz’s Crime is not “100% society’s fault.” Cruz literally and figuratively pulled that trigger. At best maybe a 50:50, but to completely absolve Cruz of any wrongdoing is asinine.
I don’t think that the blame assigned is in the literal sense I think it is in the philosophical sense.
Meaning the chain of events that led here had many MANY interruption points where society could have prevented this from escalating. There is no 1 person to blame for this entire thing, it’s a shared societal burden.
What I find weird about this is how unbalanced people assign blame. A white young male mass shooter: absolutely society’s fault.
When anybody else does something bad, the internet is much less forgiving.
Take an incredibly tame example as comparison: Amber Heard. The internet hates that person, although her life was shit and she isn’t even a murderer. I’ve never ever seen someone say it’s society’s fault that she acted like a douche.
Or take another mass shooter: Andrew Bing, who was a young black man and killed 6. You don’t have people on communities like 4chan, Lemmy and Reddit falling all over themselves blaming society and discussing his tragic life.
It does come off a lot as if the average person online, has a much easier time to sympathise with some people. And in consequence they give these people much more leeway than others.
I completely agree. However, if we’re talking about solutions, blaming someone like this doesn’t get us anywhere, and it certainly won’t prevent another similar tragedy.
The people interested in actually solving this problem aren’t wasting their time on the motives of the shooters. They are all aberrations, but when the number of aberrations starts rising, that tells you there’s a problem in the system, and treating the symptoms won’t make it go away.
You’re missing the point when people say it won’t solve future issues. Yes, lock the perpetrator up (ignoring the issues with the penal system in the first place), that’s a no brainier. But locking up that person and placing all the blame at their feet doesn’t do anything for the other people in very similar situations.
The person you were talking to was making a broader societal point. Placing the blame for this whole situation, which is the fruit of many of the failings of society, just enacted through a single man, and saying we’re good 'cause that boogeyman is dead or in prison does NOTHING to address the root causes, the actual problems. That’s the point you’re missing.
I understand exactly what they were trying to say.
Unlike them, I’m not making a broader point, I’m not in a larger discussion of societal reform. Attempting to shift this conversation to that is a fault. If you scroll through this thread I’ve been extremely consistently saying that Cruz bares responsibility for his actions and condemning him does serve a vital, albeit very disheartening, purpose for all of us.
If you think about it from my perspective it seems that the only purpose of talking about the faults of society in the context of my statements would be to detract from Cruz’s guilt, which as I stated previously is asinine.
You’re painting a false dichotomy, though. Both of these things can be true at the same time, and in fact are. It does everyone more good to accept that yes, Cruz did a bad thing and should be held accountable, and to accept that, yes, society at large has a hand to play in this.
Can they both be true? Because the post we’re under claims 100% of the blame goes to Society. I voiced that this was wrong, and suddenly all of you in the replies want to correct me. Give up, mate, you don’t even know what you’re fighting for. Cruz is responsible for Cruz’s actions, if not wholly than in majority part.
What, exactly, prevents both from being true? Cruz is to blame for his actions. Society is to blame for the conditions that led to the actions. They’re both true. We can punish, imprison, whatever, the person who did the crime, while still also acknowledging that there may be other things that led to the thing from happening.
Right, so we agree completely, what then are you here to try to explain? We both claim Cruz is to blame for his actions, and that any actions by society as a whole does not absolve him.
I fail to see the relevance of this post and it comes off as if people want to victim blame. A lot of people have problems. A lot of people get bullied. Just think about the thousands of women who get raped and sexually abused throughout their lifes.
Mass shooter fit a profile, sure. They obviously aren’t happy people. But the reason why they do this is not what has happened to them in their lifes. Otherwise we would have a lot more mass shooters.
I think you’re missing the point in that we already have a lot of mass shooters because society has failed them.
This is a symptom of our society.
Trying to absolve society of its involvement is essentially just turning a blind eye to the problem and hoping it goes away. Which is exactly the problem that we have.
This is simply taking an actual nuanced thought on the situation instead of letting your emotions regulate your thoughts and turning everything into a false dichotomy.
It is not society which is failing when people turn to murder it’s the people who turn to murder who are failing.
