Danger with a gun in hand

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Chief the solution is pretty simple, eliminate the gun free zones. Make everybody do 2 yrs of service, like in some European countries, upon completion of which they can then purchase firearms and ammunition. In essence make their DL their CCW, only revocable by a court of your peers.
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Only 2 problems with that:
First, requiring some sort of "test", like 2 years of military service, in order to access your rights is not the way the constitution works.

Secondly, who is going to pay for this? We currently spend more on our military than anyone else in the world. Inf act several times more than the next country down the list. And all that with just about 1% of the US population serving. How much would it cost to have every able-bodied male* do 2 years of service? People complained about the cost of Obamacare and it's burden on taxpayers. Oh lawd, wait until this mess comes about.
And for all that hassle and expense we would be severely degrading the quality of our military. All that just to cut down on a handfull of shootings.

*PS: Just caught that, what about women? Traditionally they are exempt from drafts or other mandatory military service, even in the most totalitarian nations. Do they lose their rights because they didn't meet the requirements? Or do they get an exemption from the 2 years just because they're women? Some inequality goin' on there.
 
Law-abiding gun owners are self-reliant "villains"?

Government has for decades been deliberately setting itself up to become so dominant in American life that it cannot be stopped from taking over completely. It sees itself as best able to control the people by making the people stupid, irresponsible, and dependent, by systematically creating a culture of helplessness, need, and victimization. It has been planting in as many people as possible the idea that they cannot take care of themselves and that no family member, employer, network of friends, or unseen God can help them.

Of course, according to government, neither can any firearm.

Then, just when things have become as bad as they can get, government has come charging in on its white horse to rub salve on America's collective chest and put chicken soup on America's collective table, making everything all better and painting as villains everyone who didn't make everything all better.

And claiming that those villains are to blame for everything that isn't yet all better.

All of this seems wonderful to those who have become persuaded that they need government to provide for their needs. They heap high praise on their new government lords and vilify anyone who would question them. They are deaf to rational arguments that government is seeking to expand its authority into realms from which our Founders specifically sought to bar it (via, for example, the Second Amendment). They don't give in to this new culture of government power and societal dependency with reluctance; rather, they welcome it with thanks and ask for more of it. Most importantly to government, they reliably vote for those who promise to provide more of it.

Since they believe government will protect them, they see no need for any private ownership of firearms. They think, if firearms are ever needed, government will have them.

Government works it plan to choruses of praise from the very people it oppresses because they don't see themselves as oppressed; they see themselves as fortunate to have such a benevolent master.

So do our household pets.

Here's where it gets even worse. When people have nothing to do but be cared for, they get bored. Many don't know how to do real work (because they have never had to), and their minds have nothing productive on which to focus; they've been robbed of the sense of meaning and purpose that people instinctively need. Some create meaning and purpose for themselves in a world of their own making, inside their heads. They make themselves crazy because they have nothing else meaningful to do.

But they haven't broken any laws, yet. And their mental illness hasn't been clinically diagnosed and legally adjudicated. Once in a while one of them legally buys a gun and a bunch of ammunition and goes on a rampage...then government and its allies immediately blame legal gun ownership for the damage that's done. The "law-abiding citizen" and his gun become villains. Except that, once he begins formulating the implementation of his heinous act, the perpetrator is already breaking the law.

Personal responsibility and accountability, self-reliance, and faith in an unseen God are anathema to government's desire to control every aspect of our lives. Gun control is not about managing private gun ownership; it is about robbing us of self-reliance. It is a critical battleground in the fight against all manner of government control.

The right to keep and bear arms will become the measuring stick by which all our rights are measured. If we lose RKBA, or allow it to be so parsed (through some sort of expanded definition of mental illness, for example) as to be rendered meaningless, we will have nothing left with which to continue the fight for the rest of our rights.

Is that a coincidence?
 
