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I know all about parents who use police encounters / hospitalizations as threats to manipulate and control your kids. All too well.

Brawlsack

Taking an extended hiatus from gaming

i agree with you, i was just kind of curious what everyone else would respond with.

It's amusing to me in a sad sort of way that some people honestly think "let's train and arm teachers" is a viable solution.

It's not, for the same goddamn reasons gun control is a contentious issue in the first place. The entire point of the second amendment, these libertarian lunatics would have us believe, is personal freedom. Fine, let's go with that. Want to know what else is a personal freedom? Being a pacifist. Education is a non-zero percentage of state employment. Mandating that teachers have to know and be willing to use firearms in defense of a classroom is an egregious breach of personal choice, and it's also employment discrimination. Not gonna fly.

Besides, all it takes is for the gunman to be faster than the teacher. If he is, you've just given him another firearm and however many extra bullets that entails. If cops can die in shootouts where there's dozens of them and a single perpetrator, single teachers in individual classrooms aren't going to have proportionately better rates of success.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

Azelma, how did you even come across that blog?

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Frankly, I don't care if they care about getting shot or not. I care that if they're there with the intent to do harm to people, that they're shot before they do it. It's funny how all these shootings keep happening in "gun free zones." I thought banning guns was supposed to keep people from being killed with guns. Hmmmmmm...



I agree with you completely that people shouldn't be forced to use guns if they're opposed, and I don't think teachers should be armed because their job is teaching, not physical security. There should be armed security staff at schools to deal with that. I'll even take the tax hike that's going to cost.

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I'll just leave this here.

Brawlsack

Taking an extended hiatus from gaming

This "discussion" is still going on? I though you pro-gunners would have wizened by now after Aestu came in and wiped the floor with you guys, despite your innumerable straw man arguments... Unless you guys have resorted to simply ignoring his posts just because he hurt your poor lil ol' feelings.

sigh

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You can't have gun-free zones in a gun-abundant society, and "heavily armed police" can't be everywhere at once - on the scene before a killer whips out a weapon and mows down many innocents. At any rate, what you are describing is cart-before-horse: spending vast sums on omnipresent heavily armed police that will cost us tax money to support and infringe on daily life, all because of one sacred cow.



Innocent until proven guilty. So that principle, too, is less important than the right to pack heat?

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I'm going to summarize then be done with it (no rly).

Pro-gun arguments fall broadly into two categories. Arguments based on utility, and arguments based on principle.

The arguments based on utility - that owning guns will create a safer society, or protect citizens from their government, or fend off an invader - have already been shot full of holes (no pun intended).

Countries with restrictive gun laws have a much higher rate of non-gun crime to gun crime than the US and other pro-gun countries. For this reason, amongst the former, pickpocketing remains endemic. Therefore, while criminals are still being criminal, they aren't using weapons in their crimes, and as the low relative rate of gun crime and murder shows, the ban is probably not preventing crime, but it is definitely saving more innocent lives than it ends.

The only two exceptions are Switzerland and Israel. Neither is comparable to the US. Switzerland is a homogenous country with no sense of individuality as we understand it, they do not own weapons for personal defense, and ammo is illegal. Israel is a crazy and paranoid country that owns guns to protect themselves from foreign nationals, and not criminals amongst them, and all Israelis do three years' military service. Their societies and the role of guns have nothing in common with ours.

The next argument is that there are simply so many guns we can't get rid of them all and should accept them as an immutable fact of life, and therefore the balance of terror must be maintained. Obviously, this is a ridiculously fatalistic and absolutist argument.

The hard counter to this argument is that a ban, coupled with a guns-for-cash program, would remove all incentive for criminals to hold onto guns and therefore make their role in self-defense obsolete. A crook isn't going to stick you up for the contents of your wallet when he can trade in his gun for a thousand bucks cold hard cash, and we can buy every gun on the street for irresistible sums amounting to a fraction the cost of the murders they are used in.

Countries with high gun ownership such as Iraq, Russia and Pakistan have shown themselves no more resistant to tyrannical governments than unarmed societies such as the USSR, East Germany, South Korea and Taiwan. In fact, the evidence suggests that mass gun ownership makes society so fractious and chaotic that it is all the easier for a tyrannical regime to justify itself and maintain overall control.

The final practical argument - resistance against a foreign invader - doesn't apply because tanks, aircraft and nuclear weapons make pea-shooters obsolete. Countries such as Vietnam and Afghanistan can hold out against foreign invaders only by taking terrible losses, life becoming unlivable for decades on end, and only if the invader decides not to simply wipe the population out from the skies. Never mind that foreign invasion is an unrealistic scenario, and inapplicable to personal gun ownership (as opposed to participation in a militia).

So, those are the practical arguments and why they aren't valid.
Then there are the arguments based on principle.

