Gun Control

[promethean75]

"We have shootings all the time precisely becuz we are not an openly armed society. We plaster gun-free everywhere and act surprised when nutjobs target such places."

a good point, but the contrary scenario carries with it it's own problems. The argument is that if guns could be bought by anyone and openly carried, confrontations between people and/or groups that would have ended without real incident, instead, escalate and become lethal situations.

society would sooner devolve into a giant wild west bar scene or high noon shootout in the streets than become an exemplar of peace, virtue and justice.

[henry quirk]

But I don’t think that the lunatic shooter really takes much into consideration.

It's funny, though, the nutjobs never make their way over to the local PD and open up. They never go to a gun show and open up. They never go to a gunshop and open up. They never go anywhere where armed folks might be. Always they choose gun-free zones. Or public venues that are hard to control.

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society would sooner devolve into a giant wild west bar scene or high noon shootout in the streets than become an exemplar of peace, virtue and justice.

As it's on the verge of bein' now.

As I say: We punish folks who self-defend and give passes to those who offend and act surprised so many are willin' to offend.

Turn that around.

[Immanuel Can]

I understand then that, seriously, you would have the teachers holster their handguns in plain sight.

Where do the police keep their guns?

Answer: uniformed officers, in a special holster that grabs the gun if an assailant tries to pull it out.

Detectives, in a similar concealed holster inside their jackets.

I would argue that the latter option is better. Under a jacket and down at the side or back would be best. And not all teachers even need to carry. But in this situation, we're not dealing with quick draw, probably. So it would be enough if the teacher had a slim weapon concealed on his person somewhere under his clothes. If there were a lockdown, or an alarm, he'd have plenty of time to get it out if he needed to.

If a gunman knew that even one or two of the teachers in a school had the means to end his rampage summarily, do you think he wouldn't pause and rethink the logistics of his plan to off his classmates? Of course he would -- even if only for the fact that his plan could fail very quickly.

So there are ways of doing this well.

Makes sense.

But I don’t think that the lunatic shooter really takes much into consideration.

Well, they certainly plan. They're cunning. They choose their weapons, they map the school, they obsess over their strategy and salivate over how many children they can kill, and meditate on the fame it will get them...all of this we know from their own materials, usually discovered after their deaths. It was like that at Columbine, for example, we know. Those guys really knew what they wanted to do, and had plans for how to pull it off.

So one thing they will be sure not to forget is that when they walk in that door, they could, if they plan badly, end up on their backs bleeding out, without a single casualty, or with many fewer than they would like, looking like a fool. And they'll know that if they try to run through the school, they have to move much slower, looking carefully for guns that might ruin all their plans. That will give the cops more time to arrive, too.

So unless they are so completely deranged that they can't even plan, they're going to have to weigh those sorts of considerations up. And if they can't plan, then they can't pull off a school shooting successfully anyway.

[Immanuel Can]

But I don’t think that the lunatic shooter really takes much into consideration.

They never go to a gunshop and open up.

[promethean75]

Well Henry the point of a mass murderer is to not get killed himself (unless he intends suicide by or not by cop) and kill as many as he can.

Perhaps that's why they don't go into fort Bragg when they wanna kill people.

[henry quirk]

Well Henry the point of a mass murderer is to not get killed himself (unless he intends suicide by or not by cop) and kill as many as he can.

Perhaps that's why they don't go into fort Bragg when they wanna kill people.

That's my point. As I say: If anywhere, everywhere, a nutjob could go, he knew there was probably gonna be one or more carryin', carryin' with the intent to self-defend, he might think twice.

Also: just how nutty are these nutjobs? They certainly have enough wherewithal to pick sites that favor them. Mebbe they're not nutty at all. Mebbe they're just amoralists and nihilists.

[Immanuel Can]

I saw somebody make an interesting comment a few days ago.

Back in the early part of last century, anybody who wanted to could walk into a store and buy a Thompson submachine gun, a bunch of 50-round magazines, and as many bullets as he or she would like. No background checks. No forms to fill out. Nothing. Just buy it, and walk out.

And yet, in those days, school shootings...nobody even knew what they were. There was nothing in the news about them, nobody worried about them, and everybody went to school without fear. There were no lockdown drills, no SWAT squads or even security officers in the schools...and yet there were these very deadly assault weapons, far more deadly than any AR-15, and yet just there for anyone to have.

Serious mobsters, rum-runners and thugs had them. And the army, and even the police force had them. But there were no school shootings.

