Monday, August 5, 2019

"Why Do We Still Have This (Mass Shooting) Problem?"

That was among the first things I heard after the El Paso mass murder.  I didn't write down who said it, whether it was politician or someone who isn't a megalomaniac (which pretty much all the politicians are). 

I muttered to myself, "because we punish the people who had nothing to do with the killing and reward the killers with the attention and celebrity status they want."  It's a rule of life: "if you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting."  They can't keep doing the same things.

It started within minutes.  You heard it - punish gun owners, punish the NRA, punish everyone except the murderers.  Meanwhile the leftist, environmentalist, whack job who wanted his diatribe read on the news gets it read on the news.  So they change a few words here and there to blame Trump for motivating him, why should he care? 

What's so hard to understand?  There's on the order of 75 million gun owners in America with 800 million guns.  One murderer broke at least a dozen laws to kill people because the planet is overcrowded.  He said plain as day (though not in these words) that he wanted to play the role of Thanos from the Marvel Avengers movies - there are too many people in America so he needed to kill lots of them off.

You get more of what you reward and less of what you punish.  The people who commit the mass murder, and the aspiring mass murderers out there get incentivized to do more killing.  That leads to more mass killings, but the people being punished didn't do anything wrong to start with so there's nothing to get less of. 

What's so hard to understand?  Killers prefer gun free zones.  They prefer to have the longest time possible to rack up the most kills.  If they really want to stop the killers, we need to eliminate their killing fields. 

In fact, if they really want to get rid of the mass killings they need to do the exact opposite of what they're talking about and the exact opposite of what they've been doing for at least 50 years.  They need 50 state constitutional carry, an end to free fire (gun free) zones, and more armed citizens.  In both cases this weekend, the police did a stellar job of response, but the first person to see and hear the shooter is always already there when the shooting starts.  The Dayton police got that shooter within 24 seconds, but what if someone in the crowd - or five, ten or twenty someones - got a good shot off in half that time? 


From John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center

Very simply, if they keep rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent, they're never going to end mass killings.  There is simply no solution they can legislate to stop this.  The people they're passing the laws against are not the ones committing the crimes.


8 comments:

  1. This keeps happening because the perpetrators have nothing to lose and a little to gain.

    On one level, they are narcissistic. Totally self-absorbed, they harbor delusions of grandeur. They crave celebrity, but will gladly settle for infamy.

    On another level, they are nihilistic. They see no value in their life or the lives of others. Their brief attacks are rebellion against society, humanity, and the universe.

    They have no investment in life or reality. They have no existential assets. No purpose. No family. No friends. No future. Their existence appears before them as a barren wasteland because they've never learned to see that they're responsible for their own happiness. They hold others, those who actively work towards self-actualization, in a mix of envy, disgust, and contempt.

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  2. What's that line?

    The very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

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  3. The problem is that you get the people who think that they can stop a person intent on killing if they pass just one more law. Whether that law is "no guns allowed in this place" or some other one, they think that the killers are basically like them, and will obey rules.
    The majority of the American people don't understand evil. They think that everyone is like themselves: they have a job, they have friends, and generally follow the rules of society. This child like view of the world guides their voting. Those mass killers? None of them live near me. Those people are in other places, not my neighborhood. No sir, that can't happen here.

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  4. It appears you may be conflating the stated goal with the actual goal.

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  5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC522639

    A blue-ribbon scientific advisory panel has urged the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to include "black box" warnings on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) advising of the increased risk of suicidal behaviour among pediatric users. Black box warnings are typically reserved for lethal drugs.

    https://www.fda.gov/media/77404/download

    The following symptoms, anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania, have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder

    Guns don't enter the body, cross the blood-brain barrier, and alter the operation of the brain; SSRIs do. SSRIs are proven to have a rare side effect of uncontrollable violence. The most likely to experience this side effect are adolescent males who skip doses because they have poor supervision from their family. Fred Reed reports when he was a young man rifles were commonly brought to high schools in rural areas during hunting season, but there wasn't a school shooting problem.

    You're slowly being poisoned. Fluoride in the drinking water didn't have enough of an effect, nor did Mercury in teeth fillings and vaccine preservatives. But carbohydrate-majority food promoted by the regulatorily captured FDA as low-fat-healthy-whole-grains was the home run. It makes people fat, diabetic, sluggish; impulsive and hungry-angry, then a quick rush of energy, then back to sluggish. It's cheap, too, and the farming of it has been subsidized to crowd out small family farms growing a variety of animals, cereals, vegetables, and fruits. SSRIs are merely the cherry on top.

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  6. The purpose of "gun control" isn't to control guns or mass murder events, the purpose is to eliminate the fact that Americans are armed so that they may be forcefully controlled. The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to restrain or eliminate an out-of-control tyrannical government. The ability to shoot crooks and deer are only side-effects.

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  7. Your summary is a subset of the entire leftist philosophy. The reason our once-great republic is declining is because the leftists (they don't get to use the term liberal anymore) is because they force is to reward failure and punish success.

    Too lazy to work? Welfare for you!

    Bust your ass and make good money? You get taxed to pay for welfare folk.

    Bad behavior has no consequence for far too many, starting in elementary school. If your parents didn't teach you respect for others, a swift paddling did the trick in my youth.

    Far less crime then...

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    1. I can't claim credit for the idea, but I saw a poster or meme with a saying that goes, "We discourage things by taxing them; things like alcohol, tobacco, giant sugary sodas, gambling, income... Wait..."

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