One argument holds that guns have an integral role in American society. This argument doesn't apply to the here-and-now because it was never American society as a whole that had a use for guns, only the redneck/frontiersman subculture, and for reasons that no longer apply (Jim Crow and the Indian Wars). And the guns in question - muskets and shotguns - aren't the weapons that there is now talk of regulating or banning outright. The best that this argument can do is assert the right of rural people to own a shotgun - nothing more.

Then there is the hackneyed 2nd Amendment argument. This doesn't apply because the FFs lived in a very different world, and the vision they had for guns (as a substitute for a standing army) was tried and failed. The 2nd Amendment is a relic, and any argument based on the 2nd Amendment is, at best, skewed interpretation married to hollow legalism. A biased way of reading an obsolete law, choosing to take it as an absolute rather than something made by mortal men and subject to re-examination.

The final argument is that the right to own a gun is "God-given". This argument is pure fallacy, but if we are to interpret it on a strictly moral basis, then it remains indefensible, for the reason that in order to effect that degree of freedom, we would have to give up many more freedoms, perhaps most importantly the right to freedom from fear.

So that's the Cliff Notes. Anyway, we should start a new thread about something else, preferably non political.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

This. Though I doubt anyone you're arguing against will read that, much less understand it. Rather I think they will bash your supposed "lack of reading comprehension." Where did that FUBU catchphrase even originate?

[✔] [item]Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker[/item] (Three)
[✔] [item]Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]32837[/item] & [item]32838[/item]
[✔] [item]Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury[/item]
[✔] [item]46017[/item]
[✔] [item]49623[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]71086[/item]

Someone posted that thing on facebook. In the days since, I've concluded that woman is an attention whore.

http://mashable.com/2012/12/17/liza-lon ... interview/


Interesting development, Adam's mother seems to have made out with a considerable haul in her divorce:

http://www.lohud.com/article/20121217/N ... 9k-alimony

Over 200k a year, tickets to red socks games, a house....daaaaamn.


I'm wondering what kind of woman this was...everyone just keeps repeating that this Adam kid was "quiet" a little socially awkward...but not violent. Why did he snap?

I've been reading through all the slayings (specifically Columbine and Virginia Tech). What's different is that this kid didn't even have a manifesto. Just like the Colorado shooter. No manifesto. No motive.


Aestu, you seem to want to pin all the blame for these disturbed people on their parents. However, everything I've read about the Virginia Tech shooter suggests his parents tried to help him as best they could (albeit, a little misguidedly with religion). Now we hear that this kids mom loved him and wanted to care for him.


You say it's a problem of society...that all these young men (interesting that it's always young men) are the result of poor parenting, yes? This is what makes them snap?

I struggle to understand it because yes...I've been bullied, yes I've had parent issues and been angry at my peers. I've never come to the conclusion that getting a gun and shooting a bunch of 6 year olds would solve any of this.

Don't you think it's possible that some people are just crazy, and it's not 100% the parents fault?

People who are just plain bad pieces of meat exist, but they are very, very few in number, and they usually manifest grossly abnormal behavior very early in life - torturing small animals, bullying other children, starting fires, etc. Proof being that troubled kids are extremely rare in societies that take child-rearing seriously. The supermajority of the time, bad child = bad parent. Especially today when it seems to be not the exception but the rule.

It is socially unacceptable to not love one's children. Arrogant and self-righteous parents will therefore always claim to love their children no matter what their true feelings are.

The acid test is whether the parent has a propensity to blame themselves. As I said, any good parent is constantly self-critical, for the reason that they put their child's well-being ahead of their ego and are therefore always willing to improve the former at the expense of the latter. That is true whether or not a mistake was made. A parent who is not self-critical is automatically a bad parent. Parents who give statements to the media about how they "tried" or whatever (rather than recounting possible mistakes or simply not commenting) are automatically guilty.

As I said, our society puts a high value on young children. It does not put a high value on white males in their teens and twenties. The boy clearly felt he was being used as a pawn, undervalued, etc. With very good reason. If one feels that one has no value and has no power, then one will try to prove society wrong by destroying something that has value. In this case, young children.

That his mother was such a cretin as to marry a man, bear his child then break up the family and bitterly feud over money and control of the boy cannot be detached from the condition of her son. I flatly refuse to believe that if this boy felt he had a reason to live and was valued in his life, he would have taken the lives of those valued by society. After all, it's very rare in societies where that is the rule.

That is simple, objective, empirical truth, and that reality of that makes shrinkological explanations out to be pseudoscientific. Like any kind of religion, shrinkology doesn't base its cosmology or superstitions on anything other than its own culture.

