So what's the US doing?

renniks said:

Your government has already become more restrictive and since you all gave up your guns you can expect that to continue to get worse.

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It tickles me when someone from the US refers to another country - Australia in this case, and say 'well, your government...' as if we are some 'Democratic Republic of Australasia' and have had the same people running the show for years.

Since we had a serious discussion on guns and some serious changes to gun laws (back in '96), we have twelve different prime ministers. All with some quite significantly different political views. Maybe you think the outgoing mob has a chat with the incoming one and coordinates the tyranny, continues the restrictions and tries to maintain the authorative boot on the neck of the Australian people.

If we don't like the policies of a specific government, we vote 'em out. The last lot was voted out a couple of weeks ago on a few perceived faults but let me assure you that that not being able to buy guns across the counter wasn't one of them. We all want the strict gun laws we have. We're safer because of them (and likewise restrictions we had during covid - we all preferred to have them and we were safer because of them. And as @Occams Barber said - some states with the most severe restrictions did best for the party who enforced those restrictions).

Maybe the difference is the individualism of Americans versus the concept of 'mateship' of Australians. We think that if there's a problem (guns or covid) then we're all in this together and we all generally pull together to get through it. But in America, that concept doesn't seem to exist. It's all about individual rights. The individual versus the state. The individual taking it to The Man.

Notwithstanding the absolute polarisation of political views in the US. I wanted the Australian government out, but I didn't hate them (well, maybe quite a strong dislike for the last PM). And I can have a reasonable discussion with someone who has very strong support for the other party without any chest prodding and raised voices. But in the US?

Whenever I have been there, my wife and myself have a 3G rule. If we're maybe in a bar and chatting with a local, NO discussions on guns, God or government. Views on all three are just too extreme to expect a friendly chat.

So...there's not much room for consensus. It's all black and white. You're either with us or against us. And any suggestions as to how to prevent having a schoolroom full of children blown apart by an assault-type weapon bought by an 18 year old gets a response like 'You won't take my rights away!' Even taken to the most hideous extereme in claiming that those looking for some worthwhile solution are using the deaths of the poor kids to push a political agenda. Quite possibly the most shameful argument I have ever heard.

So there are some solutions that will reduce the carnage. But your biggest problem? Attitude.

Tom 1 said:

Here's something to start with, mostly focused on the role of MH professionals in understanding the prevalence of mass shootings over there: Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Future of... : Harvard Review of Psychiatry

From the abstract:

'...researchers must abandon the starting assumption that acts of mass violence are driven primarily by diagnosable psychopathology in isolated “lone wolf” individuals. The destructive motivations must be situated, instead, within larger social structures and cultural scripts.'

And from the main text:

'There is no existing or forthcoming unified theory of impaired brain functioning or of cognitive, mood, or behavioral dysregulation that could adequately explain mass shootings or multiple-victim gun homicides.

Symptoms of mental illness by themselves rarely cause violent behavior and thus cannot reliably predict it. Certain psychiatric symptoms, such as paranoid delusions with hostile content, are highly nonspecific risk factors that may increase the relative probability of violence, especially in the presence of other catalyzing factors such as substance intoxication. Yet the absolute probability of serious violent acts in psychiatric patients with these “high risk” symptoms remains low. In general, focusing on individual clinical factors alone leaves too much unexplained, as it tends to ignore the important social contexts surrounding mass shootings and multiple-victim homicides. To assume that gun violence is primarily a problem confined to a perpetrator’s brain may impede inquiry into a ranges of factors that could be crucial to a full understanding of mass shootings—factors such as the perpetrator’s sex, race, socioeconomic status, relationships, attitudes, personal history, the place where a shooting occurs and the perpetrator’s (dis)connection to it, and the ways in which local gun cultures and unrestricted access to guns might create the conditions under which these events become more likely.'

There's more to it, but the general idea is that labelling shooters 'insane' is a red herring and that a much wider net needs to be cast for research to be of any use.

I'll find something with a focus on societal issues later on.

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Thanks for the article. It's the factors mentioned within it that are the kind of thing I think of when referring to "unstable." However, I have a difficult time disambiguating "psychopathology" or "sociopathology" from the contributing factors and effects mentioned in this paper from Harvard. If anything, this paper buttresses my points from earlier since I wasn't stating the 'red herring': That in the U.S., mental health needs more attention on a wider scale, particularly where guns are involved as a mass component of society. This paper from Harvard also seems to be another but more current argument of what I find in the book I have by Martha Stout, "The Sociopath Next Door" (2005).

