More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

…

After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.

“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html

So yeah, maybe it really is a mental health crisis after all: the mental illness of gun worshippers that enable this to happen.

failure to acknowledge the importance of anyone but yourself. — Fooloso4

Ding ding ding. That one.

I think all our thinking is in dualsitic terms — Janus

Well it depends on what kind of thought. My junk thought doesn’t seem dualistic in any sense. When I’m contemplating myself or my world I’ll schematize the world that way, but that’s not my typical state.

It’s not that we have more bad people, it’s that the bad people we have can go into a store or a gun show and purchase one of the 400 million guns in the US with ease and then go shoot up a school.

illegalizing drugs — Tzeentch

I don’t want to make drugs illegal. I don’t want to make guns illegal.

This shooter bought a gun legally, incidentally.

But “illegalizing” drugs does work in some cases. I don’t hear about many Quaalude addictions anymore…

The “war on drugs” was never about drugs anyway. It was about criminalizing minority life. Ditto “law and order.”

In my family, often enough. Plenty of them.

Otherwise I vote for rules directly via referenda, and I elect others to do so. Those others are also people. If I don’t like what rules they create, I vote them out. There are other ways of creating rules as well, at the local level.

But I guess the point there was supposed to be something about “statism” blah blah blah

People make up rules for many reasons. Sometimes they're justified, other times they're unjust. Some are commonsensical, others are aren't. I'm glad that we have made rules that punish people who break them.

True, we don't need a state for this. But to argue against any and all rules is absurd. — Mikie

To argue that only those in power get to make rules is absurd. No man is good enough to be another’s master — NOS4A2

Nothing in what I said suggested any of that. People create rules, not some elite class of people, not "those in power," not the deep state. People. In any society. In hunter gatherer societies. People make rules all the time. Rules are a good thing, and so is authority -- provided they can be justified.

So I repeat: to argue against any and all rules is absurd.

I'll repeat the example, with bold:

If fentanyl deaths skyrocketed in country Z, and it turned out country Z was an outlier not in drug use but in the amount of, and ease of access to, fentanyl -- then call me crazy, but my first priority would not be to discuss the prevalence of substance abuse. It would be to restrict the amount of, and ease of access to, fentanyl.

It's not a war on drugs or guns. It's saying that, all else being equal, country Z has a problem with this particular object. Other countries don't have the fentanyl deaths we do not because they don't have more potential drug abusers, but because they don't have the amount of fentanyl. Pretty simple.

A flawed example, of course, because it's harder to get fentanyl than it is to buy an assault weapon. Now imagine saying, "What we need to do in order to fight fentanyl deaths is to increase the availability of fentanyl." That would be absurd.

And if all those restrictions disappeared tomorrow would you start driving through red lights and murdering your fellows? — NOS4A2

I'd probably go through more red lights if I thought the rule wasn't enforced, sure. Murdering people, no.

People make up rules for many reasons. Sometimes they're justified, other times they're unjust. Some are commonsensical, others are aren't. I'm glad that we have made rules that punish people who break them.

True, we don't need a state for this. But to argue against any and all rules is absurd.

Maybe you can, but I cannot abide by controlling people’s lives and letting them control ours. — NOS4A2

I'm not controlling anything. People can do anything they want. You can go shoot up a school, obviously. Is that your idea of true "freedom"? Is creating laws that discourage or punish those acts "controlling"?

What a strange view of the world.

no one’s rights should be restricted — NOS4A2

My rights are restricted every time I drive a car. My freedom, my liberty, is restricted. If I want to go through a red light or drive on the left hand side of the road, I could be punished for it. Those are the rules, the laws. People create laws. People in government, voted in by and supposedly representing its citizens. That's how societies work -- at least republican style democracies.

By all means voice your opinion for why we shouldn't have any rules whatsoever. You'll be laughed out of town, and deservedly so.

Because they are there to benefit society as a whole not you personally. — Baden

And this really summarizes the heart of the matter, the taproot belief from which these absurd analyses emerge: a weird kind "individualism" a la Ayn Rand and company.

I guess the same people aren't in favor of stricter voting ID laws, or even registration. Why should I be inconvenienced when I've never committed voter fraud, and don't intend to?

Why should I have to sit in line for a driver's license, when I've never been in an accident and don't intend to?

I don't recall anyone asking ME if this was OK.

take them away almost entirely, like a vast majority of the nations in the world. — NOS4A2

Indeed paranoia -- at least to those like you who view this as some kind of nightmare scenario. In my view, way too HOPEFUL. It won't happen.