You can't ask a Christian whether people born in pre-Christian times are going to hell. You can't ask a pagan whether things turn out favorably for cultures that don't have an oracle. You can't ask a witch doctor whether Chinese people have voodoo. And by the same token, you can't ask a shrink whether cultures that are not like ours have these supposedly organic problems. Because shrinkology belongs to the same category of belief systems.

As for you, Azelma, I would say that you are greatly damaged by your life, although you do not realize it. You seem to have no ego, no agenda, no value system of your own. I notice that bullying you is invariably a highly successful tactic in not only getting you to agree with me but even altering your views, and from what I know of your life, others seem to notice this and behave accordingly as well. You seem unwilling to accept any viewpoint as unequivocally right or wrong.

I believe that your parents and your life history of being desperate for affiliation and perceived legitimacy, surviving by being "nice" (i.e., never a conflicting agenda) has made you who you are. Your near-total lack of ego structure is the flip side of the coin from the young man who tries to fight society's refusal to recognize his ego by destroying something of value.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Don't really care about gun control laws, humans have been murdering each since the dawn of time, and will till we die out as a race. What honestly scared the living shit out of me are cars, so goddamn dangerous and are given to 16 year olds, fuck cars.

What you say makes sense, and I do believe good parents ought to be critical of themselves. If you don't ever question your decisions, how can you improve?

I think there's a reality that 1.) There are :bad pieces of meat" as you say and 2.) Horrible family lives / bad parenting can have an adverse affect on a child to the point of creating someone who would lash out at the world by destroying things of value, as you say.

But what is to be done? If we accept that these two types exist I believe there are 2 actions:

1.) For truly "bad eggs" who either suffer from severe psychosis, or have mental issues far outside the realm of poor socialisation and upbringing...hospitalisation / medication seem to be the only course of action

2.) For the second type, I'd argue that a look at family structures....therapy for both the parents and the child could be helpful. Could a parent who has previously never been self critical be "shown the light"? Could, with enough discussion and coaching, a parent learn the ways they are doing wrong by their child?

You're right in that shrinkology is too often focused on the child...the child's issues. Yet, I know in my girlfriends' program they work on viewing the family as a whole. They work on attachment theory...developing stronger bonds etc. It's not perfect, but I think we have to start small. We cannot just outlaw all guns and throw all unfit parents in a ditch (as much as I'm sure you'd like to ). We can however, work on starting with 1 family at a time.

The key for all of this too, is identifying the Adam Lanza's of the world before they snap.



I think I realize more about it than you give me credit for.

You're right, my solution to being neglected by my mother, picked on by peers, and growing up without a father was to play peacemaker and jester. I was constantly in trouble for being the class clown when I was younger...because being funny and acting up in class was the easiest way to get people to like me.

Even now, my way of survival has been "keep your head down and stay close to those with power" At the risk of being too honest, I was reading about prison culture the other day..... If I were to ever be arrested I know what I would do on my first day in prison. I'm certain I would align myself with a stronger male and become his bitch for protection. Perhaps I'd carve out a niche as a man who can make deals and sneak in things. Bottom line, it would work, and I would survive. Do you read/watch game of thrones? I'm Littlefinger with a moral compass. I know how to play the game, and it's helped me be successful.


However,

I think you confuse my search for truth with a lack of ideals. I know I used to be very passionately conservative in High School. I believed what I believed and would argue to the death about it. Since college, since having my heart broken and approaching the brink of suicide, I have since been on a constant quest for truth. I constantly question and speak with people with polar opposite viewpoints in an effort to form my own. It's why conversations with you and my ultra libertarian brother are the most stimulating for me. I think I learn the most when faced with extremes.

You see it a vacancy of conviction, I see it as a search for truth. You also know nothing of my own moral code. You don't acknowledge my fierce loyalty to those I care for. You haven't seen it to be fair. You don't realize that were we to know each other better, and dare I say, become IRL friends, that I would defend you with the conviction of our very own Fanta.

Have I had setbacks? Of course. Do I still care too much what others think of me? Absolutely. I'm probably the only person on FUBU who's ever truly felt bad about not being able to connect with you (what happened when I attempted to become a regular vent-hanger).


I do acknowledge these flaws...I acknowledge my strengths and my weaknesses.

Personally, I think you cling to rigidly to things. You seem unable to see the other side of the story. You form your opinions based on your own research and facts, and disregard any contrary facts or opinions. You would sit all day and call me weak, but I truly believe I will strike back one day. When I find my truth, I will be in a position to exact that truth and help make the world a better place. This is what I want.

I believe you want similar things (with a dash of revenge). Yet, like me, you seem to not make as much progress on it. You still stand in your own way.

Perhaps that's the issue all these shooters have faced to much more significant degrees. When you feel you have no purpose, are not being heard, or cannot express yourself...you lash out. Obviously, there's something missing -- and all the convictions in the world can't fix it. Just like all the questioning in the world can't fix what leaves me unfulfilled.