The war against individual freedoms

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_Some Schmo
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _Some Schmo »

honorentheos wrote:So...how exactly does one go about imposing change on families to increase the ratio of families with two parents including an attentive father figure while avoiding becoming a well trained monkey state so we can remain a free range anarchic monkey state?

Amore keeps bringing up the dubious fatherlessness thing as though it's somehow relevant to solving the issue, like if we just acknowledged it, we'd understand.

But I, like you, would be interested to find out his solution to the no dad problem. Kids are only allowed to have guns if they can prove they have an active dad? But then those poor single parent kids don't get to defend themselves with high powered firearms, so that's no good.

What could we possibly do about it?
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_cafe crema
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _cafe crema »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:What's more pragmatic? Take the stick away or solve mental illness?

- Doc

Wouldn't it be most pragmatic to first take away the stick and then solve the mental illness? You are not really who I am looking for an answer from, I'm just being lazy and not going back to the start of the let the kids keep the sticks proposal.
_EAllusion
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _EAllusion »

Seriously mentally ill people are less likely than the average person to commit violent crime. Serious mental illness doesn't necessarily make people violent, but it does affect people's basic functioning. The seriously mentally ill make up a small fraction of gun related offenses. If you made serious mental illness go away tomorrow, you wouldn't have done much of anything to stop gun crime and it's even possible you might have increased its incidence.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4211925/
_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

café crema wrote:
Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:What's more pragmatic? Take the stick away or solve mental illness?

- Doc

Wouldn't it be most pragmatic to first take away the stick and then solve the mental illness? You are not really who I am looking for an answer from, I'm just being lazy and not going back to the start of the let the kids keep the sticks proposal.


For some reason gun nuts can't bear the idea that taking the stick away will result in less deaths. They think if we were to rid ourselves of our weapons that somehow future wars involving karate hands will still result in millions of deaths.

- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_cafe crema
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _cafe crema »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:What's more pragmatic? Take the stick away or solve mental illness?

- Doc

café crema wrote:Wouldn't it be most pragmatic to first take away the stick and then solve the mental illness? You are not really who I am looking for an answer from, I'm just being lazy and not going back to the start of the let the kids keep the sticks proposal.


Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:For some reason gun nuts can't bear the idea that taking the stick away will result in less deaths. They think if we were to rid ourselves of our weapons that somehow future wars involving karate hands will still result in millions of deaths.

- Doc



It seemed to me that the idea you wouldn't take a stick away from a child who was poking another child with it is utterly bizarre. I have never heard or heard of a parent taking that approach, not as a child, not as an aunt, not as a parent among other parents. Always the stick goes away and explanations, discipline follow, even among the gun nuts I know.
_Kevin Graham
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _Kevin Graham »

Amore wrote:Kevin,
Besides mental illness &/or prescription meds, another common factor is most shooters didn’t have their fathers in their lives. You can ignore that, but it doesn’t change it, all it does is prevent you from seeing reality and make you ignor-ant.


WTF?

I'm not ignoring that, I'm actually using the data you provided to dismiss a theory of cause and effect. Maybe you should pay better attention you the articles you're providing and stop engaging in the fallacious reasoning of correlation equals causation.

Mass Shootings and Mental Illness:

Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides. In contrast, deaths by suicide using firearms account for the majority of yearly gun-related deaths.

The overall contribution of people with serious mental illness to violent crimes is only about 3%. When these crimes are examined in detail, an even smaller percentage of them are found to involve firearms.


Guns cause mass shootings, not psychiatric drugs

Incidentally, I've been seeing a lot of social media memes about a link with mass shooters and "psychotropic" drugs. That sounds scary but the long list of psychotropic drugs include drugs taken by tens of millions of Americans. Ambien (Insomnia), Ritalin (ADHD), Celexa (Stress), Valium (Anxiety), Zoloft (Depression) etc. These are all "psychotropic" drugs and you probably know at least ten people who have taken at least two of these at some point in their lives.
_Kevin Graham
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _Kevin Graham »

You need to figure out why he’s misbehaving


OK Amore, we've heard your theory that this is about bad parenting or lack thereof, and so for sake of argument let's say you're right.

So now what?

What's the solution?

You haven't even begun to propose one other than "father's stay at home." That's about as useful as trying to end abortion by preaching abstinence. You can't legislate morality right?

Now if you think all children in public schools need to be looked at by school psychologists then I'm on board with you. But given the number of potential candidates that are out there (loners, depressed, bullied kids from broken homes, etc), we'd probably have to double the funding for public education which is something the Right Wing strongly opposes. Every penny in increased spending is frowned upon as another step towards socialism. In fact, the people who keep pushing against public education in favor of charter schools is typically the same crowd who says it isn't the government's job to raise children. And yet here you are talking about how so many disturbed kids need parenting in a life without parents. So who needs to take care of that?

