climbskirun
Member
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2014
- Messages
- 31
But "gun violence" is a complete non-entity. There is not violence perpetuated BY guns or BECAUSE of guns, or in some clear way, especially exacerbated by guns.
We study different kinds of illness because they are CAUSED BY wildly different factors, from viruses to bacteria to deficiencies, congenital defects, and many other factors. Studying illness as though every illness was HIV, or every illness was chicken pox would not tell you anything about how to fight the vast majority of illnesses.
Similarly, your "gun violence" concept is like lumping together illnesses that cause nausea and trying to study ways to eliminate them as one. Well, that's inane because illnesses which cause nausea are myriad and have thousands of different forms and roots. The fact that nausea is involved is largely irrelevant to solving those illnesses.
You want to study gang violence? Fine. Makes sense. You want to study drug prohibition-related violence? Yeah, that has legs. Domestic violence? That's a real, discernible, concrete thing with specific roots and causes. Power-display/dominance or thrill violence? Yup. Robbery and other crime-related violence? Psychotic predatory violence? Uh huh! Sure, study that.
But "gun violence?" That ISN'T a thing. That's like the nausea I mentioned before. Just an avenue, irrelevant -- UTTERLY -- to the causes and solutions of the problem you say you want to study.
If you lump all these things into a heading of "gun violence," all that says is that you've focused on the thing you have a fixation about, a problem with, or a fear of, and mis-identified one possible avenue of the phenomenon as the problem itself.
That doesn't wash.
We first started studying heart disease because we noticed that a lot of people died from heart failure. We've since learned of the myriad of different heart diseases and study them in detail, resulting in huge strides in treatments. Same goes for cancer: we now know of more strains and types of cancer even on a single organ, but you gotta start somewhere.
Similarly, we have a huge number of Americans dying from guns, and we have no idea why because we're somehow not allowed to study that in depth. I'm sure we can refine that target somewhere down the line but right now all we could do is guess, which is not sound science.