Forum - View topicNEWS: Media Reports Tie D.C. Navy Yard Shooter to Violent Video Games
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
victor viper
 Posts: 630 Location: The deep south |
|
|||||
I concur with the sentiment, but I do have to question how effective such a measure would be. After all, every cigarette smoked causes some type of damage to someone somewhere, but most guns and gun owners never harm a hair on anyone's head. The health and societal costs are much more uniformly distributed in the case of cigarette smoking. That solution sure beats knee-jerk prohibition, though.
On the topic of waiting periods, how about if our elected officials agreed on a "cooling off" period, say 18 months, after any major tragedy before drafting long-lasting (and often disastrous) new legislation. It would have spared us the Patriot Act, the creation of the TSA, and most laws named "(insert name)'s Law" (most of which are badly thought out).
I don't really subscribe to her brand of philosophy (at least not since I was a 20-year old college student), but Ayn Rand had an interesting response to this question that I can vividly recall. The gist of her answer is that a handgun is the civilized man's preferred last resort for purposes of self-defense. In the hands of a civilized, competently trained and sane individual, a handgun affords the individual an effective means of self-defense without infringing on the individual liberties of innocent, non-aggressive parties. A nuclear missile is not a weapon of self-defense, as such a device cannot be used without massive collateral consequences, thereby violating the individual rights of innocent parties. I don't know if you'll agree with this answer (if you don't really believe in the notion of natural law then the whole argument is for naught), but I've yet to see one that's appreciably better. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
revolutionotaku
Posts: 890 |
|
|||||
|
Last year, ABC News reported that 1 in 5 Americans suffer from mental illness.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/01/19/1-in-5-americans-suffer-from-mental-illness/ |
||||||
|
||||||
Deadwing
 Posts: 174 Location: North Augusta, SC |
|
|||||
|
("TL;DR" warning. Long post ahead.)
Y'know, I'm about as liberal as one can get. I support same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, environmental protection, regulating corporations, progressive taxation, etc. I'm one of those guys the GOP likes to call a "socialist." But there's always been one issue that I disagree with my my fellow liberals on, and that's guns. Maybe it's because I'm accustomed to guns — I don't hunt, but I've been to the range many times and fired off several different semi-auto handguns, a .357 revolver, pump-action and semi-auto shotguns, a Cx4 Storm (a pistol-caliber carbine), and an AR-15 — but I view them as tools with legitimate purposes (recreation, sport, and, if necessary, self-defense), not as carnage-spewing instruments of death and misery. I know many anti-gun people feel that gun owners are troglodytes who are trying to compensate for something by owning a phallic symbol that makes them feel like Dirty Harry, but I think we could all do without the pointless caricatures and name-calling. It's no different from when one of those idiot pundits on Fox News caricatures liberals as latte-drinking, Christianity-hating, anti-American, East-/West-coast elitist communists living off the government dole. Of course, I do believe our representatives in government have a responsibility to make tragedies like mass shootings as rare as possible, but I don't think we should resort to emotionally-charged, knee-jerk responses when it comes to debating or crafting policy. Mass killings are indeed horrific, but they are statistically very rare, comprising a tiny percentage of all homicides. They’re anomalies. By all accounts, drunken driving is a vastly more horrible problem than mass shootings in terms of sheer number of deaths. According to the NHTSA, in 2011 there were 9873 alcohol-related traffic deaths. 181 of those deaths were children 14 years of age or younger. On average, more people die from drunk drivers each month than have been killed in mass shootings in the past 30 years. And these are just traffic deaths involving alcohol. How many other lives are ruined or destroyed by alcohol abuse every year? However, you don’t see anybody calling for reinstating the Eighteenth Amendment. The difference in reaction is a clear example of what is known as “misleading vividness.” Anomalous incidents tend to evoke more of a reaction than things that are "business as usual" because they tend to stick out in our minds more. This explains why calls for stricter gun control almost always happen in response to mass shootings, and almost never in response to homicide in general, even though the latter claims more lives. It's like how even though air travel is statistically one of the safest means of travel, many people refuse to fly because because of fear of plane crashes, but think nothing of getting out on the road every day despite the greater danger. Now, even though mass shootings are statistically rare doesn't mean that they don't