The focus should be on why a few people decide it’s okay to hate other groups of people so much, that they murder them.
To believe it’s society’s fault people are turning into murderes and now it’s society’s responsibility to dissolve each and every problem anyone could have ever is completely unrealistic.
People will always have problems. And there will always be people who believe other lives are worth less. It’s much more likely to be able to do something against the latter than doing something against people having problems.
We have enough examples of (mass) murderes who did not have horrible lives
I’m something of a news junkie and I haven’t heard of them. Maybe there’s a one-off here or there, but the majority of them would not have what you described.
and so many people have horrible lives and don’t kill others.
Well yes, of course. Mental illness is a spectrum, it’s a bell curve, it’s not an on and off switch, when it comes to murder.
It’s illogical to draw the conclusion it’s a bad life that turns people into murderes.
I disagree with this, strongly.
Honestly that sounds like an opinion of someone who believes illogically in that we’re always “captains of our ship” and we’re always perfect mentally, and that we always can make decisions free of illness.
Humanity is just not like that, we have emotions and can have mental illness, and sometimes they drive us to do things that we regret later on or uncontrolling of during.
Mental illness can affect our perception of things to the point where we do things that seem logical to us but that society would think is completely illogical, like murder.
I think you have trouble differentiating between causes and fault or responsibility. English is not my native language, so perhaps I get the inuendo wrong. But claiming “Cruz’ crime was 100 % society’s fault” absolves the murderer of all his responsibility.
Society is not responsible for the decisions you make, it’s your decision alone. You don’t get to blame others for your decisions to hurt and murder people.
I think you have trouble differentiating between causes and fault or responsibility. English is not my native language, so perhaps I get the inuendo wrong. But claiming “Cruz’ crime was 100 % society’s fault” absolves the murderer of all his responsibility.
That was the original comment by you that I replied to. The tone of that paragraph was suggesting you were speaking about me specifically.
As English is not your first language, I would suggest next time separating that paragraph into two paragraphs, or adding to the end of that paragraph something along the lines of “as the original article states”.
I would suggest you understand comment hierarchy on Lemmy. You responded to my comment, which was in the tree of a direct response to the topic. Not to you or any other comment.
You can see that by the fact that there’s no line next to my post when you look at top layer of hierarchy:
I would suggest you understand comment hierarchy on Lemmy.
I notice you keep trying to “Kill the Messenger” by challenging my understanding and intelligence level.
I’ve made plenty of posts throughout the decades to understand how it works. Also, English is my primary language.
I stand by my comments to you about how you worded your comment that I replied to.
Finally, a reminder of what I said, since the screen pic that you posted is not referring to the comment that I was replying to, and speaking about…
I think you have trouble differentiating between causes and fault or responsibility. English is not my native language, so perhaps I get the inuendo wrong. But claiming “Cruz’ crime was 100 % society’s fault” absolves the murderer of all his responsibility.
That was the original comment by you that I replied to. The tone of that paragraph was suggesting you were speaking about me specifically.
As English is not your first language, I would suggest next time separating that paragraph into two paragraphs, or adding to the end of that paragraph something along the lines of “as the original article states”.
“Killing the messenger” apparently means to “attack the bringer of bad news”. That doesn’t seem to be a good fit for the situation at all. I suggest you read the definition again. I suppose what you meant to say is an “ad hominem attack”.
Well, I am certainly sorry when it came off as an insult to you. But it’s quite the stretch to assume I wanted to challenge your intelligence by simply trying to understand what could be the underlying cause for you to write something that seemed simply untrue to me.
Yeah, there would be orders of magnitude more mass shooters if everyone with a garbage childhood and an intellectual challenge followed this path. It is the tiny minority of such people who take the terrorist path.
But the reason why they do this is not what has happened to them in their lifes.
What other fuckin’ reason is there? Everyone is precisely how they are because of the sum total of their life experiences and the results of their genetic lottery.
Because a lot of people have struggles and only few are becoming murderers or hurt people in other ways. Murderes, at some point in their lifes, decided it is okay to hurt others. That is the deciding factor.
Okay, what about mental health aspects? Yes, suicidality is an incredible predictor. But guess what? It’s only there in 30% of cases prior to the shooting.
