Worried for our children Loc: Massachusetts

Spot on as usual, CDM.

I also want to thank you for taking the time to contribute to this thread. Your discussion with J. has been a pleasure to read. The two of you have shown what a debate on this forum should be like, it's nice to read a discussion without the personal attacks; thanks to both of you.

(I hope your discussion continues)

J Anthony Loc: Connecticut

No, I am well aware of the psychological and cultural conditioning at the root of these things; where to go from there is another story. I don't think any attempts at further gun prohibition is an answer, nor have I ever implied such. I deny nothing, aside from your presumptions...

J Anthony Loc: Connecticut

So do I, WFOC, so do I. To be able to get through a couple pages of disagreeable yet thoughtful back-and-forth without anyone resorting to juvenility or claptrap is a nice surprise...I'm still convinced we're on the verge of a breakthrough, that is, someone having a novel approach to the topic. I'm a little stunted when it comes to offering any viable solutions on this one, I must admit, but I can feel it in my bones, there has got to be a better way to tackle this one. The same-old-same-old just won't do, for if we can't change our minds, we can't change anything...

CDM Loc: Florida

J; The 'presumptuous condescension' you are tiring of is nothing of the sort. I am not presuming you are stupid or unworthy of argument and certainly not demeaning your ability or integrity. What you are seeing is consistency of purpose – a very fundamental element of argument and debate.

From my perspective and obviously that of others I do not see 'side' in this argument in the sense I believe you are suggesting. What I see is more akin to Kublai Khan on the ridge line at dawn with 50,000 soldiers, ready to swoop down and destroy my village of 2000 because we failed to bend to his will. By some logic I suppose my village can be referred to as the 'other side'... I only see dictators, the Leftist Democrats who will, by mandate, impose more and grievous restrictions in the name of 'solutions' to unknown problems on us … the serfs … Hardly 'sides'.

Your remark; “And I did not say the alleged growing-numbers of gun-violence in proportion to gun-ownership, however false … “ is purely argumentative without merit. The data shows what the data shows … not from one accredited agency but many. Gun ownership has almost doubled while gun violence had decreased disproportionately rapidly to that increase. This is not false and is an important element to understanding the core issue in this analysis. Guns obviously cannot be the (singular) causal component. Their frequency of application for the given population is just too insignificant, statistically.

I will provide data as soon as I can find it again that refutes the notion that people are buying guns in record numbers from fear of pending confiscation. This is a false notion. New gun owners are acquiring weapons for fear of the well being of themselves and families. This fear is fomented by a government, an administration and specifically a president that has whipped the nation into a frenzy of racism; who defends Islam our most violent enemy - all the while openly and without hesitation, blaming rank and file Americans for these peoples anger and actions. Americans are not afraid to recognize that their leadership may not protect them so they will do it themselves. Contrary to what Obama thinks ... that's who we really are.

There will be no immediate, mass disarming. There will be no 'confiscation' as such. However, the rhetoric of which you speak … the fear mongering is promulgated by the Democrat Party … many of whom speak openly about just that … taking guns away by force. It's a mindset that has been demonstrated in this thread; confiscation of all semi-automatic weapons. Some will of course react to that.

A Leftist, a socialist, a communist, a Progressive Democrat - are nothing if not patient. If one looks at the past 85 years these people have been grandly successful at usurping the entire public education system, turning it into a weapon of indoctrination; at destroying the 1st amendment with Political Correctness (pounded into the skulls of the impressionable young in the public education system), possibly one of their most successful anti-America campaigns in history.
Two weapons are being mobilized to disarm America over the longer term; the so called 'background' check which needs to be renamed for what it is; the Citizen Classification System – and proposed liability with punitive measures imposed on firearms manufacturers. This will happen when Clinton is president. We can discuss these later if you like because they deserve independent attention.

We cannot put the petty politics aside. That is virtually impossible. Because the entire argument is founded on politics...the politics of an ideological political faction that is pursuing an agenda of which this, the gun question, is only one small facet. The most immediately obvious short term solution to stemming gun violence is to crush Political Correctness and allow law enforcement to do its job. Case in point; NYC … a communist in a position of authority takes stop-and-frisk away from law enforcement, the people who know the streets, and gun related incidents and violence increase. Shackle the FBI and the results are tomorrows news.

We know today that guns are used in homicide by 0.000028% of the population. That is fewer than 10,000 people. Of those we can prove that the majority are street criminals for whom the gun is a tool of the trade. An infinitesimally smaller segment is old fashion American sociopathic loons, the mass shooter as we call them. The last group are terrorists, driven by true (to them) ideological beliefs and motives. This group is growing in America. However, they all fall within the 0.000028%.
But somehow we are to put aside 11,000 deaths by drunk drivers, more than gun homicide, 6,000 by texting and expected to exceed gun homicide by 2018; or child abduction, 45,000 annually or rape, a horrifically violent act, 125,000 annually – we have strict laws regarding all these societal maladies – but the maladies persist and in fact grow with population growth, all but gun violence.

