‘Black Rifles Matter’ sign stirs controversy in Maine tourist town

[Igel]

21. It's always nice to try to change another's culture,

but it does miss the point.

Most gun-related deaths fall into just a few categories.

Those that are suicides.

Those that are accidents, committed not by owners with no training but by non-owners and from silly acts. (Sort of like most driving accidents happen with people who are trained and licensed, but do silly things.)

Those that are committed by people who have illegal guns and are doing illegal things on purpose.

None of those are "gun culture," and for a lot of the people in the third category, well, they're not whitebread NRA members.

As for not accepting the status quo, the problem with change is that most change is for the worse. There are far more worse scenarios than there are better ones, and once you start change you really can't predict how it's going to go. It's why CEO salaries are so high now--there were unacceptable CEO salaries, so regulations and rules were put in place to stop the practice. The ways found to get around the rules made it easier to inflate CEO salaries, and the limits on salaries became floors. So new regulations, new workarounds. We're on iteration 3 or 4 now. Please, let them stop before it gets even worse. Omniscience isn't really a thing.

BTW, "broken windows" is one of those things that's still argued against, mostly on ideological grounds. Given that social sciences typically aren't amenable to controlled experiments, when the correlation between broken-windows policing and the crime rate's cited, well, it's coincidence. Other things were at work and in play. So, really, all that's left is the original ridicule because, well, broken windows tends to be applied in neighborhoods where windows tend to be broken, and that's not usually middle-class and upper-class areas. To support that view of policing, in the view of some who call themselves the majority, is to be an oppressor. Meh.