Guns, the NRA, the constitution and senseless shootings

This is such fucking basic logic.

Of course, I'm guessing the gun nuts are religious nuts, too.

So, where does logic ever stand a chance?

 

Well put.

I can't believe this argument.

More than any other piece-of-shit tug-of-war, I can't believe this one.

 

Has it been mentioned yet in this thread that there's apparently no waiting period in Virginia? They run a computer check against known wants and warrants.

 

I'm pretty sure that alcohol kills more people than guns. I saw a little over 30K in killed by guns over one recent year in the NYT article cited earlier in this thread. These people assert about 75K killed by alcohol annually:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/Spotlight/2003_Alcohol_Conference_Proceedings.htm

I don't know...statistics can be deceptive and as I'm at work, I don't have the time to research this and figure out how firearm deaths compare to alcohol deaths. Moving away from that side-note...

I hate guns, but I suspect a crackdown on gun ownership wouldn't work. When people are determined to do something, they will, regardless of laws. I think the root problem is our culture. I think you could give a loaded handgun to every adult in Sweden tomorrow and they'd still have a lower per capita gun fatality rate than us. I'd enjoy seeing this thread turn to our culture rather than re-hashing the old gun control debate.

There are some perceptive folks around this board...I'd like to hear their take on the cultural aspect. I'm afraid that I have a hard time answering this question, even though I'm convinced it's the right one to ask. I think the fact that as a culture we are extremely fucking violent is so obvious as to be beyond debate. More controversial would be the assertion that we, as a culture, don't respect human life very much. I don't think we do. But it's messy to debate all of these very non-quantifiable factors...people usually start with their conclusions pre-ordained and then search for evidence that validates what they want to believe.

I would also suggest that having a shallow consumer culture in lieu of a more solid cultural foundation is a problem. Without a cultural referent, I think it's harder for people to interpret life and deal with life's inevitable failures. I know this is getting way out, far from specifics about guns, but I think it ties in. The vapid and quasi-nihilistic quality of consumer culture is someone that seems apparent to damn near everyone with a brain. The right blames the godless left, the left blames the reduction of human life to a meaningless treadmill of work and consumption to keep the system going. In a way, I think they're both right. Thoughts?

 

I posted this over on the other thread -

We are the most casually violent culture on the planet. Until we rcognize that in ourselves, nothing will, or can, change.

 

Maybe this will make me middle of the road, or maybe it makes me a wingnut, I don't know, but I grew up in hunting areas, and have no problem with people who have hunting weapons.

But assault weapons should be banned. Anything fully automatic should be banned.

And handguns should be banned. You want to target shoot, you can do it with a rifle. You want to hunt, you can do it with a shotgun.

There is no practical use for a handgun, and they are WAY too easy to conceal.

 

writing irish, very profound and excellent post.

Something I like about Bowling for Columbine, if you take out all of Moore's self-congratulatory grandstanding, at its base it poses these questions without giving some half-baked "answer." These are all interesting points that deserve consideration.

Americans love violent movies: look at "300" or "Grindhouse" as recent examples. But Japan has produced some of the most violent movies I've ever seen: "Ichi the Killer" and "Battle Royale." Americans love violent video games like Grand Theft Auto, yet such games are equally popular in Japan, Canada, Australia and Britain.

We have this take-take-take consumer culture, but so does Japan and to a lesser extent Australia. It's so baffling and something that really needs to be taken into greater consideration.

 

If Americans had the same Puritanical attitude towards violence we still do sex, there would be much less of this, IMO.

Sex = 'not ok.' Violence = ok

 

This is why it's so maddening. Where does our violence/nihilism come from? Good point about Japan. Japan's more consumerist than us, but they don't have the problem, so you can't blame consumerism. There are countries that are more secular than us, but don't have the problem, so you can't blame secularism. There are countries that are more religious than us that don't have the problem, so you can't blame religious nuts. You can't blame poverty...plenty of countries with worse poverty. You can't blame wealth....we don't set the standard on that any more. Why are we so fucking homicidal? This question baffles me. A lot of other questions about social ills seem obvious to me. Not this one.

 

Much of it, IMO, has to do with the dominant culture's (WASP) history/characteristics (particularly those which settled America) as well as that America has yet to 'lose' a war (at least on its own shores). Japan was always highly militaristic, but after the two nuclear bombs, it became much less so, unsurprisingly.

Same with Europe. They have seen so much tension and Warfare (WWI and WWII) that it took much of their desire for conflict out of their collective system. This is also why much of Europe is Atheistic. That is, people witnessed things (trench warfare, the Holocaust, etc.) which made them seriously question whether God could possibly exist in the face of such brutality.

The US really hasn't had that type of all-out, epic destruction that other parts of the globe have experienced, and this contributes to its naivety with regards to the horrors of violence.

 

Rok, we are a nation born in blood. We moved west at the price of the lives of millions of indigenous Americans. The war we had on our own shores - the Civil War - spilled the blood of hundreds of thousands. We are a people bathed in blood.

As are all people everywhere, at one point or another in their history. The difference with us is that by now we should know better.

nb:Japan demilitarized because we took away their army and their navy.