Gentoo

This but unironically. If the precedent is "shall not be infringed" are you not creative or hopeful enough that there could be some other solution that could reduce or stop school shootings?

Careful with your words here. How many of these bozos do you think are psychopaths/sociopaths? I can see the case being made for the Columbine shooters, but anyone deeply affected by bullying would not fit the bill for "blunted emotional response", their issues would seem to be a bit more nuanced. I'm asking specifically about mass murderers against children. Tribalism, primitivism etc are all their own beasts and can't be compared to someone scraping together the nerve to kill children and aren't remotely caused by the same phenomenon. Sorry for dodging your point that guns are good at killing people, I have limited time to read and write posts and it wasn't the point that I thought was important to respond to, but I can loop back around later if you're so rabid to have that discussion.

Voting hasn't worked in the past thirty years despite the majority flipping between red and blue 5 times and hundreds of seats changing. This time we really need to band together and just get different guys in the same system. Fair enough, I'll grant you that it's potentially a viable solution to the symptoms of an underlying problem. I think the semantics need to be very carefully considered and legislated rather than knee-jerked and sweeping like the last 10 bills in this sympathy have been, and that's not an excuse to dismiss the underlying issues. You mentioned it, which is specifically what I quoted and responded to. "I don't think banning specific shooter guns is a bad idea" or whatever. This is kicking the can down the road and dragging various manufacturers. If you ban ARs, shooters will use AKs, if you ban AKs, shooters will use Mossbergs, and you are not going to see a significant drop in frequency or effectiveness. This is something that sounds more reasonable to me. However, you say this, but you and most other people in this thread lead with "we should really ban/restrict guns" rather than looking deeper into the causes or bringing up alternative more moderate and less infringing solutions. Starting with someone posting their opinion and having someone else dunk on them and post their solution without connecting the dots or making an effort to bridge the gap is what turns these threads into toxic pissing matches. If I did have any solutions of my own, would it make any difference posting them of we're not going to work there from where you're at? Or is it just going to be more content for people to tear apart and meme obtusely? This is a troll post right? You can't think of anything that reduces the rate of crime? Here, I'll start you off. Crowding is a significant factor in increases of stress, antisocial behavior, mental illness, crime and violence. Can you think of any way this correlation could be useful in decreasing the likeliness of these events? You say "it's a universal constant at this point". Has it always been? When did it arise? What may have caused it? You shouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as just an anomaly or inevitable.

This traces back to point number one: No amount of tragedies justify relinquishing the right and ability to the people to overthrow a tyrannical government. Sure it's a hypothetical, but that means it's a possibility; not worth chancing it or introducing a precedent. If you're not informed enough to give a rough estimate of what this would entail, I would be very cautious about supporting or campaigning for it. Police evaluations and requirements are not standardized. Two counties over you can have a criminal record and still join the force, in my county, if you've even had the cops called on you, or aren't putting enough of your paychecks into savings, you're not getting on. Determination on this would most likely come down to how strict or lenient different places are and what their interpretation of the laws/standards is - kind of like how it already is. Some places have laws about it and some don't, move somewhere that sounds safe enough if you're that worried about lightning striking you I guess.

"Dude the government would never do that. Why would they do that bro?" Not an argument. If it can be done, you should assume it will. If you'd like, you can walk me through what one of these reviews would look like and what objective measures could be used to determine who does and doesn't get to exercise their second amendment rights. ??? There's too many people walking around with iPhones nowadays, most serial killers have an iPhone and Apple just did too good of a job with it. We gotta make em harder to get bro. It's a means to an end. There's no point in punishing manufacturers, brokers, and other non-school-shooters because bad apples are grabbing the first thing they see in the store. As for rifles, idk man, I think any goober could do a lot more damage with a single or pair of pump shotguns and a speed loader. I really don't understand your mindset or motivations on this at all. It seems like you saw this and looked for the shortest route to making this specific event not occur the way it did again. I don't think you have the knowledge or experience on firearms to dictate what is and isn't dangerous and I don't think you've spent any significant amount of time considering what may have caused something like this to happen.

No amount of tragedies justify relinquishing the right and ability to the people to overthrow a tyrannical government. The majority of legislation proposed or passed can easily be twisted or modified to include anyone the government sees unfit to own and operate a firearm. Mental health checks discourage people from seeking treatment and includes a large amount of people that suffer from problems in living in an anti-human society created by institutions. This is like saying the Honda Civic is the most commonly crashed vehicle because it's dangerous to drive lol. It's just the most widely produced, readily available, and popular platform. There is nothing about it that makes it inherently more affective at killing large amounts of people than any other rifle on the market.

I am out of steam for the night but will pose this as a final thought until morning. Mental health requirements as a deterrent for people to seek treatment, go!

I'll leave a disclaimer here that I think anyone who thinks they are suffering from poor mental health or one of these discussions should go to a professional, you are still able to make your own decisions about treatment and care but you should at least inform yourself to the best of your ability by seeing a professional. With that out of the way, yes and no. There is less debate over these conditions for a multitude of reasons, their symptoms are less grey so it's easier to say or imagine that there is something permanently wrong with them like a disease, symptoms are more likely to have catastrophic effects on their lives so it can be easier or safer to use psychoactives to pacify these symptoms. An interesting commonality in many of these conditions is that they are triggered by trauma or long periods of stress or depression. It's inarguable that dealing with these issues - which can and are often a result of problems that could be attributed to the way our society functions - which can and are remedied with by therapy and psychotherapy - would greatly reduce the number of people that ever experience symptoms of these illnesses. If you are open-minded and have the time, I recommend reading the works of Thomas Szasz and others following his school of thought. I am not saying what he has to say is 100% true; I am not saying that psychoactives don't do any good, I just feel that much of what he has to say makes sense to me and has been taken seriously - to varying degrees - by large portions of the field and could be very helpful in giving common people a better understanding of mental illness in their own lives and that of those around them.

