Is it time to talk about guns?

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Well as a former hunter, I had a shotgun for duck hunting, a rifle for deer hunting, and a hand gun for protection when working in the woods cruising timber. BUT that’s not what the gun issue is about of course. The flood of guns that have only one purpose, to kill people, is a different mater. Nobody but nobody needs an AK47, nobody needs a 20 shot or more magazine, nobody needs hundreds of rounds of ammunition, nobody needs to carry a weapon to a school…so there cheeseheads, with very few exceptions nobody needs to carry a concealed weapon. The issue is about $ and intimidation and power.

 

Bartenders are afraid of the liability. Gun shop owners have reason not to

That seems to be true, for the minority of the U.S. population who are into the gun culture. It's estimated that there are over 393 Million guns are in civilian hands in the U.S., about 120 per 11 citizens-- the equivalent of 120 firearms per 100 citizens. But only about 32% of Americans say they personally own a gun and 4-44% live in a household where a gun is kept.Wide differences on most gun policies between gun owners and non-owners, but also some agreement As we might guess, the highest concentration of these guns is in the hands of Republicans (50%), rural residents (48%), men (45%), self-identified conservatives (45%) and Southerners (40%). https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns. About 20% of us own only 1 gun. Just 3% of Americans own a collective The gun numbers: just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms I happened to watch a documentary on (I think) CNN about an Italian photographer who was interviewing American gun owners. Some of them had their weapons on display, covering their decks and porches, bordering their pools, or arranged in designs like a map of the U.S. lined in guns. I found it pretty bizarre. High concentrations of gun ownership also overlap the Southern and western gun culture, where owning and using guns is an important rite of passage and father -son bonding, and the so-called " honor culture in the same regions. I took my son out camping with some of my MAGA friends. They taught him how to shoot, and afterwards asked him, eyes gleaming, "How did it feel?" He asked me later: "Dad, are those guys weird?
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I’m convinced there’s a culture of idolatry or worship of the power of the gun in America. The USA is such an extreme outlier - see here: Gun ownership - Wikipedia

especially this figure: Gun ownership - Wikipedia

It’s like ‘those who worship the gun will die by the gun’.

 

Right on! Like a religion, it is based on sets of cultural beliefs and values that defy rational challenge. I mentioned the regional phenomena of Southern gun culture and honor sulture. The gun culture in the South is linked to father-son bonding, coming of age, and symbolically becoming a man.
www.jstor.org/stable/23365753#:~:text=In addition to the symbolic importance of guns,firearms ownership is that Southerners are more likely
Why the South Loves Guns
Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. (Published 2018)
The "honor culture", in which men seem compelled to defend their reputation of strength and toughness is also alive and well in the South, having its roots in the Scottish herders who settled the region. R.E Nisbett, Culture of Honor..
More broadly though "white men in economic distress find comfort in guns as a means to reestablish a sense of individual power and moral certitude." Gun Culture in Action
If not idolatry, it comes close.

 

That's commendable, but apparently not all gun owners can make the same claim. Since the appalling Buffalo supermarket massacre, the horrendous massacre of the kiddies in Uvalde, we've had more smaller scale mass shootings than the news media can keep track of: the shootings in the Tulsa hospital and a number of shootings at restaurants, bars and a funeral. The targeted shooting of a judge in Wisconsin was intended to be the first of serial killings including Mitch McConnell and two state governors. Guns don't kill people, but far more people with guns do than with knives, clubs, machetes, etc.-- because it's so much more efficient. While most gun owners aren't a problem, there is a sufficiently large and growing minority of abusers to warrant trying to do something about it. I've mentioned my doubts about mental health as a solution. Hardening schools might help with school shootings. Are we to harden grocery stores, hospitals and restaurants too? And it's obvious too that a breakdown in morality is behind it all, but that's been going on since Adam an Eve and may be beyond human control . I think we need a war on multiple fronts, but reasonable regulation of firearms--background checks, waiting periods, red flag laws, restriction on numbers of rounds and kinds of weapons that can be purchased--seems to me to promise the quickest payoff. As the late Justice Scalia said, in his opinion in D.C.v. Heller, that opened the door to this mayhem: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” How soon we forget.

 

Firefighting in other parts of the world is a noble thing to do. But it's not when your own house is on fire and provides fuel for propaganda purposes of adversaries and make their jobs easier.

Also from a cost-benefit analysis, you can see that much of the campaigns in Korea, Vietnam and recently Afghanistan ended in defeat and failure with heavy expenditure of further resources which could have been used for constructive purposes at home. Iraq has regressed to a much worse scenario than it was under Saddam and has now become a major destabilising issue as such requiring more American resources.

U.S needs to create a stable and healthy society at home before embarking on campaigns elsewhere to justify its yearly 755 billion dollar military budget. Anti-american propaganda around the world will also dissipate easily on this account .

Example is better than precept. Imho, the example of a stable and healthy society at home can achieve American ideals of democracy and freedom better than a gargantuan military budget, and they need to invest sufficient resources in attaining this.

 

But obviously engaging in mass shooting at risk to oneself as well, means mental health issues. No sane person would do something of this sort.

By identifying and healing such people at the earliest, much of these mass shootings will come down rapidly.

Violent films and video games should be strictly banned as well for the time period.

I remember going to a cultural center in my town where I could view most of the films from around the world including Iranian, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean , Indian , Japanese and other cinemas. One thing I noted even then was the heavy content of violence and drama in the American ones.

 

I blame Hollywood for that. Think the glamorizing of John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, etc. The solution was always shooting and killing someone to solve a problem. Some of that was racism. Wayne was known as a racist, Eastwood not as much.

