re: #261 Renaissance_Man

You’re very right that it’s not just the mere presence of guns it’s also the culture. I completely agree with you that mental health is not the panacea solution, partially because some people are perfectly sane and still decide to commit mass murder. Sanity doesn’t require adherence to morality.

Anyway, compare us to Swizterland, where they have a lot of guns but also a lot of gun control and very non-machismo, non-vengeance, non-vigilante culture. They have a high rate of suicide deaths and accidents from guns as compared to non-gun-having countries, but they don’t have the use of the guns in crimes. So it is possible to have guns and to keep gun violence low. It is not possible to fetishize guns, and to have a society with a permanent criminal underclass created by a prison and ghetto system that starts rolling kids in there as teenagers.

The particular guns used in these murders were legally owned by a person that, even under more restrictive gun control laws, would probably be allowed to have them. They may have been unsecured— if that’s the case, I think it’d be a good idea to push for mandatory gun-safes for all gun-owners. This is present in a number of other countries and helps to prevent a lot of crimes.

But I really think the main reasons we have so much gun violence are the fetishizing of guns and the fetishizing of violence, vigilantism, machismo, along with the stupid-ass drug war and the number of people that sends through our meatgrinder prison system.