Obviously the ready availability guns eases mass murder — I like sushi

So put in steps to make mass murder harder, e.g strict gun regulations. And then at the same time address the causes.

US culture is not like other countries. I am just saying there may be a much deeper problem in US society because it is a cultural attitude held, and impressed, by the ruling body. — I like sushi

It addresses all that. The US is no more violent, has no more mental illnesses, and has no more crime than other developed countries. And even excluding the US, the same pattern emerges; the more guns there are the more mass shootings there are. Which is fucking obvious.

Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings? Research Is Clear: Guns.

But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?

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.

The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

...

Worldwide, Mr. Lankford found, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence.

...

If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.

A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues. And Mr. Lankford, in an email, said countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings.

Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country.

Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings.

...

America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.

Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime, a notion ingrained, in part, by a series of films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.

Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

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.

Maybe if I put this into terms more to your liking:

Who is to blame for you paying taxes? You or the government? The existence of a law and the threat of punishment doesn't force you to do anything; that would (apparently) be magical thinking. You choose to pay taxes. If you choose to pay taxes then taxation isn't theft. Will you accept that conclusion?

You don't think people would be prompted to resist against government tyranny? As people have throughout history? — Tzeentch

I don't think a hypothetical tyrannical government is so likely that the current situation in the USA is a worthy sacrifice.

Not if I spoke a different language. Same meaning, same knowledge, different symbols. You understand these words because you’ve spent time learning the language. It is the effect of your learning, your self. — NOS4A2

It's not just the effect of my learning, it's also the effect of your speech. We cannot converse or share knowledge if we just sit in silence and stare at each other. Us actually talking is an essential component. I'm not going to pass you the butter unless you ask me to.

Influence means effect. Incite means to stir up. But there is no effect or stirring involved. — NOS4A2

Of course there is. My words have an effect on you. That's precisely how we are able to engage in conversation and share knowledge.

I understand the folk psychology of “influence”. You make decisions based on information you pick up from the environment and believe the information has effected you in some way, somehow forcing you to turn left. But there is zero physical evidence of this cause and effect. — NOS4A2

Who said anything about force? I'm not arguing that words are compulsive. I'm just talking about the sense already mentioned: you would not have done/said X if I had not said Y. That's really all is meant when we talk about influence and incitement, and that's really all that is required for moral responsibility to be shared. If I threaten to kill you if you do not kill someone else then I share (perhaps even the majority) of the moral responsibility for you then killing someone.

You chose to by your own volition. — NOS4A2

Choices don't occur in a vacuum. They're influenced by our environment, including the things other people say. I might choose to turn left instead of right, but I only choose to turn left because you told me that it's the fastest way to reach my destination. Your words have influenced my decision making.

And if it then turns out that turning left has led me onto what you knew to be a dangerous, collapsing road, then you bear some degree of moral responsibility for my accident, just as in the previous example of me threatening you I bear some degree of moral responsibility for the murder and can rightfully be prosecuted.

Words don’t have the kind of causal power you claim they do. — NOS4A2

They have exactly the kind of causal power I claim they do; the kind such that you would not have done/said X if I had not said Y.

It might not have the kind of strawman causal power that you're arguing against, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.

Firearms are leading cause of death among U.S. youth

Firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents 0-19 years of age, with a staggering 83 percent increase in youth firearm fatalities over the past decade, according to a commentary published in Lancet Child and Adolescent Health. Nearly two-thirds of youth firearm deaths were from homicides. Strikingly, Black youth had an unprecedented 40 percent increase in firearm fatalities between 2019 to 2020.

Bullets can tear through a person’s body. Shooting someone is justifiably a criminal act. Words possess no such force, have zero connection to another’s actions, and thus speaking cannot be justified as criminal act. — NOS4A2

So if I am carrying a gun and threaten to kill you unless you kill someone else, and if you then kill someone else under such duress, then you should be prosecuted for murder and I should be left alone because I didn't kill anyone and because words cannot be justified as a criminal act?

The physical processes that produce brain activity are nonetheless that of the individual, and therefor determined by him. Until you can show that a human’s action is determined by some outer or foreign force, it seems to me your view is without merit. — NOS4A2

There's no such thing as a self that's distinct from brain activity. There's no ghost in the machine. Our decisions just are brain activity, and such brain activity is a consequence of prior physical events which must originate from outside itself.

Your decision to post the above was directed in part by reading my post. You wouldn't have posted it had I not posted mine. My post influenced your post. That's all there is to the matter. Whatever kind of causal role you're arguing against is a strawman.

In Canada, the number of guns per capita is even higher than in the states. — Jarjar

It's definitely not. Canada has 34.7, the USA has 120.5 (from 2017).