Again, what are you actually proposing other than a meaningless acknowledgement that fatherless, mentally ill kids are the real problem?

And Cruz's father died from a heart attack when he was 6 years old. This happens to many families. He wasn't abandoned.
_Kevin Graham
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _Kevin Graham »

subgenius wrote:Nope, clearly the language of the 2nd makes a clear and obvious distinction between "regulated militia" as being a right of the State and then uses "The People" with regards to "keep arms". The 2nd does not specify "Only the people in the militia".


If you had read the study I linked you'd see that the second clause is dependent on the first.

English common law had long acknowledged the importance of effective arms control, and the meaning of the Second Amendment seemed clear to the framers and their contemporaries: that the people have a right to possess arms when serving in the militia.Over the years, this “collective rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment was upheld in three Supreme Court decisions, in 1876, 1886, and most recently, in 1939 (Bogus 2000). The meaning of the Second Amendment remained uncontroversial until 1960, when a law review article using sources like American Rifleman asserted an additional, individual, right to bear arms for the purposes of self-defense (Hays 1960)

Conclusions:

In our amicus brief in the Heller case we attempted to demonstrate,

• that the Second Amendment must be read in its entirety, and that its initial absolute functions as a subordinate adverbial that establishes a cause-and-effect connection with the amendment’s main clause;
• that the vast preponderance of examples show that the phrase bear arms refers specifically to carrying weapons in the context of a well regulated militia;
• that the word militia itself refers to a federally-authorized, collective fighting force, drawn only from the subgroup of citizens eligible for service in such a body;
• and that as the linguistic evidence makes clear, the militia clause is inextricably bound to the right to bear arms clause.

18th-century readers, grammarians, and lexicographers understood the Second Amendment in this way, and it is how linguists have understood it as well.


"We see that the need for a state militia was the predicate of the "right" guaranteed; in short, it was declared "necessary" in order to have a state military force to protect the security of the state. That Second Amendment clause must be read as though the word "because" was the opening word of the guarantee. Today, of course, the "state militia" serves a very different purpose. A huge national defense establishment has taken over the role of the militia of 200 years ago." - Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States (1969-86)

Burger is on video here calling the NRA's interpretation one of the greatest pieces of fraud. Oh yeah, and Burger was a Conservative judge, not a Liberal.

If the 2nd amendment meant what the NRA tells you it means then why did George Washington disarm American citizens who, in the name of "Liberty," rebelled against tax collectors because they felt the government was treading on them? Why did James Madison call Shay's rebellion treasonous?
_Doctor Steuss
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _Doctor Steuss »

Kevin Graham wrote:Incidentally, I've been seeing a lot of social media memes about a link with mass shooters and "psychotropic" drugs.

Try as I might, I've never figured out how to weaponize my Geodon.
"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." ~Charles Bukowski
_Fence Sitter
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Re: The war against individual freedoms

Post by _Fence Sitter »

EAllusion wrote:Seriously mentally ill people are less likely than the average person to commit violent crime. Serious mental illness doesn't necessarily make people violent, but it does affect people's basic functioning. The seriously mentally ill make up a small fraction of gun related offenses. If you made serious mental illness go away tomorrow, you wouldn't have done much of anything to stop gun crime and it's even possible you might have increased its incidence.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4211925/


Mental Illness is a red herring. Besides the ridiculously small number of incidents in which gun related and mental illness are involved, the only way to even approach that issue would be to install regulations that gun fanatics don't want.

Here is the problem.

Many case of mental illness, especially severe mental illness do not manifest themselves until well past the age where it is legal to own guns. Additionally it is not like mental illness is a definition where one is either totally mentally ill or not at all. It covers a broad range of illness from moderate depression, to bi-bolar behavior to Schizophrenia and a variety of illnesses in between. Every one of those illness range from mild to severe depending on the patient. On top of all that, every patients cognitive abilities and symptoms are subject to change over time. Some get better, some worse, some stabilize for years then get better or worse. There is no guarantee that a person with mild depression who owns a gun cannot get worse suddenly and without any outward signs.

So my point in all this is that how are you going to regulate this type of dynamic pool of people? People can get sick after they have purchased guns, or their disease is so moderate it wouldn't occur to anyone they need to be regulated and out of the blue they take a significant turn for the worse. About the only way to regulate this would be to require an Israeli type of gun control where every few months one is required to take a safety course and go through interviews showing you are still eligible for ownership, as well as a 3 month waiting period to even get a gun.

So the gun fanatics can keep talking about how this is a mental health issues, when it isn't, but even if it was, those same people would never put up with the regulations it would take (or pay for them for that matter) to try and keep guns out of the hands of the severely mentally ill or those who have that potential.

Mental health and the gun problem is a red herring put forward by ignorant people who don't know what they are talking about.
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."
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