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If you remove the traditional vehicles of morality, insert the State as parent, lie to the students about history, science, and anything having to do with right & wrong, and preach to them that they are important, they are special, they are not responsible, and that they deserve whatever they want, you will eventually harvest a generation of slothful, confused, self-important, criminally irresponsible folk who have no clue about life, how it works, and what has to be done to sustain it, but who will be convinced that somebody owes them a living.
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While I can at times agree with you, this sounds more like a self righteous rant than a discussion on gun rights and mental health.

Sorry.
 
Interesting discussion.
There is a contemporary parable called "Upstream, Downstream" that, in my opinion applies here. Here's a link: http://tinyurl.com/9kfmvbt
I think some of the posts here are on the right track regarding mental illness, crazy people, whatever you want to call them.
Some folks at the University of Wisconsin - Madison have created something called the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. I think we would all agree that people who go off and start shooting other people for no good reason don't have a healthy mind. Helping people, specifically children, develop healthy minds can only be a step in the right direction, IMHO.
Meanwhile, some other folks have developed something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) that helps people figure out what stresses them out and how to cope with it before they go out and start doing bad things to themselves or other people. MBSR helps people become more stable and people with guns really need to be mentally stable if they are going to not hurt themselves and others.
Most of us go through bad times at some point in our lives. Some people can handle those bad times and some people can't. The shrinks have yet to figure out how to identify those who can and those who can't. Some people are crazy from the beginning and some people get there somewhere along the line. It's better for those folks to get help than to get guns.
 
Law abiding citizens don't go on shooting sprees...so the writer of that letter has already disproved his own hypothesis....simple as that.
 
Nushif said:
While I can at times agree with you, this sounds more like a self righteous rant than a discussion on gun rights and mental health.

Sorry.
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"Mental health?"

You know, when I were but a lad, we had no "school psychologist" for any of the schools in our district. None of our teachers had that as a prerequisite for their teaching certificate. This condition was pretty much the national norm.

Guns were commonplace where I lived. They were unremarkable and just another thing you could pick up at the hardware store. We didn't have "outbreaks" of "gun violence" and everybody understood that murder was against the law, robbery was against the law, and it didn't matter what tools the criminal used. There wasn't any "[object] violence" bias. The concept would have been absurd.

It's now nearly fifty years later.

The adoption of "mental health" memes and "technologies" in the school system has become almost universal. A certain minimum of psych credits are required for the certification of any teacher.

If there is any one single thing which can be said to embody the broad application of the psych "sciences" it is our education system.

Now, I could be wrong, but last time I looked it seemed to me that nationally we have had decades of declining SAT scores, graduation rates, functional literacy, and competence in math.

An argument can be made that "correlation does not imply causation." And, while that is certainly true, it can also be said that anything that correlates closely with a trend in outcomes cannot be dismissed out of hand as a contributing cause.

So perhaps you perceive my remarks as "self righteous" ranting, but could it possibly be that there are actual facts in play here? Is it not possible that my observations might actually track with reality?

Perhaps you have an alternate explanation? Maybe a set of observations that imply a causation along another vector?


We have, as a community, tolerated the "gun related" [whatever] meme for far too long.

Guns don't make illiterate students or irresponsible, needy, dependent "adults."

Guns don't create the conditions that foster spontaneous insanity.

And I have a great deal of difficulty accepting that a 'culture' that has been incrementally foisted on us over the last fifty years is somehow "unrelated" to the problems of "[object] violence" in society.

I'm certainly open to a more plausible explanation.

 
I didn't have a school psychologist, either. I had teachers who had enough of a scientific base to not be damaging to people. It wasn't considered "good psychology" it was considered "people skills" and "teaching."

The decline of education seems to me more in the nature of stuff we tacked on the curriculum. We can't just teach academics now, no ... we have to teach pseudoscience, altered history, a driver's license, extra curricular activities that seem to be at the foreground and a whole slew of things the public school frankly has no "duty" to teach.

Why? Because somewhere along the lines it became a sign of "bad parenting" that both parents had to work to support a family. And I can assure you, it wasn't the kids with the "pants too low" who decided non-nuclear families and the fully functional support network that comes with those were a "threat to moral order." That's something you gotta trace back a bit longer.