I'd like to ask that you avoid that topic out of good faith unless they offer to bring it up. I'm not going to base my perspective off one instance, and I haven't here. I'm not going to sit here at let you act like it's some fringe opinion when the idea was held and campaigned by on of the most important and influential minds in psychiatry and psychology in this century and the last. It's still heavily debated by psychologists to this day the degrees to which medication is helpful, necessary, or harmful. If these members are having difficulties, assuming they have sought professional help, it's likely because they've been told that there are multiple ways to skin a cat and becoming dependent or changing your brain chemistry shouldn't always be the first. If these conditions are one of the 3-5 that affect the majority of patients seeking help, you are welcome to Google that psychotherapy is listed as an effective treatment, meaning it's not accurate to say they require meds unless you are their healthcare professional (which you are not seeing as they're not prescribed). I'm not these people and I'm not omniscient, but from the sphere I'm in, given personal experience and from the people I know, it is very easy to get prescribed medication for depression, anxiety, ADHD even day of or online.

As someone who has experience with using and seeing people around me with various 'meds' I have my own qualms with them. For the sake of the thread I'm going to leave it as it's better to strive for a society that doesn't require drugs for most people to live a functional and happy life and we should be very cautious about advocating support and funding for an industry known to over-presrcibe to the detriment of it's consumers out of laziness and greed.

Yeah sorry to those unaware, the police that you pay for are not required or obligated to protect you. This has happened in a number of active shooter situations in the past and the state will continue to back them.

Damn bro, that's crazy. Except you forgot to take into account desertation, infrastructure, optics, foreign involvement etc. Yeah the US military technically owns some cool fucking Apaches, but they need fuel for it, need to have a pilot, make sure that pilot is fed and convinced he's doing the right thing while the eyes of the world are on them. Take a look at the middle east or any other civil war, coup, insurrection etc. and tell me it would be a cake walk given a population that is better armed with more former military service and range time than any other. I'm going to preface this by saying that what this goober or any similar ones have done isn't justifiable or anything other than absolutely disgusting. With that out of the way, try to spend a reasonable amount of time trying to picture what it would take for someone to get into the mindset of being capable of something like this. It's obvious that these people feel they've fallen through the cracks, been neglected, abused, or mistreated by the system/society and look to get their revenge where it's most vulnerable. Immediately everyone assumes they must've been born with a screw loose and brainwashed by internet extremists and the only plausible solution anyone can fathom is to demolish people's brain function with more drugs and make sure anyone who has grievances to air never has any access to the tools needed to make change. I already know this is going to be torn apart by people to close minded to consider a different perspective from the narrative they know or who just like to dunk on people with a different opinion from their preformed conceptions so I feel the need to preface this. I'm not advocating or justifying tragedies like this one, I just think that when you see this many sick people walking around, it's probably a good sign that there are some things deeply wrong with society that shouldn't be addressed by chasing symptoms.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022 Take a good look at this one.

How do you intend to do that? Voting? lol

Any other countries are irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. If your government is not founded on the principle that the government can and will fuck you in the ass - the government can and will fuck you in the ass. Hell, it still happens here anyways, but at least we theoretically have some safe guard if things get too bad.

What do you think caused this pattern to sprout, specifically in the US in the last 20 years? Maybe that would help us figure out a good way of taking care of it.

Yeah, but what about bodily automation? Didn't think about that did you, huh?

I'm trying to picture what this would look like in practice. I'm picturing us just keeping around hundreds of thousands of motherless children because people are still too lazy to use contraceptives 100 years down the road. Spooky. I don't think that stands as an argument in its own right, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on how things may play out.

Okay, I'd like to hear a more clear explanation of why this is a good marker of when life gains value for you, as it's not self evident to me how you make this connection. But first, isn't this definition based on the limitations of current technology? Would you say that after this point the mother must carry to term or offer it to be sustained only when this becomes viable?

Could you be a bit more specific on what "sustainable human life" is? Sounds like this could reach a lot further than you intend if you're not careful.

Clearly you interpret things differently, but my understanding is that a belief similar to Aquinas' intrinsic value of human life is what is most often pointed to in modern ethics. The human experience has value in and of itself, with the potential for good coming second. With the mother's health set aside temporarily, I don't think her potential for what she or anyone else deems better overrules the fetuses intrinsic value of life. I think saying that it is reasonable because the fetus doesn't feel pain, have sentience, etc. is just a semantics game and opens the door to all sorts of other nonsensical arguments.

Fair enough, at least you'll come out and say it. Personally, I think it's risky to call into question the value of human life based on various semantics, given that it undermines the foundation of all modern ethics but I'll give you props for being upfront about it.

If they're not planning on having children sure? I'm not sure what you're getting at here - do you not think other forms of contraception are preferable?

I'm not sure why you would make that reduction unless you're being intentionally dishonest. Getting their tubes tied is one of the options available to women who don't want to get pregnant, the closest to compare to a vasectomy in my opinion. There's a multitude of others as I'm sure you already know. If women don't want to have a child they should pursue one of these.

Yeah I don't think I mentioned that anywhere, are you just reaching into hypotheticals you think I might propose?