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Post by wannaberoo'ing on Dec 17, 2012 10:42:25 GMT -5
Actually alot of my posts have been about our society and our values and what exists in our culture that could be helping to perpetuate these acts of unthinkable violence. Parents/parenting are definitely included in everything I'm saying. I am really trying to speak of all this in as a broad a framework as I can because I see so much of this as a web of factors all interacting to create for a tremendous malfunction in our society. Trying to get to the inner circle, the beginning point I guess one could say, is what I'm aiming for. No, video games certainly aren't the center. But they are a product, a recognizable output, of what I imagine to be this root cultural component of American society that embraces and glorifies violence. I'm just trying to find some conceptually tight route to follow in my thinking. Working on a paper. Looking for answers. It all goes pretty far for me, into our history, our collective unconscious, our deep-seated cultural constructs that we all operate by.
I don't know how much detail anyone wants but I can speak to mental health reform. Mental health centers are generally (but not always) providers of both mental health services and substance abuse services. Some also provide services for those with developmental disabilities. The problem is that governments are easily convinced that the private sector should be providing mental health services and not government. State run hospitals and facilities are closed and the clients who had been served by them are moved back into their "community".
Unlike hospitals and residential programs, communities are not capable of dealing with the most severely involved clients. In N.C. most providers are for profit agencies and don't even take on the most difficult cases.
A study done on NC showed that during the first six months of 2010 over 3,000 people were wait-listed for psychiatric hospitalization and, on average, they waited 2.6 days for admission. Eighty-six percent of patients waited in hospital ER's. A significant number of people experienced extreme delays of several days to weeks. 1,476 waited 2 days or longer. Of these, 212 waited 7 days or longer.
Here's the one that worries me - 27%, over 900 patients were returned home without admission after waiting an average of 1.8 days.
Part of the problem is that we all assume that medication will solve psychiatric issues. Unfortunately while amazing progress has been made in medications these do not work for all people, the side effects can be too much for people and frankly if people are in the community setting there is no way of assuring that the medications are taken on a regular basis.
I'll go further if you want more information, don't want to bore anyone.
if you have anything other than your opinion or anecdotes that proves your point I'd love to see it
Lol bro, you don't know what the fack you are talking about.
If you take out chile from the equation because they produce massive amounts of cocaine there, the USA has 5x the amount of gun murders per capita than the next leading country (turkey - and you should know THEIR issues...).
The bottom line is, we don't have any military issues going on on our soil yet there is a MASSIVE amount of gun murders per capita here compared to anywhere else in the world. Even Canada, where their gun laws are even more lax than ours.
This is a problem with America, not guns.
Do your facking research before acting like you know what the fack you're talking about.
The entire board is now dumber after reading your post.
Actually alot of my posts have been about our society and our values and what exists in our culture that could be helping to perpetuate these acts of unthinkable violence. Parents/parenting are definitely included in everything I'm saying. I am really trying to speak of all this in as a broad a framework as I can because I see so much of this as a web of factors all interacting to create for a tremendous malfunction in our society. Trying to get to the inner circle, the beginning point I guess one could say, is what I'm aiming for. No, video games certainly aren't the center. But they are a product, a recognizable output, of what I imagine to be this root cultural component of American society that embraces and glorifies violence. I'm just trying to find some conceptually tight route to follow in my thinking. Working on a paper. Looking for answers. It all goes pretty far for me, into our history, our collective unconscious, our deep-seated cultural constructs that we all operate by.
I agree that the country has tumbled further and further from a common morality, but I just think the video games angle is a cop-out in many respects. People have been committing diabolical acts since the dawn of man, centuries before this country was even founded. What we need to address in this country is a) how easily it is for those people to get weapons capable of mass murder, b) how easily it is for those people's mental health issues to go undetected and untreated, and c) what are we as a country going to do to reverse the current trend of selfish, immoral and reprehensible behavior towards our fellow humans.
