Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

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@NEStalgia Ha, by making a couple of typos, you may have actually completely accidentally come up with a couple of new buzz words. I'm certainly going to remember and use "metal health" and "metal illness".

As for the topic at hand: I'm afraid that I couldn't disagree more, my friend. What I mentioned in my previous comment, is EXACTLY what both the problem and the solution is. No if's, and's or but's about it.

First off, if you're not in law enforcement, the military, security and/or wildlife preservation or similar, then there really is no inherent need to have any kind of fire arm in your home, and most certainly not fully automatic ones. Over here in Europe, any gun owned by civilians that are a member of a shooting range, stays at the shooting range, in a personal locker, and can never be taken home, so no gun-related "accidents" could occur.

That's why, nine out of ten times, when killings do occur here, it's by stabbing or bludgeoning. Obviously also not good, but I'm sure that you can imagine that the number of victims is greatly reduced that way. As I said in my previous comment, the people that REALLY want to do bad things, and have access to criminal and/or black market sources, will ultimately still be able to get their hands on a gun, but all the hoops you'd have to jump through, make it far too cumbersome for the average evil and/or deranged person, so they resort to more easily attainable means, and as a result, even though any victim is one too many, the number of casualties is drastically reduced.

So, there literally exists no scenario where not having access/having more limited access to guns isn't better than a world where you can just buy a gun at your local supermarket. To believe that, you'd have to be standing smack dab in the middle of that famous river in Egypt, and it's not too far removed from the beginning of the end. Believing that the surplus of weapons isn't the problem is exactly where the problem lies.

And to elaborate on my previous comment: although it's not fully tied to mental health, more often than not, the individuals doing this definitely ARE highly disturbed or deranged. Whether that comes from them being pushed or whatever, is completely irrelevant, seeing as even someone pushed should still have some modicum of awareness of certain things, angry as all hell or not. Unless of course, they're intellectually challenged, in which case it all becomes one, big red haze. Just look at this idiot in Texas: he truly believed that Mexican and/or colored people were an actual threat to his own livelihood and that of other white people. That's not a person ACTUALLY being cornered or threatened, that's a highly subjective/skewed view, or rather: a perceived threat in the mind of a probably already not too bright and/or pretty volatile person.

And no sane person makes a manifest about such decidedly racist sentiments either. And the other guy kept an actual hit list of people that he wanted to kill. Both examples clearly show that neither of them were thinking straight. If you want to rise up or protest against something, do it in a constructive way, not in a way that pits even more people against each other, which is what violence always does. As the old saying goes: violence only begets violence...

So, taking away or at the very least limiting their access to the means that would allow these individuals to maximize the effects of the damage that they want to do, most certainly IS the solution.

Most of what you just said, is actually the very thing that the NRA thrives on, so that's only playing into their hands, and that is something that no sane person should want to do. The size of the country, the environment, the way of living etcetera may factor into the equation, but more often than not, they aren't of a decisive influence. Besides the fact that there isn't just one society or environment in the States, there's also plenty of similar situations in Europe and Asia, and yet, things like these still don't happen there as much, "oddly enough", which should already give you more than enough pause...

If someone's teeth are rotting away because he eats too much candy and doesn't brush enough to at least mitigate some of the damage, you're not going to solve that by giving him an electric tooth brush and ordering him to brush more often: THAT is fighting the symptom, whereas the solution would be taking away or diminishing his access to candy, which is the actual solution.

And yes, the candy was a metaphor for weapons...

But regardless of all that, it's all theoretical and pointless anyway, and that's where we arrive at the one thing that we do agree upon, which is that nothing will ever change, sadly enough. Guess we'll just have to wait for that cosmic intervention and that massive, unstoppable comet, to finally take care of the human problem for good. Earth is probably in need of a hard reset...