If indeed there is a solvable problem or problems at the bottom of all this perhaps the new direction you are looking for, the 'fresh' ideas, is that we address the 200,000 victims of violence, intentional or not. Because surely if we think we can prevent or stop such violence perpetrated against a specifically identified 0.000028% of the population we can certainly apply that same logic to all societal ills … Or can we?

J Anthony Loc: Connecticut

Sorry, I must have worded the sentence incorrectly- I was AGREEING in regards to gun-ownership increasing while at the same time gun-related death DEcreasing. I do understand this to be true, though unfortunately it is not any comfort, for the very reason in which you illustrate an aspect of here- the "death-by-guns" rate is like the final nail-in-the-coffin of a society where death due to numerous kinds of avoidable rage, psychopathy, overindulgence, ignorance or just plain accidental, is ludicrous.

And YES, in answer to the question that we can and should apply the same logic to that, absolutely. I saw corporatist politicians as nothing less than disingenuous when they worked themselves into a lather over death-by-guns more than say, all those dying and suffering due to our endless wars, all our drug O.D.'s, all the idiots who manage to kill themselves or others(and will continue to do so) because they play with their damn phones when they're driving, the list goes on. Accidents will happen, but what's been going on for too long now is alot of preventable insanity on alot of different fronts.

I also believe it's worth trying to understand why the particular kind of violence wrought by random shootings may spook people more than most kind...it reminds people of war, whether conciously or subconciously, more than most things...for the most part, we've avoided any major warring on our homeland and I believe some are terrified that there will be full-blown war in our streets any day now. As much as we've waged war abroad for many decades now, we have managed to keep the fighting always way off of our shores. Now that it seems as if the wars may come home, or worse, the prospect of some sort of domestic-war amongst ourselves, well, this understandably scares people. It's still inconceivable to most that it can possibly happen.

I'm glad you brought up education, because no question it has more than a little to do with things. But let's be honest, the degradation and creeping-privatization of our public institutions, especially the schools, has been a bipartisan affair for some time now. Its about business. Both parties have their billionaire-backers looking to subjugate the masses through a dumbing-down process of disassociative-history, rote memorization and distractions-galore, because it serves their econi. Both Dems and Repubs have been on-board the charter-school train since the 90s, and neither has lifted a finger to do anything about hundreds of schools being shut-down or in various states-of-decline. Meanwhile public dollars are being funneled into private hands and there is no accountability to those to whom is most affected- the kids, the parents, and the teachers. Many are being swept-aside, like so much refuse.
And that's an enormous concern- But there doesn't appear to be a strong enough push from any direction to try and reverse-course.

CDM Loc: Florida

J; The issues that have divided this country so severely in the past decade all have one thing in common – fear; fear rooted in true bias, ignorance and unfortunately, pure stupidity. And what is the primary weapon of the Elitist, of those who will control the entire society? Fear … always. So look at gun violence, racism, police brutality, police bias, homosexuality (broadly) and religion, to name the top of the chart. Fear has been the primary if not underlying motivator of the masses to unreasonable if not stupid reaction. The individual level motivation that you suggest is for me impossibly complex.

Lets bear in mind too that we as a society have no experience with elements we face today; massive population (320 million is a lot of people), an unthinking almost criminally negligent media and instantaneous, light-speed mass communication to the individual level. All made intolerably egregious by a population that for the most part is the product of a corrupt education system (as we have established as a facet of this discussion), incapable and unwilling to find the truth and who think only with their eyes and thumbs; hence easily led.

Coming back to the theme of the thread, gun control, in this discussion we have established a foundational basis for debate, that being that guns are not the core 'problem'. So what is? (I know, there I go asking questions again!).

Problems, and above all societal problems are not singular, vertical entities. They are living things with many organs. For a king or a dictator or a Khan social problem solving is easy; marry it, spear it, hack it with a sword, bash it with a rock, nail it to a cross, shoot it, gas it or whatever means is of your liking. In civil society however, another, mandatory facet is introduced; tolerance.

Let's lump together all of what I will call 'wrongful death' purposeful or not (in America) for this discussion; homicide, drunk driver, texting and so on. The total of these, with generous error factor is less than 40,000 incidents annually. The first rule of problem solving is to identify the problem and it's facets. And then, identify what you cannot solve, that which you cannot influence and then solve for the balance. This is were the 'tolerance' factor comes in; what part of our problem must we accept as tolerable if we are to solve the balance?

The incidence rate is 0.0000125%. How much of this can we eliminate? The Utopian answer of course is all of it. The pragmatic answer accepting that man will act as man does is; how bad is it? What is the level of tolerance we must accept as being outside human control? Not that we have to like it; rather accepting we just can't predict or control it.

The argument that these 'problems' don't exist in other countries, particularly EC countries, is of course non sequitur … there is no rational comparison to a total population representative of two of our states; populations of vertical ethnicity and religion and importantly who understand from birth that the government owns them. Americans for some strange reason persist in believing themselves to be born free men in a constitutional Republic. That complicates the crap out of things.

I need to ponder the question; just how bad are Americans? From where I sit right now I am having trouble reconciling that we are the violent, hateful, destructive society that those in positions of power and influence would have us believe. The answer to the (secondary) gun question is in there somewhere.