But if it did, can you imagine? We'd be more like that hell hole Japan -- practically no mass shootings or gun violence. What a dystopia. But wait -- even Japan doesn't fully ban guns. Ah well.

I guess requiring a driver's license was also government overreach, on their way to banning cars for its citizens. What came of that? Guess it may happen eventually, and isn't paranoid at all to think it will...

How has that approach been working out? — Tzeentch

Quite well, in terms of guns.

As the U.S. gun control debate intensifies, some Americans are looking overseas for ideas on how to prevent mass shootings. Japan has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the world. There were more than four firearm homicides in the U.S. per 100,000 people during 2019, compared to almost zero in Japan.

As CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports, Japan's strict laws on private gun ownership have surprising origins in the United States. She met Raphael, a well-known Japanese YouTuber who decided to take skeet shooting lessons. Despite being ex-military, he had to jump through all the same hoops that any Japanese civilian must clear to get a gun license.

There's mandatory training. You have to pass a written exam, plus a physical and mental health evaluation. Even then, the police will go and ask your family and friends whether you have any violent tendencies.

All said and done, Raphael told CBS News it took him a year to get his license, during which time the police even interviewed his wife.

Japanese police do carry handguns, but they're the only ones who can have them, and they're rarely drawn.

I wouldn't argue for even something as strict as this, but it goes to show...

(If you meant literally fentanyl, which was only an example, it's still being smuggled in illegally to the US from China through Mexico, so the amount is still quite abundant in the US.)

Why do the chosen nobility and their armies get to defend their borders but a single man cannot? — NOS4A2

Why do the rich get to drive cars and a single man cannot?

Oh wait, a single man can -- if he has the means, and goes through the proper training. It's almost as if the claim that a "single man cannot" is paranoid. :chin:

Well, so far you haven't shown a great deal of interest in the iceberg of suffering that underlies these killings either. — Tzeentch

I have -- in Deaths of Despair and elsewhere. Places where it's appropriate to highlight or emphasize the issue of mental health. Making mental health the focal point in a thread about gun control or when the topic is mass shootings is, as I mentioned, an NRA talking point and diversion tactic.

If fentanyl deaths skyrocketed in country Z, and it turned out country Z was an outlier not in drug use but in the amount of, and ease of access to, fentanyl -- then call me crazy, but my first priority would not be to discuss the prevalence of substance abuse. It would be to restrict the amount of, and ease of access to, fentanyl.

All the armaments of the United States armed forces--from ICBMs to pistols–do not contribute to the peaceful relations among our fellow citizens. What maintains peacefulness in society is the collective desire to avoid conflict as one goes about one's life. Internal peacefulness is not maintained by 300,000,000 guns either. — BC

Absolutely, and not only is paranoia used to justify having a gun (you know, to "protect yourself against the government" and "criminals" -- which is absurd enough), but it's also used to justify REGULATING guns. How? Well, any talk of gun control becomes the slippery slope: you want to BAN ALL GUNS and "disarm" your fellow law-abiding citizens!

Actually, there are a number of rational things to do:

* Requiring licensure and training, similar to driving a car (or truck, or motorcycle, or plane, or operating complex/dangerous machinery).

* Universal background checks.

* Wait periods.

* Banning assault weapons (except in rare circumstances)

* Better regulate gun shows and private selling.

* Harsher penalties for non-compliance.

Etc. etc. Plenty of sensible ideas, many of which are used in other countries who, lo and behold, have less gun deaths and whose governments haven't capriciously attacked its citizens.

I agree and would add that it is not just guns but a "gun culture" that promotes the idea that guns are the solution to two major threats, the government and criminals. — Fooloso4

True -- they go hand in hand. We wouldn't have the amount of guns nor the ease of access if it weren't for this gun culture, which has been deliberately manufactured over the years by gun companies -- but even if we had the gun culture with less guns and rational regulation, there would still be less shootings.

Perhaps if guns were banned and a sharp rise in school stabbings was observed, it would get people's heads out of the sand, hm? — Tzeentch

The health of the nation is important, no doubt. The same people who argue for more guns also argue against medicare-for-all and other programs that would help people, so pretending to care about "mental health" is laughable coming from them.