This discussion was merged into The American Gun Control Debate

When mass shootings occur, somehow the debate is always about gun control and never about why kids are massacring kids. — Tzeentch

It can be about both. 1) fix whatever it is that makes people want to shoot people, and 2) make it harder for people who want to shoot people to shoot people by making it harder for them to get guns.

I don’t go out and buy something whenever I see an advertisement for it. — NOS4A2

OK.

But it's still an empirical fact that advertising increases sales. That's why companies spend so much money on advertising. And it's an empirical fact that campaigning increases votes. That's why political parties spend so much money on campaigning.

It is an empirical fact that our decisions are influenced by our environment, including the things other people tell us.

That you, personally, don't succumb to such influences every time is a strawman.

Philosophically, it’s magical thinking. Speaking cause little more than the movement of air. Speech is an act but words are not actors. — NOS4A2

So you're saying that persuasion/incitement is a (meta)physical impossibility? That advertising and campaigning work would prove you wrong.

And if we were to take a more technical view, the libertarian concept of free will is inconsistent with what I think is the more reasonable account that the human mind (and any associated decision making) is a product of brain activity which is subject to the same deterministic (and occasionally stochastic) physical processes as everything else. We don't have anything like a "soul" that is able to transcend these influences.

According to Putin, he was invited by Russians-speaking populations who were - and this is actually true - getting fucked by the Ukrainian central government. But go on, make your apologies. — Streetlight

What apologies? I'm just drawing a factual distinction between a government requesting military assistance from a foreign power and foreign power starting a war.

Your argument would work better if you compared Russia's invasion to the U.S-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and then we can argue whether or not Putin's/Bush's invasions were legitimate.

Except this is exactly what Putin said did in fact happen in the Donbass. But of course, when the US says it, one is obvious propaganda - which it is - and the other is, uh, good guys being good guys, helping friends out. — Streetlight

Well, Zelensky didn't ask Russia to invade, but the Somalian President did welcome U.S. troops, so I don't really understand what you're trying to say here.

It merely denied a right that women should have (irrespective of whether it's constitutionally protected as a technical matter) by permitting states to create arbitrary restrictions. IOW, per SCOTUS, a woman doesn't have a right to choose, but the state does have the right to choose for her. — Relativist

Well, all the Supreme Court can do is rule on whether or not it's "constitutionally protected as a technical matter."

Whether or not that's what they've actually done is being debated by the legal experts, with some saying that the initial ruling was correct and that this draft ruling has been unduly influenced by the justices' biases.

You're welcome.

What if we were to point to "capable of suffering" vs "not capable of suffering" as the distinction? — Harry Hindu

Even then it's a matter of degree. An adult with congenital insensitivity to pain, a foetus at 24 weeks old, and cockroaches aren't capable of suffering in the same way that I am. At what "strength" does it become an ethical concern?

Would it be better if I used the term, "kill"?

There's no point where it "becomes" killing. As I've said before, there is no point where something that wasn't alive "becomes" alive; it's all a matter of degree. Like personhood, life isn't some binary state that something either has or doesn't have.

And you seem to think that Witt is a prophet of some sort whose words are infallible. — Harry Hindu

No I don't. I just think he happens to be right. Personhood, life, being a game -- none of these are some intrinsic property that things either have or don't have. The world is a chaotic place, and to help us navigate it we start using words like "person", "life", and "game". But such use isn't dictated by some strict formal system of logic; it's often imprecise and inconsistent. That's just the reality of language.

So when does abortion become murder if not by the way we define "person"? — Harry Hindu

"Murder" is a legal term, so it "becomes" murder if the law declares it to be murder.

Then I don't understand why you brought Wittgenstein into this discussion. — Harry Hindu

Because you seem to think that there is some set of necessary and sufficient conditions that qualify a thing as a person, but as Wittgenstein argued, this is a mistake. Instead, we just use the word "person" to refer to things that fit within a (vague) family resemblance, and that there are some things that clearly fit the use and some things that clearly don't, and then other things that sit within a grey area.

Depending on how we define "person" vs. "non-person" the transition between the two can be very brief or very long. What we are trying to do is narrow that window of transition. By doing this and then by giving the benefit of the doubt to the fetus during this transition, we only end up adding a small amount of time to when it is not okay to abort a life. — Harry Hindu

What's the connection between our definition of "person" and whether or not abortion is OK? I didn't realise that how we use words is the measure of morality,

Then intelligence is another defining factor? — Harry Hindu

Yes.

We put people in jail for animal abuse. It's okay to abuse a pig on a farm, but not a dog? Pigs are actually more intelligent than dogs. What about dolphins or apes? — Harry Hindu

I don't understand what these questions have to do with anything.

Yet you're saying that there is a clear-cut case between what is discernable vs. indiscernible. — Harry Hindu

I don't know what you mean here either. All I've said is that there is a very clear difference between a fertilised egg and a healthy adult.

