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Can anything stop America’s savage gun epidemic? By Mark Morford
Guns are America’s greatest shame. A numb, unquestioned fetish for ultra-violence combined with a warped conviction that gun ownership somehow equals freedom, or safety, or that it represents a desirable, even honorable form of God-sanctioned patriotism (it is none of those) – this is our greatest sickness..
I’m not saying anything new. You have but to witness, once again, the numbing wave of moral desolation and powerlessness that sweeps over the land as we’re confronted, day in and day out, with evermore murderous, devastating headlines too savage, too inhuman to contemplate – roomfuls of dead schoolchildren, rows of massacred churchgoers, butchered holiday partygoers, dead moviegoers and bloodied college students, countless women (wives and girlfriends and mothers) shot to death by countless wrathful, contorted males.
Still, we panic. Still we conflate safety with violence, peace with paranoia. America enjoyed record gun sales on this past Black Friday; the FBI recorded the single highest number of newly registered firearms, more than 185,000, since records have been kept. There will soon be a 24-hour home shopping TV channel, Gun TV, dedicated solely to direct sales of firearms to Americans. In the days following the massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary, sales of bullets in America skyrocketed. The fire is raging, and everyone is buying more gasoline.
Meanwhile, the facts keep ripping us apart, numbing us to the core: 2015 has seen more mass shootings (defined, unofficially, as four or more people shot in any kind of scenario) than we’ve had calendar days. Not good enough? How about this: More people have been killed by guns in America (nearly 1.4 million) than all our wars since 1776, combined
The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/12/04/can-anything-stop-americas-savage-gun-epidemic/
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Turbineguy
(40,038 posts)Watch Fox News for two years and you'll think it's normal. You may even join the herd.
mountain grammy
(29,006 posts)Not a care for facts, figures or reality.
MariaThinks
(2,495 posts)
malaise
(295,801 posts)11,000 a year in gun crimes in the same period but the ReTHUGs and media keep telling people that they must fear Muslims not guns.
It's a total and complete inversion of reality
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)What I mention herein draws on a professional papers published by Jost whose career has focused on cognitive motivations for conservative behavior.
A dominant feature, Jost calls it a core feature, of conservatism is Fear of Death, aka Existential Fear. Conservatives also greatly troubled by uncertainty, and persons with dominant conservative cognition, rely on simple answers easily picked up from 'authority'.
Manachean explanations that reduce a very complex world into two components, which typically represent good vs evil, but which also fall neatly into 'us' vs 'them' thinking are favored by conservative thinkers.
And because conservative thinkers recognize and endorse authoritative statements, dominant/celebrated conservative voices in the media can provide very simple answers that readily identify the 'them'. And them are variously "monsters among us" (from Wayne LaPierre), or Muslims (Murdoch media).
Without delving into the details developed by Jost across his career, it's fair to say that the current Islamic increase in xenophobia is well anticipated by informed understanding of conservative thinking that responsds to the message "They Intend To Kill Us"
It's important to appreciate that conservative mindset and it's perception isn't operating on a preponderance of evidence, but rather 'resonance' of internal biases with simple answers provided by authority.
Consequently, evidence-based argumentation, about numbers of people killed by terrorists in the US, or the risk of a home invasion, or the statistical likelihood of a good guy with a gun stopping a mass-shooting, doesn't matter.
Narratives at hand, true or false, that stimulate their cognitive framework are what is important. Trump, the NRA, Murdoch media, are virtuosi at getting the minds of conservatives to vibrate.
