Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Guns in America

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

From 2000 through 2021, in the US, there were 433 shooter attacks in which one or more shooters killed or attempted to kill multiple unrelated people in a populated place. Most attacks were over before law enforcement arrived. In such cases, 113 times the attacker left the scene, 72 times the attacker committed suicide, 42 times bystanders subdued the attacker, and 22 times bystanders shot the attacker (12 of these bystanders were regular citizens, 7 were security guards, and 3 were off-duty officers). These data are from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, as reported in The New York Times 22 June 2022.

Yesterday, 17 July 2022, a 22 year-old man who was a passer-by armed with a handgun, courageously entered the heinous shooting episode and shot the shooter dead. Three people were killed by the attacker. This was in Greenwood, south of Indianapolis.

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

Let's hope the DA wasn't elected with any help from Soros.

 

Not an insightful or informative remark. Just say No to attaching shallow, distracting-yet-boring, personage-political sentiments to just any ole post anyone makes on any topic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Informative no , that I'll grant and I suppose not groundbreakingly insightful , but I really do hope for the sake of the 'civilian' bystander that the DA in that jurisdiction wasn't elected with Soros' money or help. If that were true he will likely face some charge, even though the state government just recently allowed for unpermitted carry.

And I thought to post a comment around the juxtaposition of the mall shooting and your(?) characterization of the courageous passer-by and what we have seen of the actions of the Uvalde police during the massacre of children under their charge.

Edited by tadmjones
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Seems like the Left is running with "we're more Christian than the Christians" by claiming that self-defense is wrong because it's selfish. Apparently Jesus would have turned the other cheek.

The DA in New York finally did drop charges against the bodega worker who defended himself (or so I read today), but probably due to public outcry.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Soros founded DA had a plausible reason to charge the bodega worker, a homicide had occurred and a criminal investigation into the incident is called for. Though some questions could be raised as to the initial bail/bound amount, given the relatively timely ability of the police to determine if the individuals knew other prior to the encounter and the video of the incident.

Hopefully the outcome was due to a 'public outcry' for reasonableness , though disheartening that such an ingredient was/may be a necessary condition for reasonableness to ensue. Large urban centers are becoming increasingly dangerous to visit or live in due in no small part to the breakdown of reasonableness in the institutions that are to provide 'law and order'.

I subscribe to the conspiracy that the Left is systematically destroying the functionality of the justice / law and order institutions to create chaos , inspire fear of others, and promote violence as a means of subjugation, just bolsheviks bolsheviking.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And meantime, I just checked Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined out from the library. Granted the state of philosophy is precarious out there, but I wonder what bemoaning it contributes to harnessing the energy expended into the sails that guide the philosophical ship in the right direction.

In the light initially turned on in this thread, mass shootings are occurring at the rate of more than 1 per day. On the face of it, this would run counter to Steven Pinker's assertion in his subtitle. I question why more don't seek out data such as provided by he, and others, such as HumanProgress.org, TheRootsOfProgress.org that seek to draw attention to the attribute that continue to shape the culture, and less "catastrophism" as the selling point for enrolling in what Objectivism has to offer for living life on earth.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My own first gun was a 20-gauge Remington pump, somewhat like this. I think you had to be 14, maybe 16, before you could have a gun in my state in those days. I got it for Christmas. Until then I was allowed to carry my father's .22 rifle, which had been handed down to him from his father. And, of course, as boys, we had BB guns, and I got a hunting knife one birthday. Our hunting was mostly for quail in situations of close brush out in western Oklahoma. Very challenging. We also went goose hunting around the Great Salt Plains Lake in the northwestern part of the state, but no luck. The first time I got a quail, it was with the .22. We had spotted one on the ground in the brush ahead, and the men decided I should take a shot at it to stir up the covey. I got him, centered just above the breasts. In those days, none of our guns had scopes. Normally, we did not know there were quail until the covey took off all of a sudden practically beneath your feet. We learned meticulous gun safety from the beginning, the right methods for crossing a fence, never let your barrel come in the direction of another human being, and always be sure there is no shell or cartridge in the chamber when the hunt is over. (Related good advice would be that if you clean a quail for the women to make supper, you be damn sure you find and dig out every little shot. If your jaw comes down on one at the dinner table, it's going to be horrible.) We had a trap spring-device for hurling clay pigeons out at the farm of grandparents. One of our uncles had been in the Marines in Korea. When he said "pull" he did not even raise his shotgun to his shoulder, he just shot from the hip. He never missed. Eventually, Grandpa got fed up with all those pieces of clay pigeon out in the field, and that was the end of that. One uncle got a mechanical hand machine with which to load our own shotgun shells. We younger set would load shells (which was cheaper than buying them already loaded) upstairs in the farmhouse. There was nothing exact and no adult quality control, so now and then, we added a little extra powder for a little surprise.

My grandfather on my father's side had always worn a sidearm pistol like in the Western movies, up until the '20's I think, whenever he would go into town from the farm. It was a nice advance of civilization when you no longer needed to do that, for self-protection. I was speaking recently with a young man, an Objectivist, who lives at a ranch house in Mexico. In their vicinity there are shootings of people most every day. We are so much more fortunate here. He agrees. 