Does this mean everyone will join hands in unity and sing songs and be happy forever? No. But instead of escalating a guy cutting a person off and that person carrying a firearm with them, maybe we can get to a place where honking and flipping the bird is sufficient retribution for getting cut off. Maybe, instead of a kid getting bullied for 10 years and then taking it out on innocents, people step in after seeing it once or twice and save a lot of tragedy.
There are countless (literally, countless) ways we could talk about preventing tragedies like this. To focus on too many will lead to this pending "showdown" (and the fact that there will even need to be a confrontational political debate about gun control in this country is, to put it bluntly, a sickening proposition to even consider) being an unorganized mess and will accomplish little, if anything. I agree wholeheartedly that the generation currently growing into adulthood is full of insufferable, unconscionable, spoiled, enabled and selfish lemmings, but gun control and rebuilding the sense of community this country probably needs are two different discussions. Unfortunately, the gun control debate can't be about personal feelings, it needs to be about hard facts. And hard facts dictate that the way guns are readily available in this country is the main difference between this country and countries without rampant gun violence. The first step to stopping these acts is to take the tools used to carry them out away.
Two random thoughts I had yesterday:
I was watching Mayor Bloomberg on one of the morning shows and he said (which is a great point), if between 40,000 and 50,000 American soldiers died fighting a war that this President got the country into, people would be rioting in the streets. But that's the amount of people that's likely going to be killed by illegal weapons in the US during Obama's current term, which is more people than the country had die in the Vietnam war. Illegal guns, for those still confused, are illegal because it is incredibly easy to "lose" a gun in the system and have it pop up on the black market. If you restrict the market and monitor it more closely, illegal guns don't walk themselves from Virginia to NYC on a daily basis and commit 85% of the violent gun-related crimes in this city. If it seems like I'm bitter about how the Virginia governor
Also, reading an article yesterday and saw you can buy the following on the internet: A Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle (a gun so powerful you can shoot an armor piercing bullet through an armored vehicle nearly 5 MILES away), an AK-47, a glock (if anyone says "it's just a handgun," they get a f*cking fresh one), Bushmaster M4 Type Turbine (an assault rifle that is widely used in Iraq/Afghanistan), and an M134 General Electric Minigun. What's that last one, you ask?
That, my friends, can be legally purchased since it was created before the 1986 Firearm Owner Protection Act, and thus grandfathered in along with any machine guns made before the signing of that legislature. This weapon was used to explode TANKS, HELICOPTERS AND ARMORED VEHICLES IN VIETNAM. But Joe W. F*ckface feels his freedom is being impended by not allowing untrained citizens to purchase it.
If you support the belief that is an undeniable freedom based on the words of the founding fathers....f*ck you. I don't care if that offends anyone, because to be honest people have been p*ssy-footing around this issue for far too long for us to continue to worry about hurting feelings in the interest of protecting 1st grade classrooms from being massacred.
How have you wandered through life being this self-unaware without getting hit by a bus? At this point you're playing with house money.
How easy is it to get guns in those other civilized countries? Infinitely more difficult than it is here in the States. But sure, keep acting like the issue is only that Americans are f*cked up and it has nothing to do with the fact that you could get a gun over-nighted to your house and kill your boss tomorrow.
And on the video game issue: same video games available and played in Europe and Canada. Look at the per capita gun murder rate. Obviously not as much of a link as some want to believe.
Is there a link between becoming desensitized to death and the value of life? I believe yes. Does this lead to a few misguided people or mentally inept people to kill? Sure. But it doesn't account for having THIRTY FIVE TIMES as many gun murders per capita as France, where gun laws are relatively similar and they play COD daily.
This is a problem with America loving guns. This is a problem with Americans thinking gun ownership is an inalienable right. This is a problem with people like you who can't see facts staring them straight in the face.
There are obviously many secondary factors, like mental health treatment and violence in the media. But guns is the #1 issue.
How have you wandered through life being this self-unaware without getting hit by a bus? At this point you're playing with house money.
How easy is it to get guns in those other civilized countries? Infinitely more difficult than it is here in the States. But sure, keep acting like the issue is only that Americans are f*cked up and it has nothing to do with the fact that you could get a gun over-nighted to your house and kill your boss tomorrow.
