very legit ;-)

It is awful and regrettable that these tragedies seem to keep happening so often in the past few years. It wasn't always like this - it seems to be a very recent and strange phenomena of the 21st century. Nothing would be better than a world without weapons, a world without cruelty and violence. But that, unfortunately, is not reality.

However, hundreds of millions of psychologically & emotionally well balanced people own weapons. It's really very simple. You can understand that only someone severely lacking in self control would be afraid to handle a weapon which explains why some people, not all of course, but some calling themselves "progressive" have been convinced by propaganda that only government mercenaries should be allowed to be armed against the people. Most weapons owners are not running around waving them about as some would have you believe. They are kept as self-defense for home and communities, often as protection from both violent individuals and even the threat of tyranny - that may seem strange to some of us but better a government fears the people, rather than a people whom fear their government. Hopefully the day will NEVER come when they have to use them to defend themselves against those who advocate forcibly taking away the right to defend oneself.

Learn to understand the difference between force and violence. If one can learn to center and calm oneself and cultivate self discipline then eventually even the most hysterical and emotional individual shall begin to understand this and may change their views.

Sort by date and start reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United_States

edit: Sorry, didn;t see the Canada tag:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Canada

Any form of media derived influence, be it from videogames, movies, books, music, etc., is subjective. It's only possible for somebody to be "influenced by games" to act violently if he is already predisposed.

When specifically addressing the discussion happening in the US, there's an obvious hole in the White House's argument against videogames. Simply put, games are available worldwide and the stats for gun violence show no connection to videogame consumption at all. Access to firearms, however, is directly related to gun violence. More, easier access to guns means more gun violence.

Has been mentioned that when the 2nd Amendment was written guns took two minutes to load, fired one shot, and were only accurate to within a few yards? :P

It is amazing the levels of cognitive dissonance going on. The same people who would have you believe they're now ruled over by a man who they claim various level of fascisticness* (yeah, well Shakespeare invented 1000s of words) are simultaneously, begging him to disarm them all ASAP. No wonder America and Western Civ in general are the laughing stock of the rest of the world.




*Interesting note the auto-spell wanted to change it to antifascist. h3 h3.

Lol. Yeah Wikipedia :/ They even get birth dates of celebrities wrong. XD

Assuming you're referring to me:

First, I'm a she, not a he. (Did you forget to read my forum title?)

Second, toxic masculinity has been shown to lead to mental health problems. Hence, it is quite possible that toxic masculinity could lead to mental health problems that, in turn, might result in shootings; therefore toxic masculinty might still be the indirect cause of shooting. Combating toxic masculinity will, therefore, reduce the number of shootings that occur.

I could mention a user who used to post here, whose username consisted of alternating lowercase and capital letters and ended with the digit between 6 and 8. He (he has said he's a man, so this pronoun use is correct) would often talk about how women had supposedly wronged her, but from what I could tell, his attitude about women in general was clearly a sign of toxic masculinity. Perhaps there's a reason that women don't like him? (I haven't seen this user lately, and from what another user has said, it sounds like he might be banned.)

A couple links that come up from google searches are provided below:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/toxic-masculinity-mental-health-problems-for-men
http://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/men-boys-health-disparities.aspx

The argument that cars are or can be used as a weapon of mass killing is old, senseless whataboutism and in this particular case cuts your own flesh. Because, who are the reckless drivers, who's causing the most horrific accidents?

Ta-dah. It's men.
http://www.4autoinsurancequote.com/uncategorized/women-are-bad-drivers-fact-or-fiction/

I personally think that requirements for drivers should be much more strict, and I personally think that 60% of people out on the streets (in Germany) do not have the proper sense of responsibility to drive a car. I personally haven't touched a steering wheel in 20 years because I don't want that kind of responsibility and thankfully am not required to. I've been in a mass pileup when I was 5 and hit by a car when I was 7, leaving parts of my right shoulder on the seven metres of asphalt that the damn thing dragged me over while breaking. It's probably a bit of an excessive overgeneralization, but I personally try to hitch rides with women, not men. Just to be absolutely clear: I don't fucking like those things, and I have multiple extremely good reasons for that. I want you to fully understand that even from my fringe perspective of expressly loathing cars, your comparison is still hogwash.

You're probably right to believe that the very same thrill men get from firing an assault weapon leads them to act recklessly on the streets. But that still makes a car a tool to bring you from point A to B, and an assault weapon still remains a tool manufactured for the sole purpose of killing a whole lot of people very quickly.

You're also oversimplifying the issue of toxic masculinity way too much as a means to just wipe the argument off the table. Shooters are men, I don't know of a single exception. Women have 'psychological problems' too. Men and women throughout the world actually do have psychological problems. But there's just one, just one country where a declared anti-feminist enters a movie theatre during an Amy Schumer movie and starts gunning down the audience. Asking the question whether in this and other cases the mental illness/psychological problem has a connection to a certain concept of masculinity is not facultative, no siree.