Thanks for posting this, Tom!

Tom 1 said:

This is interesting too: Understanding Mass Killings

'George W. Bush once said that he took the U.S. to war in Iraq so that we could fight “over there” and not at home. It is an attractive fantasy that, by using the military to intervene in the Middle East, we can corral the violence there. But we are learning that a connected world does not work that way. Intervention “over there” generates terrorist attacks by angry Muslims in the capitals of Europe and in nightclubs and office buildings in the U.S. And the soldiers we send “over there,” to the land of violence, bring the war back with them. Many of our mass killings at home are a haunted shadow of our interventions abroad.'

Although this isn't the main point of the article, it's easy to get the impression from the outside that at least some Americans have a kind of love affair with retributive violence, and the fantasy that everything can be solved if you just lock up or kill enough bad guys, as in the average Hollywood action movie. Like those characters who chased down and shot that black jogger last year, there do seem to be a minority of otherwise law-abiding citizens who exist in a kind of fantasy world in which every societal problem can be solved with more prisons, more guns, more violence - so long as it's the 'right people' who have the guns. It can seem like some sort of mass delusion, like the idea that private gun ownership would somehow deter a government bent on tyranny.

The arguments put forward for the 2nd amendment reflect a simplistic worldview that has little to do with the real world we all live in. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the mindset of one of these mass shooters is just another aspect of that basic view of the world, the 'I have problems, I'm a special snowflake so it can't be my fault, it must be the fault of those other people/the govt/society etc' that comes out of the confusion between individual agency and the fact we all share the planet together.

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A lot of the 'gun heritage' in the U.S. goes all the way back to its days of initial colonization and frontier exploration. It's going to be difficult to separate the yolk out from the albumen on this issue. Moreover, there has always been on ongoing distrust of 'big goverment' that also goes at least all the way back to the days of our Revolutionary War. So, there's a massive hurdle in the historical development of American ideology that will have to [somehow] change.

The problem here in the U.S. then is one of gun allowance within a society that is founded upon the notion that market and other diverse, competing forces are ... a good thing. I think we can see where this combination can lead to little individual eddies of personal turmoil that erupt among "the unloved."

Occams Barber said:

So the US should continue to do nothing while more children (and adults) die?

You're beginning to sound like yet another fatalistic Christian.

OB

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I was offering an explanation not an apologetic. C'mon, OB! ... personally, I'd like to see some firmer gun regulation, but being that I live here AND have studied the ideological history of my own nation, I understand some of the underlying impetus that drives the thinking within certain demographical sections. I don't like it, but what can I do to change an endemic gun ideology that is centuries old? Vote?

Yeah: Just gonna "vote" the guns away...

Tom 1 said:

There are far fewer incidents of this kind in Europe as a whole, which is slightly larger and has a significantly higher population than the US.

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And we all quietly hate each other.

Tom 1 said:

Here's something to start with, mostly focused on the role of MH professionals in understanding the prevalence of mass shootings over there: Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Future of... : Harvard Review of Psychiatry

From the abstract:

'...researchers must abandon the starting assumption that acts of mass violence are driven primarily by diagnosable psychopathology in isolated “lone wolf” individuals. The destructive motivations must be situated, instead, within larger social structures and cultural scripts.'

And from the main text:

'There is no existing or forthcoming unified theory of impaired brain functioning or of cognitive, mood, or behavioral dysregulation that could adequately explain mass shootings or multiple-victim gun homicides.

Symptoms of mental illness by themselves rarely cause violent behavior and thus cannot reliably predict it. Certain psychiatric symptoms, such as paranoid delusions with hostile content, are highly nonspecific risk factors that may increase the relative probability of violence, especially in the presence of other catalyzing factors such as substance intoxication. Yet the absolute probability of serious violent acts in psychiatric patients with these “high risk” symptoms remains low. In general, focusing on individual clinical factors alone leaves too much unexplained, as it tends to ignore the important social contexts surrounding mass shootings and multiple-victim homicides. To assume that gun violence is primarily a problem confined to a perpetrator’s brain may impede inquiry into a ranges of factors that could be crucial to a full understanding of mass shootings—factors such as the perpetrator’s sex, race, socioeconomic status, relationships, attitudes, personal history, the place where a shooting occurs and the perpetrator’s (dis)connection to it, and the ways in which local gun cultures and unrestricted access to guns might create the conditions under which these events become more likely.'

