.....
But you wanted a proposal. I'll give you a half-dozen, and the list won't be anything like complete. It also won't necessarily address violence directly, but address the root causes of what persuades people to accept violence as a first-resort solution to problems.
Convince the entertainment industry to accompany depictions of violence with depictions of the consequences. On-screen deaths shouldn't be neat and tidy, they should be horrifying. Bodies shouldn't vanish from the frame, they should stick around to remind the viewer that a character has been converted to a corpse. A wounded character shouldn't be fine in the next scene, s/he should be realistically debilitated. Violence should hurt.
.......
I like the suggestions. If I can focus on the entertainment industry.
I wish:
- the entertainment industry (Hollywood for short) would stop glorifying tobacco. All kinds of characters smoke tobacco on screen these days that one would not expect to see addicted to tobacco in 'real life'. This glorification of tobacco risks hurting those of low and modest socio-economic status more than others. Not cool.
- Hollywood would deromanticize death, especially death by firearms. The European and Latin American film makers are typically better at this.
For a recent television series that directly confronts the horrors of violence, see Echo 3.
Listening to a podcast this morning where one of the hosts has moved with his family to London from NY. While discussing what he misses in the US, he noted the decrease in fear of his kids roaming around the city (London). He pointed out that 79% of homicides in the US involve a gun, versus 4% in the UK. The homicide rate in the US is also 4X higher per resident.
Do we realy need semi automatic, multi-round AK 47 and AR 15s? Other than the "I gots ta shoot them Hogs," what do people use them for? They obliterate the animal they are shot at, so not effective for hunting. Many of the kids shot in Uvalde were unidentifiable and DNA along with clothing were the only way to identify them.
Here in Texas, the parents are considering laws that can sue the state for the death of a childwhile in the care of the state - at school.
77 minutes those 200+ DPS officers milled about in confusion before breaching the doors to get to the kids. It wasn't the 18 year old they were afraid of, it was the Gun.
I couldn't agree more. Military weapons do not need to be in private hands. Buy too much fertilizer, and the FBI will visit your house, yet you can buy AR-15's and thousands of rounds of ammunition and that's somehow interpreted as "protected" by the Constitution. It makes no sense.
I think the biggest opportunity for change is time. The realization that our laws make no sense continues to grow. Slowly. The hard-line Right is getting older. The conspiracy theory-prone generations will fade (a bit), and it's likely that facts, reason, and logic will come out of hiding. When they do, the SCOTUS will turn over. Maybe then.
So what to do now?
I think the only way to get some small sense of control is to start holding enablers financially responsible for the costs associated with gun crime. Here's an example of one tax suggestion. Maybe you ignore the guns and create very large taxes on ammunition. Put a $5/round deposit on shell casings. I appreciate that "good gun owners" have to pay extra, but that's the price for not encouraging legislation and programs to limit the social harm done by the "not-so-good" owners. It's like when your car insurance goes up because the drivers in your area get in too many accidents.
As for the Uvalde situation... it was proof that "arming everyone" doesn't work. There were 400 cops on-site by the time they entered that classroom, and they sat on their hands and waited as small children bled out because of 1 person with superior firepower. I can't figure out why law enforcement doesn't lead the charge to remove these weapons from the street. Pure insanity, and not what the drafters of the Constitution were thinking when they wrote "..insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare..." They would be amazed at how the second amendment has been interpreted.
Do we realy need semi automatic, multi-round AK 47 and AR 15s? Other than the "I gots ta shoot them Hogs," what do people use them for? They obliterate the animal they are shot at, so not effective for hunting. Many of the kids shot in Uvalde were unidentifiable and DNA along with clothing were the only way to identify them. Here in Texas, the parents are considering laws that can sue the state for the death of a childwhile in the care of the state - at school. 77 minutes those 200+ DPS officers milled about in confusion before breaching the doors to get to the kids. It wasn't the 18 year old they were afraid of, it was the Gun.
High powered, high capacity weapons are People Killing Machines. No one needs them, except law enforcement and the military.