So the question becomes this: what's causing the school shootings? It cannot be the guns, or their availability: there were more deadly weapons more available when there were none of them. But something has flipped a switch on our kids and on the psychos. What changed?

Thoughts?

[henry quirk]

I saw somebody make an interesting comment a few days ago.

Back in the early part of last century, anybody who wanted to could walk into a store and buy a Thompson submachine gun, a bunch of 50-round magazines, and as many bullets as he or she would like. No background checks. No forms to fill out. Nothing. Just buy it, and walk out.

And yet, in those days, school shootings...nobody even knew what they were. There was nothing in the news about them, nobody worried about them, and everybody went to school without fear. There were no lockdown drills, no SWAT squads or even security officers in the schools...and yet there were these very deadly assault weapons, far more deadly than any AR-15, and yet just there for anyone to have.

Serious mobsters, rum-runners and thugs had them. And the army, and even the police force had them. But there were no school shootings.

So the question becomes this: what's causing the school shootings? It cannot be the guns, or their availability: there were more deadly weapons more available when there were none of them. But something has flipped a switch on our kids and on the psychos. What changed?

Thoughts?

In no particular order...

We abolished rites of passage (formal recognition of attainin' adulthood); we treat, by way of psychotropics, what is just natural high spirits; we wrecked family; we reduced morality to opinion; we aren't allowed to be sad or angry or confused (that is, we don't sit thru, work thru, normal emotion), we're medicated and mood stabilized; we divorced consequence from action.

We relinquished self-control and micro-managed simultaneously and bred chaos.

[Immanuel Can]

I saw somebody make an interesting comment a few days ago.

Back in the early part of last century, anybody who wanted to could walk into a store and buy a Thompson submachine gun, a bunch of 50-round magazines, and as many bullets as he or she would like. No background checks. No forms to fill out. Nothing. Just buy it, and walk out.

And yet, in those days, school shootings...nobody even knew what they were. There was nothing in the news about them, nobody worried about them, and everybody went to school without fear. There were no lockdown drills, no SWAT squads or even security officers in the schools...and yet there were these very deadly assault weapons, far more deadly than any AR-15, and yet just there for anyone to have.

Serious mobsters, rum-runners and thugs had them. And the army, and even the police force had them. But there were no school shootings.

So the question becomes this: what's causing the school shootings? It cannot be the guns, or their availability: there were more deadly weapons more available when there were none of them. But something has flipped a switch on our kids and on the psychos. What changed?

Thoughts?

In no particular order...

We abolished rites of passage (formal recognition of attainin' adulthood); we treat, by way of psychotropics, what is just natural high spirits; we wrecked family; we reduced morality to opinion; we aren't allowed to be sad or angry or confused (that is, we don't sit thru, work thru, normal emotion), we're medicated and mood stabilized; we divorced consequence from action.

We relinquished self-control and micro-managed simultaneously and bred chaos.

That's the sort of answer the original commenter also thought was right. If I remember, he said "social decay." You're being much more specific than he was, which is more useful in terms of finding solutions.

I'll add to that.

I would think that the lack of an existential framework of meaning was behind all of this stuff. We've ripped the rails off the Western worldview, and said "Anything is possible/probable/reasonable/believable." But when we do that, we're also introducing what's called "anomie" into the system, which is to say, the absence of all guidelines or points by which a person can navigate. It's life in a vacuum.

People have total freedom now to fantasize and "make themselves" into anything they think they want. But they don't know what they should want. And the result is despair, futility, confusion, hatred of life itself, and the desire to immolate the world and themselves so as to escape the void.

That's a school shooter's mindframe, I think. And whether or not he has a gun is secondary. He could use a bomb, a knife, a fire, a car...it makes no difference to him. He's just killing people, himself, and life.

[Immanuel Can]

Thirty Seconds To Make A Point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVRxzoKQ8Zk

The original KKK, and the KKK for most of its halcion years, was 100% Democrat. No exceptions. As were all the slave owners. And the Old South itself.

Somebody wants you to forget that, and to forget their entire history.

Good people remember.

[henry quirk]

That there is good stuff: right on the money.

[Sculptor]

Thirty Seconds To Make A Point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVRxzoKQ8Zk

The original KKK, and the KKK for most of its halcion years, was 100% Democrat. No exceptions. As were all the slave owners. And the Old South itself.

Somebody wants you to forget that, and to forget their entire history.

Good people remember.

irrelevant.
It does not matter how many times you say it, it is still irrelevant and shall remain so.

