General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNewtown minister: "Evil visited our town, today."
I wonder if assigning this horrific act to some amorphous, unmanageable, unseeable force as "evil" exonerates us from our responsibility to act on it in any meaningful way. I know it allows self-serving creeps like Bryan Fischer to make political hay but does it really help the rest of us?
Taking evil out of the equation, as I consider the proliferation of the guns in our culture versus the problem of mental illness, I'm struck by the fact that, again, we can't see, ahead of time, the level of mental illness that result will in mass murder by firearms. But we can see assault weapons.
With that in mind, doesn't it make sense to clamp down on what we can see and touch?
We need to dial way back on the permissiveness of violence in our culture--as portrayed in news, games, commercials, movies, music videos, print ads, and so on. But, until those representations of violence make exceedingly rare appearances, if at all, shouldn't we take the means of their execution in real life out of everyone's hands?
Control what we can, now, and begin working on the rest until, culturally, we're safe again.
*Please move this to the gun forum, if necessary.*
DURHAM D
(32,610 posts)Fridays Child
(23,998 posts)Don't OPs get moved to other forums anymore?
DURHAM D
(32,610 posts)But I don't see anything wrong with your OP right where it is.
MANative
(4,112 posts)by a minister, but I heard him say it in a live broadcast. And he wasn't wrong. It doesn't absolve responsibility in any way. Some people are evil, and do evil things. Adam Lanza was one of them.
Fridays Child
(23,998 posts)...what's the answer? We can't stop evil or mental illness from gunning down first graders. But we can (in theory) stop the guns.
MANative
(4,112 posts)We're well past the point of no return on guns. With more than 300 million of them out there, in the hands of everyone including suburban divorcees in tiny New England towns, I can't see any way humanly possible to stop them. They've won, and we'll all continue to suffer for it. "Evil" has always been part of the equation, long before biblical parables told of brothers killing brothers. There are people who have no moral or social compass, and the masses have been so deluded for so long that it's just a matter of personal individual survival. Call me fatalistic or cynical, but less than 5 miles from my house, 27 people died yesterday at the hands of an ill-adjusted post-adolescent who also shot his mother in the face as she slept. I'm not feeling terribly optimistic right now.
Fridays Child
(23,998 posts)I share your lack of optimism but I don't believe that we're past the point of no return, as you put it. As a nation, we can, and should, do a lot better.
We're not mind readers, of course. Even if we could agree on definitions for lethal evil and lethal mental illness and even if we could, then, identify all of the lethally evil and mentally ill people out there, we still can't control or predict their behavior.
But we can control guns.
From another thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021995466