There's more to it, but the general idea is that labelling shooters 'insane' is a red herring and that a much wider net needs to be cast for research to be of any use.

I'll find something with a focus on societal issues later on.

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I think the following piece from that Harvard article is the locus here:

One factor that I thought was particularly poignant, and one that I've seen somewhere else (the letter of James?), is the citation of: "smoldering anger."

Larnievc said:

And we all quietly hate each other.

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I hope you aren’t planning to invade Clapham Junction?

Tom 1 said:

I hope you aren’t planning to invade Clapham Common?

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Too far.

Larnievc said:

Too far.

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Spike Milligan reference

Larnievc said:

And we all quietly hate each other.

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I can’t figure out if this is meant seriously or not.

Occams Barber said:

Voting is one way to get rid of politicians who are unwilling to do anything.

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Voting doesn't actually do that here. Get rid of one ineffective politician via voting, and 4 more pop up in his place, waiting to be "elected by common, representative consent." No, the political apparatus here in the U.S. was designed early on to be slow and very mediated (ala Madison and kin). So, we don't expect overnight miracles, if any where politics are concerned.

Another is protest.

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Meh.

Another is being publicly seen to support action to minimise the problem. As long as you continue to convince yourself that there is no solution there will be no solution. As I said earlier your attitude comes across as typical Christian fatalism.

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And your attitude comes across as typical 'modernist can-do-ism.'

Why not put your vote and your voice where you claim your convictions lie?

OB

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Ask my wife why I don't.

Bradskii said:

Maybe the difference is the individualism of Americans versus the concept of 'mateship' of Australians. We think that if there's a problem (guns or covid) then we're all in this together and we all generally pull together to get through it. But in America, that concept doesn't seem to exist. It's all about individual rights. The individual versus the state. The individual taking it to The Man.

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Today's so-called "conservatism" is based on selfishness. The right of an 18 year old individual to own a weapon with 30 round magazines designed to kill as may people as possibly far outweighs the safety of the community's children. Heaven forbid the individual should have to wait until 21 or be subject to an extended waiting period while back ground checks are completed or have to use smaller magazines.

Occams Barber said:

I hope your God will forgive you for your apparent indifference.

I can't.

OB

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You can paint me any way you like, OB. It won't change the reality behind my apparent reticence: that I live here and breath the cultural miasma. You don't.

Bradskii said:

So...there's not much room for consensus. It's all black and white. You're either with us or against us. And any suggestions as to how to prevent having a schoolroom full of children blown apart by an assault-type weapon bought by an 18 year old gets a response like 'You won't take my rights away!'

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Not true. We have lots of ideas to prevent that. Some schools already have armed teachers but no one knows which ones for example. And BTW some 18 year olds are capable of having civil adult conversations.

wing2000 said:

Today's so-called "conservatism" is based on selfishness. The right of an 18 year old individual to own a weapon with 30 round magazines designed to kill as may people as possibly far outweighs the safety of the community's children. Heaven forbid the individual should have to wait until 21 or be subject to a waiting period while back ground checks are made or have to use smaller magazines.

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Many states already have background checks. Like mine. It's no big deal, but it doesn't prevent maniacs from killing people because maniacs don't care about laws. BTW the background check doesn't require a wait...all that info is immediately available to the FFA agent.

renniks said:

Many states already have background checks. Like mine. It's no big deal, but it doesn't prevent maniacs from killing people because maniacs don't care about laws.

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If the background check is not completed in x amount of time, the applicant is granted access by default....even though the background check may have not been completed. Additionally, there are gaps in the background check process.

myst33 said:

I do not know of any country that was happy during the pandemic.

And certainly not the USA (oh mine, so many beast/antichrist/microchip/vaccination/Bill Gates conspiracies from Americans in those times).
Half of Americans were scared to death of tyranny and the other half in a high risk because of a wide-spread obesity and bad healthcare system.

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When people are being dragged off by the police in Australia and Canada for holding worship services or having a protest, being " scared" of tyranny is perfectly logical.

wing2000 said:

If the background check is not completed in x amount of time, the applicant is granted access by default....even though the background check may have not been completed. Additionally, there are gaps in the background check process.

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Evidence? If I don't pass the check I don't get my gun.