 

I agree with @Flagme15 almost every movie/tv program is geared towards violence.

The video games that are very popular among the kids, Call of Duty, Fortnite etc all have one thing in common, extreme violence. I believe our children have been desensitized by these types of gameplay for years.

The lack of social skills, have rendered the youth of today with very poor coping skills. No one hardly speaks to one another anymore.

Many of todays children are taking medication for problems most of us have never heard of.

 

And most of them don't know how to deal with someone saying "NO" to them.....but wait....don't I get a trophy just for participating? Aren't I entitled to whatever I want ? 90% of the problem comes down to poor parenting and discipline - oh, now that's called ADD - Adults Didn't Discipline.

 

But that's using 20-20 hindsight. The problem is how to identify them before they strike.

How do we identify them and get them into treatment? Is every disgruntled person who acts odd or out of the ordinary to be rounded up and subjected to treatment? We can try to make the resources available and encourage people to use them, just as we can lead a horse to water. Getting the horse to drink is the problem.

There's also the problem of defining mental illness in a culturally divided society. Back in the sixties, definitions of mental health emphasized being well-adjusted to society's norms and expectations; but hippies complained that the societies themselves could be sick. Back then, homosexuality was defined as a mental illness, but an intense political protest and lobbing effort changed that. Some definitions emphasize impulse control and subjective feelings of contentment and satisfaction with life in the face of changing fortunes. But philosopher J.S. Mill told us he'd rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Being "out of touch with reality" is frequently use as a criterion for more severe mental illness. Yet many of conspiracy minded right wingers, especially those influenced by QAnnon and "great Replacement" fans, impress me as being exactly that, but my Retrumplican friends call them patriots. Republican who own most of the guns can be counted on to invoke mental health in lieu of any kind of gun regulation. But they generally take a dim view of mental health professionals and are unlikely to send their kids to them. Some 47% of Anericans report having experienced one incident of mental illness, and 90% think mental health is as important as physical health. A Revealing Look at Public Attitudes Toward Mental Illness But there is still a stigma connected to it, and mentally ill people are wrongly viewed as mostly dangerous.

 

Crazy people don't think they're crazy. That's what makes em' crazy.

 

As it happens I have a brother that suffers from mental illness . When he is on his meds he's no problem at all but when he decides he'll feel better on less he starts to reduce them . At some point , when he feels like he's enjoying life more , he reduces them until he's off them altogether . Since he feels better he doesn't think anything's wrong with him . That's when it all goes to hell and you can't tell him there's anything wrong !
He's not been violent just crazy .

 

A case in point being the "Proud Boys", the neo-fascist organization prominent in street violence and the Jan.6 siege of the Capitol on behalf of their hero, the Donald. Gavin McInnes organized these twenty-to-thirty something millennial male misfits dwelling in their mom's basements and playing computer games. He taught them to straighten up somewhat, think of having sex with girls instead of their hands, and enjoy male fun--brawling à la the movie Fight Club. . There was also the " Gamergate" gang, young male computer gamer addicts from a similar demographic who conducted a misogynistic online harassment campaign in 2014-15 against feminist influence in computer gaming. It caught the attention of the Alt Right and is viewed as a turning point in that movement. And we mustn't forget 4-chan, that gave us the Pizzagate conspiracy and ,some believe, the Buffalo shooting. How 4chan’s toxic culture helped radicalize Buffalo shooting suspect How likely is it any of these lads could be reached by a mental health campaign? I ask that question rhetorically. For further insight, I'd recommend reading histories of the rise of Nazism and Hitler before WW II. Those Nazis weren't too stable. This is social pathology, as well as individual pathology, and that makes it harder to combat.

 

I would just like to comment on this one: Not going to work. Movie and video game censorship has already been tried in the 80's and 90's. Didn't work back then, won't work now, because violence in these products was ultimately never the real issue. It's a red herring that was used to distract from the real issue, which is the much too easy access to high powered firearms. All proven connections of violent media to gruesome acts of violence have been superficial at best, and have never shown to be the actual trigger.

Not to mention the technical impossibility of what you're suggesting. This type of content censoring would work even less now, because we now have this little invention called "high-speed broadband Internet", which makes side stepping censorship like this all too easy. The materials will always be there. It takes very little effort to set up a new server, if the old one gets busted, and geo-restrictions can be circumvented with proxy servers. In a pinch, if all else fails, you can start mailing SD cards.

Also, try this for size: Wanton violence like what we're witnessing now has always existed, long before there ever was a Hollywood. So whence came the violent behavior of the contemporaries back then? Which modern video game would you suggest started the American Civil War? Or the brutal witch hunts of the Dark Ages? The French revolution, and the Reign of Terror that followed? The abysmal treatment of the 19th century black slaves? Even the Nazi holocaust of the Jews can't be pinned on films and video games. Video games didn't exist at the time, and your typical 1930's and 40's German person saw relatively few movies in his/hers life. So, which violent movie would you blame on those historical horrors?

All violent movies and games do is act as a window to show how rotten we, as a species, truly are, and always have been. They merely bring to display what our subconscious has always yearned to do.

 

I agree that some folks probably shouldn’t have so many, but there are those that honestly love to collect guns. I’m not so worried about those folks- unless they possess a substantial amount of ammunition.

 

While they consider raising the legal age to purchase guns to 21(which won’t make a damn bit of difference), they should probably revisit these bullshit open-carry laws. I’m sick and tired of watching people walk around like it’s Wild Wild West, and really think that they are the shit! Open-carry should not be allowed, and if they don’t want to stop it, they should have damn near the same requirements it takes to conceal carry!