IliketheBullsNBearstoo wrote:I agree they want to skip the pain. A little over half of the suicides here are by the firearm for that reason, its easier.
I agree with this.
This is a whole different conversation in which I have no answer for other than more mental illness awareness.
I agree it is better to treat this cause too if you want to prevent suicides. Though as others have pointed out, it is generally the same political party that is for gun ownership rights that is also strongly against social services that would treat these types of things. That's a separate argument really, as an individual you may not feel that way, but if you are passionate about suicide prevention, it is a frustration that one group is stopping you from attacking it on either end.
Guns are going nowhere though we know that right?
It wouldn't surprise me if we ban guns in my lifetime in this country. I mean you can say this, but there is a growing base that is passionate against gun ownership, and it's hard to justify the value of gun ownership. There are many very real and very difficult problems to overcome if you actually want to remove guns, but I wouldn't be surprised if we overcome those problems over the next 50 years.
I don't feel strongly about the topic, but I think it is worth looking at philosophically. Is this country better or worse for having guns in it? Does the good outweigh the bad? As I said, I don't care strongly about it, but I would say the bad absolutely outweighs the good. We may keep them anyway, because the will of the people may be strong enough to keep them anyway. You could look at something like alcohol, and does the good outweigh the bad? Tough question really, because the amount of fun times people have while drinking is hard to measure as "good" but does have real value, but society wants alcohol so much that it doesn't matter if the good or bad outweigh each other.
With guns, who knows, at one point I think the society was in favor of guns enough that we would never remove them, but I see that shifting over the span of my life, to the point where society may eventually have enough consensus around the topic to remove them. Maybe not.
I guess the point of these three paragraphs wasn't to convince you though, but to say that it's certainly possible they could be gone. Many people want them gone. They are gone in many other modern countries and where they aren't, most are probably moving towards that. It shouldn't be a surprise if we do as well.
Theres no point in spinning our wheels on that. Gun owners will always have a firearm that will at least fire off a round. This is an issue that needs to be fixed under everyones own roof and it can be by securing the firearms better but maybe pay more attention to each other and try to notice the red flags.
I think even then, people notice red flags, but don't know what to do about them. Like take this recent mass shooter, people knew there were red flags, but failed to think they could possibly be THAT bad, and even if they knew they were bad there is no clear action to take. I've had to deal with a lot of mental health issues in people close to me, and as someone put earlier, what can you do really? Take them in for an emergency check in at a facility? Generally, they just get out immediately and are pissed you humiliated them. It's easy to lie your way out of those things, and even if they get checked in temporarily, those places are so toxic because you are surrounded by so many othe rmentally ill people that I've actually seen behaviors get worse after being in patient for awhile. There are no easy solutions even when you know the red flags exist. That really isn't a gun topic to me per se.
So this has gotten off topic in regards to fixing the mass shooting topic. Once again with the suicide/ gun topic people need more help with mental illness as well,I dont have an answer for that other than that. Theres a lot more households with guns that this doesn’t happen. Dont have an answer how to fix people. All I know is guns are going nowhere so we need to be more creative than just say get rid of them because once again we just end up spinning our wheels in mud.
I understand why people want to get rid of guns, just like I understand why people who don't drink would say get rid of alcohol or people who don't get high would say get rid of weed, or people who don't participate in <thing abc> would say get rid of <thing abc> whenever it has a negative impact.
Sometimes that might be the right answer, if you were to take something extreme, a slaveowner might have made that argument to a non slave owner. Of course you dont' care about freeing slaves, you don't have any, but it obviously was the right thing to do to get rid of slavery. Sometimes it might not be the right answer and the answer is to seek out something else.
As I've said, I don't really feel passionately about guns personally, but society seems to be moving more and more passionately against gun ownership as a whole, and ironically, I think most of the arguments by people with whom passionately want to keep them actually push the moderate people against them because they often come off as callous and unreasonable (not to say your arguments fall into this category, but many of the most vocal arguments do, I know as a moderate when I hear most of the more vocal people about it, I think they're **** crazy).