deserve a disproportionate share of the nation's attention. The scale of these incidences can inflict a greater emotional toll on the communities affected by them than the routine day-to-day violence does, and they sometimes involve the deaths of children, who aren't typically the victims of regular street crime. So, we do need to do more to prevent mass killings, but, just like how we need to do more to curb drunken driving and combat alcoholism without outlawing alcohol, we need to do so in a way that actually works and doesn’t infringe on Second Amendment rights. For example, something many perpetrators of mass killings have in common are psychological issues of some kind: mental illness, severe personality disorders, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Harris & Klebold, Cho, Loughner, Holmes, Lanza, and Alexis all had something wrong with them mentally and apparently showed warning signs long before they went on their murderous rampages. If they had been institutionalized or otherwise properly monitored, we could have avoided these senseless tragedies. Perhaps we need to reevaluate the mental health situation in this country, and we definitely need to do something to keep guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people who have no business handling or having access to firearms. This is where better enforcement of existing laws comes in. Sometimes, the shooter was able to legally gain access to firearms, yet it almost always comes to light that the shooter was showing clear warning signs that they were, to put it bluntly, completely freakin' nuts. For example, Aaron Alexis was cited for misconduct eight times while in the Navy, was arrested on two occasions — once for unlawfully discharging a firearm within city limits, and again for shooting out a man's tires —, and has been treated for mental illness. The problem isn't that private, law-abiding, mentally-sound citizens can own guns. The problem is that people like Alexis are allowed to slip through the cracks. Better enforcement of existing laws are what I'd call "sensible gun control." We already have laws mandating background checks and prohibiting the mentally ill and convicted felons from possessing firearms. Pretty much everyone, even the NRA, agrees with this bare minimum standard. They'd be more than sufficient to make mass shootings a vanishingly rare phenomenon, but apparently we're not doing a good enough job enforcing them. Of course, some people think "common-sense gun legislation" also includes outright banning entire classes of firearms or making it prohibitively difficult for citizens to acquire guns. But as far as I'm concerned, things like the Assault Weapons Ban (and its state-level counterparts) are like putting a band-aid on gangrene. It doesn't address the core causes of gun violence, whether that violence be from lone maniacs that perpetrate mass shootings or from common criminals who are responsible for the bulk of violent crime in America. Now, I'm not going to say that "more guns = less" crime because statistics don't bear it out, but I'm also not going to say "more gun control = less crime" either, because the statistic don't support that, either. There doesn't appear to be any correlation one way or another between homicide rates and relative toughness of gun laws. It doesn't matter if you're comparing one country with another, one U.S. state with another, or one U.S. city with another. For every example of a place with tough gun laws and low violent crime or lax gun laws and high violent crime, there's always a counterexample. Switzerland, probably the most gun-friendly place in Europe, has one of the lowest homicide rates on the continent; it's only a bit more than half that of the notoriously anti-gun UK. Russia, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, and Jamaica have very restrictive gun laws and much lower rates of gun ownership than the U.S. (in many cases, it's nearly impossible for the average civilian to legally own a gun in these countries), but have murder rates much, much greater than the U.S. California, the Brady Campaign's crown jewel, has the same homicide rate as Texas, both of them sitting right around the national average. Blood-soaked Maryland has tough gun laws, while the relatively peaceful Utah has lax gun laws. D.C. and Chicago are ridden with violence despite having some of the toughest gun laws in America, while Austin and Des Moines are among safest big cities in the country. Red state or blue state, good Brady ranking or bad Brady ranking, it's totally random. Toughness of gun laws and levels of violent crime might not be correlated, but I will tell you what is correlated with violent crime: poverty. Specifically, urban poverty. Violent crime is concentrated in cities with high poverty rates, and specifically in the poorest neighborhoods within those cities. Even down here in my part of the country (born in Augusta, GA, live right across the river in SC), the differences in murder and other violent crime rates can vary widely despite nearly uniform gun laws. Augusta proper has a murder rate of over double the state average of 5.8 per 100,000 (2010 data), but the much more affluent suburbs