Another shooting and here we go again. “BAN GUNS! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!!” Let’s take a step back for a second.
It is important to point out the statistics: only 4% of all gun-related homicides are carried out with a rifle of some kind. Most of those are with a semi-automatic rifle of some type. If you were to ban all assault weapons, the MOST you could reduce the murder rate is by 3-4%. But you’d only stop the sale of assault weapons. There are thousands upon thousands readily available in private collections. These could be sold at anytime. The black market will simply fill the vacuum as it always has with drugs or anything else. It is more likely that you’d see at most about a 1-2% decrease in the rate of gun-related homicide. It’s a nonsensical solution. This is where the reliance on emotion rather than empiricism and reason impedes proper decision making.
Everyone is attempting to treat a symptom and not the underlying disease. The tool used is irrelevant. This shooter could’ve just as easily made a bunch of Molotov cocktails and threw them into classrooms. The death toll would’ve actually been higher. No, the issue here isn’t a gun issue, it’s a social issue, a parenting issue, and an issue arising from the way we’ve decided to treat children since the early 90’s.
We’ve made these kind of mental breaks far more likely by teaching children that they are all special, entitled, etc. We’ve done this by pumping them full of SSRI’s and stimulants simply because they are smarter than the other kids most of the time. We’ve done this by teaching children self-victimization. We’ve done this as adults by perpetuating the dehumanization of those with whom we disagree. Even a crazy person cannot commit murder without dehumanizing his victim. That is unless the murderer is a true psychopathic personality—most younger mass shooters are not.
As a society, we dehumanize others over political differences live on national television. Children are raised seeing this. We no longer teach civility, morality, or reason. We spread hate. We spread fear. We spread divineness. This environment has a profound impact on the psychological development of our children. It also opens them up to being corrupted by toxic ideology. Without the ability to think clearly and without proper direction, being corrupted by dangerous ideology is inevitable.
We also teach children to be victims and foster irrational egocentrism, narcissistic behavior, and a profound sense of entitlement. As a result, when something inevitably goes wrong like a bad break up, bullying, or a bad job review, this results in an enormous amount of emotional trauma due mostly to a lack of coping skills resulting from never having to face failure or emotional discomfort. This predisposes children and young adults to high levels of depression, suicidal ideations, drug addiction, and anti-social behavior.
As adults and parents, we teach and display acts of dehumanization. We no longer teach civility, ethics, reason, or morality. We no longer teach children history or various aspects of the human condition. The probability of depression and anti-social behavior morphing into either homicidal tendencies or suicidal tendencies increases as a result. These children are wandering into the dark unarmed and unprepared for what they are about to face.
When children start to show the inevitable signs of depression or “unacceptable” behavior, we pump them full of Seroquel, Abilify, SSRI’s, and/or stimulants thereby multiplying all of these probabilities ten fold.
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with guns. Those who make it about guns have an agenda, and they are responsible for perpetuating all three of the issues listed above. They are responsible for putting the polices in place. They are responsible for pushing an ideology that demonizes the past and its wealth of literary knowledge—knowledge in the form of epic stories that represent thousands of years of human experience, lessons learned, etc. They want to avoid talking about these issues in order to avoid taking responsibility for causing them.
Morally inert objects are directly influenced by the nature of the society in which they exist. For example, social media isn’t causing people to be ego centric. Ego centrism is part of human nature. People are choosing to be ego centric through social media because they’ve never been taught the dangers of doing so. In fact, they’ve been taught the opposite. Ego centrism has been encouraged. The existence of guns isn’t causing people to kill people. People are killing people because they’ve ever been taught to value life, or to avoid the use of violence as a means to an end.
You can create all the rules you want, ban all the objects you want, etc. You’ll never solve this problem that way. You must treat it at its source. We have thousands of years of literature at our fingertips—some religious in nature, some not. Classics like Homer and Dante. These are no longer taught to children by parents or schools, but they are as important now as they’ve ever been. Without them, children have no concept of human nature, of hubris, of the monster they can become if they are not careful. And if parents don’t understand these ideas, there’s no way they can pass them down to their children. We have a multigenerational issue here.
Learning about these ideas used to be the reason for going to university. Religion served as a guide for the poor and uneducated while philosophy and classical literature served the more privileged. As literacy rates improved, so did morality. More and more people could branch from being spoon fed religious ideas to reading them for themselves. Then they moved on to philosophical ideas and classical works. We’ve abandoned these ideas. We spit on Socrates and Aristotle, and to our detriment.
The fabric of our society is collapsing for all the wrong reasons—not moral ones. Social order’s can be uprooted for moral reasons and should be. What we are doing is the misguided destruction of most of what is actually good about our social order while leaving all of the bad in place. As a result, you end up with confused youth who feel they have no sense of purpose and no guidance shooting up schools or blowing their brains out—not to mention an array of other issues I won’t get in to.
Our society was and still is predicated on violence. To suggest that resorting to the use of state violence is a solution to social violence is absolutely absurd. Not only does it entirely miss the mark, but it keeps us locked in this inescapable cycle.
I have been called many things by many people. I have lost friends over political differences because I refuse to be a slave to ideology. I am an inquisitive person who wants to find the truth. I don’t care where I find it or if it completely destroys something I once believed. However, most people do not want to face the truth. People don’t care about truth. Truth is inconvenient. Truth is uncomfortable. The truth can force you to reassess everything you’ve ever believed, but you come out stronger and smarter as a result. I live for those moments—those when I’m proven wrong or exposed to new information.
And the most uncomfortable of truths is that without truth, there is nothing left but darkness and suffering. Without the desire to find and speak the truth, your life has no meaning. That which you need most will be found where you least want to look. We are a society of cowards hiding behind our ideological bullshit, and we will one day look up from the depths of the abyss and wonder why we were so fucking stupid. At this point, a large portion of the population is nothing more than a collection of inert objects—slaves to the nature of the society in which they exist—absent of purpose or meaning, and existing only to serve the ideological constructs of the modern world. And that my friends is the scariest thing I’ve ever come to realize.
ADDENDUM: It is important to note that these are not the only types of parental behavior that can cause a child to snap. Authoritarian parenting is actually more likely to do so. This parenting style creates serial killers, serial rapists, etc. especially if there is profound physical or sexual abuse. In the interest of fairness, I felt the need to add this.
—TheFeralTaint (CTOM Admin)
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