[Immanuel Can]

Thirty Seconds To Make A Point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVRxzoKQ8Zk

The original KKK, and the KKK for most of its halcion years, was 100% Democrat. No exceptions. As were all the slave owners. And the Old South itself.

Somebody wants you to forget that, and to forget their entire history.

Good people remember.

irrelevant.
It does not matter how many times you say it, it is still irrelevant and shall remain so.

I didn't "say" anything.

Argue with the gentleman with the AR-15.

[Walker]

"We have shootings all the time precisely becuz we are not an openly armed society. We plaster gun-free everywhere and act surprised when nutjobs target such places."

a good point, but the contrary scenario carries with it it's own problems. The argument is that if guns could be bought by anyone and openly carried, confrontations between people and/or groups that would have ended without real incident, instead, escalate and become lethal situations.

society would sooner devolve into a giant wild west bar scene or high noon shootout in the streets than become an exemplar of peace, virtue and justice.

Contrary to the contrary imagining:

Nope. But if everyone was packing or had a shotgun within reach in the home there might be more dead wife-beaters, and more who change their wife-beating ways because that could get them shot for their evil ways.

The little psychos of today would learn early on in life the purpose of the gun, and the significance of that purpose. That means that corporeal punishment would probably need to be re-instituted, to drive the importance of the message home, and that the importance is not a matter of relativism, subject to debate.

The Wild West ain’t got nothing on now. Every weekend in Chicago: 20, 30, 40 shootings. They don’t tell you what’s going on during the rest of the week, but you gotta figure it’s more of the same.

That wasn’t going on in the Wild West. People were much more polite then. Just look at how they wrote. All flowery and politeness back in the days when there were no gun restrictions, and insults were face-to-face, with consequences.

The Shootout at the OK corral is infamous because it was a shootout, and because shootouts were rare. Not now. Gang shootouts by gangs that can’t shoot straight are commonplace now.

People still talk about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago from a hundred years ago, back in the Italian Gangster Days. I think fewer than ten were murdered on that day. These days, that’s forgotten by mid-week because it happens so often.

These days, drug-dazed gang yutes spraying bullets while on a sprint watch too many cowboy movies. They don’t realize that shooting a pistol or revolver while running is just as effective as shooting from the back of a galloping horse, which is ineffective unless practiced a lot.

Maybe they just like the big noise they make in sound and society, because those Tony Montana wannabes don't have a voice.

[iambiguous]

Note to IC:

Will turning Judgment Day and eternal damnation into a joke likely work with God?

I wouldn't try it.

Lots of people do.

People like henry, apparently.

So, back to this: It's Judgment Day for henry. He's packin' at the Pearly Gates and he's on the righteous path in regard to abortion. He can assure God that he has never once had one. And he apologizes for the joke. But his God is still the Deist God.

Does he have to renounce this and accept Jesus Christ as his own personal savior or not?

Me?
Well, I'd like to think that if there is a Christian God, He'd at least respect the fact that I often took His existence quite seriously.

"Took His existence seriously"? What does that mean?

If a person holds the existence of God losely, as one of many possible theses, does that amount to "taking God seriously?" Or does thinking about Him, and deciding one is just as well to do nothing but wait to see what happens after one dies, does that amount to "taking God seriously"? Or how about living one's whole life as a skeptic, and then just hoping to get a pass on whatever terms please me...is that "taking God seriously"? What if God had spoken, and I simply refused to read His words or think about them, or only read them with an urgent desire to dismiss what I was reading; would I be "taking God seriously"? Or if I prefered to dabble in other "religions," and perhaps in some form of universalism, because I couldn't be bothered to search a book that would put serious responsibilties on me to know and respond to truth; would I then be "taking God seriously"?

And what if He sent His Son, and I never even bothered to pay attention, even though I had heard about that: would that be "taking God seriously"?

You're going to have to pin that down. What's allegedly "serious" to one person may ultimately prove not really very "serious" at all.

Exactly! Given the manner in which our religious faith reflects all of the existential variables in our life that predispose us to go in any number of directions here, some will be more serious about it than others.

And that includes you too, of course.

But I'm certainly willing to put my own commitment to seriously grappling with God and religion on the line. Though, sure, if God taps me on the shoulder on Judgment Day and insists that He must first run that by you, I'm likely damned.

Just not henry, right?

And here at PN, it's not God that pins things down, it's you. It's you who judges us as either the True Christian packin' or as damned.

And then that hush-hush "private" deal you have with henry. He shares your own political prejudices on things like guns and abortions so Jesus Christ will cut him some slack on Judgment Day.

That loophole I keep waiting for.