But it doesn't account for having THIRTY FIVE TIMES as many gun murders per capita as France, where gun laws are relatively similar and they play COD daily.
Prove this statement. You think my academic literature is so Quackking stupid, how bout you prove this statement.
I don't know how much detail anyone wants but I can speak to mental health reform. Mental health centers are generally (but not always) providers of both mental health services and substance abuse services. Some also provide services for those with developmental disabilities. The problem is that governments are easily convinced that the private sector should be providing mental health services and not government. State run hospitals and facilities are closed and the clients who had been served by them are moved back into their "community".
Unlike hospitals and residential programs, communities are not capable of dealing with the most severely involved clients. In N.C. most providers are for profit agencies and don't even take on the most difficult cases.
A study done on NC showed that during the first six months of 2010 over 3,000 people were wait-listed for psychiatric hospitalization and, on average, they waited 2.6 days for admission. Eighty-six percent of patients waited in hospital ER's. A significant number of people experienced extreme delays of several days to weeks. 1,476 waited 2 days or longer. Of these, 212 waited 7 days or longer.
Here's the one that worries me - 27%, over 900 patients were returned home without admission after waiting an average of 1.8 days.
Part of the problem is that we all assume that medication will solve psychiatric issues. Unfortunately while amazing progress has been made in medications these do not work for all people, the side effects can be too much for people and frankly if people are in the community setting there is no way of assuring that the medications are taken on a regular basis.
I'll go further if you want more information, don't want to bore anyone.
Those statistics are downright scary. And I'm not suggesting that most people with mental health issues are even remotely capable of what took place at Sandy Hook, I'm just horrified that so many people that are in need of care and are willing to seek it out and get it are being turned away all because of a lack of funding.
Will Connecticut shooting change U.S. support for gun rights? It can be a two-month painstaking process to buy a gun in Canada. (CBC) A firearms expert says Canada's tougher gun laws likely help insulate this country from U.S-style massacres like the one in Connecticut Friday that shocked the world.
A gunman shot and killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in the community of Newtown, making it one of the worst school massacres in U.S. history. The gunman was also found dead at the school, while his mother was found slain in her home, for a total of 28 lives lost.
It’s not yet been revealed exactly how many or what types of weapons the 20-year-old shooter used or how he acquired them.
In many U.S. states, weapons of many kinds are readily available for legal purchase with just a driver’s licence as ID.
“I guess you could say part of their problem would be the fact that their constitution allows it, unlike in Canada [where] it's more of a privilege,” said Tony Di Salvatore is a firearms instructor in Surrey, B.C.
It takes up to 60 days to obtain a firearm in this country, after registering, taking a course and going through background checks.
“It's … just not a five minute process,” Di Salvatore said.
Di Salvatore said Canada's gun controls used to be even stronger until the long-gun registry was dismantled this year.
He says it provided one extra check and balance to regulate weapons.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper signalled last week that his government might not act on recommendations from a federal advisory committee to further loosen gun regulations.
How have you wandered through life being this self-unaware without getting hit by a bus? At this point you're playing with house money.
How easy is it to get guns in those other civilized countries? Infinitely more difficult than it is here in the States. But sure, keep acting like the issue is only that Americans are f*cked up and it has nothing to do with the fact that you could get a gun over-nighted to your house and kill your boss tomorrow.
This is a problem with America loving guns. This is a problem with Americans thinking gun ownership is an inalienable right. This is a problem with people like you who can't see facts staring them straight in the face.
There are obviously many secondary factors, like mental health treatment and violence in the media. But guns is the #1 issue.
If guns is the #1 issue, why is there 1/35th as many gun murders per capita in the uk?
This is a problem with America loving guns. This is a problem with Americans thinking gun ownership is an inalienable right. This is a problem with people like you who can't see facts staring them straight in the face.
There are obviously many secondary factors, like mental health treatment and violence in the media. But guns is the #1 issue.
If guns is the #1 issue, why is there 1/35th as many gun murders per capita in the uk?