Tad, sorry to hear you live under the puke-green skies of conspiracy theories. I do not. The sky is blue. The social conflicts are the on-and-on ignorance of many, the stupidities in collective-action situations, and incorrect values. And social conflicts, including wars, are not the greatest sources of human suffering and death anyway. Most everyone reading here today will die in bed and from a natural depletion of the body, not even from an accident.

On the spectacle mass-shootings (and other murder spectacles), I do not think they will stop in the lifetime of anyone here. More guns or less guns won't make a significant difference. The evil in some human beings is there, reliably so, animosity towards humans by losers is there, as ever, the firearms are all around and will continue to be, and the example of such hateful, sick attention-getting begun so many years ago now from the tower at the University of Texas, Austin is refreshed and refreshed.

Necro, whether anyone actually buys it all the way, the selfishness of self-defense is a logical implication of a morality whose only standard of value is unselfishness. Then too, as Rand also noted, a purer unselfishness would be to defer to the convictions of others in all things, including what are the correct moral standards.

 

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Tad, sorry to hear you live under the puke-green skies of conspiracy theories. I do not. The sky is blue. The social conflicts are the on-and-on ignorance of many, the stupidities in collective-action situations, and incorrect values.

My "conspiracy theory" is that people wrote books hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago, and then died of old age, but many people today are still following those books, and their actions come out to be coordinated even if they do not communicate with each other at all, because they are following the same books.

6 hours ago, Boydstun said:

And social conflicts, including wars, are not the greatest sources of human suffering and death anyway. Most everyone reading here today will die in bed and from a natural depletion of the body, not even from an accident.

That may not be true for much longer. The environmentalists are now banning nitrogen fertilizer in places. If this becomes widespread, billions of people will starve, and I think the environmentalists would welcome that as "less of a load on the Earth." (Of course Peikoff quoted one of them as saying "we can only hope that the right virus comes along," and along comes COVID-19...)

6 hours ago, Boydstun said:

Necro, whether anyone actually buys it all the way, the selfishness of self-defense is a logical implication of a morality whose only standard of value is unselfishness. Then too, as Rand also noted, a purer unselfishness would be to defer to the convictions of others in all things, including what are the correct moral standards.

The selfishness of self-defense is a virtue. (I use "selfishness" here in the Ayn Rand sense, which could be described with redundancy as "selfishness without victims.") There is something in Atlas Shrugged (probably from Ragnar Danneskjold) about the killed attacker achieving the only destruction he has any right to achieve -- his own. And I suppose it's okay to regard it as a sad thing if someone commits suicide, perhaps more so if they do it at your hands, as it were...

Technically the Left is correct that they are "more Christian than the Christians," in the sense that they are more consistent about self-sacrifice than the Republicans. The Republicans support both freedom and Christianity, even though consistency would make it an either-or choice. A lot of Republicans are too anti-conceptual to see the contradictions, and they don't want to see them. (They sometimes argue that such inconsistencies prove that reason is inadequate by itself and that religion is necessary, but this argument is circular, because it is religion that creates the inconsistencies in the first place.)

In the past I have interacted with atheist groups, but was disappointed that they wanted to be "Good without God" which suggests that if you take God out of the Bible you can get something good. Thomas Jefferson also tried that, writing his own Bible with the miracles edited out, or so I've read. But if you secularize Christianity and make it more consistent, you get Communism, as Ayn Rand observed. Thomas Paine ended up a Communist, if I remember correctly... (I don't recall the chronology around this.)

Ayn Rand was right to call selfishness (as she defined it) a virtue. American intellectuals have been unwilling to embrace what she said (or even read it I think), but what is left of the originally American sense of life seems to understand it perfectly (without reading Rand or knowing that she provides a logical basis for it). It is this sense of life that the Left seeks to destroy, and they are trying to use Christianity as a tool with which to do it. I hope this is not successful; I would hope it undermines support for Christianity instead, but far too many people would rather give up consistency.

Edited by necrovore
Link to comment
Share on other sites

"While the shooter, 20-year-old Douglas Sapirman, fired 24 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle, Dicken did not hesitate to use the Glock handgun he was legally carrying. Sapirman was "neutralized" within two minutes, police said."

Hero

Within that CNN story in the link, is a story of a shooting in Colorado in which police arrived, mistook the private rescuer for shooter and fatally shot him. A thing like that happened in the small country town where my Mom lived her whole life, in southern Oklahoma near the Red River. There had been an armed robbery of the bank going on, a local man wrestled the gun away from the robber and was holding it on the robber when the police arrived from a neighboring, larger town. The police shot the good guy, but fortunately, in this case, it was only a wounded arm, and he lived.

 

Edited by Boydstun
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/19/2022 at 4:28 PM, tadmjones said:

More like twenty a year as per the OP.

I believe Pinkers statistics do show that violent crime has dropped and continues to trend downward , what would explain current ‘spikes’ ? If ‘mass shootings’ are an example of such ?

Not all his graphs flow consistently downward. This could be aberration that won't show up without putting it under a future microscope examining the past.

C Bradley Thompson offers the following clip aimed at the educational sector for consideration:

Our Killing Schools Part 1
Progressive Education and Our Killing Schools Part 2
Nihilism and Our Killing Schools Part 3

Edited by dream_weaver
Fixed broken link to part 2.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...