Suicidality was found to be a strong predictor of perpetration of mass shootings. Of all mass shooters in the The Violence Project database, 30% were suicidal prior to the shooting. An additional 39% were suicidal during the shooting. Those numbers were significantly higher for younger shooters, with K-12 students who engaged in mass shootings found to be suicidal in 92% of instances and college/university students who engaged in mass shooting suicidal 100% of the time.
Oh no it must’ve been trauma then! Everyone knows someone who suffered abuse is more likely to abuse right!? No.
In terms of past trauma, 31% of persons who perpetrated mass shootings were found to have experiences of severe childhood trauma, and over 80% were in crisis
Want to know the real profile? Massive change in personality. Wants access to guns. They’ll TELL someone they’re thinking about hurting others. Loneliness.
NONE of which requires anything even remotely mentioned in that farce of a greentext lol.
Okay, what about mental health aspects? Yes, suicidality is an incredible predictor. But guess what? It’s only there in 30% of cases prior to the shooting.
Suicidality was found to be a strong predictor of perpetration of mass shootings. Of all mass shooters in the The Violence Project database, 30% were suicidal prior to the shooting. An additional 39% were suicidal during the shooting. Those numbers were significantly higher for younger shooters, with K-12 students who engaged in mass shootings found to be suicidal in 92% of instances and college/university students who engaged in mass shooting suicidal 100% of the time.
Oh no it must’ve been trauma then! Everyone knows someone who suffered abuse is more likely to abuse right!? No.
In terms of past trauma, 31% of persons who perpetrated mass shootings were found to have experiences of severe childhood trauma, and over 80% were in crisis
Want to know the real profile? Massive change in personality. Wants access to guns. They’ll TELL someone they’re thinking about hurting others. Loneliness.
NONE of which requires anything even remotely mentioned in that farce of a greentext lol.
You respond as if in disagreement yet the article affirms everything I’ve said lol.
There is no single profile for a mass shooter. Your best chance at getting any one thing correct about them is that they’re male. 94% chance.
I’d be interested in your reasoning here as the article summarily disagrees with your first statement; it highlights an incredible degree of commonality among mass shooters above and beyond “male”.
You’d have to read it to know that, I suppose.
I’m glad you found the copy/paste buttons, but I do wish you’d bothered to read up.
I see we’re projecting in our assessments. I can understand how being confronted with proof one’s opinion is wrong, may you deal with it with grace in the future.
So much commentary here focusing on societal ills, but even in other countries with lots of poverty and shit social services they don’t have individuals committing random mass murders like us because they don’t have a collection of high capacity personal arms. There’s plenty of people in other countries that have commonality with his life, yet they don’t commit mass murder. Yeah, shootings do happen elsewhere…but not like in the US, and the difference is access to firearms.
In the UK knife crime is a big issue for those in poverty or those in struggling cities. Having access to weapons of course increases risks of people dying ot those weapons, but removing guns isn’t going to just convince everyone trying to lash out to just lie down and suffer in silence.
I don’t live in a contry with civilan access to guns, and I don’t live in a situation where I feel the need to protect myself with weapons, so I’m not gonna stake a claim in the gun control debate. But if you ban every weapon ever conceivable, without addressing why people are becoming violent to begin with, people will just result to using their own hands (or perhaps more realistically, going above the legal means. Like with Shinzo Abe’s assassination).
At least with a knife, you can’t mow down a room full of people. Here in the U.S. dozens of people can be killed in a short time by a single person due to guns. We give them out like candy.
Both access to guns (force multiplier) and the underlying issue (poverty, lack of social mobility, etc) need to be addressed.
Well, yeah. I’ll take your word on the issue of US gun control.
However, if we want to tackle both these issues it’s probably a bad habit to redirect the conversation to gun control when we are talking about the motivations a situations that are generating the violent outbursts to begin with, since gun control gets a hell of alot more talk anyway, while societal issues keep getting pushed away from the collective spotlight, and are usally coming from underprivileged postions that stuggle to get a word in to begin with.
Yeah, you treat the symptom, but in an effective way. It’s called mass shooting, because so many people die, when guns are involved. You do not have this, if there is someone trying the same with a knife. Banning guns is a band aid during the time necessary to fix the underlying problem.
