Are you desensitized to gun mania in the USA?

It wont do any good.

And yeah. My sisters twin girls go to high school in Portland and my sister was freaking out until she heard from them.

I was pretty glad that only one innocent person was killed and stopped caring.

Yes. after 30 years of watching the TV news I don’t believe that Canadian’s and the Americans are really trying to solve the problem.

Desensitized, no. Bummed out, yes.

We as a country could do a lot to reduce the carnage. But the extremists and the gun lobby have decide that frequent, regular killings are good for their cause – lots of deaths feed their narrative – and therefore have a vested interest in letting them continue.

Every one of these mass killings (a) sells more guns, and (b) gets more people to affiliate with the NRA and groups like that.

It is in the interest of these populations to have these incidents every couple of weeks. Great advertising.

Unfortunately, yes.

Unfortunately, yes.

I asked a question on here a few weeks ago (or maybe months ago) about how it seems like every other week there’s a random shooting in the US and some people disagreed with me. Really? It doesn’t? Because now it really seems like it’s every other day. I can’t even keep track of the random shootings because they happen so often. It’s alarming and I hope it never happens close to home.

No. I am not a paranoid type at all, but, I’ll tell you what, I have found myself thinking about random shooters several times in the last few weeks.
Sitting at an outdoor cafe having lunch with a friend, in the movie theater sitting out at another place having an ice cream. Crossed my mind that out of the blue it could all over if some random lunatic just happened by.
Pretty sad commentary on the state of things.

2nd amendment you pussies! It has been a few hundred years but it is still totally relevant today.

@johnpowell 238 years ago people shot bears and mad dogs not college kids and movie patrons.
Time to amend the 2nd amendment, it is outdated by at least 100 years.
238 years ago there were not semi-automatic weapons either and mass shootings springing from billions of humans that ramp up the odds of more mental illness.

Pussies…really? Pffft!

No, but resigned, with sadness, to the fact that there will be people spouting the 2nd amendment bullshit like @johnpowell. He sort of proves my point.

I’m not in the states but yes. As an outsider looking in, the lack of action from your governments seems completely ludicrous to me. Makes me wonder how many people have to die before your legislators take away your right to carry guns and to buy automatic weapons. It no longer surprises or shocks me when I turn on the TV to see a headline…. ‘xxxx killed in mass shooting in [insert the name of some US city]’.

The only REAL question is how many shootings and deaths will the society find tolerable in a land with a truly peculiar frontier mentality. It really requires an intellectual deficit not to appreciate that laws visualized and enacted in an age of muskets might require revision as the potential for havoc rises exponentially in a gun swamped, automatic weapon society of crowded urban environments.

@johnpowell: Nobody is saying American’s shouldn’t have the right to have guns. We’re talking about common sense gun legislation, and certain segments of our society get totally incensed at the mere thought of it.

By the way, very embarrassing that I put “American’s” instead of just “Americans.” It was late and I was tired. I usually think negatively of people who make errors like putting extra apostrophes where they’re not needed.

@jca I guess we’ll just have to shoot you. haha

The ever increasing problem in the US is sociopathy.
Focusing on guns is a good way to evade the sorry truth.

@josie Ya got that right.

I get that @josie….. but it isn’t a 1 and 0 argument. Mental health issues are, of course, of the utmost, but why are guns ending up in the hands of questionable of the questionable minds?

@cazzie
If you really believe that guns are going to disappear from the American landscape any time soon, then continue to imagine that you do not have to actually deal with sociopaths, but simply to disarm them. But it won’t happen, of course, no matter how much you dream. The problem will still be sociopaths.

One of the myriad problems with the current crop of Americans is that too many of them are timid about dealing with people who present a clear and present danger to them. Whether it is the sociopath next door, or the lunatic in the Middle East.

It may or may not be the downfall of the civilization,but it would be pretty shitty if your children, or grandchildren, as they were being burned alive, or having their throats cut or something equally shitty had, as their last thought said “Gosh, I wish Mom and Dad had had some balls”

@josie I think you forget who you are talking to and what Norway went through in WW2. We have an armed, trained home guard. I don’t need to keep a shotgun under my bed or a handgun in my purse.

@cazzie
At the risk of being insensitive, I have no idea whom I am talking to. I have an avatar and a nickname. Sorry about WWII. I wasn’t around to be of assistance, but both of my Grandfathers were part of helping you out.

Having said it, whatever problems there are in Norway, past or present, there is a sociopathy problem in the US.

Some of it is developing in the public school system. A lot of it is developing in the “inner city”. People are uncomfortable talking about the ways the culture breeds sociopaths, so they make guns a scapegoat.

I have a baseball bat under my bed.

I look at it like this, if someone is motivated to kill people, they will do it. A teen male went on a rampage in my state not too long ago using a knife. Obviously a gun is more dangerous, but if victims were armed it could easily offset other factors here. If people want to kill they will, and if they don’t have access to a gun they could target isolated people for attack to make up for it, or even build a bomb.

I’m not a fan of the gun culture in this country, and I do support reasonable gun control measures like banning high-powered assault rifles and basic background checks. I support the latter protocol with the knowledge not everyone who’s dangerous, even potentially, will be weeded out during background checks though.

I don’t think guns themselves are necessarily the problem, but other factors are. I don’t buy the white ‘privilege’ babble either, though this term sounds wonderful on paper to the politically correct these days it seems. What I think is there’s a problem with males of all races in general in America.

Personally I believe our hyper-masculine culture, and unfair expectations and ridicule of males is the cause of this violence. Males are lucky today, because both traditionalists with their real man propaganda and progressives with their all males are pigs babble have really helped to boost the self-esteem of boys. No wonder I’m a political nonconformist. Male issues need more attention.