But yes, if we're serious about less violence overall, we should try creating a better society. In the meantime, guns need to be regulated rationally. Give me a nut with a knife over a nut with an AR-15 any day -- just ask the Uvalde cops.

As to owning a gun to defend myself and my family against criminals, it is not as if they are going to wait until I get my gun, load it, and point it at them before they point their loaded gun at me or a family member. Perhaps you sleep cuddling a loaded gun, but I think it far more likely that a gun in the house will do me or my family harm than good. — Fooloso4

As has been shown over and over again. To a paranoid gun manufacturing shill who's convinced himself that the government is nothing but evil, you have to be ready 24/7, carrying around a weapon at all times. Too many wild west movies as a kid (which were part of the gun propaganda, incidentally).

Anyway, yeah it's a ridiculous position. Not only paranoid, but also failing to look at other countries and failing to see that if the government wants to arrest you, they will. Daydreams about insurrections aside. It's just a life based on fear and a pathetic notion of "freedom."

Different types of mental illness manifest in different parts of the world, often relating to their culture. — Tzeentch

Yes, but you act as if this hasn’t been researched. It has— and the conclusion: it’s the guns.

Why are so many people depressed in Argentina? Thailand? Canada? Those are good questions. But the question, “Why do we have so many mass shootings in the United States?” is what I’m interested in.

Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.

These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.

I needn’t spell out what that conclusion is. So let’s talk about gun control. Hard to do if we’re distracted by NRA talking points about mental health.

There is, however, a very serious societal problem if that large a number of people are pushed that often to mass murder. — Isaac

Yes, which is why I dedicated an entire thread to it here.

Not sweeping it under the rug. But the issue here is gun control, and since other countries don’t have the mass shootings we do, despite the same problems with “mental health,” we should be emphasizing that.

And I don’t see the gun lobby pointing out the US’s outlier status. If they do, they talk about mental health. It’s simply the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” slogan masquerading as concern for healthcare — which the same people want destroyed.

Each dot is a country. If I told you the y axis was number of mass shootings and the x axis was number of guns, what do you think a rational human would conclude?

Any guesses on what country the top right dot is?

If the answer were no, wouldn't we expect to see similar events carried out with other weapons happening in the UK? People have committed massacres with common household objects like kitchen knives. Stomach churning to think about it, but alas there it is... — Tzeentch

In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun.

By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html

Its hard to settle on a specific breakdown of contributing factors but it seems to me that mental health is a significant factor yet gets ignored by and large. — DingoJones

On the contrary, it’s the go-to argument of the NRA-owned GOP. It also happens to be completely bogus.

In fact some research suggests that mental illness was a factor in 4% of mass shootings.

Once we get guns into everyone’s hands, as the gun manufacturers want, then at long last gun violence will be solved.

We’ll finally reach the lower levels of mass shootings achieved by…every other nation on earth.

Opioid crisis solution: give EVERYONE opioids!

All of this is a natural consequence of one stupid belief drilled into American brains for decades: everything the government does is bad. This belief was developed by the corporate sector so as to reduce regulations and increase profits.

You don't think kids committing mass murders is a mental health issue? — Tzeentch

Mass murders that wouldn’t happen without powerful weapons. Japan, Italy, Brazil, Britain, France, China…all have people with depression, anxiety, despair, violent ideation, suicidal ideation, etc. None have the rates of mass shootings that we do. Why?

To argue it’s because we have a greater rate of mental health issues is factually incorrect.

One has to really try hard to avoid the obvious: it’s guns.

But the fact of the matter is that the frequency and extent of damage is nowhere near comparable. — Fooloso4

True, but also: it’s laughable to say people who want to do something WILL do something, and that having easy access to particular means is irrelevant. Yes, I suppose you could run someone over with a bicycle or try to kill people by knife…but the results are going to be much, much different than a truck or AR-15.

So the mental gymnastics is fun to watch, but don’t try to make sense of it.

It’s hard to imagine continuing to hold beliefs that lead to laughable conclusions, over and over again.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
“Government is the problem.”

Simple slogans for simple minds.

:rofl:

Indeed.

Gun worshippers have no real argument. So don’t expect much except motivated reasoning.

Anyway - we require licenses and training to drive a car. It’s not a human right to own one. It’s not a human right to own a gun either. This is true despite what years of gun manufacturing propaganda — linking guns with “freedom” that so-called libertarians lap up like slaves — has to say about it.

