Time to let free market solve gun violence?

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm typing this quickly because if I linger even a moment, the latest mass shooting won't be the latest anymore!

So, is it time to let the free market solve the problem of gun violence? The Fedex shooter was excreting warning signs... that his mother picked up on... and then the police picked up on, and took his weapon away. Which searching for the shotgun on his computer hard drive, they also noticed a web browsing history indicating white supremist issues. I'm not talking OAN, Newsmax, or Fox News.

Here is the problem. The teen was able to go to hospital, be temporarily hospitalized for mental health problems and then buy a couple more guns.

So clearly we are looking at this the wrong way. The family can't help the kid. The police can't help the kid. But the person selling him guns can.

So the solution is simple, we just need to let the Free Market do its thing... but with a cattle prod.

Any person who sells a weapon to another person who then uses that weapon to commit a crime is fully liable as an accessory for that crime. That way the Free Market has an added benefit (not going to jail) for ensuring that people don't give other people weapons that'll be used in crimes.

 

[Politesse]

Kills don't gun people. Sheep kill guns. The only gun that can stop a people is a bad sheep with a kill. Masks sheep more kills than guns.

 

[Swammerdami]

I'm typing this quickly because if I linger even a moment, the latest mass shooting won't be the latest anymore!
...
So the solution is simple, we just need to let the Free Market do its thing... but with a cattle prod.

Any person who sells a weapon to another person who then uses that weapon to commit a crime is fully liable as an accessory for that crime. That way the Free Market has an added benefit (not going to jail) for ensuring that people don't give other people weapons that'll be used in crimes.

Is gambling allowed here? What's the Over-Under on a Senate vote for a federal law of this form? 13-87? Even less?

I'd vote for Senator Higgins' excellent suggestion, mind you, but I don't think we have 14 votes, let alone 50 or 60 or whatever it takes.

Meanwhile, if there has been another incident let's first thank both victim and shooter for standing their grounds. Thoughts and prayers to the dead, wounded and their kin. Avgcvpx: ฤื รทยนหะนพ Na vzcbfgre pbhyq freir nf n zvqqyr-zna, rt. ba gur Qnex Jro naq lbh pbhyqa'g fgbc vg


~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[Move this to Poetry thread] Let's compose a Sestina or Villanelle on this topic

 

[Politesse]

Let's compose a Sestina or Villanelle on this topic

The Second Amendment Should Have Been the First - A Villanelle

Peace comes when they deregulate the gun
These troubles never happen on frontiers
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

When everyone is armed, and none can run
Good citizens will have no cause for fears
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun

It makes me MAD to be shamed by anyone
Critique by academics gives me tears
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

Columbine? Sent bullies on the run
Pulse? A necessary cull of qu**rs
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun

Pelosi is the truly evil one
"That woman" from the town of twinks and bears
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

I'll stand for no more talk of what I've done
They all have to shut it, when my Glock appears
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We need a fair system for handling mental health issues and guns.

The conservatives say "no way!" with no regard for the need.

The lefties say "as much as possible!" with no regard for innocents caught in the net.

Perhaps we need to handle it like we do restraining orders.

And without the overreaction we see with regard to mental health and suicide. Nobody wants to be the one that overlooked a suicide, plenty of people end up in inpatient psychiatric care that don't need it and people are scared to talk to a therapist about suicidal ideation because of this.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

We need a fair system for handling mental health issues and guns.

The conservatives say "no way!" with no regard for the need.

The lefties say "as much as possible!" with no regard for innocents caught in the net.

Technically, the innocents are the ones bleeding out, thinking they didn't think they'd die on the cold hard flood of a grocery store, and maybe wishing they could hold their kid one last time.

Perhaps we need to handle it like we do restraining orders.

How exactly? Doesn't that require the court? It is real simple. You sell a gun to a person that in the following week murders 6 or more people, you are guilty of a serious crime. It'll make the Free Market come up with a solution to the "selling weapons to people that want to murder lots of people" problem.

 

[Swammerdami]

Let's compose a Sestina or Villanelle on this topic

The Second Amendment Should Have Been the First - A Villanelle

Peace comes when they deregulate the gun
These troubles never happen on frontiers
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

When everyone is armed, and none can run
Good citizens will have no cause for fears
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun

It makes me MAD to be shamed by anyone
Critique by academics gives me tears
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

Columbine? Sent bullies on the run
Pulse? A necessary cull of qu**rs
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun

Pelosi is the truly evil one
"That woman" from the town of twinks and bears
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

I'll stand for no more talk of what I've done
They all have to shut it, when my Glock appears
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun!