There will still be kids slipping through. They also say it themselves:
Too often in politics it becomes an either-or proposition. Gun control or mental health. Our research says that none of these solutions is perfect on its own. We have to do multiple things at one time and put them together as a comprehensive package. People have to be comfortable with complexity and that’s not always easy.
If only there were other factors which could impact the highlighted systemic issues… perhaps Canada’s notable single-payer healthcare system, social safety nets, etc. impacting the desperation and providing help?
It is about the weapon. If someone wanted to inflict a lot of damage, they would use bombs. That has happened several times in the past but doesn’t compare to the number of mass shootings. Why? Because guns are simply just plentiful and easy to get, and too many apologetics keep allowing them to be plentiful. It really is that simple. Yes it doesn’t fix society’s underlying issues but that is a MUCH harder problem to solve than simply getting rid of (as many) guns (as possible), or at least not just allow so mamy people to own them willy nilly.
The goal is to drastically reduce the number of innocent lives being taken ASAP, not to argue about weapons or social ills or all of this other nonsense.
why are you worried about an object that can do no harm unless what happens? …Some…One…Picks…It …Up.
drastically reduce? that’s weak tea im trying to stop ALL violence. your half measures are a compromise. and that’s sick compromising for some deaths vs many. It needs to be solved at the root and violence needs to be cut off completely.
We still have to talk about teenagers who beat up homeless people to death.
going to tell a rape victim they shouldn’t be so paranoid and to just relax around people?
if i get drowned, are we gonna ban water?
we need to stop the Core Issue of Violence in Humans.
you wanna shout loud about drastically reducing murders, no that’s cowardly, im trying to do better. im going for Zero Murder.
how is stoping human violence not a reasonable goal post. half the deaths aren’t enough for me and others. for you life is so cheap you’ll accept only a few deaths…i accept zero death from human violence. reasonable goal posts…its okay to slaugther a few but not a lot…the fuq is that mental hoolahoop bs
Right, like bringing about constitutional amendments requiring a majority of states and Congresspeople instead of a change which simply requires a majority of Congresspeople.
Because guns are simply just plentiful and easy to get, and too many apologetics keep allowing them to be plentiful.
You seem to be close to a moment of understanding here but not quite getting it. You seem to recognize that there are other tools available to affect such disastrous outcomes we’d be doing nothing to address, but to also pretend that there’s no indication nor chance anyone would use any of these other tools.
You seem to recognize the futility of the whack-a-mole game while recognizing its existence.
Yes it doesn’t fix society’s underlying issues but that is a MUCH harder problem to solve than simply getting rid of (as many) guns (as possible), or at least not just allow so mamy people to own them willy nilly.
It really isn’t. How much effort do you believe will be required to bring about an amendment to the constitution of the United States?
How much less effort will be required to bring about simple legislative changes? By simple comparison of the two vectors of change, one of them is unquestionably easier than the other. Spoiler: It isn’t undoing the 2nd amendment.
Interestingly enough, you seem to double-down on the previous recognition the problem - pressures toward mass violence - would be left unaddressed but with the vast majority of options for mass harm still very much present and ignored.
The goal is to drastically reduce the number of innocent lives being taken ASAP, not to argue about weapons or social ills or all of this other nonsense.
Which is more effective: A change which is quite impossible to bring about, or a change which can be brought about with some difficulty and compromise?
Which is more effective: A change which removes one of unbounded options to bring about a given end, or a change which reduces the count of people seeking to bring about a given end with any tool available?
Yeah. that’s what i was mocking. everyone is fine with one person getting stabbed vs 20 people shot. That 1 death is also untenable and just as bad as gun death. what are we doing to solve That? Humans Using things to kill is the Problem.
The point isn’t If it’s bad or not, of course it’s all bad.
But If I had to notify 30 families of their deceased parents over 1 family, the choice is obvious.
You are right the guns won’t shoot anyone by themselves, but they’re very much an easy access to whoever wants to mass kill people.
Trying to solve people’s heads is a long term effort, and taking away guns is a short term bandaid. The thing is people are dying Now, you need to save people now, while simultaneously trying to solve the root problem.
