There are many reasons why there is so much gun violence in the USA. I think we can look at a loss of rigid morality and respect for human life beginning at conception. We can blame the new morality that upholds people’s particular falsehoods as truth, think about gender ideology and its unscientific basis.
We can blame mental illness on the rise since people think their truth is truth even when it is delusional.
We can blame guns to easily purchased, especially weapons of warfare.
But let’s look at the news media an who owns them—all entertainment companies:
CNN—Discover/Warner Brothers
NBC—Universal Studios
ABC—Disney
FOX—once affiliated with Fox Studios
All of these make entertainment that glories graphic violence and shows it in the most explicit way. Think about the “Walking Dead” as but one example.
Think about the news now showing the most graphic results of violence rather than blurring it out or simply not showing it.
Think of video games that glorify violence.
All of these radicalize a country gone crazy, irreligious and with amorality on steroids. What is promoted is everything that is opposed to traditional Judeo Christian sensibilities by the media.
Let’s curb the media, censor them and bring back the Hayes Code! That along with other measures, like calling people back to true religious truths will help.
22 comments:
The media is having a hard time right now - all of these shooters are either illegal aliens, Blacks, transgenders or leftists - give the media a break! That’s why these are disappearing so quickly - “wrong” perpetrators
"We can blame guns to easily purchased, especially weapons of warfare." A few points: 1) Do we blame forks for obesity? Do we blame bats for the rise in homeruns? No; we do not blame inanimate objects, rather we blame those that animate them. 2) Guns are much more difficult to purchase now than they were prior to the 1968. 3) Weapons of war are still very restricted (automatic firearms) or not legal to own at all (artillery). Semiautomatic rifles are not weapons of war. 4) The vast majority of crimes committed with firearms are done using handguns. 5) Criminals do not obey laws; which is why so many cities with strict gun control laws also have very high rates of crimes committed with fire arms...and very few prosecutions for violations of gun control violations.
Fr. ALLAN McDonald:
Like the United States many other countries have: a loss of rigid morality and respect for human life beginning at conception, a new morality that upholds people’s particular falsehoods as truth, mental illness, and graphic depictions of violence shown in the most explicit way on the screen.
Yet, The United States has 73% of the mass shootings.
What's the difference? The easily availability of guns.
That's it. The easy availability of guns.
monk - No one blames the guns. Fr. McDonald doesn't blame the guns. He said, "...guns too easily purchased." That's the easy availability.
As for the shooters, the majority are not aliens, Blacks, transgenders, or leftists. 52.3% are white males.
I have said before that the “gun control debate” comes across (to me at least, and to much of the world I suspect) as an argument among the lunatics in an asylum. And so, I had given up on discussing the issue.
However, being a glutton for punishment, here I go again. I am, of course, with Father Kavanaugh on the issue. It is patently absurd, insane even, that the United States tolerates so much gun violence. People disagree about abortion because the human being is still developing inside the body of the mother and may even be at an early stage where there are no more than a few cells or certainly nothing resembling a human being in form. Not so with gun violence. Real people, clearly human beings, now dead, killed by another real person, clearly human, with a firearm.
Please read the following January 2023 article by Nicholas Kristof. Yes, I know it is in the New York Times, but toward the end it is quite critical of liberals on the issue. It is lengthy, unglamourous, not sensationalist, and seems quite sensible:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/opinion/gun-death-health.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The only question is whether our “political leaders” at both the state and federal levels are willing to put in the work to achieve what Kristof calls “harm reduction” or are more interested in wedge issues that yield votes. Put simply, do they care more about saving lives or about money and power?
The question remains, why are there so many people with psychiatric diseases compounded by rage and anger? Out west there have be two recent mass killings where the murderer used a butcher knife to kill. As for myself, I would have preferred being shot rather than stabbed. Are we going to outlaw butcher knives?
What is inspiring murderous violence in people, regardless of the method used. They could easily hijack a jetliner and crash it into a building like the Twin Towers and accomplish the same goal, mass killings.
Why the focus on the means when the cause is neglected?
Did you read the article? It addresses causes as well.
And “they” want to “outlaw guns” is just a political talking point. No-one is seriously suggesting that, at least no-one serious is seriously suggesting that.
What we must do is get beyond the rhetoric and the caricatures so that we can begin to address the issue in a rational manner.
Kristof asks, quite reasonably:
“Why should it be easier to pick up military-style weapons than to adopt a Chihuahua? And why do states that make it difficult to vote, with waiting periods and identification requirements, let almost anyone walk out of a gun shop with a bundle of military-style rifles?”