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@ThanosReXXX A disclaimer first: I'm not a gun enthusiast or owner, and I don't intend to be, however it's not a matter of being against them, but a matter that, it's something that has to become a fairly consuming hobby in terms of maintenance, practice, etc, etc, and I already have enough hobbies...so I have no interest in adding more, let alone one that's not particularly interesting to me. So I'm not saying any of this in some sort of defensive attempt to justify a hobby...I have no personal stake in that game, and am merely an observer, albeit one that respects the hobby as a valid hobby, while not being part of it.

However, at the same time, I have to say "spoken like a true European" (I can't even say Californian on that one...California's a high gun ownership state...even before we get to the illegal ones ) I'm sure in "everything is an urban environment" Europe they're not as useful, and "everything is a bureaucratic nightmare" Amsterdam....actually strike that, sounds like they'd be MOST useful there... But in the US (and ESPECIALLY CA!) there's a ton of hunters, a ton of farmers that use semi-automatic weapons for pest control.....fully automatic weapons/military grade weapons are already illegal, most of the things the press calls "assault rifles" aren't (the AR14 is most purchased as a 'varmint gun' by farmers, and is not fully automatic unless illegally modded, etc, yet the press loves to showcase that every time there's an incident.). Pistols of course become a debate of if that is viable self defense or not, however, the bottom line with those is: pistols aren't terribly useful for mass murders so they're really part of a separate debate anyway. (And as long as there's a land bridge to central America, pistols will be everywhere, legal or not. If Russia weren't Russia, Europe would be inundated with them through China as well. Thank goodness for the Russians! )

If we're going to talk about irresponsible people given dangerous tools, before we ever get to guns we need to talk about a 100% ban of motor vehicles. Not a single civilian needs to own a motor vehicle. That should be saved for commercial transportation services. As a fact, motor vehicles are responsible for far more deaths every year in the US than guns, and that doesn't include the serious injuries. And as a percentage, far more gun owners are responsible and informed than motor vehicle owners. Given a choice of hanging out at a shooting range with 50 random registered gun owners in my county, versus hanging out in a parking lot with 50 random registered vehicle owners in my county, I know which one I'd not be fearful of death or injury while standing there...and it's not the parking lot. I could just watch out the window over the next 20 minutes and find numerous dangerous, reckless/violent individuals in posession of a lethal weapon, who should not be authorized to possess such a weapon, abusing the weapon in such a way it could lead to loss of life, and displaying open hostility while wielding it. The same can not be said for gun owners where I would have to search quite extensively to find evidence of such open recklessness and hostility. Ban the cars. THEN we can talk guns. Ban both, and you'll hear no complaint from me. Bottom line is my safety is threatened numerous times daily by registered vehicle owners. My safety has been threatened 3 times total by registered gun owners, and none of them directly. The same story is true everywhere. It's absurd to talk about banning one tool while not talking about banning the other tool that's far, far, far more widespread and dangerous, with the numbers to back it up.

But that's all sauce for the gravy, to my point. My point is all you do in this country by removing guns as a tool to kill with, is force a change in tools. The violence problem remains because access to that tool is not the cause of the violence, it's just the cause for the violence listed by tool use. Fun fact, by FBI stats for several years running, the #1 tool used for murder was hammers, not guns. Screwdrivers was up in the running as well. So take all the gun murders, many of which were gang/cartel/commerial-black-market oriented, and remember that more people were murdered by hammers, and those were mostly not gang/cartel/commercial-black-market oriented.....

Let that sink in for a moment. Not only is the very high gun murder rate unique to the US, the only place with such widespread gun access, but that's not even the MOST chosen way to kill someone here, basic household items are used to kill more often than guns, despite guns being "everywhere." Then factor in the amount of gun murders that are tied to inter-gang organized crime, a rampant separate problem that ought to be removed from the statistics when comparing to Europe without as extensive a gang/drug operation. THAT is how extensive the violence rate is here. Not the gun violence - the violence in general. And that's not even talking about the deaths-by-car that are seldom written up as homicide or manslaughter, when in fact, the pure recklessness/hostility of actions on the road, clearly are just that. And back to your reference of bludgeoning...as I said with hammers, that's also the most common method here...the guns are in addition to our already massively higher murder-by-bludgeoning rate than there. Gun murder is just a free bonus to already winning the contest against Europe for all other methods! Really.

