Random Politics & Religion #00

You mean to identify, or what to do with those who are already identified? As they're two very separate yet both large issues.

Your kidding yourself if you think any fire arm will depreciate in value for one. For two, Hypocrite.

/Drops mic.

Both ideally. Identifying them is hard enough, try subverting their rights based on what they "might" do. Or taking their right to possess weapons of they haven't committed a crime. You can address access to weapons a lot of ways.

None that are really constitutional.

I'm fine with denying anyone who has a history of mental illness from purchasing a firearm, as long as it's subject to due process.

But identifying those without a history is impossible. There will always be those who are trying to hurt others.

I don't see the point in talking about this though, we're not going to agree.

Due process in what way? If they haven't committed a crime, how would you constitutionally limit their access? Even denying access to convicted felons is borderline unconstitutional.

I'm not expecting to agree, I'm not even trying to sway you. You are adamant that firearms must be available. I'm just curious how you propose to address the rates of gun violence without infringing on the 2nd Amendment.

Start with addressing the poverty issues of the inner cities, and remove restrictions for legal firearm ownership.

But I care more about the overall violence rate, than just the "gun violence" rate. Quite frankly gun violence is the least of my concerns, even political ones.

Adam Lanza has Assbergers I believe. I think we should ban that !

He was obsessed with video games too can we ban those ?

A childhood friend of the Charleston shooting suspect says he must have only recently began to "hate black people" as there was no indication of his being racist while they grew up.

Caleb Brown, who identifies as half-black, said he went to elementary and middle school with Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old accused of killing nine people inside Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday. Brown, 20, said he last saw Roof, 21, about a year-and-a-half ago.

"How could you claim [to] hate people like that, kill all of these people [when] you were my friend back then?" Brown said he wanted to ask Roof. "This white supremacist, racist, 'black-people-have-to-go' kind of ideals weren't put into him when he was a kid. It wasn't something that was sitting and festering his whole life and then he just busted. It’s very recent that that came into his mind and that type of mindset. That’s the only way it could have been."

As America comes to terms with a monstrous shooting in Charleston that has left nine churchgoers dead, bewildered members of the public are seeking rationality in apparently wanton and inscrutable crimes.

We may never know quite what drives some people to kill. But it seems that in young Dylann Storm Roof, we have further evidence of a trend that should worry us all. I’m talking about his dependence on prescription drugs: suboxone, to be precise.

Roof is just the latest in a long line of young men who have committed appalling crimes after a lifetime on psychotropic drugs. If you don’t believe me, consider some of the most notorious young male shooters in American history.

Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza? Lexapro and Celexa. Red-headed Aurora killer James Holmes? Clonazepam and sertraline. Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho? Prozac. Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper”? Dexedrine. Columbine executioners Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? Zoloft and Luvox.

You get the idea. These young men were all on prescribed medication. Feminism helped to get them there. In particular, female teachers who either dislike men or are completely ignorant of healthy behaviour norms for boys are creating a generation of emotionally stunted, drugged up young men.

Millions of young American men are prescribed powerful drugs after being diagnosed with the phantom condition “ADHD,” better known as a mixture of natural boisterousness and poor parental discipline. The mere fact of being male has become pathologised.

When they get into their teens and early twenties, they graduate onto drugs like Zoloft and Prozac, drugs that can produce a powerfully dissociative effect in the mind, muddying the distinctions between reality and fantasy. All this, because boys are now treated as though they are defective girls.

I once clumsily wrote that video games helped to “shape the fantasies” of Isla Vista gunman Elliot Rodgers. I intended not to incriminate video games in his spiral into madness and murder but rather to point out that young men who lose grip on the real world often retreat into imaginary ones, which can then have a stylistic effect, if you like, on their crimes.

After a year of reading the research on what America is doing to its men, and interviewing hundreds of young men in preparation for my book on the GamerGate controversy, I have come to believe that in most cases it’s not games, or movies, or “misogyny,” or “racism” that drives young men to kill. It is the increasing sense of isolation and disorientation young boys feel in a world that now feels architected against them.

Dylann Roof’s actions are unlikely to have been primarily motivated by race, even though he may have identified as a white supremacist. For one thing, half his Facebook friends were black. Similarly, Elliot Rodgers wasn’t a misogynist in any meaningful sense of the word. What these terrible crimes express more clearly is a crisis in masculinity – a crisis brought about by the way we treat boys in schools.

Men, in particular introverts, and especially highly intelligent introverts who sit near the top of the autistic spectrum, are routinely ridiculed in society, cast out as “manbabies” and “privileged oppressors.” The lived experience of such men is precisely the opposite of privilege: they are punished for being boys at school, branded “creeps” or, worse, rapists for showing sexual interest at college, and after all that – assuming they even graduate – they are discriminated against in job applications.

If “Dylann” “Storm” “Roof” deserves ridicule for anything, it’s his ridiculous name and that 1990s lesbian pudding-bowl haircut, not the fact that he is a man struggling to find his place in an increasingly feminised culture. What was his mother thinking?