Apparently, three Democrat controlled states have just adopted some of the measures Kristof advocates. But, of course, predictably the Republicans and the gun lobby are resisting and threatening litigation:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/3-states-pass-major-gun-control-reform-packages/story?id=98942364
Fr. Roger Landry writes in the Register, 2 May 2023:
"This crisis of hope [and I would say the increase in violent acting out] is linked to a crisis of faith. Gen Z, those born between 1999 and 2015, are experiencing a rapid decline of faith in God. Since 2010, religious practice among high schoolers has dropped 27%. Thirteen percent now define as atheist and 16% as agnostic.
In his 2008 encyclical of Christian hope, Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict described hopelessness as St. Paul once did to the Christians in Ephesus, connecting those living “without hope” to those living “without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Hope comes from recognizing, Pope Benedict said, that God is with us in the world, bringing good out of evil, bringing justice to victims, helping us find eternal meaning even in the most ordinary activities. The failure to transmit the faith effectively to younger generations, and the rise of secularism with its practical atheism spurring people to live as if God doesn’t exist, is doubtless abetting the crisis of our young."
As I have written here and elsewhere, almost 2 generations have become disconnected from the institutions - religious community and family - that can pass on lasting values and teach the young how to have prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.
Father Kavanaugh:
That sounds right, of course. And are not those of us who are fortunate enough to have had these values transmitted to us required not only to refrain from committing such horrendous acts ourselves but also to support the kind of multi-pronged approach that Kristof advocates, including reasonable gun control, to help restrain those who would otherwise commit such acts? Indeed, doesn’t love of God and love of neighbor demand that we do so?
Here is some actual data on firearms deaths and race for Fr. K
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/firearms-death-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
Fr K ignores an very important fact: Democratic controlled cities like Chicago, LA, New York, Detroit, Houston, Dallas, etc., have the most gun violence. I remember one idiot who tried to say Red States have more gun violence buried the fact, that in Texas for example, gun deaths are in Democratic controlled cities like Dallas and Houston. These cities also have a high concentration of African-Americans who commit a disproportionately number of the shootings.
The essential problem is the corruption of our culture over the past 60 years, notably beginning with The Great Society which inflicted terrible damage on Black families. Most high schools had gun clubs in the 1950s and there were almost no school shootings, as I recall. There are photos of high school boys on the New York subway taking their rifles to school. Even Jesse Jackson, in a rare moment of candor, said Black communities had to solve this problem themselves.
For those of you commenting saying we need "reasonable' gun control, look no further than Chicago. They have some of the toughest gun control laws in the US and extremely high levels of people violence who use guns. If they did not have guns they would use knives (which they have) or other means of inflicting harm, such as running people down in cars.
I cannot find the article I read some time ago, but if you strip up the large US cities controlled by Democrats, incidents of gun violence would look much like Europes.
monkmcg,
Father K won't read it, because it is contra to "The Agenda." Just like abortion is healthcare
monk - I gave "actual data."
Fr K
What is the source of your data? It seems awfully fragmentary and contradicts most everything from widely recognized sources on crime statistics. Just for fun here are a few more links (including the CDC):
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278304
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7042a6.htm
I say outlaw automobiles as these kill more people than guns and knives and murderers combined!
Father McDonald:
No-one is seriously suggesting outlawing guns. Instead, Kristof advocates a “harm reduction” approach, just as with automobiles. Do we let anyone who wants to do so drive a car? Of course not. Instead, we have reasonable regulation to keep the risks of death and injury within tolerable limits. And so it should be with firearms.
To provide perspective, I joined a rifle and pistol club when I was living in London after I discovered I was a pretty good shot. I used club issue firearms and never tried to purchase one of my own. Had I wished to do so, in addition to the usual checks, the police would have inspected my home to make sure any firearms were secure.
Another anecdote—after I had lived in the United States for a few years, I wanted to take my stun gun to Britain as defense in any encounters with aggressive dogs on my walks (I had several such encounters over here). My father asked a policeman friend of his about this and was told that I would be committing the criminal offence of carrying an offensive weapon—a stun gun, not a real gun, mind you! Now that is what law and order looks like. Law and order (which Americans, especially Republicans, are supposed to be so big on) is not letting any Tom, Dick, or Harry run around with dangerous firearms (and yes, it’s usually a Tom, Dick, or Harry, not a Jane, Jill, or Sue who commits firearm offenses). Isn’t it time for American men to grow up?
Please understand—I don’t disagree with you about the importance of other cultural factors, especially the g(l)orification of violence in the media. Indeed, I have long contended that instead of obsessing so much about sex, we could do with a little bit more obsessing about violence.
