What to do about gun violence given the problems of false positives and false negatives in designing mechanisms to get both guns and mentally ill people off of the streets?
(Sigh ...) I don't have anything clever to say. It's hard not to agree that "society" as a whole is not a healthier place than it was, say, pre-COVID, or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Or one could all the way back Daniel Moynihan's 1965 memo about the incipient breakdown of families ... Where to start?
"incipient breakdown of families" - more than likely the cause for many getting sideways with society. We once thought there was a higher power that we had to be accountable. Over time society asserts that mythical figure is of no utility but have not replaced it with a better notion. Morality should not be relative, the golden rules must exist in society. Where has empathy gone?
Faith in government and dependency is soul crushing. The government is never benevolent nor caring but pretends both.
Certainly, the situation today would be much better without modern "mental health" and all the drugs it purveys. How is it that guns ownership was far more common through most of American history than they are today but there was much less gun violence? School shootings spiked in the 1990s, and a little research even just on the Internet will show that every perpetrator was on some kind of psychotropic drug. If these drugs worked, then they would work.
That said, I remember one of my grad school professors suggesting that it could be better to get cocaine users hooked on opiates, because cocaine "makes you feel like Superman and want to knock over a convenience store" whereas opiates just make you want to chill out and fade away.
Meanwhile, it's been some time since I've mined through publicly available crime statistics, and those statistics can be like COVID data from the CDC: incomplete, censored or truncated. But, I don't have any ideas right off about the coincidence of firearms and crime. I should revisit such things.
gun deaths are just the unavoidable cost of people having guns.
a society where you can show the most horrible acts of violence on tv but cannot show moments of intimacy on tv is normalising violence.
it is not the crazies that are the problem, it is society as a whole.
(Sigh ...) I don't have anything clever to say. It's hard not to agree that "society" as a whole is not a healthier place than it was, say, pre-COVID, or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Or one could all the way back Daniel Moynihan's 1965 memo about the incipient breakdown of families ... Where to start?
"incipient breakdown of families" - more than likely the cause for many getting sideways with society. We once thought there was a higher power that we had to be accountable. Over time society asserts that mythical figure is of no utility but have not replaced it with a better notion. Morality should not be relative, the golden rules must exist in society. Where has empathy gone?
Faith in government and dependency is soul crushing. The government is never benevolent nor caring but pretends both.
Certainly, the situation today would be much better without modern "mental health" and all the drugs it purveys. How is it that guns ownership was far more common through most of American history than they are today but there was much less gun violence? School shootings spiked in the 1990s, and a little research even just on the Internet will show that every perpetrator was on some kind of psychotropic drug. If these drugs worked, then they would work.
Right on, Brother.
That said, I remember one of my grad school professors suggesting that it could be better to get cocaine users hooked on opiates, because cocaine "makes you feel like Superman and want to knock over a convenience store" whereas opiates just make you want to chill out and fade away.
Meanwhile, it's been some time since I've mined through publicly available crime statistics, and those statistics can be like COVID data from the CDC: incomplete, censored or truncated. But, I don't have any ideas right off about the coincidence of firearms and crime. I should revisit such things.
You may wish to look at https://hwfo.substack.com/ who has compiled a lot of those data. In particular https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-magic-gun-evaporation-fairy?s=r, https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-gun-solution?s=r, https://hwfo.substack.com/p/lying-with-gun-data-again?s=r. There are likely more because HWFO enjoys the gun issue.
Thanks for the lead.