Criminal Deeds

[Kevin]

I agree that a gun is a tool. That they, by themselves, are not the problem.

Humans are fallible creatures. In our moments of weakness we make mistakes. Depending on the means available to us at those times, those mistakes can be amusing anecdotes, or they can be national tragedies.

Guns may not be the problem, but removing them from the equation would be a solution.

I guess I wasn't as clear as I thought with the rest of my posts. I'm fairly convinced that removing them from the equation will make things safer overall, though it will certainly make certain situations worse. A large part of my point is that guns increase the severity of an action, be it an assault, accident, or defense. I also tend to say that money can't buy you happiness but it certainly can grease the wheels of the vehicle that gets you there.

But I also think that removing guns is treating a symptom, admittedly an acute symptom, but still a symptom. There is value in treating the symptom and perhaps you need to before you can treat the cause.

Of course the cause will never fully be cured, despite what some ideologues might say, human nature is more than just societal pressure. There is experimental, as well as case study of isolated societies, within the field of evolutionary psychology that are fairly convincing.

Societal pressure can certainly over ride it (the classic prison guard, and 3rd Wave experiments are often pointed to), but we have genetically based behaviors, that lead us to form similar societal norms over and over again. Those traits are also why certain things can shape attitudes and behaviors, why "brainwashing" can work.

But it's not simple, nothing involving the human brain is. Some of that base nature can have quite a few societal expressions, but we tend towards things because they helped the species survive back when natural pressures were still forcing evolutionary changes (I know a controversial statement, but we don't have many selective processes happening to us, though overpopulation is starting to create some new ones but this is all very tangential to my point). Some people, regardless of what form society takes, will not cope with it well, be it being wired differently, or be it being exposed to things that created certain neural pathways. Nature and nurture are not mutually exclusive, and while that makes isolating factors frustrating, it's odd to me that so many people want to make it an either/or proposition.

The practicality of removing guns from a society, especially the US society, are not simple, the effects of doing so are not clear, and with a large disenfranchised population (how many people do we have in prison?) the transitional period could be very painful, and potentially bad enough to have many devastating and wide spread unintended consequences. The final result, I think, would be much better though, I just don't see a nice path to get there right now.

Now after we solve other issues, or at least alleviate them, I think we would have a much nicer pathway to taking care of the gun violence issue, due in part to it starting to take care of itself thanks to fixing, or removing some of the pressure of, the root causes. But I could be very wrong. I won't oppose trying to regulate or remove many of the guns from out society, I just won't push for it at this time.