TJM:
It is a Republican talking point. Remove the large Democrat cities in red states and you still get a significantly higher gun murder rate:
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem
There may be an historical demographic explanation for this:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413?utm_source=pocket-newtab
The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5. That’s triple and quadruple the rate of New Netherland — the most densely populated part of the continent — which has a rate of 3.8, which is comparable to that of Switzerland. Yankeedom is the next safest at 8.6, which is about half that of Deep South, and Left Coast follows closely behind at 9. El Norte, the Midlands, Tidewater and Far West fall in between. . .
We also compared the death rates for all these categories for just white Americans — the only ethno-racial group tracked by the CDC whose numbers were large enough to get accurate results across all regions. (For privacy reasons the agency suppresses county data with low numbers, which wreaks havoc on efforts to calculate rates for less numerous ethno-racial groups.) The pattern was essentially the same, except that Greater Appalachia became a hot spot for homicides.
The data did allow us to do a comparison of white and Black rates among people living in the 466 most urbanized U.S. counties, where 55 percent of all Americans live. In these “big city” counties there was a racial divergence in the regional pattern for homicides, with several regions that are among the safest in the analyses we’ve discussed so far — Yankeedom, Left Coast and the Midlands — becoming the most dangerous for African-Americans. Big urban counties in these regions have Black gun homicide rates that are 23 to 58 percent greater than the big urban counties in the Deep South, 13 to 35 percent greater than those in Greater Appalachia. Propelled by a handful of large metro hot spots — California’s Bay Area, Chicagoland, Detroit and Baltimore metro areas among them — this is the closest the data comes to endorsing Republican talking points on urban gun violence, though other large metros in those same regions have relatively low rates, including Boston, Hartford, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland. New Netherland, however, remained the safest region for both white and Black Americans. . .
In a classic 1993 study of the geographic gap in violence, the social psychologist Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan, noted the regions initially “settled by sober Puritans, Quakers and Dutch farmer-artisans” — that is, Yankeedom, the Midlands and New Netherland — were organized around a yeoman agricultural economy that rewarded “quiet, cooperative citizenship, with each individual being capable of uniting for the common good.”
Much of the South, he wrote, was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took their values . . . from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue” (by which he meant Tidewater and the Deep South) or by Scots and Scots-Irish borderlanders (the Greater Appalachian colonists) who hailed from one of the most lawless parts of Europe and relied on “an economy based on herding,” where one’s wealth is tied up in livestock, which are far more vulnerable to theft than grain crops.
Father McDonald:
You make a good point about automobile deaths. I just checked on the number of automobile deaths in the United States—42,915 in 2021. Now compare that with the United Kingdom—1558 deaths:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2021/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-annual-report-2021
The United States has about six times the population as the U.K. (331 million compared with 67 million). Six times 1558 is 9,348. On can infer, then, that the automobile death rate in the U.K. is about 22% or so of the death rate in the U.S.
Why the difference? If you take the driving test in the U.K. and compare it with the absurd charade that passes for a driving test in the United States (I am familiar with two, one in Michigan, one in Georgia), I think you have a large part of the answer.
Sometimes, I am afraid, the responsible exercise of freedom requires government regulation, or more government regulation, whether of guns or automobiles.
monk - My reference was to mass shootings, not homicides in general.
So half of "mass shootings" are committed by whites...Two points: 1) Nice of you to immediately jump to the racial aspect for no apparent reason; 2) since whites are about 67% of the population they are underrepresented among mass shooters. If you used the Gun Violence Archive definition of mass shooting it would be skewed even more towards POCs.
Let me say this again, there needs to be gun controls and safety devises for automobiles and proper training and screening of drivers to prevent highway deaths. But there also needs to be controls on freedom of speech and expression. Every time there is one mass shooting and 24 hour news coverage of it, ad nauseum , there are more to follow. The 24 hour news stations cover these in such a way that inspires copy cats. We had the Atlanta shooting, where only one person was killed but coverage worldwide. The next day they’re four four killed in Moultrie, Ga, but very little coverage. Now there is Allen, Texas at a shopping center, 8 or 9 dead.
Even if there are gun controls, I do believe that those who want to do something nefarious, they will find illegal ways to get guns. But go for it, make it more difficult to legally get one. Put controls on the 1st amendment too as it regards news coverage.
At the same time, forbid promoting ideologies that are anti-God, anti-religion and the glorification of mental illness as it concerns gender confusion, personal truth independent from verifiable truth and fierce individualism where you can do anything you want, to include killing babies, the elderly and those who don’t want to live anymore. It is not a stretch to say that our culture of anger, rage, personal rights to falsehoods, like gender ideology, are at the core of the mental and moral illnesses in our country.
monk - Since it seems you did not read TJM's post here it is: "The media is having a hard time right now - all of these shooters are either illegal aliens, Blacks, transgenders or leftists - give the media a break!"
That's where race entered the conversation. I did not bring it in "for no apparent reason." It was already there.
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