[kenberg]

onoway, on 2012-December-17, 12:25, said:

I think it's unfortunate to say the least when adults don't remember that children don't come equipped with the same understanding of the world that adults do and must grow into it. Too many regard kids as just small adults and they aren't. It's asking too much of them and an abandonment of adult responsibility imo. When a child has seen something like 18000 murders on tv and in video games by the time he or she is a teenager, is it really such a wonder that some kids end up thinking that violence and murder is a viable way to deal with problems?

This saturation effect also seems clear to me. When I was a kid we lined up on Saturdays to see a movie, cartoons, and usually some serial. Don Winslow of the Navy comes to mind. The rest of the time we played with our friends. We now have a three year old grandson who knows how to operate the &*%^*& wii. His older brothers are regularly wiping out monsters and other villains. Yes in the 40s we all once listened to the Lone Ranger. And the Green Hornet and his faithful servant Kato. But mostly we played. With other humans. A better way to grow up, I think.

[mikeh]

kenberg, on 2012-December-17, 14:17, said:

We have priests to help people on death row. I wouldn't imagine an atheist wanting one.

I've sometimes wondered about the thinking process of religious believers in that sort of situation.

I appreciate that each sect has its own unique interpretation of doctrine, even within an umbrella such as Islam or Christianity and I don't pretend to know about the particulars of many of them.

However, I was raised Catholic, and exposed to Anglican, and have done some reading. I gather that at least some Xian sects are of the view that their god will forgive just about every imaginable sin provided that the sinner truly repents and seeks forgiveness.

The same sects often assert that their beliefs give rise to morality, and that atheists, a common foe to all believers, lack a moral sense. And it is that moral sense that prevents murder and other horrible acts.

It prevents it because the murderer will be punished in the afterlife. But.....hold the phone....that's not true after all! All the murderer has to do is to later feel sorry for killing someone.

And the priests on death row have to be selling this redemption. I can't see them being popular if all they do is to tell the condemned person that he or she will face an eternity of damnation...no.... they are there selling pious bullshit to people in such distress that they will believe almost anything. Such priests may consider themselves to be doing god's work, but I see them as ghouls and, no, I wouldn't want such a sorry excuse for a human being anywhere near me if I were on death row or death's doorstep.

[mike777]

Disbelieving something is really hard, cognitively speaking. We humans are naturally gullible and it takes a tremendous expenditure of energy to go about disbelieving stuff. It is a limited resource in a sense.

If the general public believes the second amendment is a good thing, then people weigh
how much it affects their own life and just how much energy they should expend on that issue compared to other important issues in their life.

Likewise if you believe guns or semiautomatics should be banned it is going to take alot of energy on your part to disbelieve or even try too.

[dwar0123]

mike777, on 2012-December-17, 15:11, said:

Disbelieving something is really hard, cognitively speaking. We humans are naturally gullible and it takes a tremendous expenditure of energy to go about disbelieving stuff. It is a limited resource in a sense.

I find it pretty easy to disbelieve most everything you say.

Including this.

[Cyberyeti]

kenberg, on 2012-December-17, 14:17, said:

We have priests to help people on death row. I wouldn't imagine an atheist wanting one.

Why not ?

The fact that the priest and atheist don't believe in the same thing wouldn't mean that an atheist wouldn't want somebody to talk through what was about to happen with somebody used to acting as confidant and counsellor.

Priests have the same profile as the rest of us, there are good ones and bad ones at all levels. In the UK (and I believe even more so in Ireland) we are going through a spate of legal cases where priests are implicated in child abuse at religious children's homes, and the church hierarchy are in the dock for when they're told about it, simply moving the offending priest on somewhere else to abuse more kids.

Religion is good, atheism (or religion that is not my religion) is bad is an outdated attitude. Organised religion has been a source of evil as well as good for a long time, look back at the crusade against the Cathars, the pope of the time declared that anything taken from them was the property of the crusaders, causing a load of people to do his dirty work for him.

IMO a personal code of ethics (whether founded in religion or not) is in general a good thing, organised religion can be either good or bad.

[mike777]

dwar0123, on 2012-December-17, 15:18, said:

I find it pretty easy to disbelieve most everything you say.

Including this.

Case in point, you have your beliefs.

[blackshoe]

ArtK78, on 2012-December-17, 10:11, said:

Of course, slavery was not abolished by the Constitution, as the Constitution clearly states:

"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."

