Jersey Girl wrote: ↑Thu Mar 30, 2023 9:43 pm
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑Thu Mar 30, 2023 12:55 pm
I read a thing yesterday; there are nearly 400,000,000 firearms in the US. This won’t get fixed.
- Doc
Neither will the topic. Thanks for trying.
I give.
I’ll keep trying. I was thinking about this year’s # of mass shootings
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/repo ... s-shooting and I want to say it’s not looking great
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls given our numbers. But I do think there are, in fact, underlying issues I
think I can at least try to suss out.
Obviously there are glaring differences between us, the US, and other countries where mass shootings are rare to non-existent. I
think the actual problem, guns aside, is more insidious and subtle. So, here’s my Big Reveal:
Americans are stressed out. Shocker, I know.
The kind of stress I’m talking about is more of a character trait. And we’re fearful which feeds into stress. And it’s a low-key fear every single day. I think this stress, fed by fear, causes some of us to just snap. Here in the US, it seems to be a normal state of affairs, to be so stressed that it’s normalized.
What is causing us to internalize this stress so it’s just a fact of life here? Here are my guesses:
Firstly, it’s media. Whether it’s the mainstream media, alt-news, or social media, it’s all designed to ping our fear reflex, to keep us hooked. This isn’t even debatable. People, by far, are more apt to engage in negative media rather than positive and informative media. Our brains are wired to focus on threats, whatever form they take, and stay on them until something else captures our attention. Were fed, create, and participate in fear-based media. We’re always being stressed, deliberately, because it keeps eyeballs on the content. This has a huge day-to-day impact on our psychological and physiological processes.
Secondly, I
think it’s the food people eat, and the drinks people ingest daily that are processed, incredibly packed with sugar and additives, and it’s damned up our systems; it causes our bodies to be stressed. We’re also over-consuming this slop that’s literally designed to addict you to them. And, we’re consuming too often, never giving our bodies a chance to process this slop, so our physiology is always in a state of dealing with tension, inflammation, filtering, or just not getting a break. Our ‘nutrition’ is killing us slowly, and I think our bodies are freaking the “F” out, which translates to humans who can’t relax due to their diets and habits.
Thirdly, the way people live, the sort of live-to-work and work-to-live cycle we’re in is making us crazy. For million, tens of millions really, the dream of upward mobility is impossible. It could be any number of factors, all debatable, but when people realize they’re busting their asses just to pay rent, eat like crap, and then be filled with fear every day … of
course some of them snap, and what’s readily available as a tool to use to either off themselves, or to inflict the pain and frustration on a society that’s designed to milk them to death? What happens when a person who’s mind is presented with fear and despondency every day, who’s body is filled with addictive poison, and realizes they’re not going to have the American Dream? Stress and fear translate to resentment. Resentment typically feeds into escapism or lashing out. It is what it is.
I suspect gun legislation is or would be just a band-aid on the American psyche. I’m fairly certain if I were to google other forms of violence and dreadful stats, America s would be at or near the top in virtually every category.
Now. Just banging out this post, I resisted the temptation to provide solutions to the problems I think are real enough to present. I have solutions in mind, but what’s the point? I’m not trying to be a doomer, but the fact is any practical solution has to be an internal process wherein the individual has an epiphany here and there in order to fix their life, their perspective, their health, and live consistently in a manner that begets balance. Trying to legislate behavior to an addict will only result in an outburst, and we’re a nation of rage addicts, slop-food addicts, escapism addicts, and resentment addicts. I don’t think there is a holistic approach that can fix a nation of 380M people with 400M firearms. We’ll always be in a reactive position because we cling to our addictions.
- Doc