Do we realy need semi automatic, multi-round AK 47 and AR 15s? Other than the "I gots ta shoot them Hogs," what do people use them for? They obliterate the animal they are shot at, so not effective for hunting. Many of the kids shot in Uvalde were unidentifiable and DNA along with clothing were the only way to identify them.
Here in Texas, the parents are considering laws that can sue the state for the death of a childwhile in the care of the state - at school.
77 minutes those 200+ DPS officers milled about in confusion before breaching the doors to get to the kids. It wasn't the 18 year old they were afraid of, it was the Gun.
The most recent gun control legislation passed by the Canadian federal government will inconvenience serious gun owners and hunters, and accomplish nothing else other than gratuitously polarizing Canadians. Prime minister Justin Trudeau leans far too heavily on vacuous virtue signalling for my liking.
There might be a few measures that could be contemplated in the USA and other countries.
1. Start a debate on political violence and politically punish political leaders that support political violence. Socially trash celebrity narcissists like Elon Musk who support political violence.
2. Educate people about security and the limitations of firearms. Propose alternatives to firearms such as excellent physical conditioning, knives, mace, pens, pencils, knuckles, heels of the hand, knees, etc.
...
3. Teach people how to read a street. Teach people how to avoid gratuitously antagonizing someone carrying a firearm or other deadly weapon.
4. Invade and occupy the problem areas in Chicago and Washington DC. Completely sweep all homes and buildings for weapons. Establish the equivalent of Martial Law for a period. Ignore non-violent narcotics offenses while providing increased levels of public health services. Ramp up capital available for local entrepreneurs.
Turn the neighbourhoods into weapons-free zones. Use a massive police and military presence in order to accomplish that. Make sure key Black American leaders and communities are on side before proceeding. Evacuate the area of unarmed civilians before sending armed units in. Clean house. Setup community-based security organizations that share the function with municipal police forces going forward.
Set up a perimeter and keep the weapons out, at least until the court issues an injunction.
My suggestions are silly and they have no hope of being realized. Next?
FWIW ... there is an attempt underway to redefine violence to exclude willful property damage as an act of violence. This coming from the Stacey Abrams camp.
vi·o·lence /ËvÄ«(É)lÉns/ noun behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
Haven't read about this, but this my first take. Violence is an attack on people - but destruction of property is vandalism. Nitpicking, that makes perfect sense. There are people who can't handle nuance, like - the entire Internet - but I see what they're doing, I think.
actually your second take
Steely_D wrote:
Haven't read about this, but this my first take. Violence is people (like Soylent Green) - but destruction of property is vandalism. There are people who can't handle nuance, like - the entire Internet - but I see what they're doing, I think.
this is the important part though
but destruction of property is vandalism.
Vandalism to me is defacing property. Destruction is destruction, or rendering something either / or useless and recognizable. To destroy something with force is most certainly an act of physical violence. Violence can be brought about with anger or calm by the perpetrator.
Once upon a time many years ago we had a discussion about striking first and taking something to a physical level. IIRC you said that words were violent and the equivalent of a first strike physical blow, justifying retaliation by making the real first strike physical blow since it was justified by words that constituted an act of violence.
My how times have changed, or have they ?
. Oh and how prescient of you to bring up Soylent Green. I saw today the the EU has approved adding crickets and meal worms to human food as a protein substitute for meat. I sure hope they are not fed GMO's to fatten them up ... cuz if they do ... it makes us only one step removed from SG.
No, you only hear about them within our borders. Only something really spectacular (like the Bataclan shooting that killed 130 in Paris, or the Charlie Hebdo shooting that killed 12, or Anders Breivik's rampage in Norway that killed 77) or with strong political overtones makes the news here if it happens overseas.
I bet you didn't hear about the shootings of Kurdish activists in Paris last year. Or the Copenhagen mall shooting. Or Oslo. Or several in Canada. Or the many in Russia.
You don't hear about them because our media is pretty parochial, but also because it doesn't fit the narrative.
No one has found an answer to stopping a determined spree killer. If you're willing (or eager) to die for your grievance a thick book of laws isn't going to stop you. Hell, the former Prime Minister of Japan was murdered with a homemade hand-cannon last year. Every aspect of that act was illegal.