Bernardo de La Paz
(60,320 posts)Bernardo de La Paz
(60,320 posts)Psychological Bulletin 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, 339—375 Copyright
2003 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0033-2909/03/$12.OO DOt: l0.1037/0033-2909.129.3,339
Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition
John T. Jost, Stanford University; Arie W. Kruglanski, University
of Maryland at College Park; Jack Glaser, University of California,
Berkeley; Frank J. Sulloway, University of California, Berkeley
Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition
integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism,
dogmatism—intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs
(for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological
rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A
meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that
several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death
anxiety (weighted mean r = .50); system instability (.47);
dogmatism—intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience
(—.32); uncertainty tolerance (—.27); needs for order, structure, and
closure (.26); integrative complexity (—.20); fear of threat and loss
(.18); and self-esteem (—.09). The core ideology of conservatism
stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is
motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to
manage uncertainty and threat.
http://www.sulloway.org/PoliticalConservatism%282003%29.pdf
malaise
(295,801 posts)Thanks 
Bernardo de La Paz
(60,320 posts)The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives:
Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the
Things They Leave Behind
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/jost/Carney,%20Jost,%20&%20Gosling%20%282008%29%20The%20secret%20lives%20of%20liberals%20.pdf
[...]
personality differences between liberals and conservatives that appear in adult-
hood are already present when children are in nursery school, long before they
define themselves in terms of political orientation. Specifically, preschool children
who later identified themselves as liberal were perceived by their teachers as:
self-reliant, energetic, emotionally expressive, gregarious, and impulsive. By
contrast, those children who later identified as conservative were seen as: rigid,
inhibited, indecisive, fearful, and overcontrolled. These findings—especially in
conjunction with adult data (see Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b, for a summary) and
growing evidence that there is a heritable component of political attitudes (Alford,
Funk, & Hibbing, 2005)—appear to substantiate the convictions of Adorno et al.,
Tomkins, Wilson, and many others that basic personality dimensions underlie
ideological differences between the left and right.
[...]
Proserpina
(2,352 posts)that would bring us back down to sticks and stones....
PeoViejo
(2,178 posts)Stop the Hate Speech.
mdbl
(8,636 posts)I don't want to watch society degrade into duels in the town square.
Orrex
(67,083 posts)Because we all know that dick jokes about guns are more terrible and offensive than thousands and thousands and thousands of annual gun deaths.
America truly believes that the gun problem can only be solved with more guns.
I await the gunsplainers showing up to tell me how wrong I am about the tenets of ther religion...
hack89
(39,181 posts)We understand their only purpose is to shut down meaningful discussion. Which is fine - I think everyone understands DU is not the place for rational discussion on guns.
Orrex
(67,083 posts)In nearly every case I've encountered, the discussion begins with "we will make no concessions except on matters that aren't important to us."
In order even to begin the discussion, all participants must bow down in worship of the gun apologists' interpretation of the holy 2nd Amendment, and all other interpretations are dismissed outright.
So I'm sorry if you find dick jokes immature and juvenile. When dealing with stubborn members of the cult of gun worship, there's little point in attempting to persuade them with reason.
How can gun controllers possibly be in the wrong? How dare we not capitulate immediately instead of challenging your moral superiority?
Orrex
(67,083 posts)Gun apologists want to protect their guns above all other considerations.
My position is indeed morally superior to yours, because mine--if it were realized--would result in fewer deaths. Your position--the horror that we currently must suffer--is causing thousands upon thousands of deaths annually.
Tell me about your moral superiority, please.
hack89
(39,181 posts)I live in a state with strict gun control. I routinely vote for congressmen and senators that vote for gun control. There are only two gun control proposals I reject out of hand - AWBs and registration.
But that means nothing to you. Instead of looking for common ground, you focus on the differences between us and deem that sufficient to label me indifferent to gun violence. That is why I have no use for people like you. The cultural wars are all that matter to you. You would rather do nothing but whine instead of looking for something we could agree and collaborate on.
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)
Duckhunter935
(16,974 posts)Last edited Sat Dec 12, 2015, 06:48 PM - Edit history (1)
All of us here compromise for UBC. I have yet to see one post from a pro controller optimise on anything. And yes the insults and childish sexual references put out by your side are there just for the insult and to shut down any meaningfully discussion. Not to mention whenever we try and talk about basic facts to have a meaningful discussion is you shut it down as some NRA talking point, am I correct?