Think before you keep spewing stupid.
Because they have gun control?
edit: "Following the Dunblane massacre, the [UK]government passed the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997, banning private ownership of handguns almost completely. Exceptions to the ban include muzzle-loading "black powder" guns, pistols produced before 1917, pistols of historical interest (such as pistols used in notable crimes, rare prototypes, unusual serial numbers and so on), starting pistols, pistols that are of particular aesthetic interest (such as engraved or jewelled guns) and shot pistols for pest control. Under certain circumstances, individuals may be issued a PPW (Personal Protection Weapon) licence. Even the UK's Olympic shooters fall under this ban; shooters can only train in Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, or abroad (in Switzerland, in practice)."
Post by wannaberoo'ing on Dec 17, 2012 12:04:11 GMT -5
Ugh, I hate fights. It gets us nowhere.
I've been enjoying the discussion with you, flanzo. Definitely. Thanks for that. But at this point, fellas, I'm bowing out. I just don't think my emotional state can handle any more heated talk.
We've all said our piece. I think that there are some incredibly insightful and accurate commentaries by you all.
Two seconds on Wikipedia proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
"Registration of firearms in Canada has been an issue since the 1930s when the registration of handguns became mandatory. Over the past few decades, legislation had become increasingly restrictive for firearm owners and from 1995 until 2012, all firearms were required to be registered."
And handguns and assault rifles aren't required to be registered through the NFA? Hello.
This is a problem with America loving guns. This is a problem with Americans thinking gun ownership is an inalienable right. This is a problem with people like you who can't see facts staring them straight in the face.
There are obviously many secondary factors, like mental health treatment and violence in the media. But guns is the #1 issue.
If guns is the #1 issue, why is there 1/35th as many gun murders per capita in the uk?
How have you wandered through life being this self-unaware without getting hit by a bus? At this point you're playing with house money.
How easy is it to get guns in those other civilized countries? Infinitely more difficult than it is here in the States. But sure, keep acting like the issue is only that Americans are f*cked up and it has nothing to do with the fact that you could get a gun over-nighted to your house and kill your boss tomorrow.
Canada.
Drops mic
Hey, if you're going to be condescending, at least use coherent statements instead of one-word answers. If you're referring to the ability to purchase firearms online in Canada, I suggest you spend, oh, 5 minutes reading through the many, many steps the Canadian gov't has people go through in order to purchase a weapon. Again, condescension without evidence, you're making a habit of this.
And hey, when discussing one of the single most important topics of our generation, let's equate it to a f*cking freestyle battle that you "win" and "lose."
I've been enjoying the discussion with you, flanzo. Definitely. Thanks for that. But at this point, fellas, I'm bowing out. I just don't think my emotional state can handle any more heated talk.
We've all said our piece. I think that there are some incredibly insightful and accurate commentaries by you all.
There are countless (literally, countless) ways we could talk about preventing tragedies like this. To focus on too many will lead to this pending "showdown" (and the fact that there will even need to be a confrontational political debate about gun control in this country is, to put it bluntly, a sickening proposition to even consider) being an unorganized mess and will accomplish little, if anything. I agree wholeheartedly that the generation currently growing into adulthood is full of insufferable, unconscionable, spoiled, enabled and selfish lemmings, but gun control and rebuilding the sense of community this country probably needs are two different discussions. Unfortunately, the gun control debate can't be about personal feelings, it needs to be about hard facts. And hard facts dictate that the way guns are readily available in this country is the main difference between this country and countries without rampant gun violence. The first step to stopping these acts is to take the tools used to carry them out away.
I don't necessarily agree with the idea that this generation is worse than others, but your thought that gun reform and cultural reform are separate discussions is right on and well stated.