Namby-pamby culture in schools is partly to blame for the current crisis in manhood. Teachers, who are overwhelmingly female, freak out at boyish things like play-fighting, cops and robbers and even playing “finger guns.” At best, this is silly over-policing of natural male exuberance. At worst, it is holding boys to feminine standards of behaviour. It’s not hard to understand why some boys, after enduring this for a decade, finally snap in a tragic violent outburst.

By suppressing male behaviours in school and whacking boys on psychotropic medication, we create a perfect storm almost guaranteed to produce broken young men who want to lash out at a world they feel has hurt them. After all, the outlook for young men these days is desperately bleak, which explains why so many of them are giving up on relationships and even sex and retreating into pornography and video games. I call it the “sexodus.”

Medication like Paxil, which Donald Schell was taking when he killed himself and three other people, is society’s answer to its deep discomfort with traditional masculinity. Our authorities don’t know how to stop men behaving like men, so they drug boys into submission.(A jury ruled that the drug company that makes Paxil was partly responsible for Schell’s meltdown.) It is a sadistic and high-risk strategy. And it isn’t working.

Feminists like to bang on about “toxic masculinity” in wake of atrocities like Charleston. But it’s not masculinity that’s toxic: it’s the chemicals we’re pumping into our young men’s bloodstreams, frying their brains and turning them into washed-out addicts and dissociative lunatics who go out and murder anyone they can easily victimise, particularly girls. As ever, it’s women that feminism hurts the most.

And it’s going to get worse before it gets better – unless we stop drugging our young men and allow boys to be boys.

Maybe people need to accept that humans are violent by nature. And no gun or law is going to stop anyone.

Nuh uh. Guns give you a bad case of the murders. Just look at the "Who Shot Mr. Burns" episodes.

Nuh uh. Guns give you a bad case of the murders. Just look at the "Who Shot Mr. Burns" episodes.

And with just a few minor modifications, you can turn 5 guns into 1 gun. Perfect for home defense.

Start with addressing the poverty issues of the inner cities, and remove restrictions for legal firearm ownership.

What possible effect would confronting inner city poverty have on mass shootings?

there's still no strong correlation between race/class/financial status and propensity to violence.

There's a very strong correlation to poverty and crime rate, and the last I checked, crimes lead to violence.

When did I ever say that it would?

There's a very strong correlation to poverty and crime rate, and the last I checked, crimes lead to violence.

But when it comes to gun violence, that's red herring territory. It's completely irrelevant to the subject of mass shootings.

Or racism, because you're making an inherently racist assumption by tacking the words "inner city" in front of poverty.

It's always nice to see that you never change.

if we're to genuinely approach and deal with psychological illness, we have to stop pretending that being a boy is an illness. I'm not willing to go as far as saying that psychoactive drugs are gateways to killing, either mass or individual, but our entertainment glorifies masculinity while the society that shapes boys and young men vilifies it. It's not doing any favors for girls, either, unless being unhealthy, bitchy, and passive-aggressive are now the gold standard of sexiness

(seriously, we went from "gay plague (AIDS)" to the SCOTUS preparing to validate marriage equality in 30 years but we're still fighting to preserve Jim Crow?)

In two separate incidents, 11 people were shot in Detroit in a matter of hours Saturday, one fatally.

Ten people were shot at a block party on a basketball court at Webb and Dexter on the city's west side Saturday night. One of those victims died.

Police do not know the reason for the shooting, and are still investigating.

At least three of the victims who were shot were women, ages 30, 45, and 26.

Asst. Chief Steve Dolunt said it's a miracle no children were shot as many were present during the shooting.

As of 10 p.m. Saturday, police were not releasing the identity of the person who was killed

A 46-year-old man is also in critical condition and two other men, 21 and 26 years old, are in serious condition.

Dolunt said police do not know the reason for the shooting and thus far people at the party were not being cooperative with police seeking information.

He said there was no excuse for shooting when kids were present. There were little kids and strollers, he said. "It's a party," he said.

"I think one individual was the target the others just happened to be at this party," Dolunt said.

One person was detained for questioning, but no suspects are in custody, said Sgt. Cassandra Lewis, public information officer for the police department.

One person remained in critical condition late Saturday night; all other victims had non-life threatening injuries, she said.

Authorities say seven people were shot Saturday night in West Philadelphia.

This happened just before 10 p.m. on the 4100 block of Ogden Street in the Mantua section of the city.

Police say an 18-month-old baby, an 11-year-old, a 13-year-old and four others were shot during a block party.

The infant was shot in the neck and is in stable condition, according to police.

The 11 and 13-year-olds were taken to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the others — who range in age from 22-46 — were taken to Presbyterian Hospital. Authorities say all the conditions that are known are stable.

At least one shotgun was used by an unknown number of shooters, according to police.

The motive is unknown at this time as an investigation continues.

7 People — Including An Infant — Shot In West Philly

Looks like only 1 person killed, so there's that.

So all you people that think guns are the problem and we need to make more laws, confiscate, or down right get rid of them.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/at-least-two-killed-in-austria-after-man-drives-into-crowd-before-stabbing-passersby-in-graz-10333891.html

My word, 3 dead in Australia since they outlawed guns 15 years ago. Yeah, there's plenty of ways to kill people if you want to. We've had more people killed in mass shootings in the last week than Australia has in a decade. Accessibility to guns definitely plays a part in that difference.