If you’re thinking only talking to people Now, will help anyone, we’re in for many more kill streaks
what was your solution for removing guns? not just here or there but all firearms.
It is impossible unless you murder everyone down to every last intellectual capable of figuring out how to make a gun.
the gun is a tool and it’s efficient. humans at the core have to change. Trying to get rid of the object in space is futile they are here guns arent leaving our civilization as whole.
since we are arguing about minimal vs no violence. i pray that it is you who pays the stab tax and not me. ill be sure to notify your family and say how sorry we as humans all are about it.
This same sentiment is echoed in the tech community around AI artwork and it’s, frankly, silly. You cannot blame a tool for being misused. You can say that only certain people should have ready access to a tool, and there are strict rules for the use of a tool, but at the end of the day, the tool bloody exists, saying “hey, can we just not use the tool, guys?” doesn’t work. Fix the people who have the most likelihood of misusing the tools, prevent access to the tool from unqualified people, and otherwise just accept that misuse is the price of advancement, as unfortunate as that is.
You make it sound that changing peoples minds are a super easy task compared to removing guns.
I for one am saying that both things should be done at the same time.
Lets end this here, you’re trying to poke flaws in the person you’re discussing with, instead of being civil and analyzing the problem, I pray that neither of us pay no stab tax, jesus.
I agree. This guy’s been all over this thread and all he’s really said is “wouldn’t it be better if nobody died?” Yeah of course it would. No one can argue with that and no one should argue with the poster above you because it isn’t productive at all.
What’s your angle. is 1 murder bad or 20? its all Bad. but you are arguing about efficiency. what are you planning to say to a loved one when they get stabbed?
“yo lol at least they didn’t shoot up the place, thanks for taking that stabbing for the team?”
i hope you have to pay that tax. ill even give up my guns to see it happen. Oooh Wait. Why is that statement Baaaad? No one wants to be killed. and when you sigh of relief that it fewer murders happen instead of none at all makes you a joke of a human.
you act vile to people online and yet have no idea why people shoot or stab human beings? im so glad guns exist because people like you have to keep their mouth shut in public or risk injury and death for your cruelty of language
i deserve death because you got your little feelings hurt? yeah, that’s totally not vile and totally something a sane person would say. go play in traffic.
go play in traffic. hahaha way to be a peaceful human being. this…this right here is what starts the fires humans make. and you think humans are going to give up the advantage of a firearm. good luck out there. don’t forget to be this vitriolic online as you are in person. don’t be afraid of who and what you are. Just Another Monster in this jungle with the rest of us.
its just you and me down here in this comment chain bruno… feeling it yet?
that’s the feeling of not being heard despite all that posted. yeah i know the pendulum swings in two directions. but you didn’t, which is why we are down here. just the two of us…i brought you down this comment chain alone. see who followed you?
im going to not play in traffic because now i need to protect myself from yet another human who wishes me harm. way to be a part of the solution with all your diatribe.
and you want to be a peaceful person living ina gun free world. drink bleach, run into traffic. damn you are the monsters we need to be afraid of and arm ourselves to protect from, your sick fantasy of killing me. pendulum will contine to swing in two directions until you smarten up and look at the root cause not the object in space. you lack verbal communication skills and the intellect to discuss topics. why do i know this? what have been your last two replies? hmm…and you want us to hand over our guns to who, you? lol.
Actually I’m down here and you’re absolutely insufferable. How you think it’s okay to take personal attacks at several people across these post comments just because they don’t think it’s feasible to completely conquer the idea of violence before coming up with some common sense regulations is the craziest thing. You’re coming off like a crazy person.
you’re coming off like half measures are going to work. you stop the gun tree but are missing the entire forest of violence. you stop the guns then when your tackling the other weapons guess whats going to crop up and grow again? Pick up a history book. Humans have done this song and dance ad nausea for hundreds of thousands of years. you want to believe that you are detached from cave men. none of us are. the sooner you stop doing half measures and tackle the core issue. human will to kill, then you have my attention. otherwise you are a child who thinks to shallow.