If you're going to read the Constitution, read all of it. The Constitution includes the twenty seven amendments that have been made to it since 1787. One of those amendments, the thirteenth, abolished slavery:

Quote

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

So while it is true that the original Constitution did not abolish slavery, the current state of the document is that slavery was abolished in 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment went into effect.

[dwar0123]

The 2nd amendment.

Quote

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

Nowhere does it specifically grant individuals the right to bear arms, That was an interpretation by the Supreme court.

If societal needs changes, the Supreme court is free to reinterpret. This won't be easy, as precedent weighs heavily upon the judicial system, but far easier then repealing the 2nd amendment.

[billw55]

Wow, I've heard people rant against religion before, but mikeh you sound kinda angry.

[dwar0123]

billw55, on 2012-December-17, 16:16, said:

Wow, I've heard people rant against religion before, but mikeh you sound kinda angry.

Saying atheists are more apt to commit mass murder due to their lack of a moral code tends to piss atheists off.

Would piss off any group so singled out.

[mikeh]

billw55, on 2012-December-17, 16:16, said:

Wow, I've heard people rant against religion before, but mikeh you sound kinda angry.

I've for too long been exposed to the pious making all kinds of attacks on those who don't believe as they do. I read of a survey in the US that revealed that being openly atheist was the worst of all factors being polled, in terms of being electable to public office. I have read that atheists lack any moral sense, and are thus likely to be cold-blooded killers and rapists. I have read that prominent US politicians have stated that natural disasters, such as Storm Sandy or Hurricane Katrina, are god's vengance upon non-believers. I have read, this morning, a former and perhaps future Republican seeker of the presidential nomination (Huckabee) claim that it was the prohibition of school prayer that led to this most recent massacre.

Then I read Fluffy's moronic assertion that atheism is responsible for this mass killing of children and the image of my grandkids flashed through my mind and I got very angry indeed. Far too many religious believers, smug and arrogant in the infallibility of their silly beliefs are willing to blame atheists....people who, on balance, have spent far more time thinking about religion than most believers....for anything bad in the world.

I have read much, tho not all of the bible. I have read some, but not all, of the koran. I have read some of the bhuddist teachings. I know a smattering, tho only a smattering, of the hindu beliefs, and have had discussions with Jewish believers about their faith. And I have read widely in terms of history, and natural history/evolution, and about the study of our origins as members of our species. I have read of the Greek gods, the Roman gods, the Norse gods, the Egyptian gods and others.

I have read various anthropological texts. I have read books about the brain and the mind. I am, from a legal perspective, a specialist in cases of traumatic brain injury and have seen how the 'meat' part of us causes us to experience and believe things, including things that may not really be there. Damage the brain in a certain way, and empathy disappears. Damage it in another way, and moral inhibitions go away. Damage it in a 3rd away, and we get visual and/or auditory hallucinations, and so on.

I find the universe to be awe-inspiring. I love the fact that as we seem, as a species, to be arriving at some global understanding, a new fact is discovered that causes us to step back and realize we have so far barely scratched the surface.

I even find awe in the idea, hardly original with me, that maybe our brains, having evolved in response to the earthly environment in which we speciated and flourished, are simply not equipped with the cognitive power to understand 'everything', and I only wish that I could be one of those actually trying to show that that is not so...or to go as far towards understanding as we can.

So when I encounter the wilfully blind who think that the variously translated tales of largely ignorant scribes, from many centuries ago, or the incoherent ramblings of a fanatical zealot reflect absolute truth, and who go on to blame me and people who think like me for the atrocities of (probably) mentally ill mass murderers, then, yes, I get angry.

It is in my view very important that the religious nuts, who blame people like me for things like this, get called on it everytime. Otherwise, they and others who tend to think that way, will never have to think that perhaps they are mistaken.

[Cyberyeti]

mikeh, on 2012-December-17, 16:52, said:

It is in my view very important that the religious nuts, who blame people like me for things like this, get called on it everytime. Otherwise, they and others who tend to think that way, will never have to think that perhaps they are mistaken.

Absolutely, and also - don't get me started on creationists and other people who want to force their religiously coloured view of the world onto non believers by forcing it to be taught in schools as truth.

[ArtK78]

blackshoe, on 2012-December-17, 15:54, said:

If you're going to read the Constitution, read all of it. The Constitution includes the twenty seven amendments that have been made to it since 1787. One of those amendments, the thirteenth, abolished slavery:
So while it is true that the original Constitution did not abolish slavery, the current state of the document is that slavery was abolished in 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment went into effect.