The last two mass casualty shootings were in California, a place where most of the gun control wish-list is law, but similar things happen in Chicago or D.C. every weekend. Gang bangers shoot up those streets with impunity. They're already murdering people, and murdering people has always been against the law.
True.
The most recent gun control legislation passed by the Canadian federal government will inconvenience serious gun owners and hunters, and accomplish nothing else other than gratuitously polarizing Canadians. Prime minister Justin Trudeau leans far too heavily on vacuous virtue signalling for my liking.
There might be a few measures that could be contemplated in the USA and other countries.
1. Start a debate on political violence and politically punish political leaders that support political violence. Socially trash celebrity narcissists like Elon Musk who support political violence.
2. Educate people about security and the limitations of firearms. Propose alternatives to firearms such as excellent physical conditioning, knives, mace, pens, pencils, knuckles, heels of the hand, knees, etc.
During half a decade of hitchhiking and backpacking through South American and Africa, the only people who asked and then expressed shock that I was unarmed were Americans. These well intentioned individuals had no understanding of how dangerous it would be to pack a firearm while travelling, let alone the challenges of illegally crossing borders with the weapon. The whole notion of strategic interactions never occured.
The problems:
- the usefulness of firearms can be severely limited in close quarter conflict.
- uneducated and poorly trained security forces in low-resource countries can be nervous and trigger happy
- popular American cultural imports exhort people to shoot first and ask questions later.
- a hidden firearm takes time and effort to access.
3. Teach people how to read a street. Teach people how to avoid gratuitously antagonizing someone carrying a firearm or other deadly weapon.
4. Invade and occupy the problem areas in Chicago and Washington DC. Completely sweep all homes and buildings for weapons. Establish the equivalent of Martial Law for a period. Ignore non-violent narcotics offenses while providing increased levels of public health services. Ramp up capital available for local entrepreneurs.
Turn the neighbourhoods into weapons-free zones. Use a massive police and military presence in order to accomplish that. Make sure key Black American leaders and communities are on side before proceeding. Evacuate the area of unarmed civilians before sending armed units in. Clean house. Setup community-based security organizations that share the function with municipal police forces going forward.
Set up a perimeter and keep the weapons out, at least until the court issues an injunction.
My suggestions are silly and they have no hope of being realized. Next?
Haresfur made a couple. Mine generally involve supporting less structural violence - our military. We spend orders of magnitude more on our military than other countries, and then we're somehow surprised that we have a violent society. It's basically a jobs program anyway, so lets make better jobs. Let's build stuff that doesn't blow up and destroy. Take some of that military industrial complex money and redirect it to housing, infrastructure, science, art...
Sure all these things are hard. But what happened to our willingness to accept challenges. 40+ shootings in 23 days, is just nuts and we shouldn't tolerate it.
If you want a Big Idea, a magic (ahem) silver bullet that will make American society peaceful...you're going to continue to be disappointed, and not just by me. There is no top-down fix here. While changes in policy would be part of it cultural change is mostly driven by forces outside the control of government.
Look how we got gay marriage. In 2008 California voters approved Pop. 8, amending the CA constitution to forbid state recognition of any marriage other than between one man and one woman. And won by a solid majority. By the time it was overturned in court it was (culturally anyway) a moot pointâthe issue was settled in the public mind.
That didn't happen because a law was passed or a TV show with gay characters aired or because a famous person or your neighbor or coworker or your doctor came out of the closet or because a university offered a a Queer Studies major. It came about because all those things happened. It was a campaignânot always conscious, not always intentional, and not centrally directedâwith many, many fronts, many setback, many successes, many individual minds changed one at a time, often without the owners realizing they were changing.
Changing a culture of violence will be harder, and it will be harder to know when we've succeeded. There won't be a single milestone that tells us we have.
But you wanted a proposal. I'll give you a half-dozen, and the list won't be anything like complete. It also won't necessarily address violence directly, but address the root causes of what persuades people to accept violence as a first-resort solution to problems.