This country was founded on certain beliefs about the right of human beings. I keep reading about how the constitution is out of date and needs to be changed. It has been changed. We've added many amendments since its creation. So, I don't think America has a problem making changes when necessary. One of the rights we were founded on was that we as citizens have the right to take our own safety in our own hands with the same arms that may be used against us. As liberal as I am I don't think we should turn our safety over to the government completely. I think its important to hold on to that right. I'm not one of these crazies that are saying, ” well if these teachers were carrying guns this would have been avoided” Fact is though, that gun ownership is it an all time low in this country. If more people accepted the fact that gun ownership is a fundamental block of the building of this country, made themselves more familiar with these weapons, and taught responsible gun handling and ownership to their families, I don't think there is any doubt that these things would happen less often.
This country was founded on certain beliefs about the right of human beings. I keep reading about how the constitution is out of date and needs to be changed. It has been changed. We've added many amendments since its creation. So, I don't think America has a problem making changes when necessary. One of the rights we were founded on was that we as citizens have the right to take our own safety in our own hands with the same arms that may be used against us. As liberal as I am I don't think we should turn our safety over to the government completely. I think its important to hold on to that right. I'm not one of these crazies that are saying, ” well if these teachers were carrying guns this would have been avoided” Fact is though, that gun ownership is it an all time low in this country. If more people accepted the fact that gun ownership is a fundamental block of the building of this country, made themselves more familiar with these weapons, and taught responsible gun handling and ownership to their families, I don't think there is any doubt that these things would happen less often.
Just a question, do you support restrictions on hand guns and assault weapons? Not trying to pick a fight, just curious.
There are countless (literally, countless) ways we could talk about preventing tragedies like this. To focus on too many will lead to this pending "showdown" (and the fact that there will even need to be a confrontational political debate about gun control in this country is, to put it bluntly, a sickening proposition to even consider) being an unorganized mess and will accomplish little, if anything. I agree wholeheartedly that the generation currently growing into adulthood is full of insufferable, unconscionable, spoiled, enabled and selfish lemmings, but gun control and rebuilding the sense of community this country probably needs are two different discussions. Unfortunately, the gun control debate can't be about personal feelings, it needs to be about hard facts. And hard facts dictate that the way guns are readily available in this country is the main difference between this country and countries without rampant gun violence. The first step to stopping these acts is to take the tools used to carry them out away.
I don't necessarily agree with the idea that this generation is worse than others, but your thought that gun reform and cultural reform are separate discussions is right on and well stated.
This belief is basically rooted in my belief that our generation has the same issues that plagued the ones before us (racism, classism, etc.) with some new added wrinkles due to the advent of advanced technology and other factors our predecessors simply didn't have.
Basically, we're the same we just have more avenues to f*ck ourselves up with.
If I personally issue every American either a handgun or a shotgun then can we get rid of automatic and semi automatic weapons?
Trickey - You're right that most people who suffer with mental illness either long term or short term are not capable of this. The problem is those who are and their ability to obtain weapons.
This is also a reflection of the desensitization of our culture in general. Are video games the problem, of course not. But when you add that to increasing depictions or violence throughout the culture as well as other underlying issues.
If you have Netflix you should try this. Click on an early episode of any of your crime shows (I'm a Law and Order gal myself). Watch an early episode and see how much blood and gore is shown, listen to the language that is used. Now take a look at one from this season. Now this works best with shows that have been on for a while but the difference is noticeable. Again, this is not causal at best it's correlative but it is cumulative.
I want to reiterate: I am not a fan of guns, I am a fan of freedom. When I get home I will be able to put together a more solid post with links and diagrams as evidence.
We can agree that something has to be changed. We can also agree that we enjoy living in a free country.
In our country most states have different gun laws and the variance in percentage in per capita murders is not extreme enough to show that gun laws make much of a difference.
Different countries have different laws and you can quote articles all you want, the bottom line here is that guns are available in all of those countries. As they are here.
Horn, your stat in how many guns per 100 people owned in the us v England and Wales is an illustration, or a product of the actual problem, not the problem itself. It's a difference in attitude of the population as a whole that is different. It starts there. If you traded gun laws in America with Britain for a year, I would venture to say that the difference In Gun murders would be negligible. Because of the Attitude.
That's what needs to be fixed, and it will take generations of education to undo the damage that has Ben done.
Change the laws all you want, but it won't change the way people think.
