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Thyroid

Guns and gun control

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As you pointed out, even though you weren't interested in using the rifles and everything turned out okay, just tossing them in the closet is still irresponsible. Part of the point is to have public awareness that firearms, if you have them, need to be locked away in case young you happened to be the sort of person who would gladly grab and play with rifles or go on a rampage. As was the case at Sandy Hook. If Adam Lanza went through the same education program you and apparently millions of Americans have, clearly the point not to touch firearms was lost on him.

My dad was well aware he shouldn't do that, but he felt just telling me not to touch them was enough. No amount of lecturing my dad would have changed a thing. Just like he still doesn't wear a seat belt unless he's pulled over to shit on your, "Dad turn the safety on!" analogy earlier as it's just as simple as a kid nagging to wear a seatbelt right?

You do realize that using fringe cases to say gun education as it exists is useless? Adam Lanza obviously had serious mental issues. As extensively talked about pages ago in the thread, it's beyond a matter of teaching. Again, less access, less deaths. If a person who wants to kill someone can't get a gun, he won't shoot someone. Very simple.

As a member of that younger generation, I agree whole-heartedly.

Again, proving the point that you guys are arguing stuff you don't believe just for the sake of playing devil's advocate.

My point is just that gun control laws have been used around the world and even within the US with no statistically significant effect.

These stats don't exist.

...but you can't just wave the magical legislative law and make guns stop existing.

Very obviously this is not overnight thing. Again silly useless distraction.

I think I've pretty much said all I can say on the matter. I don't see how any of you are going to combat the very simple logic of less guns being in circulation and no access to automatic weapons will lead to less gun deaths. Every hypothetical argument and all these silly unrelated analogies and anecdotes are a distraction, and I'm pretty bored with repeating myself in this thread and will back out for now.

monocausotaxophilia

:tup: :tup: :tup:

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Abandoning the topic of whether education is valuable, I think it's fair to blame the NRA for a lot of our problems, because it's a very large and powerful lobby. By constitutional rights of course, the NRA has the right to assemble and lobby. People are free to associate. Whether you like it or not, money is considered free expression and a whole heckuvalot goes into supporting the NRA.

I was talking to a friend who works with Planned Parenthood, on the fundraising side, and he noted that talks about changing fund raising and lobbying laws is unappealing to him and his organization because they happen to work very effectively in the current model, and they do a lot of good. For people within the system doing good, it ain't broke, and fixing it would only make it harder to do the good they already do. PP can only keep getting funding if they continue to do things that people, especially powerful people, think is valuable. If Planned Parenthood funding were democratic, it might not even exist in most of the southeast.

Now the fact that in the US the sorts of people who seem to be rich also seem to be the types that thing Ayn Rand was on to something isn't very encouraging, but my friend would argue that the NRA isn't magically powerful because it's big and evil, it's powerful because people, especially rich people, think it's doing valuable work. Idealist kooks like the Koch brothers. Rifle enthusiasts. Firearm manufacturers. As it is, lots of very influential people today grew up in a culture that has the same values as the NRA. But, as you note, 70% of today's youth think it's a load of bull.

I don't know that the NRA will shrivel up and die completely--nonprofits are very good at surviving--but the culture is shifting to not value them. Sure, there's a lot of old money in its pockets, but what about the new entrepreneurs? What about the software companies, the 3D printer developers, the electric car manufacturers? The Koch family got a fortune in fossil oil, which will be valuable for a long time, but we've got alternative energies growing in viability and information technology is more powerful than ever. Values will change from the bottom up, guns will be dismissed for new national pasttimes, and the global trend of decreasing violence will continue its 10,000 year course.

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Of course I don't need to tell any of you this, but it's hardly surprising if someone who would shoot dead his entire family also enjoys playing violent games and watching violent movies. But that's hardly causation.

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Of course I don't need to tell any of you this, but it's hardly surprising if someone who would shoot dead his entire family also enjoys playing violent games and watching violent movies. But that's hardly causation.