Orrex
(67,083 posts)As for the rest, I frankly don't care if gun apologists don't like the dick jokes, though they seem lately to have decided that it's the "immaturity" that bothers them. Well tough shit. The infantile and insatiable need for Guns! Guns! Guns! does not merit a more sophisticated, thoughtful rebuttal.
As for "compromise," don't make me laugh. There is no compromise with gun apologists because they refuse to concede the basic point that the wild proliferation of guns is making the nation less safe. Any compromise with a gun apologist must only take the form of full capitulation because, you know, 2nd Amendment.
You can reply or not, but I won't see it anyway.
Duckhunter935
(16,974 posts)And I am glad to say I have nobody on ignore. I find having to hide from a discussion silly in my opinion.
ETA: The dick jokes do seem to hit a nerve.
However, you only have to look at the Bushmaster "Man Card" ad campaign (a monstrously successful ad campaign BTW) to realize that there is something there.
They like to say that gun humping has nothing to do with one's feelings about one's masculinity. I think they are incorrect.
friendly_iconoclast
(15,333 posts)You've got an hour or so before the blackout, care to explain your warmed-over Freudianism?
Squinch
(59,446 posts)men who had fears about their masculinity. Bushmaster knows its market, and that ad cleaned up.
And even with the increase, what's the percentage of women gun owners to men gun owners?
ileus
(15,396 posts)appal_jack
(3,813 posts)Morford is just spluttering word salad throughout this 'article.' Even when he's making sense, he's veering and careening:
Here’s a point: Every single accusation the GOP has leveled at Planned Parenthood has been false, an outright lie, revoltingly so. Republicans do not care that they have painted a world-renowned health organization, one that’s helped millions of women (including, surely, countless Republican women, GOP members’ own wives and daughters), as as merely a “seller of baby parts.” It’s a vicious lie. But Robert Dear, for one, believed them.
I agree with every bit of the paragraph quoted above. But what do Republican lies about Planned Parenthood and an ongoing war to deprive women of their critical reproductive rights and access to health services have to do with the entirely separate right to keep and bear arms? Morford wanting to deprive citiens of the RKBA will not help women's rights one whit.
And then he veers off in another wrong direction:
By the way, here’s the gun lobby, arguing that suspected terrorists should continue to have access to guns in the US, without background checks.
And here’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein, on Thursday and for the third time, offering an amendment requiring that suspected terrorists undergo background checks – something the vast majority of gun owners and even most NRA members (and George W. Bush) supported.
So here's Morford calling for the systematic violation of people's right to due process and "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence." So he's not only against the Second Amendment; he's also perfectly willing to trash the Sixth Amendment.
Morford favors tyranny. This is not who we want defining or protecting any rights, women's included.
-app
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)
EdwardBernays
(3,343 posts)No.
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)....Gun Control
Sounds like the editorialist is frustrated by the continuing entrenchment of FR and corporate control, and somehow wants to lay his frustrations on... Gun control?
He is fighting a proxy culture war, choosing to take on tens of millions of Americans over a very narrow issue, and wonders: "Can anyone stop (it)?
Really. He asks that with a gasoline can in his hand.
Initech
(108,680 posts)Who will blame just about anything and everything but the fact that anyone can buy a gun and that it's really easy to do. Hell there's even fucking assholes like Alex Jones who believe that San Bernardino was a false flag operation. You have to be batshit crazy to believe something that insane. That's the worst part. 
Duckhunter935
(16,974 posts)They all seem to be buying them legally after passing the federal mandated background check. I guess UBC will fix that. Many of them used legal non assault weapons that are banned in states like Connecticut or California. So I guess another national ban won't help. Just curious what new laws people want that would actually make a difference.
mwrguy
(3,245 posts)Feinstein was right.
hack89
(39,181 posts)I don't get into security theater. The Patriot Act turned me off to simplistic solutions to complex problems.
Waldorf
(654 posts)Duckhunter935
(16,974 posts)madville
(7,847 posts)A direct result of the War on Drugs. But few politicians on either side will acknowledge that, they would rather focus on treating the symptoms than the actual disease.