of Evans and Martinez have considerably lower rates of violent crime, well below both the state and national average (incidentally, Augusta's homicide rate is comparable to Chicago's, and Georgia and Illinois as a whole have nearly identical homicide rates as well). A couple of hours away we have the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, which is infamous for passing an ordinance requiring — yes, requiring — all adult residents (with obvious exceptions such as criminals and the mentally ill, as well as "conscientious objectors" and those too poor to afford guns) to own and maintain a firearm. Despite said law being on the books for 30 years, Kennesaw hasn't exactly devolved into Wild West shootouts. In fact, it is regarded as one of the best small towns in America, and there has been a grand total of one murder there in the past three decades and it maintains a lower crime rate than even the similarly-sized Evans and Martinez. No matter what the state, you can go county by county, and you'll see violent crime rates decline as poverty rates decline and median household incomes increase. It would be nice if we could do something simple like pass an Assault Weapon Ban, call it a day, and all our worries would be over, but it's not that easy. Gun control is a placebo, and does not address the root causes of violent crime. Tough gun control in the UK and Australia has not had an appreciable affect on rates of violence, nor has it prevented mass shootings like the Cumbria and Monash University shootings (technically, the Monash shooting wasn't a "mass shooting" because, with a tally of 2 dead and 5 wounded, it didn't meet the requisite casualty threshold, but it could have been much worse than it was). D.C.'s tough gun laws didn't keep a mental case from shooting up a Naval yard. There's no evidence the federal AWB worked (less than 2% of all homicides are committed with a rifle of any kind), and even though it sunsetted a decade ago, and despite more and more states having become "shall-issue," the national homicide rate continues to decline. Reinstating the AWB or pushing for other equally prohibitive laws will not lower the crime rate one bit, and it's not worth it. It's a losing issue. The ship has sailed, and pushing for California-style, Brady-friendly gun control at the federal level, which does nothing but punish the 50 million law-abiding, gun-owning households in America, plays right into the GOP's hands. We need measures that involve things other than prohibiting entire categories of weapons. More effective background checks, harsher punishments for unlawful gun trafficking, and just plain better enforcement of the laws we already have might actually accomplish something and wouldn't infringe on our Second Amendment rights. But our main focus should be on eliminating the conditions that give rise to violence in the first place. If we did that instead, if we were the ones who took the initiative to really do something proactive and constructive in keeping disadvantaged youths away from crime by improving their lot in life, if we were the ones insisting we do a better job in taking care of the mentally ill and those with severe behavioral disorders so that they don't pose a threat to themselves and others, then we could really make a difference and make all forms of violence, from common street crime to mass shootings, an increasingly rare occurrence. As the Liberal Gun Club puts it, "Want less gun violence? Fight poverty, not gun owners." And that's all I have to say about that. |
||||||
|
||||||
TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5861 Location: Virginia, United States |
|
|||||
This is the attitude that kills any debate. Who can talk to you. You'll pretend that gun owners are some kind of minority group that you can dismiss with a grain of salt. |
||||||
|
||||||
Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23858 |
|
|||||
But is there truly any debate? Isn't the position of the pro-gun crowd that effective gun control is impossible and the only real option is to do nothing? I'm not even trying to be facetious or sarcastic here - that really is the message I am getting from this thread. |
||||||
|
||||||
Panzer Vor
 Posts: 648 |
|
|||||
Not quite. Only the lunatic fringe of the pro-gun lobby would seriously contend that the only real option is to do nothing. Most American gun owners are actually in favor of gun control, just not to the extreme degree that the Brady Campaign and its zealots demand. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23858 |
|
|||||
That's the part that kills me. I read that a majority of gun owners favour background checks and waiting periods yet the US government can't even close the gun show loophole. Bizarre. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Deadwing
Posts: 174 Location: North Augusta, SC |
|
|||||
Well, most Americans are in favor of very specific forms of gun legislation. The only measures that polling data shows clear and overwhelming majority support for are background checks and tougher penalties for making illegal "straw purchases." A majority also say that we should simply do more to better enforce existing laws, but not add new laws.
