Oregon shooting
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Skids wrote: | | Gun control doesn't work. Fact is, if i was a nutter and wanted to shoot someone, i could get out of bed now, go buy a gun (yep, write now) and start firing. Did gun control work? |
If you ask most ordinary people in metropolitan areas, they would have no idea how or where to get a gun and would have virtually zero chance of finding one at the family home or in an acquaintance's possession. It may not stop a well-planned attack, but it certainly frustrates such attempts and cuts out a lot of crimes of passion in the process.
That's gun control, and yes, our lack of mass killings would seem to suggest that it does work.
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Last edited by David on Sun Oct 04, 2015 11:26 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| watt price tully wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | The underlying causes are probably unknowable, and so entangled that isolating one or two will falsify the picture rather than sharpen it. Inequality, family breakdown, exposure to violent media, emulation of past shootings, or the simple rates of dissociative mental illness in a large population all probably play a part. Which you prefer will depend on your ideological preferences.
The one constant factor in every case, however, is that when someone's hatreds boil over, they have ready access to weapons that allow them to kill many people very quickly. Fix that and the problem will largely go away. Obama's speech nailed it very well. |
As already stated, the latter is a no-brainer, but I was responding to David's post and talking about (male) violence broadly.
On that topic, this is one of the stablest bodies of knowledge getting around in the behavioural and social sciences. The biology and psychiatry of male violence is well-known. The main social correlates are well-known because you have great crime data worldwide and access to well-studied prison populations. That gives you the ability to get as close to stability in causal theory formation as you can in the social sciences because you can model the problem from the biology, through to the individual and family behaviour, and on to larger social units.
The writer who got me into this topic many years ago was James Gilligan, and his basic premises only become more verified over time.
So, the ideology in the case of broader male violence is claiming we don't understand it well enough to reduce it within reasonable policy constraints. |
I read one of Gilligan's books years ago and all I recall is that most violent actors had been exposed to violence at an early age and subjected to sustained denigration. That is credible and makes intuitive sense, but it does not seem to easily cover random mass shootings.
If we mentally flick through the cases of Julian Knight, Frank Vitkovik, martin Bryant, and the US cases of Virginia Tech, Colorado and Sandy Hook, i don't think that any case fits the type of profile described by Gilligan, as far as published records show. Narcissistic dissociative personality disorder looks more like it.
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I wouldn't be putting dissociative in there too quickly.
Narcissistic traits for sure, an actual disorder needs to be established.
A sociopath formerly known (in the main) as a psychopath gets my vote & invariably contains narcissistic features.
Equally, dissocial personality formerly known as anti social personality would be getting my vote. |
Ah, you're right WPT -terminology happily corrected I did psychology at Melbourne University 30 years ago, and psychopathology was never my strongest suit. There may have been something genuinely dissociative about the Batman guy in Colorado, but for the others "dissocial" was what I should have (datedly) said.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| David wrote: | | Wokko, do you at least concede that America has a problem that most other developed countries don't have? |
I think I've explicitly stated that already, hence countries with very high gun ownership like Switzerland and Israel not suffering the same problems. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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So if you agree that there is something extraordinary about America in terms of its rates of violence (whether it be cultural, a result of socioeconomic factors or something else), do you see how people like me view a libertarian gun policy as a match in a powder keg? Surely a highly dysfunctional culture should have less access to lethal weapons, not more.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| David wrote: | | Surely a highly dysfunctional culture should have less access to lethal weapons, not more. |
Hmmm, that would be racist wouldn't it  Like saying a highly dysfunctional culture that can't handle alcohol too well should have less access to it. 
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Last edited by Skids on Sun Oct 04, 2015 4:48 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Just a comment, I'm sick of the use of the term "High powered weapons" by people who wouldn't which end of the gun is dangerous.