Have any other examples? — Harry Hindu

A sperm isn't a person, but a child is.

And after you give those examples, provide the traits that they share that qualifies them as a person. — Harry Hindu

Again, see Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations re. what is a game. If you're looking for some set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to qualify as a person then you're approaching the issue the wrong way. That's just not how things work in many cases. There are extremes where it's easy to say what is or isn't a person (a healthy adult is, a sperm isn't) and where it's easy to say what is or isn't a game (chess is, clouds aren't), but then there are cases where there's no clear answer (and by this I don't just mean that we don't know which it is, but that there isn't a definite fact of the matter).

Does "healthy adult" include other species other than humans? — Harry Hindu

Possibly, if they're intelligent enough. I would think some advanced extra-terrestrial life would quality as persons. But dogs probably aren't (even if they're more intelligent and more self-aware than a newborn human).

A healthy fetus in the third trimester has lungs. Is there anything else? — Harry Hindu

There are thousands of differences between an ovum and an adult human. I'm not going to list them all, and I don't understand the purpose of doing so.

You're repeating yourself. What are those differences? — Harry Hindu

There are many differences; a healthy adult has lungs and a fertilised egg doesn't, a fertilised egg is about 100 microns in diameter and a healthy adult is quite a lot larger.

You defined a person as a "healthy adult". — Harry Hindu

No I didn't. I offered a healthy adult as an example of a person.

So the victims of school shootings were not people? — Harry Hindu

No, how did you come to that conclusion?

To even say that there are two extremes means that there must be a distinction between them, or else the extremes aren't extremes at all. — Harry Hindu

Yes, there's a difference between a fertilised egg and a healthy adult.

Maybe there are options for 3rd trimester abortions that preserve the child’s life.
...
Like put it in a test tube or something and let it grow the rest of the way organically. — Paulm12

They're called incubators.

Although that would probably require a caesarian if it were done as an alternative to abortion.

The state sure has streamlined the process, haven't they? — NOS4A2

Yep, it’s very efficient and saves me from having to do tax returns and make all these extra payments myself.

I claimed no such thing. You said your gross wage was agreed as yours by consent. That's a lie. You employer has full knowledge and expectation that you will give the taxable portion to the government. He never consented for you to keep that portion in return for your labour. — Isaac

Well, that’s even more absurd. It’s no business of the other party whether I pay my taxes or not, and it matters not one bit what he implicitly expects me to do with my payment. If a client expects me to spend his payment on food or rent it makes little sense to say I am violating his consent if I flush it all down the toilet. — NOS4A2

Here in the UK it’s the employer that pays their employees’ income tax/national insurance/student loan repayments/pension contributions. They only pay us what’s left.

Not having to deal with that hassle is a great benefit over being self-employed.

The question is whether the extreme of being a living person begins before or after birth. — Harry Hindu

I would say the two extremes are a newly fertilised egg (not a person) and a healthy adult (a person). A 24 week old foetus and someone in a vegetative state might be somewhere in between.

Then what use is the term, "person" if there is no way to determine what it is? Are you a person? How do you know? — Harry Hindu

See Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, particularly regarding what is or isn't a game.

Can you point to something that has an equal number of properties of personhood and not-personhood? — Harry Hindu

I don't understand this question.

Yes, but l don't see how it's proportional or even comparable to taking the life of a baby. The foetus has a right to life and the suffering of the mother during the time of pregnancy cannot take that away. — Wittgenstein

Whether or not a foetus has a right to life is the very thing being debated. And I would say that the woman's suffering very much is comparable, and at least in the early stages of pregnancy her rights take precedence of the foetus', just as I would say that a human's suffering takes precedence over any animal's right to life.

I could quote a medical study here but since we are not doctors, We should let the experts determine when the foetus becomes conscious and l am sure doctors have a medical definition of consciousness — Wittgenstein

I suppose there's this:

Thalamic afferents to the cortex develop from approximately 12-16 wk of gestation, reach the cortical subplate, but “wait” until they grow into the cortical plate (16). At this stage, only long depolarization of the deep layers may reach the cortex (17) (Fig. 2). After 24 wk, thalamocortical axons grow into the somatosensory, auditory, visual, and frontal cortices and the pathways mediating pain perception become functional around the 29-30 wk (18). From approximately 34 wk, a synchrony of the EEG rhythm of the two hemispheres becomes detectable at the same time as long-range callosal connections, and thus the GNW circuits, are established (18–20). From the 26th wk, pyramidal neurons in the primary visual cortex of humans develop dendritic spines (19).

And this:

Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components, nerve cells. Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation.

This fits with the current law in the UK which allows abortion up to 24 weeks, and I believe this is (currently) the case in the US as well.