I'm not completely convinced anymore that violent media doesn't lead to some level of desensitization. I don't think it's the root cause, but I do think it plays a factor. You could easily argue that a lot of countries that have stricter gun laws than America ALSO have stricter laws on violent media. Maybe that's also a contributing factor to their reduced gun violence?

The best way to get something in politics is to give something up in return. This community is composed of people who consume a lot of media in all it's various forms, so we're naturally going to be "pro-media". But would you be willing to accept tighter restrictions on violent media or a unified, government controlled rating system in exchange for stricter gun laws? I'd consider it.

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I don't doubt at all that playing violent video games desensitizes people to video game violence. But actual violence is a completely different phenomenon.

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I don't doubt at all that playing violent video games desensitizes people to video game violence. But actual violence is a completely different phenomenon.

Me either, but then I'm not a fan of especially violent movies or video games.

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I don't doubt at all that playing violent video games desensitizes people to video game violence. But actual violence is a completely different phenomenon.

Correct. It's a piece of the puzzle. Desensitization + easy access to firearms + other psychological factors = gun violence. I believe we're all in agreement on that. Following that line of thinking, taking two of those factors out the equation could lead to an even greater reduction in gun violence than removing just one?

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I believe that's a false equivalence. I purposefully said that actual violence is a different phenomenon to point out that getting desensitized to fake violence does not mean you are desensitized to actual violence. They are qualitatively different things: actual violence is not simply 'more' compared to fake violence. An act of actual violence is a completely different decision to an act of play violence.

If they are the same or of the same quality to someone, that points to an underlying condition. If someone does have such a condition and does play violent games, we cannot tell whether playing the games is keeping him from doing worse things or exacerbating the condition. There's no science to show either. For all we know, he could have spent the time torturing cats, which is not exactly unheard of.

There's way too much violence in our media, but my opposition is mainly from the point of view or art. Millions of people see and perpetrate virtual acts of violence day in, day out, but there's no proof at all that any of them would be less shocked to see someone get shot in the face because of that media influence.

Then there's presenting complex causes in such a simple manner that will make people think desensitization is one third of the problem when we don't know if it's at all. 'Desensitization' implies this person at some point was sensitized to actual violence, but what seems more likely is that this person never developed the empathy needed for that.

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I believe that's a false equivalence. I purposefully said that actual violence is a different phenomenon to point out that getting desensitized to fake violence does not mean you are desensitized to actual violence. They are qualitatively different things: actual violence is not simply 'more' compared to fake violence. An act of actual violence is a completely different decision to an act of play violence.

If they are the same or of the same quality to someone, that points to an underlying condition. If someone does have such a condition and does play violent games, we cannot tell whether playing the games is keeping him from doing worse things or exacerbating the condition. There's no science to show either. For all we know, he could have spent the time torturing cats, which is not exactly unheard of.

There's way too much violence in our media, but my opposition is mainly from the point of view or art. Millions of people see and perpetrate virtual acts of violence day in, day out, but there's no proof at all that any of them would be less shocked to see someone get shot in the face because of that media influence.

Then there's presenting complex causes in such a simple manner that will make people think desensitization is one third of the problem when we don't know if it's at all. 'Desensitization' implies this person at some point was sensitized to actual violence, but what seems more likely is that this person never developed the empathy needed for that.

Desensitization may not be the best word, then? I'll try again. I think for some people, violent media provides inspiration to act violently. A portion of those who are inspired will actually act upon those inspirations. But for the vast majority of people who consumer hyper-violent media, there isn't any lasting impact. My feelings on gun ownership are similar because I know that the vast majority of gun owners do not want to fire on another person. We have two major factions in the US. One argument says that limiting sources of inspiration for gun violence would decrease gun violence. The other argument says that limiting access to guns decreases the means of acting on those violent ideas. I think there are good elements of truth in both arguments. I lean towards limiting guns, but if someone told me the only way to accomplish that would be to also cut a few more gun fight scenes out of movies or video games, I could live with that.