Australia has not restricted the sale of "High powered weapons", they put a restriction on magazine capacity and rapid fire mechanisms. A .22 rifle is plenty capable of killing a human and it's pretty much the lowest power bullet there is. FFS i read recently where someone referred to a high powered shotgun. I don't know of any low powered ones, even a 4-10 would make a mess of someone at close range.
We never had automatic rifles legally in Australia and handguns have always been highly restricted.
"Assault" rifles are basically military weapons, usually fully automatic.
A .303 lee enfield is plenty high powered, given a decent marksman and a rest you can kill a person from nearly 1km away without need of a scope and they're still legal to buy and own as they're bolt actioned with generally a 5 shot mag.
The Desert Eagle 50 cal handgun is plenty high powered but pretty much useless at more than 100m and only good that far with a really decent marksman using it.
The problem with the US gun laws is the availability and type. Proliferation of hand guns and fully automatic rifles and guns.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| That's scary, Stui - looks like there's a whole lot of weapons that should be illegal in Australia that presently aren't. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Skids wrote: | | David wrote: | | Surely a highly dysfunctional culture should have less access to lethal weapons, not more. |
Hmmm, that would be racist wouldn't it Like saying a highly dysfunctional culture that can't handle alcohol too well should have less access to it. |
It's not a totally unreasonable analogy. Here's where it falls down:
1) Culture is not ethnicity. But when the culture you're talking about is more or less ethnically homogenous, it does become an issue of more than just culture. I'm not necessarily saying that's right or wrong, though.
2) While alcohol is a direct contributor to violence, it is not the weapon itself. Guns kill people; alcohol doesn't (not in violent conflicts, I mean). Like cars and kitchen knives, alcohol also arguably has a positive social function. So you can argue that their utility outweighs their (indisputable) potential for harm and misuse. Guns, on the other hand, only serve one purpose: killing or injuring people as quickly and violently as possible. If they're not being used for hunting, they pretty much have no other reason for existence. Again, that is not necessarily an argument against banning alcohol from dysfunctional communities, but it is an important factor to consider.
3) This is the most fundamental distinction: if Americans, through their democratic system, argue for country-wide gun restrictions, they are making an autonomous political decision about how they want their society to be. If a minority group, however, has special laws imposed on it by a foreign majority culture, and those laws apply solely to that minority group, then it may well be racist. If Obama declared tomorrow that everybody but Native Americans could carry guns, then most people would see that as racist and rightly so. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter so much whether it's 'racist' or not; what's important is that a community is making decisions about its future, not having another people's will imposed upon them. No matter how well-intentioned, such policies can only lead to further tension and marginalisation, and we see the results of that in the policy you allude to.
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ nice work, David, well-argued.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | That's scary, Stui - looks like there's a whole lot of weapons that should be illegal in Australia that presently aren't. |
Not to mention a good reason not to piss Stui off  
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| think positive wrote: | | Pies4shaw wrote: | | That's scary, Stui - looks like there's a whole lot of weapons that should be illegal in Australia that presently aren't. |
Not to mention a good reason not to piss Stui off |
Hah. I used to have enough guns to wage war on a small country but they all got handed in a long time ago. All i have now is a shotgun and an air rifle, both legal and registered.
To P4S point, I don't agree. It's the rapid fire capacity rather than the power that is the issue with mass shootings, as has been demonstrated by the fact that we haven't had a mass shooting since the new gun laws were introduced.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Culprit
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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| I have American friends who are peeved and hate their President and all they see is that he is trying to take their rights away. They don't give a toss that 13 people are dead. All they see is Christians were killed and they are OBama is letting Muslims in and giving them welfare. They don't see gun control as the problem, they don't even understand that letting people buy guns who have a mental disability as issue as it's their right under the constitution. I got an email this morning saying you guys (Australians) have gun control and someone still got shot dead. I reminded them, that it was one kid with one gun and he killed one person not four guns and thirteen people dead. My various US friends are from all walks of life but boy do they hate their right to bare arms being taken away. |
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