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  • #46
    Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
    I wonder if there might be a correlation between population density and guns. In Europe, most people live in relatively compact villages or densely packed cities where people tend to get around on public transport. In the US there is much more isolation. That might make people more fearful.
    Given your history, "More guns, less genocides" seems to be the operative rule here. And if I may quote one Biggie Smalls:

    Can't run from the police...I'm too fat...gonna catch an asthma attack...s'why I bust back...

    Our cities are also generally more open and not as parkour-able in the event of organized nastiness.

    Comment


    • #47
      Originally posted by Epoetker View Post
      Given your history, "More guns, less genocides" seems to be the operative rule here. And if I may quote one Biggie Smalls:
      Can't run from the police...I'm too fat...gonna catch an asthma attack...s'why I bust back...
      Our cities are also generally more open and not as parkour-able in the event of organized nastiness.
      Pioneer spirit, loneliness, guns and prey for prosperity gospel televangelism – because if you cannot have real people around you, a television will do. Real people are mutually protective against fear and crazy ideas, televisions are not.
      “I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” ― Oscar Wilde
      “And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence” ― Bertrand Russell
      “not all there” - you know who you are

      Comment


      • #48
        Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
        Pioneer spirit, loneliness, guns and prey for prosperity gospel televangelism – because if you cannot have real people around you, a television will do. Real people are mutually protective against fear and crazy ideas, televisions are not.
        I've often been tempted to shoot my television at times, but managed to restrain myself.
        The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

        Comment


        • #49
          Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
          Pioneer spirit, loneliness, guns and prey for prosperity gospel televangelism – because if you cannot have real people around you, a television will do. Real people are mutually protective against fear and crazy ideas, televisions are not.


          Do you just enjoy saying nutty things? I grew up in a city, with several neighbors, and my parents owned guns. Likewise, I currently live in a city and also own guns. It has nothing to do with being fearful or crazy either. I'm a target shooter and do target shooting on about a monthly bases.
          "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
          GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

          Comment


          • #50
            Originally posted by lilpixieofterror View Post


            Do you just enjoy saying nutty things? I grew up in a city, with several neighbors, and my parents owned guns. Likewise, I currently live in a city and also own guns. It has nothing to do with being fearful or crazy either. I'm a target shooter and do target shooting on about a monthly bases.
            Nuttiness is relative LPOT. Just had that idea while looking down on your towns and cities from heaven (Google Maps). The places where we live are not human scale anymore. They are scaled for the motor car and this is not a blessing but a curse.
            “I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.” ― Oscar Wilde
            “And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence” ― Bertrand Russell
            “not all there” - you know who you are

            Comment


            • #51
              Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
              Many cultures all around the world, teach kids about guns and other weapons at a very young age by giving, especially boys, toy weapons or violent computer games. Kids are taught that the use of weapons and violence is pleasurable and there are no adverse consequences because people do not actually die when they are shot by a toy and dead computer game characters can be revived by a reset button. The immediate cause is accidental substitution of a weapon for a toy. If you keep weapons in the home this sort of accidental substitution is always a possibility.

              The poor kid was just doing what he was taught to do.


              More nutty post there FF? I knew the difference between a video game and real life when I was a kid and I'm sure others do as well. Of course, the fact that my parents played our games with us and taught us gun safety might be a good reason why nothing happened to begin with. Imagine that... parents need to be parents and actually involved in the lives of their children!
              "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
              GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

              Comment


              • #52
                Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
                Nuttiness is relative LPOT. Just had that idea while looking down on your towns and cities from heaven (Google Maps). The places where we live are not human scale anymore. They are scaled for the motor car and this is not a blessing but a curse.
                Do you not know your neighbors FF? I know mine and I also knew mine as a kid too. Our neighbors to the left, I'd watch their dogs for them and our neighbors to the right had kids our age. Do you actually have an argument buried somewhere in here because gun ownership, across the US, outdates the invention of cars, by centuries.
                "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
                GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

                Comment


                • #53
                  Originally posted by firstfloor View Post
                  Nuttiness is relative LPOT.
                  Yeah, and some of my relatives are nutty! Especially on my WIFE'S side!

                  Just had that idea while looking down on your towns and cities from heaven (Google Maps). The places where we live are not human scale anymore. They are scaled for the motor car and this is not a blessing but a curse.
                  I live in the woods, but I know all my neighbors, albeit I almost have to DRIVE there to visit them!

                  If you're in my neighborhood, and you're not coming to MY house, you're LOST!
                  The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                  Comment


                  • #54
                    Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                    Yeah, and some of my relatives are nutty! Especially on my WIFE'S side!
                    Isn't that how it always works? The crazy ones are on the 'other side of the family'...
                    "The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy."
                    GK Chesterton; Orthodoxy

                    Comment


                    • #55
                      Originally posted by lilpixieofterror View Post
                      Isn't that how it always works? The crazy ones are on the 'other side of the family'...
                      Yeah, she wanted me to say something nice about her family once, and I thought real hard, and said, "You have much better in-laws than I have!"

                      After about 3 days, I was able to open my left eye enough to see blurry stuff.
                      The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                      Comment


                      • #56
                        Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
                        Yeah, she wanted me to say something nice about her family once, and I thought real hard, and said, "You have much better in-laws than I have!"

                        After about 3 days, I was able to open my left eye enough to see blurry stuff.

                        Comment


                        • #57
                          Originally posted by lilpixieofterror View Post
                          Isn't that how it always works? The crazy ones are on the 'other side of the family'...
                          I am sure you have heard this before:

                          Does your family suffer from insanity?

