Active Shooter Situation.

[Devil505]

Is the culture in this country that much different than other developed countries? In what ways, exactly, do you think we celebrate violence and are exposed to more violence than other countries?

I know of no other country that glorifies guns unrealistically and makes them as readily available to the general public as does the USA.
Add to that the fact that we allow the gun industry to bribe our govenmernt reps to write insanely lax gun laws to keep the slaughter going.

 

[Devil505]

DEA were the jack boots in the war on drugs. often used themselves. I have no idea about you of course... The DEA should be disbanded and all non violent drug offenders released

The DEA is just doing what the congress has ordered them to do by law.

We agree on the need to legalize and tax most drugs for recreational use simply because prohibition never works and only feeds money to organized crime.
Put that money into education like we have with cigarettes and we'd have a much smaller problem, less crime, fewer prisoners in jail, freer court dockets and less police wasting their time on non-violent crimes.

In DEA's defense however, as long as drugs stay illegal they will always be an easy and profitable source of revenue for the cartels and terrorists.......so the drug trade is an easy access point to introduce LE into their world to try to stop terrorists.
(most of the intel we gets comes from DEA in one way or another.)

 

[Doug1943]

We are very "Gun-Happy" culture that celebrates them as part and parcel of our Go West cowboy society.
When I was a kid in the 1950's..every boy wanted a sixgun and holster set for X-mass and even today guns play a major role in our TV and movies.

We sell war weapons in stores like they were candy and are amazed and horrified when we kill each other with them.
Hollywood glorifies guns and rarely shows the results of that they can do to a human body.

Yes, although in the 1950s ... how many mass shootings were there? I haven't done the online research, but I believe there were very few.

I don't really understand it, and have not done the necessary reading of those who claim to, yet, but ... I have a tentative thesis that the problem is really, at bottom, unrestrained capitalism of the sort the US practices, which leads to a great strengthening of what we may call individualism, or perhaps politicized egoism. (There is even a minor, but very influential poltical movement on the Right which outright glorifies egoism and selfishness.) I'm an atheist, on logical grounds, but I think the fading away of religion and religious practice, has probably contributed to this.

So ... if the universe has no meaning .. if we're just a collection of complex molecules ... if the government is corrupt .. if there is no New World to fight for (which the Left in the first half of the 20th Century believed in, their substitute for a belief in a transcendental order) ... if patriotism is just a con job, the flag a bit of colored cloth, the Pledge a meaningless ritural or worse yet a trick to make us loyal to corporations ... if there are no externally-grounded moral boundaries, as shown by the depraved videos you can easily get, with every sort of disgusting perversion -- and, let's be frank, not so disgusting but definitely over-the-boundaries ones -- ... then add drugs to the mix ... and the rapidly-changing world, the undermining of all authority -- maybe this has something to do with the fact that every few weeks, a crazed individual decides to have his moment in the sun by going on in a blaze of glory.

I sometimes go on Leftist forums and raise this or that objection to their beliefs. My test case is one called 'Friendly Atheist', which concentrates on Christian fundamentalist stupidities and hypocrisies. The level of hatred I get there is slightly unnerving especially since I'm a fellow atheist, and even my politics is not very conservative --as I've said, I'm really a 1960 Democrat. (For instance, I'm fine with gay marriage -- hey it's gays buying into something conservatives honor, just like serving in the military), butIthink it''s petty and wrong to persecute a Christian baker who cannot make a gay wedding cake. But ... this is heresy for these young people.

But what really struck me about these people is their lack of any sort of patriotism. I won't go into details, and Ishould also say I'm an instrumental patriot when you get beyond the normal feelings of anyone my age -- I'm really an internationalist who appreciates the role -- overall -- the USA has played in defending and advancing liberal democracy around the world. But I know that patriotism is what glues this very diverse society together. If its ruling elite of the future doesn't have any, we're doomed. I think the sinews of American society -- the sort of thing that holds society together, that Emile Durkheim talked about -- are becoming dissolved by the Left (aided by the Market-fanatic every-man-for-himself Right).

I don't really have a deep understanding of the what's happening ... I can make a diagnosis, but it's very tentative -- the change in American academic attitudes seems important to me, but I'm an academic and we tend towards self-importance. But the prognosis seems very clear, and it's not good.

My previous wife was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar and I accompanied her to the USSR in 1985 where we lived for several months. I brought a microcomputer with me and did a small tour around the country, lecturing on microcomputers and education, and got to meet a small cross section of the Russian technical intelligentsia. I went back two or three times in the next few years -- I even did a tour for the British Council, lecturing on Computational Linguistics. I came to the conclusion, not at all the consensus at the time, that the Soviet Union was doomed. I thought it would be within our lifetime, and didn't realize I was too pessimistic by a factor of ten. My ex-wife still reminds me of this prescience, when she's feeling kindly. I decided this was so, because it was clear to me that the system, and the CPSU itself, had lost the 'mandate of heaven' in the eyes of its intelligentsia. They no longer believed in the system, at a deep level. That's happened to the American intelligentsia, and it has gotten stronger with each new generation that passes out of our elite institutions.

Anyway, there we are. Hopefully we can avoid a big war, so the Chinese can ascend to the role of leading nation of humanity by the end of the century.