You're talking as if Congress is able to actually accomplish anything these days. The Grand Obstructionist Party only cares about beating Obama, and the Dems can't seem to talk about gun control without bringing up useless, dead-in-the-water legislation like the AWB. Even if it did have a chance of passing here in 2013, it's only effect would be to cause repeat of the 1994 midterms. Also according to a study done by the National Institute of Justice, only 2% of firearms used in crimes were obtained at a gun show. And there are no unlicensed commercial dealers at gun shows; all the laws governing commercial sales of firearms applies to gun shows as well. The dealer needs and FFL to sell and purchasers must be subjected to a backgroud check. "Straw purchases" are already illegal as well. Criminals obtain most of their guns illegally, anyway. So, I fail to see what good closing this supposed "loophole" will do. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23858 |
|
|||||
|
There are no unlicensed commercial dealers at gun shows, but gun shows permit private sellers to do business there and they are not subject to the same restrictions. Yes, it's true, that kind of business can be conducted anywhere, but gun shows certainly make it more convenient to put together private sellers with those looking to get around the usual restrictions, dont they?
|
||||||
|
||||||
ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
|
|||||
No...what kills any debate is declaring that the debate is over the moment anyone proposes anything that would take anything away from anyone:
There's not much left to do at that point besides pointing out how utterly absurd and inconsistent a position that is. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
TarsTarkas
Posts: 5861 Location: Virginia, United States |
|
|||||
Gun control for me, means keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those with mental problems, and those incapable of handling guns safely. Gun control for the anti-gun crowd, means taking guns away from everyone. We can debate the Second Amendment till hell freezes over, but when you tell gun owners you are going to take their rights away, well, yes the debate is over. The Navy Yard shooter should not have had access to any guns, and most definitely should not have had a clearance. The man was clearly mentally unstable and probably has been for quite some time. This clearly highlights the problem with the gun debate, the human element. With the Navy Yard shooter, the biggest concern the media has is with casting the mentally handicapped/challenged/impaired/unstable in a bad light. There are no military style weaponry and no unlimited magazines to yell about. Just shotgun shells. So this shooting will blow over quite quickly, because no one wants to do anything about the human causes. And that is the biggest lesson we have failed to learn from since the Columbine school shootings. Nothing really has changed in schools, sure there are public campaigns to stop bullying, but for the most part nothing enforceable. Schools usually do nothing, and if they do something administrative wise, they still leave you out to hang in the wind. When you do stand up for yourself, then you get punished along with the bully. Bullying will only end when schools see it as an evil disease that must be eradicated. So schools still continue to produce human monsters, along with A students. Our American society is so politically correct, that we are unable to deal with human problems that our society has, because we are afraid of being accused of offending some group or other entities. So in the end, the Navy Yard shooting does nothing for the gun debate, because it has none of the hot button issues going for it, and the only issue that should be talked about, but won't, is the mental issue. Because it is not politically correct. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
ikillchicken
Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
|
|||||
Claiming "we shouldn't give guns to dangerous people" is only superficially reasonable if you also insist that we must absolutely prioritize the right of everyone else to own a gun. Because obviously this is easier said than done. It's an issue of how we determine who is dangerous and who isn't. I don't think anyone here has actually said we need to unequivocally take all guns away from everyone. But I certainly think it would be reasonable to drastically scale back the type of guns, the number, and in general significantly increase the degree of control. The onus needs to fall much heavier on gun owners to prove they can indeed be trusted with a firearm rather than the other way around. That is what is reasonable given such a potentially deadly weapon. And I really don't think we should just be handing people firearms after they've been approved to own one at which point there is absolutely no oversight whatsoever.
