Shard

The human mind can flip. Just yesterday I read the story of a Welsh man, 70, who suddenly strangled his wife because he was depressed and she told him to get over it.

That's an argument to take guns out of society (or highly regulate them) as they increase the likelihood of a rage moment becoming lethal.

Lion in Winter

Sure. But "he flipped" is also, with all due respect, a cop out when you look at the sheer numbers of dead people here and the "reasons" that somebody "flipped".

Shard

Well, that poor man never did come to his senses.

civilservant

Sure, because it's much harder to kill multiple people quickly with a knife the way you can with an AR-15.

As has been said before, the guns exacerbate the fatality rate, but they aren't the only reason the fatalities occur.

Or more lethal, at least. The political will does not exist though, especially since it would take the heaviest lift of all, a constitutional amendment.

Because he commited suicide?

If that's your point, I would beg to differ. I volunteered as a Samaritan for nearly 10 years and I can tell you that some suicidal people are extremely rational and calculating.

Lion in Winter

This was precisely my question at the outset. Guns in and of themselves are not the only reason for the rate of deadly violence in the US that far exceeds the UK, or other developed countries that are highly armed such as Canada and Switzerland.

Remember this case? What about an argument over a parking space ends in "I'm shooting you"?

Warning, video contains actual shooting footage so don't watch it if you don't want to see that.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-44932283

Shard

It's literally what happened. The dead are not so much because of people flipping, but because of easy access to firearms. And perhaps it's the access to firearms that enables a segement of society to revel in that absolutism about their rights. A kind of chicken/egg.

Shard

Admittedly, I don't know if the whole thing was a staged massacre. I assume that this altercation was one too far for the shooter (whether this neighbor or society in general) and that his rage deprived him of any moral sense, and so he killed the couple and then himself. It's all tragic and they are all victims.

Shard

Thanks for the trigger warning.

I wasn't offered one by my wife, and proceeded to watch what I thought would be a benign altercation with shovels and words.

Hiro11

Nope, there's less violence in rural areas when you normalize for this by looking at rates. Totally untrue, lots of rural US is very poor and doesn't have these issues.
This I agree with. Ironically, you sound kind of like the NRA (a group I don't support,BTW) here, lol. I'm not sure what this means, but I definitely don't agree that the US "accepts violence". Unless you're talking gang violence which is bizarrely tolerated and barely mentioned in polite company.

Totally agree with you here. Banning guns will be useless in addressing violence without addressing the true root causes of lack of prospects, lack of opportunity, ignorance and insularity. This warms the cockles of my libertarian heart to hear you say this. Again, school shootings are awful and way too common, but are rounding error compared to the tsunami of daily, grinding, BAU violence in places like the west side of Chicago. They have very different root causes as well and require different solutions.

scrubbedexpat099

Drugs is also a complicated issue.

By default I tend to be against prohibition as it obviously doesn't work and usually what adults want to do to themselves, well their business.

But there are consequences, nobody seems to know, well perhaps unfair, wants to deal with the inevitable consequences.

When they legalised MJ here they taxed it heavily and logic should dictate the money go to treatment etc, but nope, went to very different projects.

I was given some pretty powerful painkillers after a Dentist trip, the prescription could not be phoned in had to show ID etc, took one and wow. Anyway Ibuprofen did the job, turns out they fetch $25 each on the street.

ddsrph

I get chills just looking at how many people live in cities. Houses so close that you can barely walk between. A bad neighbor can become a lifetime pain in the ass. With our armed populace being a jerk can have deadly consequences. I saw a tv documentary once about a neighborhood where one person went out of his way to threaten and antagonize his neighbors. They took him to court for a restraining order and when that didn’t help one neighbor, a retired Navy Commander, emptied his 9mm in him.

Lion in Winter

I don't disagree with that. But part of this is due to the nature of rural living, not the presence or absence of weapons per se.

https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/topi...onal%20average.

See above. What rural areas don't have is street crime (not many streets) and gang crime (not many gangs). Different environment.

Sure. Because I'm look at the enthusiasm for weaponry as a symptom. Clearly the guns are a major cause of death and if we were able to disarm the civilian population there would be many, many fewer deaths, but their ubiquity and our willingness to tolerate the results is a symptom of something, and that's the something I'm trying to get at. So I don't put forward the argument that the NRA does. The NRA is itself part of the disease.

We might disagree here on some of the details, but essentially we are in the same place. Removal of guns would make a huge difference to the death toll - but we can't remove them. Yet. Our society at large won't tolerate it and weapons have saturated the country to the point where rounding them all up will take decades. Even if we start now. Having said that, changing laws is a part of changing culture. For example, laws against racism and Jim Crow have not removed racism, for sure, but they have been a part of gradually changing culture so that racism is becoming less and less acceptable (over long periods of time) and at least many of its most overt manifestations have gone because they are now illegal.

Having said that, we are back to my original question. What have happened to the US that it is the way it is? Why is the violence - and the acceptance of violence - so prevalent?

Shard

Is that a rhertorical question? It's obvious: part of the orginal sin in founding, and the perpetuated through the centuries with second amendment bolstered by a popular mytholgy that guns/violence/retribution are American. Obsession with individuality, paranoia about the state, and a glorification of the military. It is literally in the DNA of America, and as you rightly point out, it will take decades to shift the culture even a little bit.

civilservant

I have to agree that the way that the US was built is partly to blame. The mythos of 'the old west' like Shard says above.

Self reliance, there was no (or limited) law. If the Sheriff wanted to make an arrest, he had to round up an armed pose from the citizenry in order to do so. If you didn't have a way to defend yourself, you were a target and a victim.

Taking the UK as an example, the right to bear arms was never a part of our DNA. We didn't need it. The country was fully 'conquered' a long long time ago. Not so with the territories.

You're trying to scrape off hundreds of years of history. Not easy.

Lion in Winter

No, not rhetorical at all. It's one I've been thinking about for years, looking for actual answers.