 

[Doug1943]

The above, by the way, is just thinking out loud.
We also have to acknowledge the advance of 'modernity' which is occuring worldwide and is a good thing. So we're all getting more sophisticated -- see 'the Flynn effect'. Notice how television Westerns have changed since the 1950s. Then, the hero wore white, pressed clothes, was clean-shaven with short hair, and just shot the gun out of his dark, unshaven, pure evil opponent's hand. Now ... the hero is likely to be seeing a psychiatrist, may have a Dark Secret in his past, and the bad guy may be a very mixed, even sympathetic, character. Think the Sopranos, or Breaking Bad. Overall, this is good. More like real life, and being complex, it makes you think. This shows up on IQ tests on the component involving logic and patterns, Raven's Progressive Matrices. But .... the old certainties, the strong moral code, is gone.

 

[Devil505]

Yes, although in the 1950s ... how many mass shootings were there? I haven't done the online research, but I believe there were very few.

We had no military weapons on the street capable killing so many.
To a crazy.....the bigger the numbers the more attractive a target.

Stop selling military weapons to civilians!

 

[Babba]

A good question. After all , Hollywood rules the world -- I'll bet Osama bin Laden relaxed by watching pirated Hollywood films in his haven -- so why is, say, British culture so different from American? I tutor British kids, having lived here for donkeys' years, and young British males are just as fascinated by guns and violence as young Americans. Yet mass killings are very very rare here -- you only get them from Irish Freedom Fighters and devotees of the Religion of Peace. Maybe it's that you can't get your hands on a gun here easily, unless you're a farmer or a City stockbroker who hunts grouse for relaxation, or VERY persistent and not a nutter. But I think --- this is just subjective now -- that there is something else.

I'm not sure what it is. There must be academic studies of how 'youth culture' varies from country to country but I've not accessed them. Maybe it's this: when you see a YouTube video of an AC130 firing 105 rounds and 30 mm cannon rounds into a bunch of jihadis --or a wedding party but let's not go there -- it's always, definitely, Americans who are doing it. Even if they British are in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if the Canadians are there ... and they are, and both of them are bloody good, see their sniper shots for example, reaching out and touching someone over some insanely-impossible distance -- they are THERE because the Americans are there.

And foul mysoginistic rap music is American. And also most of the extreme disgusting videos of people doing things that ought to make ordinary people vomit -- they're American as well. (It used to be the British who engaged in various refined and elegant perversions, and also the French -- L'histoire d'O -- but now -- it's usually stuff from the world's greatest democracy.) Two or three years after 9/11, an American college student decided to drop out and join the Army and ended up in Iraq. His name was Corby Buzzell, or something like that, and he wrote a very interesting book about his experiences there. The one that stuck in my mind was the answer to the question he put to his platoon's Iraqi interpreter in Kirkuk: He asked this fellow, "What is the biggest change in your life since we overthrew Saddam Hussein for you?" The answer: "Now we can get pornography!" That says it all, as far as I'm concerned, which is why I've sent money to Major Gabbard, despite being a hard-hearted old reactionary Republican dinosaur.

As you point out, Hollywood rules the world. So, why aren't Brits just as violent? Or, the French? Or, the Spanish? Or, the Czechs? And you mention misogynistic rap music. That's not only heard by Americans. It's popular, along with the rest American culture, around the world. You mention violent and disgusting videos and suggest they're made by Americans. What about the videos made by Islamic extremists killing people. And what does pornography have to do with mass shootings or firearms deaths in general? You haven't mentioned it, but Japan probably enjoys more violent video games than just about any culture and yet they have one of the least violent cultures. Do you think it could possibly be the sheer preponderance of firearms floating around this country that accounts for the high rate of firearms deaths that we experience year in and year out?

 

[Devil505]

So ... if the universe has no meaning .. if we're just a collection of complex molecules ....

Whooaa!
Much deeper than I am tonight. (those old files are at the bottom of the stacks!)

 

[Rev. Hellh0und]

The DEA is just doing what the congress has ordered them to do by law.

That excuse didnt fly for nazis.....

We agree on the need to legalize and tax most drugs for recreational use simply because prohibition never works and only feeds money to organized crime.
Put that money into education like we have with cigarettes and we'd have a much smaller problem, less crime, fewer prisoners in jail, freer court dockets and less police wasting their time on non-violent crimes.

In DEA's defense however, as long as drugs stay illegal they will always be an easy and profitable source of revenue for the cartels and terrorists.......so the drug trade is an easy access point to introduce LE into their world to try to stop terrorists.
(most of the intel we gets comes from DEA in one way or another.)

Meh, it never should have been created. Like the dhs

 

[Rev. Hellh0und]

As you point out, Hollywood rules the world. So, why aren't Brits just as violent? Or, the French? Or, the Spanish? Or, the Czechs? And you mention misogynistic rap music. That's not only heard by Americans. It's popular, along with the rest American culture, around the world. You mention violent and disgusting videos and suggest they're made by Americans. What about the videos made by Islamic extremists killing people. And what does pornography have to do with mass shootings or firearms deaths in general? You haven't mentioned it, but Japan probably enjoys more violent video games than just about any culture and yet they have one of the least violent cultures. Do you think it could possibly be the sheer preponderance of firearms floating around this country that accounts for the high rate of firearms deaths that we experience year in and year out?

They are, even liberal politifact admits it.

Social media post says U.K. has far higher violent crime rate than U.S. does

 

[Babba]

They are, even liberal politifact admits it.

Social media post says U.K. has far higher violent crime rate than U.S. does

So that only proves that the ridiculous proliferation of firearms is the cause of the high rate of gun violence in this country. My point is that we aren't more violent than other first world cultures.

Crime Index by Country 2019 Mid-Year

The premise that our culture is the cause of the high rate of gun violence is bullshit. It's the absurd number of guns floating around and the easy access to guns.