My point was that whenever you hear about people referring to the "Founding Fathers" in a reverential manner those people probably have no idea what is in the Constitution that the "Founding Fathers" drafted. Slavery was abolished after the Civil War. The "Founding Fathers" were all dead by then.

[mike777]

My only point in posting the stuff below is to show that I don't think the public fully understands the risks of semi automatic weapons.


------------
Expiration and Effect on Crime

Opponents of the ban claimed that its expiration has seen little if any increase in crime, while Senator Diane Feinstein claimed the ban was effective because "It was drying up supply and driving up prices." [5]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied the "assault weapon" ban and other gun control attempts, and found "insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence."[6] A 2004 critical review of research on firearms by a National Research Council panel also noted that academic studies of the assault weapon ban "did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence" and noted "due to the fact that the relative rarity with which the banned guns were used in crime before the ban ... the maximum potential effect of the ban on gun violence outcomes would be very small...."[7]

The United States Department of Justice National Institute of Justice found should the ban be renewed, its effects on gun violence would likely be small, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement, because rifles in general, including rifles referred to as "assault rifles" or "assault weapons", are rarely used in gun crimes.[8]

That study by Christopher S. Koper, Daniel J. Woods, and Jeffrey A. Roth of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania found no statistically significant evidence that either the assault weapons ban or the ban on magazines holding more than 10 bullets had reduced gun murders. However, they concluded that it was "premature to make definitive assessments of the ban's impact on gun crime," and argue that if the ban had been in effect for more than nine years, benefits might have begun to appear.[9]

Research by John Lott in the 2000 second edition of More Guns, Less Crime provided the first research on state and the Federal Assault Weapon Bans.[10] The 2010 third edition provided the first empirical research on the 2004 sunset of the Federal Assault Weapon Ban.[11] Generally, the research found no impact of these bans on violent crime rates, though the third edition provided some evidence that Assault Weapon Bans slightly increased murder rates. Lott's book The Bias Against Guns provided evidence that the bans reduced the number of gun shows by over 20 percent.[12] Koper, Woods, and Roth studies focus on gun murders, while Lott's looks at murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults. Unlike their work, Lott's research accounted for state Assault Weapon Bans and 12 other different types of gun control laws.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence examined the impact of the Assault Weapons Ban in its 2004 report, On Target: The Impact of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapon Act. Examining 1.4 million guns involved in crime, "in the five-year period before enactment of the Federal Assault Weapons Act (1990-1994), assault weapons named in the Act constituted 4.82% of the crime gun traces ATF conducted nationwide. Since the law’s enactment, however, these assault weapons have made up only 1.61% of the guns ATF has traced to crime."[13] A spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) stated that he "can in no way vouch for the validity" of Brady Campaign's claim that the ban was responsible for violent crime's decline.[14]

[edit] Efforts to renew the ban



http://en.wikipedia....Effect_on_Crime

[PassedOut]

Like most folks, I feel very fortunate that I never had to face a situation remotely like that confronting the parents in Newtown. I doubt that I would handle it well.

I'm also fortunate that my kids have been healthy, physically and mentally. Some problems are really, really tough: I am Adam Lanza’s Mother

Parents like this woman do need serious help. When they don't get it, the consequences can be tragic.

[Cthulhu D]

Fluffy, on 2012-December-16, 16:10, said:

Not sure if you meant this with more crazies, but just increasing the population will get more cases of almost anything, overpopulation gets also another effect.

Oh, and increasing atheism is not helping also IMO. Religion is a good last resort against things like this.

This may actually be the dumbest opinion I've seen expressed on this forum, which is quite an achievement considering the climate change thread. Do you have any evidence at all for this? Indeed, do you have any evidence that it isn't a rise in religious extremism that isn't the cause? Or are you just a bigot? To demonstrate exactly how ill informed your post is, let me try it again with some word substitution!

Fluffy, on 2012-December-16, 16:10, said:

Oh, and increasing jewry is not helping also IMO.

See, that sounds pretty bad, I'm sure you'll agree. Let's try some other stuff!

Fluffy, on 2012-December-16, 16:10, said:

Oh, and increasing African American presence is not helping also IMO.

See, that's amazingly racist!

Fluffy, on 2012-December-16, 16:10, said:

Oh, and increasing Islamic presence is not helping also IMO.

Tada! Do you see why your opinion is bigotry?

vvv What he said.

[Mbodell]

billw55, on 2012-December-17, 16:16, said:

Wow, I've heard people rant against religion before, but mikeh you sound kinda angry.