Another thing that occurred to me the other day was during the press conference where President Obama announced his gun control initiatives, he said that he intended to fund research on the impact that violent video games have on youth. It's interesting to me that he excluded any other forms of media, particularly movies. The gun industry certainly has a powerful lobby in Washington, but I find the omission of violent films from that research shows that there's an equally powerful film industry lobby at work. Both of them are happy to scape goat video games.

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You must be confused. All that shows is that he played Doom. Or what is it supposed to prove?

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I think it clearly shows it provided a level of inspiration, it's not like it is an ambiguous statement. That phrase says, "I intend to emulate this scenario."

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Okay, I see what you're getting at. Yet if there was no Doom, there would be something else. And even if he draws that parallel, it doesn't mean the idea would not have occurred to him if he hadn't played Doom. It shows that for him, murdering people is not essentially different to playing a violent game. That would have caused problems eventually even if all of our media was aimed at 8-year-olds and we refused to tell kids about violence in history and current events.

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Yeah I think it's more consistently useful to say that "crazy people kill people" than to say "violent media inspires killings" (though that's an oversimplification). I think there's some value to making a conscious effort to eschew violence, in the same way that it's valuable to consciously avoid casual racism or sexism, but in any case the violence in the media is probably more a symptom of the problem than a cause by itself.

Since this thread is so rife with flimsy analogies, I'll throw one in: Violence is like herpes. It's always there, and it can always spread, but it spreads more easily when you have an outbreak and you can see it. Also, I guess oral violence is more widespread throughout society because kissing with a dental dam is silly?

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Yeah I think it's more consistently useful to say that "crazy people kill people" than to say "violent media inspires killings" (though that's an oversimplification). I think there's some value to making a conscious effort to eschew violence, in the same way that it's valuable to consciously avoid casual racism or sexism, but in any case the violence in the media is probably more a symptom of the problem than a cause by itself.

This mostly matches my line of thinking.

Something else that occurred to me last night: I think most of our studies on mass violence are flawed in that they usually exclude those who have committed mass violence. For example, there have been studies that show that playing a violent video game doesn't cause you to want to go out and shoot people. But those studies are dealing with a "normal" group of individuals who would otherwise be categorized as mentally healthy. All that says to me is that most people have no intention of committing murder, which we already know through basic common sense. I don't think there's a common "murder" switch in every brain that is just sitting there waiting to get flipped when the proper prerequisites have been met. :-P

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At least there's a desire among many game developers to create more non-violent experiences, and even though the AAA space is still dominated by ostensibly or even passively violent verbs (for example, smashing crates to get the powerups inside), the diversity of experience is larger than ever between the indie scene, Facebook games, mobile games, and the like. It's pretty deeply rooted, and a lot of systems would be too abstract if they weren't violent (even Whale Trail of all things is about a whale getting hit by lightning and running from an evil whale-eating monster), but between conscious efforts on the part of devs and the natural cultural evolution, we're in good shape in the long run.

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Well this is interesting:

Charlottesville police say the man who showed up at a Kroger grocery store with a loaded gun wanted to make a point. On Sunday, an unidentified 22-year-old man carried a loaded AR-15 into the Kroger store on Emmet Street and Hydraulic Road, sparking not only a scare for customers and employees but also a 2nd Amendment debate.

On the one hand, it's effectively a valid form of free speech and technically within the law. As Banksy paraphrased, “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Well, clearly he did that.

On the other hand, it's arguably terrorism. The man walked into a crowded grocery store with a deadly weapon clearly displayed to assert his political supremacy. Plus, he got away with an intentional disturbance of the peace because it was a politically sensitive case. People have been charged and fined for far, far more innocuous and valid protests.

So anyway, in conclusion, it's shitty.

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