I am very eager to consider and debate the issue of bullying and revenge fantasies that stem from the wildly common mistreatment. This is largely (yet not fully) a separate issue from toxic masculinity. I'm absolutely willing to look at radicalisation of the youth through white supremacist groups (like in the Parkland case); this is however strongly connected to toxic masculinity. And of course mental illness as a whole should be under a magnifying glass right now. With the present administration however, what you're going to get out of this is just more fear mongering and a feeling of helplessness, because God forbid someone's paying for diagnosis or *gasp* treatment.

A complete ban on assault weapons gives you maybe 30%, maybe 40% victim reduction during the next decade. That would be an incredible leap for the US, though of course you'd still be way behind other developed countries. I hope those Parkland kids can eventually change a thing or two. Your country deserves positive change for the people, for a change.

You can either ban the guns or the games, but only one of these courses of action will actually help and it's clear as fuck which one. :|

edit: Nevermind. Just another troll whacking away.

Make sure you clean up your keyboard when you finish. That stuff will make it sticky.

Regarding media legitimacy, and people criticizing or praising one source over another. Let's take a look here.

I have more. I didn't even post the video of them reporting there was a shark swimming around downtown Houston. :P

I'm not insinuating that Wiki doesn't make bonehead mistakes, so save me a rebuttal of CNN bloopers, I'm only trying to point out that EVERYONE makes bonehead mistakes. No one gets a pass here. If you criticize one source, you need to criticize them all.

And before anyone gives me crap for #5, look really really close. You'll see it. :P

In this case, video game is truly to blame:

Video console death: US boy, 9, 'kills sister, 13, over controller'0

Oy gevalt. I hope they throw the parents into a deep hole for eternity.

I consider both studies/statistics to be valid. However, the one I linked to is less interested in the totality of car crashes, but in actually serious accidents. I believe that's an extremely important distinction to make. And as we're talking about insurers in the article I linked to, they're of course also interested in who's at fault: I'll take the fender bender of insecure driving over the death toll of road rage any day. And will expressly hold up the "ta-dah". :|

I can only repeat, I believe that statement to be 100% accurate, as aligning yourself with white supremacist groups points at mental instability in its own right, yet white supremacy is of course infused with toxic masculinity just as well. What the school shooter, the serial killer, the white supremacist and male supremacists have in common is that their code teaches them, very explicitly, to suppress any kind of empathy towards their chosen victims in order to reach their individual goals. I hope we can agree that dehumanization means leaving the path of wisdom and entering a path of mental instability.

And, of course, that video games don't have anything to do with adopting dehumanizing ideology.

Not sure what you're saying here. I'm not certain that shootings have intensified that much recently, but if they did, uhm, the rise of Trump is the rise of toxic masculinity as well as white supremacy. Having elected a pussy-grabbing, extramarital-affair-having, minor-anal-raping candidate into office sure fuels the power fantasies of so, so many unhinged people, making them more likely to pop especially when the fantasy is threatened. So yeah, I see the US to be in a political situation in which positive change is LEAST likely to occur. However, somehow, for some incredible and of course also very sad reason, your children are taking up the task right now. They're willing to take that responsibility, willing to lead that fight. And that is so glorious, so wonderful, so, well, American maybe. It may also be the only way that change can happen, because while they're sadly not impervious to real bullets, the usual verbal shots that the usual idiots are taking at them are backfiring. The conspiracy theory bubbles concocted by the usual infowars assholes are popping. Just a few more American people need to see the truth without the green ground money phlegm overcoat vomited there by the NRA, and you may actually make a sensible step soon. Baby step definitely, but maybe first of a few over the next decades.

Those are, sorry, bullshit statistics, it's beneath us both to even discuss those. Here's the rebuttal snopes article.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/united-states-lower-death-shootings/

There simply is no other country in which... oh for fuck's sake, you just had another school shooting. I'm sorry, I'm just so sorry. :( :( :( :( :(

Yes, the brave kids around the country leaving class to protest gun violence. I wonder why they don't do the same for the kids who are bullied every day online and off to the point they committ suicide? Why haven't then been marching out of class to protest violence in the media, or the politicized use of identity politics as a weapon by both political parties that have given massive rise to these supremacist groups you so love to cite? I would give their "protest" more weight if it was spontaneous and not organized.

And here's the rubuttal to that bullshit Snopes article: https://crimeresearch.org/2018/03/fact-checker-snopes-com-big-mistake-comparing-mass-public-shootings-us-europe/

At the end of the day, you're right. I am also right, as is everyone in this thread. It is because of toxic masculinity. Toxic feminism. Ethnic supremicists. Excessive violence in media. Weaponized identity politics. Undiagnosed/untreated mental illness. Absentee parents/poor parenting. Media that likes to focus on what separates us. There is no one cause, because it's a combination of all of these things. That what makes these seem so senseless, because we are left scratching our heads for answers, but there isn't one nice answer wrapped in a bow.

Guns are just a tool. Even if you could snap your fingers and make guns disappear from the face of the Earth, people would just find other tools to kill each other with: knives, clubs, bats, spears, hands.