I hate the argument people make sometimes, “Anything can be a weapon, I could go around stabbing people with a pencil if I really wanted to. Even if you banned guns, it wouldn’t matter.” Yeah, except you can’t kill dozens of people within a few minutes with a pencil. We’ve got huge problems with economic disparity, a quiet epidemic of mental health disorders with little means to help the people that need it, coupled with ridiculously easy access to high-powered firearms in our country. There will never be enough “good people with guns” to protect the world. We need to reduce access to gun ownership to prevent mentally unbalanced people from having such powerful weapons at their disposal for when they eventually snap (since they’ll never have access to treatment), but that’s just a pipe dream at this point in time in America.
Think of a neighborhood or America as an example. is it the objects in space or the people? You cant have it be both ways. You stop one effecient Weapon and Humans Make a new one. Why would they make another weapon. Why was armor and sword forged? why did anyone make bows and arrows for anything other than hunting game. why?
Human Nature. Lambasting about guns makes you a have not vs the haves in this world and you can blab blab blab a thousand words but the only way to fight human nature is with matched human nature. its screaming at the leaves on a tree hoping it wont bloom another row of leaves next season. you have to stop it at the root. The Human Will to Kill is a problem. guns are just a force multiplier. 1 death is too many 100 deaths is bad too . But when you say ‘Oh if he had a knife they couldn’t kill as many’. Any is too many wtf!?
“Any is too many” - obviously we don’t want anyone murdered, but good luck doing anything to completely stop that. People kill for any number of reasons, it’s happened since the beginning of time. Someone says something under his breath and gets killed waiting in a fast food line by somebody they’ve never met before. A jealous ex-lover shows up at a party and stabs their ex to death. A calculating spouse poisons their SO to collect insurance money. A soldier sees someone wearing the enemy uniform and shoots. Someone goes off the deep end and shoots up a music festival and kills 58 people in a matter of minutes. A troubled teen goes into a school and kills dozens of kindergarteners in their classrooms. All those are tragedies and seemingly daily occurrences, but the low-hanging fruit here is quantity. Saving more people in less amount of time is better. Utopia can wait, people need helped now.
One of the problems with arguments made by gun control opponents is that they concoct these ridiculous all-or-nothing scenarios. Like, we obviously can’t enact any sort of solution unless it’s a Magic Bullet that universally solves every problem ever that humanity has ever faced. If a solution doesn’t solve world hunger, prevent accidental overdoses, car accidents, acid showers, lightning strikes, or cure cancer, then obviously it’s doomed to failure.
Or even attempting to do ANYTHING at all about the problem is just the first step in jack-booted Government thugs kicking down you front door, dragging your grandmother out, raping her in the street and then shooting your kids and your dogs… for reasons. OR, we can’t talk about gun control solutions because obviously we’ll start illegalizing knives, acid (?), and cars next, just like they’ve done in all the countries of the world that have gun control, like those hellholes in Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Canada. OR, if anybody anywhere dies from a shooting after enacting gun control legislation, then obviously it was a failure and a waste of time, why did we even bother?
I had believed in the good guy with a gun idea until a citizen trying to stop a shooter by shooting back got himself shot by the police. Then I imagined myself in the position of the police in that scenario. It’s not neat and tidy. It gets worse as I imagine more people getting involved with their own firearms.
In a small space where everyone can see everyone, the aggressor is clear. I think of the guy who tried to rob a gun store. Everyone there hears what he said and sees how he’s acting. As soon as someone walks in without seeing the situation unfold, it becomes messy really fast.
Always the extremes with you, trying to make everything zero sum or a binary choice. There’s no room for reason and moderation if your go-to is pounding the table with the nuclear option every time.
I’m saying, if you prohibit somebody from buying a gun, I’d they’re really dedicated they can easily build it themselves. Do you ban steel because 0.0001% of the population could bypass gun restrictions?
Keep trying bro. Again, the hyperbole. There is no perfect solution. No, you don’t enact absurd bans. But you don’t make perfect the enemy of good enough by saying an imperfect solution isn’t an acceptable solution. I’m not interested in discussing your CNC or steel hyperbole.