Yeah, you keep claiming this, but you've yet to actually respond to all the blatant counterexamples I put forth. There has to be a balance between freedom and safety. As much as we may often be tempted toward giving up too much of the former for the latter, the reverse is also highly problematic and quite simply not based at all in reality. To claim we can never take anything away from gun owners no matter the danger it causes is a totally inconsistent and unsupportable position. A reasonable person must at least acknowledge that the issue bears discussion and comes down to balancing safety with the right to own guns.
Except nobody here is suggesting that we shouldn't also be tackling mental health issues. Quite to the contrary. But there are two sides to this. We need to deal with the reasons people do these massacres for sure. But we also need to look at how we can diminish a single aberrant individual's ability to inflict massive damage and loss of life. There's massive room for improvement in America but short of taking a page right out of Psycho-Pass there will always be dangerous people that we need to prevent from having the means do do things like this. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
TarsTarkas
Posts: 5861 Location: Virginia, United States |
|
|||||
|
@ikillchicken
I have no problems for mandatory safety classes and training, and 100% background checks, no loop holes and all that. Problem is everyone wants to gun owners to be the ones to give way first. Since Columbine there has not been any movement on dealing with the human causes. None. No reforms in school. No dealing with mental health issues. No one wants to deal with the political firestorms these issues will bring, even though they would deal directly with the issues that are the ultimate cause of these violent crimes. So all the onus is put on gun owners, to deal with the cosmetic symptoms, not the actual causes. This is why there is no movement on gun issues, because gun owners know, that no one is serious about actually saving lives. It is all just token efforts to say we did something. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
ikillchicken
Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
|
|||||
I don't see what being asked to give way first has to do with anything. If gun ownership is one of the causes of the problem then gun owners refusing to give in simply because other causes aren't being addressed as well is just completely ridiculous. At best it is juvenile and petty, and at worst it is a disingenuous cover to simply avoid giving at all. A reasonable gun owner ought to still give in about guns even if they also speak out for the need for other change. And if guns aren't part of the problem then giving first is irrelevant. One should never have to give in be it first, last or anything in between. So yeah, giving in first is irrelevant. Ultimately it comes back to whether or not guns are a part of the problem. And on that matter you've offered no response. Nothing to address my own argument to the contrary. Hence I find your post entirely unconvincing. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
victor viper
Posts: 630 Location: The deep south |
|
|||||
Well, the problem is when you start talking about making public policy which will impact the lives of 300 million people, and said policy is designed to thwart the potential actions of one aberrant individual (as there are plenty of aberrant individuals out there). TarsTarkas makes a good point about political theater. Most knee-jerk policies which get proposed in the face of major tragedies are window dressing. And, I think few people on other side of the gun debate will argue that we do seem to have a mental health crisis in the United States, and in principle it is probably a good idea to keep mentally unstable individuals away from guns. But there lies the problem. There is a wide gulf between a good idea and viable public policy and legislation. The suggestion that we should keep guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable is fine as an abstract idea, but how does one actually try to accomplish this within the boundaries of the law? I've seen it estimated that 20% of the adult population of the US uses some type of psychiatric medication. Do we simply start putting names in a database every time psychiatric medications are dispensed and say "sorry, the second amendment doesn't apply to you any more" to 1/5 of the population? No, of course not. Most of those people pose little to no risk of becoming mass shooters. And even if they did, isn't it dangerous to deny individuals their constitutional protections on the basis that they might commit a crime? What about the unintended consequences of such a policy? If seeking diagnosis for a psychiatric condition is going to get the seeker placed on a watch list or worse, isn't it reasonable to infer some of those individuals might opt to remain untreated? Isn't it reasonable to wonder what hidden costs will be incurred when those individuals go untreated? What will be the response when one of those untreated individuals slips under the radar and commits a horrible crime? Probably the exact same response we've seen in the Navy Yard case. |
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group