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Thread: Las Vegas

  1. #1
    Senior Member Ultralight's Avatar
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    Las Vegas

    After reflecting for a couple days or so, I simply feel like shootings such as the one that happened in Las Vegas are an unfortunately normal part of the American experience.

    This is just one part of American culture -- a big part, a part America is known for throughout the world. This is what happens when you have a society that is largely obsessed with guns, violence oozing out of all the media, and a disregard for mental healthcare.

  2. #2
    Williamsmith
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ultralight View Post
    After reflecting for a couple days or so, I simply feel like shootings such as the one that happened in Las Vegas are an unfortunately normal part of the American experience.

    This is just one part of American culture -- a big part, a part America is known for throughout the world. This is what happens when you have a society that is largely obsessed with guns, violence oozing out of all the media, and a disregard for mental healthcare.
    Reach back farther in history and you will find the reason guns became such a big part of the American culture. 59 people is a horrible tally for one mass shooter but you know there have been places that tens of thousands have been killed with muzzleloaders. Violence is not new to Americans. Our land is soaked with the blood of our neighbors.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Williamsmith View Post
    Our land is soaked with the blood of our neighbors.
    What land isn't?

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    Williamsmith
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    Quote Originally Posted by LDAHL View Post
    What land isn't?
    From what I hear.....”Lala Land”

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    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Williamsmith View Post
    Violence is not new to Americans. Our land is soaked with the blood of our neighbors.
    What land isn't?
    I think Williamsmith has a point. Our history as conquistadors is relatively short, and maybe we're still working it out of our cultural DNA. By contrast, Europe has been sitting happily with no desire to go out conquer each other for a long, long time. Back in the 15th & 16th century, the peace loving Europeans stayed home, while the other land-hungry devils went out and conquered the Americas and parts of Africa and Asia.

    I subscribe to the "seven generations" philosophy, although in our case it goes back more like 14-15 generations. I also believe that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
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    Well, a long long time if you don't count Hitler, of course, who conquered and murdered as many of his neighbors as he could.

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    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
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    "Peace loving Europeans" my ass.

    Each time we go to Europe we are steeped in the history of recent wars. We see Leftover armature, geographical boundaries newly drawn to give spoils to the victors, brutal regimes that stomp on the people. We havent even traveled near the carnage of Bosnia.

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    Senior Member gimmethesimplelife's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    "Peace loving Europeans" my ass.

    Each time we go to Europe we are steeped in the history of recent wars. We see Leftover armature, geographical boundaries newly drawn to give spoils to the victors, brutal regimes that stomp on the people. We havent even traveled near the carnage of Bosnia.
    I believe there is something to what you say, IL. One of my beliefs for why socialized medicine exists and why so much paid time off is granted and why social democracy exists in general in Europe - the suffering of the Two World Wars. Europe does have a history that is not especially peace loving, this much is true, but neither does America when you come to think of it. Rob

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    enough with the disregard for mental healthcare, maybe sometimes people who need help can't afford it, but the guy was a #$@#$ multimillionaire, he of all people could not afford all the mental health care he wanted? Puh ... lease ... Unless you mean something like lack of proper parenting when he was 4 or something for which nothing could be done at this point anyway except to make sure the current batch of 4 year olds have it better, shrug, I don't know, but could be.

    Plus as mentally ill people argue it's pretty unfair to blame these types of things on mentally ill people, as mentally ill people, and I mean even what gets termed psychotic, do not necessarily (ok argue statistics with me if you know otherwise) have higher rates of violence than anyone else in the population. So yea whatever maybe it's not great to have schizophrenia or something in other ways, since some mentally ill are homeless etc., but maybe it's incorrect to assume they are more *violent* than anyone else. The problem with armchair diagnosing behavior that is very hard for the rest of us to understand as "mentally ill", is people who really have a diagnosis get smeared just because we don't even know any other term to use.
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    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    "Peace loving Europeans" my ass.

    Each time we go to Europe we are steeped in the history of recent wars. We see Leftover armature, geographical boundaries newly drawn to give spoils to the victors, brutal regimes that stomp on the people. We havent even traveled near the carnage of Bosnia.
    OK.. you and Tybee got me there. Now that I'm thinking about it, there was also the Armenian genocide, not to mention the Eastern Europe messes that IL mentioned, and of course, Hitler. Never mind.

    I did look up "history of gun love" and learned that American gun love is a cultural thing having been borne out of the use of guns in militia during the Revolutionary War, self-preservation during frontier days, and glorification of guns through in entertainment, literature, and eventually movies and TV.

    Closely related to the militia tradition was the frontier tradition with the need for a means of self-protection closely associated with the nineteenth century westward expansion and the American frontier. There remains a powerful central elevation of the gun associated with the hunting/sporting and militia/frontier ethos among the American Gun Culture.[2] Though it has not been a necessary part of daily survival for over a century, generations of Americans have continued to embrace and glorify it as a living inheritance—a permanent element of the nation's style and culture.[3] In popular literature, frontier adventure was most famously told by James Fenimore Cooper, who is credited by Petri Liukkonen with creating the archetype of an 18th-century frontiersman through such novels as The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1840).[4]
    . Wikipedia

    So my point about being part of our cultural DNA may still be true. But I still don't understand why gun ownership gets a completely free pass.
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
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