Schools are for academic subjects, church is for religion and whatever social network the parents have is for socializing a child.

Sadly though, this has strayed far from gun ownership already, and I will no longer compound the drift into generational conflict. Suffice it to say that it wasn't the younger people who put them where they're at now.
 
Once a person takes determined action to harm another, the tools available to them matter little, if at all. The gun is the very best tool available to defend yourself at a moments notice from another who intends to do you harm, no matter what instrument your assailant has chosen.
 
As to "protection from law-abiding citizens", the point is that these folks were law abiding citizens before the shooting, and up until then were considered to be upstanding members of society. Thus, since gun rights advocates claim that these shootings wouldn't be prevented without a ban on guns, the author says - okay, let's ban guns, so this "law abiding" individual wouldn't have them.

Of course, it ignores the fact that they may then go buy something illegally, or they'll use other legal tools (i.e. a truck, fertilizer, and gasoline, or whatever the mixture was) to enact their vengeance. Crime was a problem long before guns, and if we have some apocalypse that renders all gunpowder inert and we all have to use crossbows and swords...well, crime will still be a problem.
 
So, because we didn't have these things fifty years ago, or because our schools or society was different fifty years ago does that mean that we shouldn't do something about the things that are happening today?
Fifty years ago we didn't have a lot of the things and situations we have now. Should we outlaw all the things THR people identify as being the causes of these changes? Should we make a law that only one parent can work and the other has to stay home and take care of the kids? How about that only kids who come from two parent homes can have guns?
Are we going to say it's the people who don't teach their kids about social responsibility and self control are responsible for these people who do crazy things with guns? Who's definition of social responsibility shall we use?
How about we start looking at the reality of SOME people doing crazy things with guns and trying to figure out why and help those people and people like them so that they don't do crazy things?
A couple of Sundays ago while I was at my local Buddhist Zendo a guy with too much hate walked into a Sikh gurdwara and killed a bunch of people. The people I associate with find it very easy to understand why he did what he did; hate damages the hater as much or more as it does the hated. The explanation is simple. The question is what happened to this guy that he had so much hate that it bubbled out like that. Find out why that guy filled himself with hate and try to fix things so other people don't get like that.
Simple but not easy.
 
How about we start looking at the reality of SOME people doing crazy things with guns and trying to figure out why and help those people and people like them so that they don't do crazy things?
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I'm pretty sure the majority of posts I've seen on the subject have been arguing this point. I don't know what you're ranting against. When people bash parenting, I don't think people are saying "because Mommy wasn't home, Jimmy went on a shooting spree." Both of my parents worked, and I turned out fine. But I turned out fine because they took an active interest in my life, and in making sure I was raised with their morals. As opposed to many parents who want to blame others for their kids problems, and seek to find ways to get their kids out of their way (i.e. "just turn a movie on, and they'll be fine").
 
OK, several people have focused on, somehow, identifying and removing "nut-cases" or "people who go off the deep end". (Quotes mine for emphasis.) This is relevant because such people do, in fact, cause conflict in society with respect to the RKBA, as reflected by the numerous people who point to such crimes and cry "more gun control!".

However, what if we take this back another step? What if we identify the factors in society which produce such people? This would enable us to move from a "reactive" response to a "pro-active" response.

It is incredibly difficult for a normal person to deliberately take the life of another human being. This is because we apparently have inherent controls built within our psyche which acts to block such actions. In fact, there are essentially two types of people who can deliberately take the life of another human being with little or no restraint:

1. Born psychopaths. These people, for whatever reason, are not born with the empathic abilities which act to prevent violent anti-social behavior.

2. People who, somehow, end up learning how to bypass those inherent controls which block violent anti-social behavior.

We cannot prevent the born sociopath from eroding those controls...he has none to begin with. However, true born sociopaths are extremely rare.

We can, however, work to identify and counter aspects within society which do contribute to the degradation of those inherent controls.