                          No the pretty much enjoy it.
                          Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

                          Comment


                          • #58
                            FF almost gets one right, with a minor correction necessary:

                            Originally posted by firstfloor
                            Your people are mutually protective against fear and crazy ideas, televisions are not.
                            Have you read this post yet?

                            Originally posted by Akinokure
                            When a society is heterogeneous to the naked eye, it winds up stunting their moral sense, or corrupting it if it was already developed. There is simply too strong of a temptation to equate all that's going wrong in the world with the people who don't look like us. They clearly have some kind of inner, essential difference -- and maybe that's also causing them to be so screwed up. It's the same way we distinguish a poisonous from an edible species of plant.

                            We see this most depressingly in racially diverse countries, where people of one group complain about the other groups, whether justifiably or not. That removes the impetus to examine your own group and your own self, which is the basis for the concept of sin and redemption. For those concepts to take root, it needs to be an ethnically homogeneous group that nevertheless shows a range of behavior across individuals, from helpful to harmful.

                            As far as I can tell, Zoroastrianism was the first religion to develop the themes of sin and redemption, and not surprisingly that was when the Iranian pastoralists saw that some of their own kind were choosing to make a living by exploiting others, by raiding on horseback, rather than devoting their energies to tending their livestock. To their eyes, the criminals had the same inner essence as the stewards, and so both would have seen the pay-off of a life of crime. However, since some did and some did not follow that path, it must have been an act of free will on both of their parts. And likewise, they could return to the proper path by freely choosing to leave behind their exploitative ways.

                            Christianity perfected these concepts, also during a time when the cause of Jewish suffering was not so much those from outside, but the mutually antagonistic factions within the Jewish population. Rome did not turn Jewish women into prostitutes, and it was a sub-species of Jews -- not outside occupiers -- who had welcomed the money-changers into the Temple. Seeing that they were capable of bringing ruin upon themselves, some Jews lent their ear to Jesus. He did not obsess over repelling and expelling a foreign evil, but persuading every individual to check their internal temptation toward sin, to prepare for the coming end of days, when their repentance would save them.

                            At the other extreme, the Han Chinese have never discovered the concepts of sin and redemption as described above. Most of their moral systems are based on filial piety or at most an elaborate code of etiquette to maintain harmony. The closest they got was Taoism, which although very cryptic still cannot conceal its preoccupation with an individual swerving off of the right path and acting to get back on track. Not coincidentally, this philosophy or religion was developed during the Warring States period, when the Chinese had plenty of evidence right under their noses that evil didn't just come from some wicked band of foreigners.
                            Lets see if you can handle the cognitive dissonance here. He does get to television later, but it's a symptom, not the underlying disease.

                            Comment


                            • #59
                              Originally posted by pancreasman View Post
                              Maybe we're focussing a little too much on restrictive gun laws and murders. Accidental gun death really freaks me out. In cases like the OP, this family was obviously not competent to own a handgun. Is there some creative way of addressing this issue without restricting American's beloved right to bear arms?
                              I honestly don't think there is. As long as there exists a passion for guns in America, there's going to be accidents. You can put them in safes, and you can lock them away, but a lot of people own guns for protection, and that means that the user needs easy access to the weapon. You combine that fact with a population of over 300 million wildly diverse individuals with all sorts of family customs and all sorts of educational backgrounds, and the fact that guns were designed to destroy life efficiently, there's just no way of eliminating the accident factor. The only thing that I can imagine that would limit accidents is if we could find a way to dispel gun fever, you know, hit the issue at its source, but I don't think that's a very practical solution, mostly because, for many people, its part of their cultural identity. Also, our political climate is such that suggesting any sort of restriction or education on the subject is likely to cause polarization between the extremes. People would buy guns, and advocate for them, without ever using them, just to stick it to the other side. We're a nation of extremes.

                              Personally, its one of those issues that I attempt to take a neutral stance on. I think guns are interesting. I was in the military, and was a 60 gunner. I also really liked my M16, and I carried a Beretta M9 everywhere. I liked firing them, but hated cleaning them. I was decent at the range, nothing great. My brother loves guns, and is compiling a decent collection in Upstate Michigan. I like firing at targets when I go up visiting him. But I'm not a hardcore gun nut, and I know some people who are, and their obsession is a little strange to me. I know a guy who owns like 30 AR-15s, and just got done building a walk in vault for all of his weapons. He's spent thousands and thousands of dollars on these things. I don't get it. But then again, I don't get Brony's either, so there's that.

                              Comment


                              • #60
                                Originally posted by pancreasman View Post
                                Maybe we're focussing a little too much on restrictive gun laws and murders. Accidental gun death really freaks me out. In cases like the OP, this family was obviously not competent to own a handgun. Is there some creative way of addressing this issue without restricting American's beloved right to bear arms?
                                I had to ponder this for a while. Life carries with it dangers. If you are careless the dangers are greater. Is it desirable for state to eliminate all danger. I see the responsibility of the state to protection from outside and from criminal behavior. I am not a smoker, but I do not see the outlawing of tobacco as a role the state should have. I see the drug problems in the US and I see a situation caused by the existence of laws against drugs. We are now in a state where removing those laws will definitely cause great problems. The over reaching of government has been overall more harmful than helpful. Careless use of guns is far less of a problem than careless use of cars, for example. Less government is better. I apply that to gun laws.
                                Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

                                Comment

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