Convince the entertainment industry to accompany depictions of violence with depictions of the consequences. On-screen deaths shouldn't be neat and tidy, they should be horrifying. Bodies shouldn't vanish from the frame, they should stick around to remind the viewer that a character has been converted to a corpse. A wounded character shouldn't be fine in the next scene, s/he should be realistically debilitated. Violence should hurt.
Our legal system criminalizes far too many things and punishes them far too harshly. A lot of this is the result of previous attempts at solving social problems via the criminal code. That needs reform from top to bottom.
We have communities that are afraid to approach the authorities to report crimes against them due to their immigration status. This creates an opportunity for gangs to fill the role of protector, and breeds violence between competing gangs. Immigration reform would allow these communities to return that role to the police and eliminate that opportunity.
We have far too many places kept poor by policies created to fight poverty. Poverty alone doesn't cause violence but despair does, driven by generations of constrained prospects. Obstacles that more-established populations can navigate (like zoning, licensing, and the usual absurd array of rules and restrictions) can be impenetrable when you don't have resources or connections to power and credit.
Take bullying seriously as a behavioral problem in schools.
Hire mental health first responders to handle wellness checks, people in crisis, and non-violent conflict resolution. Our approach has been to send the cops, but their limited toolset leads too often to a violent escalation. Not every 911 call needs to end with someone in handcuffs or dead.
No, this isn't (for the most part) a law you can pass, a set of political enemies to punish, a list of arbitrary objects to send people to prison for owning. You won't get a photo op at a signing ceremony where you get to declare victory. There will still be evil people doing evil things with objects you fear and loath, but that's going to be true no matter what we do.
But it also won't turn honest people into criminals, won't leave people helpless to defend themselves when the evil people do the evil things. And I think it leads to a better world.
Haven't read about this, but this my first take.
Violence is people (like Soylent Green) - but destruction of property is vandalism.
There are people who can't handle nuance, like - the entire Internet - but I see what they're doing, I think.
Around here it's perfectly justifiable to kill someone over property.
FWIW ... there is an attempt underway to redefine violence to exclude willful property damage as an act of violence. This coming from the Stacey Abrams camp.
noun
behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
Haven't read about this, but this my first take.
Violence is an attack on people - but destruction of property is vandalism. Nitpicking, that makes perfect sense.
There are people who can't handle nuance, like - the entire Internet - but I see what they're doing, I think.
But who would be our foil to hone our debate skills upon? Every good story needs an antagonist, a shadow, a mirror. Friction and sand make the pearl, yada yada.
I've been lurking on the convos and you guys can really get into the weeds sometimes. Still, its provocative, entertaining and educational. I found myself wanting to shake things up a bit.
So glad we are all trying to get away from combat attitude â something about music does that. ;)
FWIW ... there is an attempt underway to redefine violence to exclude willful property damage as an act of violence. This coming from the Stacey Abrams camp.
I bet you didn't hear about the shootings of Kurdish activists in Paris last year. Or the Copenhagen mall shooting. Or Oslo. Or several in Canada. Or the many in Russia.
You don't hear about them because our media is pretty parochial, but also because it doesn't fit the narrative.
Sorry to play process cop here... but the generally accepted definition of "Mass Murder" in the US is 4 (including the shooter if they died). Paris (3), Copenhagen (3), and Oslo (2) wouldn't make the news here either.
There were 30 shot, 7 fatally, over the weekend in Chicago. It's not about the narrative...it's about bandwidth. Why talk about Chicago (or Europe) when you've got bigger stories to cover?
Here are just the Mass Shootings YTD. FWIW...in the last 72 hours, there are 99 gun deaths in the US.
i agree
mainly violence used as a solution
philosophy/dispute resolution has a huge impact on murder as well as suicide (overwhelmingly the biggest part of gun deaths in us)
i think this is mainly out of convenience
gang violence is another we really don't talk about as much as we should
the technologies for an individual to hurt/kill/maim/harm a large amount of people is upon us
the one in particular i'm concerned about is biotech (and really nuclear too)
initiating/promoting violence as a solution is the worst thing we could do
i'm going to go out on a limb and say it is the root cause of the vast majority death and destruction
the world is getting better and better and to teach more peaceful negotiation would accelerate that
regards