Some interesting reads I'm going through, on the advice of a brother who was a Marine, are books written by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman:

"On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society", "Warrior Mindset" (as a co-writer), and "On Combat".

When I'm done with these, I'm going to get "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill".

Here's Grossman's website, which is loaded with interesting stuff:

http://www.killology.com/

Has anybody read any of Grossman's stuff? Thoughts?
 
The sentence was obviously poorly worded but the author was simply stating that the she believes current laws which prevent those with criminal records from purchasing guns are not sufficient to prevent these mass shootings. This is obvious when read in the context of her other statements. I know we all like to hate people who support gun control but is taking her words out of context really "high road"?
 
beatledog7 said:
If this turns into a nature vs. nurture debate, I'm going about 95% nurture.
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This isn't supposed to be a debate over such, beatledog. And, if you look at my own comments on this, I recognize the true born psychopaths are exceedingly rare.

In any event, it's not the psychopaths I'm concerned with...it's the 95% or more who were "nurtured" into having their psychological barriers eroded away by society.

Identifying how this is accomplished and using the same tools to reverse this trend would be helpful in reducing/preventing these instances of violence that the lady who wrote that letter to the editor is so concerned with. This would, in turn, ease the pressures on gun control.
 
Chief, I agree with your basic premise that to a large degree "we" have created the societal monster. I argue that the normalization of dependency on government and the boredom and lack of motivation such dependency creates is the root of the problem (see post #27).
 
I haven't read both pages of responses, but I seen this this morning as far as being a slippery slope.

This article talks about how the govt has targeted some people who are Christian and gun owners and used the mental illness issue to make them a prohibited person when they are out spoken against the govt.

http://www.citizens4freedom.com/Art...n-the-crosshairs-Chilling-tactic-exposed.aspx

From the article....

If you are an outspoken Christian in America, you need to be concerned. If you are an outspoken Christian in America who happens to be a gun owner, you need to be very concerned. And if you are a Christian gun owner who disagrees with the Progressive anti-Christian agenda in America and have a platform to inform others, you better believe that you are under intense scrutiny. Sound like paranoid propaganda?

I know the policy about tin foil hats here, and I haven't taken the time to research the people in the article.
 
beatledog7 said:
Chief, I agree with your basic premise that to a large degree "we" have created the societal monster. I argue that the normalization of dependency on government and the boredom and lack of motivation such dependency creates is the root of the problem (see post #27).
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So, how do we shift railroad tracks on this to another direction?
 
So, how do we shift railroad tracks on this to another direction?
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It's a very difficult question to answer. The problem is that we're too busy debating why the easy bandaid fixes to societal problems don't work to actually collaborate and figure out a more complex solution to this complex problem.

That's why I don't like this "us vs. them". I carry to prevent violence, they try to ban guns to prevent violence. Ignore the guns, work on prevention of violence, and we can work together for a common goal.
 
Nushif said:
I didn't have a school psychologist, either. I had teachers who had enough of a scientific base to not be damaging to people. It wasn't considered "good psychology" it was considered "people skills" and "teaching."

The decline of education seems to me more in the nature of stuff we tacked on the curriculum. We can't just teach academics now, no ... we have to teach pseudoscience, altered history, a driver's license, extra curricular activities that seem to be at the foreground and a whole slew of things the public school frankly has no "duty" to teach.

Why? Because somewhere along the lines it became a sign of "bad parenting" that both parents had to work to support a family. And I can assure you, it wasn't the kids with the "pants too low" who decided non-nuclear families and the fully functional support network that comes with those were a "threat to moral order." That's something you gotta trace back a bit longer.

Schools are for academic subjects, church is for religion and whatever social network the parents have is for socializing a child.

Sadly though, this has strayed far from gun ownership already, and I will no longer compound the drift into generational conflict. Suffice it to say that it wasn't the younger people who put them where they're at now.
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Thank you for the thoughtful deconstruction of modern society in this post.
 
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