But seriously, we gotta look at the structural issues at play in things like this. A lot of gun control advocates want to point at things like this, and say, see, this shit doesn’t happen in any other country in the world, obviously the guns are the problem, we need to take the guns! But when you look at other countries, you see that the US is one of the few that has both guns and almost no social safety nets. The proposed solution on the left is never “fix the problems that lead to crime and violence”; rather, it’s “take the tools used to commit crime and violence”
You can use the facile response of saying, no, this is all on Cruz, he made a choice. And it’s true, kind of, except that his choices were significantly constrained by the social conditions that were imposed on him. That’s not saying that what he did was right, nor does it make it the ‘fault’ of the people he victimized. But things like this simply do not happen in a vacuum.
Here’s another way of looking at it.
If you take a dog as a puppy, starve it, leave it outside all the time, ignore it, kick it, never give it any positive interaction, and always punish it for any ‘infraction’ when you’ve never put in any time to teach it better, are you going to be surprised when it mauls someone? Why do you expect any other animal to behave better than a dog just because it walks upright and has no fur?
Personally, IDGAF what social/fiscal regressives are okay with. We’ve been doing this shitty form of capitalism too long where we put profits ahead of people, and that needs to be ended.
The proposed solution on the left is never “fix the problems that lead to crime and violence”; rather, it’s “take the tools used to commit crime and violence”
What left are you talking about? Social issues and solving them is generally by definition leftist. If one suggests it they get called socialist/communist in the US even if they’re closer to center if compared to rest of the world.
We also discuss the issue of tons of crime being caused by poverty and lack of social nets, especially when discussing police brutality and the like. Now many of the members of congress people consider/accuse of being leftists are really just centrists, or close to it, or people who want to maintain their power, get votes, not really change the status quo. I’d say they match your definition, but if you’re saying leftists don’t want social solutions then you either haven’t been talking to leftists, or you aren’t fully listening.
As I said in response to someone else: what passes for the left says that they want this, until the rubber meets the road. Criminal justice reform/defund the police? That’s great, until you have a lot of homeless people scaring the Good, Decent, Upstanding citizens. High-density, affordable housing? Oh no, not in my charming, turn-of-the-century neighborhood, that would ruin it’s charm and wreck my property values! MLK Jr. said that the white liberals were the enemy, and–as a white leftist–he was right!
Republicans are honest; they want to fuck everyone over as long as they make a buck, or believe that they’re doing their god’s will.
Personally, I side with the anarchists that are at least trying to work within their communities to make shit better in whatever small ways they can.
I actually question what left you’re talking about lol. Outside the internet, the American left does NOT talk safety nets unless they’re one of the furthest left voices. Leftists are a very small minority in the US.
Bad faith argument. The Left is very much pro-social safety nets and pro-mental health supports. It’s kind of our whole fucking thing aside from worker’s having ownership of their labor.
The issue is not enough Americans understand the basic function of government, let alone how new policy becomes law, let alone how fucked they’re getting by their government and not having the werewithall to understand that they’ve had their social safety nets eroded consistently by Republican politicians since the Nixon era or earlier. So the only answer that seems to stick in the minds of anyone is 'libruls wanna take my guns away!" well, yeah, take the guns away of the known criminals and known mental cases because we’re not making much headway on the “improving social safety nets” part of the plan.
No, the left says that it’s in favor of this shit. It never does that, even when they have total control over a state. (Specifically, what passes for the left in the US; I can’t really speak for what the left is doing elsewhere in the world.) Look at California, where Dems have a supermajority; the things that they say they want, like affordable housing for everyone, walkable, high-density cities, good public transit, public education that works, police/criminal justice reform, etc., aren’t getting done because everyone gets all NIMBY when it’s near them, and people are losing their goddamn minds over homeless people just existing.
OTOH, they’re more than fine with taking away the right to keep and bear arms.
At least Republicans are completely up-front about being awful shitbags.
Just because the right likes to screech about how your centrists are extreme leftitists doesn’t change the fact they aren’t leftists. It’s just a smokescreen for the rightwing to cover just how extreme they’ve become.
You can call them whatever you want, but Dems are what passes for the left in the US.
If you’re going to move the goalposts and say that Dems aren’t the left, then you also can’t rationally say that the left is doing anything at all, since the left in the US has never had any real power then.
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