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Aswad -> RE: 2nd amendment (7/23/2012 12:54:40 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Yet these massacres keep happening. They can occur anywhere but seem to happen with far more regularity in the US. Why might that be?
I have some thoughts, but rather than offering those, I'll play with some other thoughts.
You've got 60 times as many people as we do. If statistics are extrapolated from the admittedly poor grounds we have, one massacre per year is to be expected at minimum. Since standard of living is lower and wealth more unevenly distributed, it stands to reason two per year is a more realistic minimum. We can also consider the lack of universal health care, particularly mental health care, and throw in the attitudes of authorities to their subjects (e.g. schools, prisons, business), so let's call it an even three per year. That's about what I would consider reasonable, all other factors being equal. They're not, of course, but it's a starting point as to what is reasonable.
So, how far off from 3 per year is the current number?
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The gunman chose to do his deed in a cinema. Why a cinema and not another place where people gather - a church sports stadium or shopping mall?
Unless you have anything on his motives, I would stop there, lest yet another agenda make its way into the debate to muddy the waters. Up here, the coverage may be poor, but I haven't seen anything about motives to indicate any grounds for speculating on the choice of a cinema as the target. I have, however, seen the possible insanity tie-in with the guy identifying with the Joker and attacking during a Batman movie. That alone should be enough to raise the bar for suggesting that the choice of a cinema has a deeper significance to it as a political, cultural or psychological commentary of any sort.
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Why choose a gun when there are far more efficient mass killing methods available (as Aswad has shown)?
Actually, what I showed was that a gun is indeed the familiar choice, because of its place in the culture, and that this is a good thing because of what I alluded to, but did not say outright. I have done the logistics of mass murder on paper. I would never share that information on a public website for some budding mass murderer or terrorist to pick up. It was purely an intellectual exercise, and I hope never to see anyone turning it into practical actions, hence not showing it. Hell, by next year, it may well become illegal for me to know these details, let alone present them online. Not that this is my primary concern.
I'll tell people how they can fuck themselves and their partners up quite freely (cf. a past thread on the use of atropine to influence the mucosal membranes of the vagina), or how they can fuck up a few people with a bit more reservations, but mass murder, no. Capacity is an issue there, and I'm not going to put the scary realities in the hands of anyone not able to conceive of it on their own. Well done, in a technical sense, a massacre effected by one man without aid and with typical resources could reach into the high four digits where I live. Probably five digits in the USA. That's when you think of mass murder as an engineering problem to be solved. I'm not going to publish the solution.
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The gun has a central place in American culture (some would say exalted). It's an object of mass fascination in the US, as many posts here show. Guns are how "the West was won".
Vikings are an object of mass fascination in some circles here. Only one has hacked someone up with an axe so far.
Like with kinks and fetishes, maybe it's more about how the object is regarded than that the object is regarded?
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Guns are collected, revered and prized by millions of Americans.
Same thing goes for Holocaust memorabilia. I think we can leave this aspect out of any analysis of the subject, save to say that it's a sign of health (people collect, revere and prize anything from dolls to organs, so it's safe to say that it is a human behavior that is relatively widespread and to be expected in regard to anything that has a normal place in the minds of the people). How many people here have a collection of whips or other sex toys?
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Does all this point to something sick at the heart of American culture? Is there something right at the core that enables twisted minds to reach for a gun and commit mass murder whenever they're depressed? And, if there is, what can be done about it?
Universal mental health care. Should cut down the numbers significantly. As for depression, the fact of the matter is, people who are depressed are unlikely to kill you. More likely, they'll kill themselves, or their families at most. Bad enough, but not the cause(s) you're looking for. I am thinking a physically, mentally, culturally, financially, spiritually healthy society will tend to make fewer killers than one in a poorer state of health, if we're talking about western societies.
The more important question, perhaps, is whether anything should be done. I tend to think not. Consider the shooting up here, for instance. Counting the bombing, we're talking near eighty dead in that incident. That is about the same number as completely preventable traffic deaths that year, which was a good year. And let's just say when you've had a licence for a decade in the USA, you're about ready to start driving instruction here. The requirements are an order of magnitude higher, the car pool more modern, and the car usage much lower. Clearly, if we're going to invest an effort in addressing something that has to do with the availability of a weapon and the attitude to using it, we should focus on the one that claims that many excess (i.e. not just "shit happens", but "someone did something they shouldn't have") lives. To say nothing of skin cancer (we've the highest rates and the lowest use of SPF-conferring products), leukemia (radon concentration is immense here, due to the third largest thorium deposits in the world) and lung cancer (same cause).
I'm not talking about gun control here. I'm talking about perspective.
As individuals, we fear airplanes more than cars. That's because our instinctive assessment of risk is influenced by many mechanisms that are useful in a naïve setting (hunter-gathering), but not useful in dealing with the scale, complexity and connectedness of modern living. The same thing plays into the distribution of funds and effort in security, and unfortunately plays a part in politics. People will make a fuss about it and things will be done that spend money on accomplishing no improvement there and a worsening elsewhere (TSA, anyone?). The supposed legitimizing factor behind having representative democracy, as opposed to other forms of democracy, is that the representatives are supposed to have perspective and judgment, among other things. We may abolish child labor and close factories. The pigs that are looking for child prostitutes will thank us. Because the "solution" doesn't address the problem. Politicians and their ilk are supposed to see such things and bear them in mind for us (a ludicrous idea in practice, but not so ludicrous in theory).
Perspective dictates that if we aim to diminish tragic loss of life, we go looking for the greatest bang for the buck, and start with the low hanging fruit. Mass murder is pretty damn high on the tree. It isn't easy to stop, and it doesn't affect many people. It just affects them all at once. Which is why it (rightly) gets so much attention from us as individuals. But as a society, we cannot focus on it. The tragedy is immense, but it hardly ranks when compared to other tragedies we can prevent with far greater ease. Food poisoning. Traffic accidents. Sedentary lifestyle. These are some of the examples that are easier to address, and will save more lives. It will also impact our lives less, and our liberties far less.
Our answers to violence and threats are rarely productive ones.
So my suggestion is: first, do no harm...
... second, do something else.
IWYW,
— √\sωað.
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