Think about that. Even if we remove ALL gun statistics and pretend there are no guns and nobody died from guns, and that also eliminates most cartel/gang deaths.....we STILL have more murder.

So the guns clearly are not a cause, or even the most popular tool. And it's not a matter that we just have tons and tons of psychos where nobody else does (or is it? If it is, I think we know to look in the direction of big pharma...) No, we have a culture problem. A very very severe culture problem. I guarantee you if the EU were to declare an even more lax gun policy than the US tomorrow.....by the end of the next 30 years....the murder rate per capita will still be substantially higher here. There's a very serious culture problem, and societal structure problem. That's the root cause. It will never be addressed or solved. The status quo works for those with wealth, status, or power. They'll keep pointing at excuses. Guns, games, "mental health", rock & roll, anything but the actual cause, because fixing that is the very last thing they'd ever want to do.

The individuals you cited are certainly on the extreme end of cases where there is actual abnormality in their behavior prior to the event in a way that suggests visible instability...however there's a reason those are the mention-able cases....they're outside the typical. We can cite the arsonist in Japan as well, obviously an unstable person....but murder as a whole is so entirely uncommon there to the point the very notion that even the disturbed and unstable could do that is inconceivable. There is a fundamental difference here. Insecurity and instability in all things is easily the most fundamental difference. (Or the extensive medication used to enforce "societal behavioral norms" (with a side effect of possibly becoming a homicidal maniac...)

And again, as a disclaimer I'm not a part of the whole gun thing myself, and have no plans to be, so I'm not defending any personal interests or habits here. But I can't really wrap my head around scapegoating "NRA members" - while they do attract some undesirables, overall, people that are members of that organization would be the hobbyists that are the most informed and disciplined with their guns...much like video game enthusiasts who care about their hobby and spend considerable time and money in trying different hardware and accessories. By and large it's a membership group for the law abiding members. They wield money for political power...but by that standard we should be targeting Boeing, Lockheed, Pfeiser, etc. etc. that are even more dangerous in their lobby. The people that point fingers at "the NRA" and by extension its membership are pointing fingers at a lot of law abiding, perfectly safe individuals to pin the actions of others on. If one gamer murders at an eSports event (which has happened) we don't accept fingers pointed at "gamers" as being a part of that. Yet if one NRA member murders someone, it becomes acceptable to point fingers at "NRA members" - And again (I feel on the internet this bares repeating endlessly) I'm not a part of it at all....just an observer outside....but that seems remarkably misguided and unethical, and remarkably hypocritical for gamers, members of another group at which fingers are pointed for the same thing, that ironically is the next closest group to the NRA itself, as a significant part of our hobby does involve guns, albeit, computer images of them. There's a lot of finger pointing and scapegoating in that. 95% of us don't deserve it, 5% maybe do.. 95% of them don't deserve it either, 5% of them maybe do. It's just more wishing for easy fixes and factions to blame for a much more innate problem.

To use your candy metaphor, there's no point taking the candy away, if the guy's chain smoking and chugging Pepsi, and has a massive sugar dependence disorder. The candy wasn't even the worst of the problem, and certainly not the cause. All the hand waving and finger pointing at the specific tools is a lovely distraction that keeps everyone from focusing on the real problem: The US has a massively higher murder rate than the rest of the world irregardless of gun access. THAT requires some serious reflection and evaluation of why....saying "guns" is like saying "no, don't look behind that door! Just look behind the other ones that don't have skeletons in them."

Your footnote though, we can both absolutely agree with that.