I'm just saying, if your young'uns are massacring each other with assault rifles, your gun legislation is not the only thing that's rotten. — Tzeentch

Mental health problems exist all over the world. Rates are not higher in the United States than elsewhere. The reason we’re an outlier in mass shootings is that we’re an outlier in the amount of guns (and the ease of acquiring them).

Plenty to say about mental health, but this is not a mental health issue, it’s a gun control issue. When you have a country run by gun nuts and politicians bought by the NRA, it creates an environment where anyone can get a gun — including assault weapons.

Result: same rates of mental illness, but much higher rates of mass shootings. It’s not that complicated, despite efforts to make it seem so.

Heidegger traces the modern idea of being as persisting presence to Descartes — Joshs

But being as constant presence isn’t a modern idea really. It goes back to the Greeks. I think he’s quite clear about that. Ousia, etc.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your wording.

This persistent presence could be understood to be dependent on consciousness, on the perceiver, or it could be taken, as it is with materialist metaphysics, to be prior to consciousness. a persistent presence that is "there" regardless of whether it is being perceived or not. — Janus

I think this is the subject/object thing again. I don’t think it’s either. There’s simply being in the world. However, once in a present-at-hand mode of being, a subject contemplating an object makes sense. In that case, sure, it’s dependent on consciousness — and everything Kant says rings true, etc.

Another mass shooting. Good time to point out, once more:

1) it’s the guns.
2) the Republican Party will continue to block any solutions, because they care more about money than children’s lives.

Simple truths get lost in a sea of bullshit, so it’s worth reminding ourselves occasionally.

[I’m posting this here because I don’t think my comments are relevant to the “Heidegger’s Downfall” thread.]

The tradition has always treated being as a persisting presence.
— Joshs

Present to who, though? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say being has mostly been thought as persisting existence or simply persistence, rather than persisting presence? Unless you mean presence to denote simply a general "thereness", rather than something perceived, or even merely perceptible in prinicple. — Janus

This is interesting. I’ve always taken “presence” to be connected with presence-at-hand — i.e., the mode of being we’re in when contemplating things, when things break down. Something like the centipede effect. It’s something derivative and emerges out of a more basic human state, the ready-to-hand — the realm of habit, skill, automaticity, “second nature” actions, etc.

So it’s not perception, but a certain kind of interaction with the world. On this basis do nearly all philosophers begin their philosophy, and so everything said is biased towards an objectifying or “substance-ifying” (ousia) interpretation of the world.

But I’m open to different interpretations.

His understanding of being and time, of history unfolding, cannot be separated from what he claimed had come to be in that here and now, — Fooloso4

Yes it can. Simply asserting it doesn’t make it true.

Guessing a bit, the point in many of these threads, so far as I can see, is that Heidegger is not only, say, unintelligible or hard to understand, but also that because he was a Nazi, he is not worth reading.

If it's not something like that, then why so much insistence on him being a Nazi? — Manuel

I think it’s exactly that. Especially among people who already thought he was a charlatan or too obscure. Now they can dismiss it all easily. One of my heroes, Chomsky, does exactly this —incidentally.

Understandable, but not very persuasive. Being and Time is still amazing, in my view. I’m open to being shown that it isn’t— but no one has done that yet.

it is, however, like the Nazi bible — 180 Proof

Says who? I’ve read it several times, and I see no relation to the “nazi Bible,” even if Heidegger liked Hitler’s writings.

And this is coming from someone who thinks less of his work than I used to. But, I cannot deny it has value, just like people here get massive amounts of value from Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or Husserl, Ayer, etc. And we all can make arguments for why any of these figures here shouldn't be as influential. — Manuel

:up:

My feeling as well.

Absolutely read him like a Nazi. Does that mean a phenomenological "sense of community", as Heidegger's described it, is a Nazi concept? Remains to be seen. — fdrake

It’s not a sense of community. The “they” can be thought as something like Freud’s superego— the sense of what “they” think and “they” believe. The masses, the mainstream, the general culture, this vague sense of “what one does.”

You’re all really stretching this if you’re arguing the “they” or “one” or “das man” is somehow referring to the Jews or anyone non-German. It may seem right on the surface, but I really can’t see how it makes sense to anyone who’s spent any considerable time reading Heidegger.

So yes, read him as a Nazi. Read Schopenhauer as an asshole. Read Wittgenstein as an abuser of children. Read Descartes as someone who justified cruelty to animals. Etc. But let’s be careful in making connections that aren’t there— and really don’t make sense in context if they were.