People should use better means to avoid getting pregnant. What's the point of getting pregnant accidentally and going through the hassle of abortion when a condom/pill etc will cut the problem at the root. — Wittgenstein

Because condoms/pills etc. don't always work.

Once the fetus gains conscious, he/she isn't a part of the mother only, but a member of society with the right to life. — Wittgenstein

When does a foetus become conscious?

In the case of rape, the mother is not responsible for taking care of her baby but the state should interfere and place the child in the care of foster parents. If the baby is the product of incest, the same rules should apply but the parents should be fined or imprisoned. — Wittgenstein

There's still the 9 months of pregnancy which a woman has to suffer through.

But this diverges from the original point I was making between you and BitterCrank - that we need to be consistent in how we define life, personhood, and suffering. — Harry Hindu

I don't think we need to be consistent, because I don't think there is a precise answer. Just as there is no single point where one species evolves into another, there's no single point where something "becomes" alive or a person or something which can suffer. We can see that at one extreme it's not a living person and at another extreme it is a living person, but in between it's just a matter of degree. With this in mind there's no reason that we can't treat the foetus differently depending on circumstance, e.g. between a woman choosing to have an abortion and some third party causing an unwanted miscarriage.

What constitutes acceptable behavior and what constitutes abuse varies from time to time, place to place — Bitter Crank

What's accepted might vary, but what's acceptable might not. If moral facts are independent of (inter)subjective opinion then these are two different things.

But an unjust transfer in wealth never results in a just distribution, let alone a just state of affairs. We cannot use injustice to reach justice. No matter the efficiency, no matter who gets what, it’s injustice all the way down. — NOS4A2

Yes, that's the reality. As I said, we just have to decide which injustice is greater and do what we can to avoid that. I (and may others) would say that poverty and exploitation are greater injustices than taxation and regulation.

And it’s not clear to me that the absence of regulation can accurately be said to cause a certain activity. — NOS4A2

Absence of regulation doesn't cause bad behaviour, but it does allow for it. The entre purpose of regulation is to prevent such bad behaviour. The majority opinion of the report was that the activities that caused the financial crisis were things that should have been regulated precisely because of their risk and likely inevitable consequences.

It’s a faith of mine, but one founded on experience, that in the absence of state power a majority of free people will not resort tyranny, theft, murder, and they should have the means and ability to defend themselves against those who would. — NOS4A2

What experience? You admit yourself that there has never been a truly laissez-faire economy. And if we just look to individual issues we can see the fallacy of this view, e.g. the only reason we have laws that prohibit dumping toxic waste into rivers and child labour is precisely because without such laws these were practices that businesses engaged in. Regulations are a practical necessity to prevent even greater injustices.

That is the fatal flaw in my arguments: it serves no utilitarian purpose. It won’t just work out. I do not believe laissez-faire or free markets results in some sort of market equilibrium. I do not believe it will work or function that well, especially in a culture crippled after centuries of state rule and intervention. It doesn’t aim for the greater amount of happiness for the greater amount of people. — NOS4A2

I think this answers your own question. We fear a laissez-faire economy "because it will [not] work or function that well."

The best laissez-faire could ever do is provide a space for humans to figure it out on their own, absent absolute power, the hard and soft despotisms and the game-rigging of a coercive and exploitative institution. — NOS4A2

All you'll do is replace one coercive power (the government) with others (big business and the very wealthy). We either have a government that regulates the rich to better protect the poor or we have the rich exploiting the poor to enrich themselves even further. I'd rather have the former.

I gave you evidence that there is no such thing as a "lack of regulation", and in fact there is a massive accumulation of regulation over time. The causes of the crisis were myriad, but to pin it on a system of laissez-faire when it has occurred in a highly-regulated mixed-economy is a bit out of bounds. — NOS4A2

You seem to be intentionally ignoring what is being said. All of these are true:

1. The United States did not (and does not) have a laissez-faire system, and
2. The economy was (and is) highly regulated, and
3. The 2008 economic crisis was caused by unregulated business practices

So perhaps rather than asserting the red herrings which are the first two you could actually address @frank's claim which is the third. To back up his claim, see The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report:

We conclude widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets. The sentries were not at their posts, in no small part due to the widely accepted faith in the self correcting nature of the markets and the ability of financial institutions to effectively police themselves. More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe. This approach had opened up gaps in oversight of critical areas with trillions of dollars at risk, such as the shadow banking system and over-the-counter derivatives markets. In addition, the government permitted financial firms to pick their preferred regulators in what became a race to the weakest supervisor.

This is why a laissez-faire economy can't work. Contrary to your naive idealism, people are greedy and selfish and make many bad decisions. A democratically-elected government is the best tool we have to protect ourselves.