I welcomed mikeh's response as I found this

Quote

Oh, and increasing atheism is not helping also IMO. Religion is a good last resort against things like this.

tiresome and offensive. Try some substitutions to get the feeling of what feels wrong "Oh, and increasing black population is not helping also IMO. Social cohesion (white pride) is a good last resort against things like this." or "Oh, and increasing homosexuality is not helping also IMO. Heterosexual families is a good last resort against things like this." I think we'd all recognize those constructions as repugnant and worthy of correction, offense, and possible moderator action.

Plus, as mikeh points out, the evidence is if anything the reverse of what was claimed.

See, for instance, study on athieism and societal behaviors (crime included), an excerpt from the conclusion is:

Quote

Do the findings of contemporary social science support this Biblical assertion [that atheists are no good]? The
clear answer is no. Atheism and secularity have many positive correlates, such as higher
levels of education and verbal ability, lower levels of prejudice, ethnocentrism, racism,
and homophobia, greater support for women’s equality, child-rearing that promotes independent
thinking and an absence of corporal punishment, etc. And at the societal level,
with the important exception of suicide, states [within the US] and nations with a higher proportion of
secular people fare markedly better than those with a higher proportion of religious
people.

I'll close with a well known quote from US Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg (that admittedly doesn't cover the school shooting, but does touch on some of the places that mikeh mentioned):

Quote

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

[onoway]

PassedOut, on 2012-December-17, 20:43, said:

Like most folks, I feel very fortunate that I never had to face a situation remotely like that confronting the parents in Newtown. I doubt that I would handle it well.

I'm also fortunate that my kids have been healthy, physically and mentally. Some problems are really, really tough: I am Adam Lanza’s Mother

Parents like this woman do need serious help. When they don't get it, the consequences can be tragic.

What a heart wrenching story. The stats about people with mental illness now being tossed into jail rather than given some sort of help/care is all too true in Canada as well.

I used to work with emotionally disturbed kids and it is humbling now to think about how much easier it was for us with a cohesive staff and programs to support the kids and each other. Also, the intake was limited by both age (pretty much between 9 and 12) and those the admin felt we could help, and we had very few kids as severely affected as her son. As far as I know, hospitals or jail were the only other options for out of control kids. Although we had a very high rate of success in helping these kids reintegrate successfully into schools and community, the program was shut down by the provincial government years ago as a means to help balance the budget. It's horrifying to think of people like the writer trying to cope without any support for her or the child or the other family members.

Perhaps she is right and attention to helping victims of mental health issues is a more urgent item on the agenda than gun control. Unfortunately, people can't see the damage, only the result of it, so it's difficult to convince politicians they would be getting a good return on their investment by dealing with damaged people, especially kids, before they reach tipping point.

The NRA is a very powerful and supposedly rich organisation, perhaps they should be involved in helping set up programs for severely disturbed kids as they are right, if nobody pulls the trigger the gun won't go off. If they want unlimited access to guns then perhaps they should be partly responsible to see that people don't grow up to use them so tragically.

Turning schools into armed camps with Wyatt Earps roaming the corridors is not an acceptable solution.

[kenberg]

Quote

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

If I may make a peace offering: I would replace "religion" in this quote by blind adherence to dogma. Without putting down a list, I think most of us could come up with examples of grievous evil coming form [you name it]-ism applied with power and no sense.

[kenberg]

PassedOut, on 2012-December-17, 20:43, said:

Like most folks, I feel very fortunate that I never had to face a situation remotely like that confronting the parents in Newtown. I doubt that I would handle it well.

I'm also fortunate that my kids have been healthy, physically and mentally. Some problems are really, really tough: I am Adam Lanza's Mother

Parents like this woman do need serious help. When they don't get it, the consequences can be tragic.

This is quite a story.

My wife singled out a passage that also grabbed my attention "I'm still stronger than he is, but I won't be for much longer". I have long thought that this is a major issue as children grow into adolescence and beyond. I recall in high school listening to some kid explain how he had punched out his father. There will always come a time when physical force will be insufficient as discipline. If the young person, for whatever reason, has not yet developed necessary self-controlthen the fat's in the fire.

It seems to be clear that in some cases the child, simply by genetic bad luck, is a really difficult case, a bomb waiting to explode. It certainly goes against both instinct and law to judge a person by what he might do rather than by what he has done, but the situation for this woman is dire. It's not a problem that I have personally faced, I don't know what to do about it.