I've read this several times and it gets better every time. You, sir, are an excellent poet!

In one way the poem may be too good. If I were a moronic red-neck gun lover, I might use your exquisite poem as affirmation that my gun lunacy is correct!

 

[Politesse]

Isn't that rather the point?

I think I lapse into absurdism when trying to talk about gun control, anymore. I mean, why not a villanelle? I do not know how to bridge the gap between myself and my neighbor on these issues, anymore. It feels like we have the same stupid conversation every time there's a shooting, in which all the parts are rehearsed and nothing changes. I feel it in my bones that such an inability to communicate cannot be a good thing, for any of us. I don't know how to fix it, and but I know it must be fixed.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Let's compose a Sestina or Villanelle on this topic

The Second Amendment Should Have Been the First - A Villanelle

Peace comes when they deregulate the gun
These troubles never happen on frontiers
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

When everyone is armed, and none can run
Good citizens will have no cause for fears
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun

It makes me MAD to be shamed by anyone
Critique by academics gives me tears
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

Columbine? Sent bullies on the run
Pulse? A necessary cull of qu**rs
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun

Pelosi is the truly evil one
"That woman" from the town of twinks and bears
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun

I'll stand for no more talk of what I've done
They all have to shut it, when my Glock appears
Peace comes when they deregulate the gun
Damn liberals want to stamp on all our fun!

I've read this several times and it gets better every time. You, sir, are an excellent poet!

In one way the poem may be too good. If I were a moronic red-neck gun lover, I might use your exquisite poem as affirmation that my gun lunacy is correct!

I second that.

 

[Trausti]

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-mztxHgYQo[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Politesse]

^^

See? Even Trausti's feeling it.

Instinctive absurdism.

 

[Jayjay]

Why not extend the same idea to knives, cars, baseball bats, ... etc.?

 

[Swammerdami]

A baboon society sheds its bullying behavior

I just stumbled on a 2004 article in the N.Y. Times explaining how one troop of baboons solved its problem with male violence. Culture overcomes genetic predisposition.

Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate.

In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.

Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside.... The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.

Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress, said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted. Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living in more rancorous societies.

The new work vividly demonstrates that, Putumayo records notwithstanding, humans hold no patent on multiculturalism. As a growing body of research indicates, many social animals learn from one another and cultivate regional variants in skills, conventions and fashions. Some chimpanzees crack open their nuts with a stone hammer on a stone anvil; others prefer wood hammers on wood anvils. The chimpanzees of the Tai forest rain-dance; those of the Gombe tickle themselves. Dr. Jane Goodall reported a fad in one chimpanzee group: a young female started wiggling her hands, and before long, every teen chimp was doing likewise.

But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. ''You can more accurately describe it as the social ethos of group,'' said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. ''It's an attitude that's being transmitted.''

The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first demonstrated in captive populations of monkeys: that with the right upbringing, diplomacy is infectious. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging.

Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said in a telephone interview, ''The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained,'' he said.

''And if baboons can do it,'' he said, ''why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.''

Baboons and Americans are both in the same zoological Parvorder Catarrhini. Perhaps we should have hoped the Coronavirus was MORE virulent, and killed off more of the too-brave-to-wear-a-mask "alpha" males — then we might have enjoyed social progress like that lucky baboon troop.

 

[Rhea]

That’s a fascinating article. Very interesting how it was taught to new baboons who joined the troup from elsewhere.

 

[Toni]

I just stumbled on a 2004 article in the N.Y. Times explaining how one troop of baboons solved its problem with male violence. Culture overcomes genetic predisposition.

Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate.

In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.

Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside.... The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.

Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress, said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted. Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living in more rancorous societies.

The new work vividly demonstrates that, Putumayo records notwithstanding, humans hold no patent on multiculturalism. As a growing body of research indicates, many social animals learn from one another and cultivate regional variants in skills, conventions and fashions. Some chimpanzees crack open their nuts with a stone hammer on a stone anvil; others prefer wood hammers on wood anvils. The chimpanzees of the Tai forest rain-dance; those of the Gombe tickle themselves. Dr. Jane Goodall reported a fad in one chimpanzee group: a young female started wiggling her hands, and before long, every teen chimp was doing likewise.

But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. ''You can more accurately describe it as the social ethos of group,'' said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. ''It's an attitude that's being transmitted.''

The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first demonstrated in captive populations of monkeys: that with the right upbringing, diplomacy is infectious. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging.

Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said in a telephone interview, ''The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained,'' he said.

''And if baboons can do it,'' he said, ''why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.''

Baboons and Americans are both in the same zoological Parvorder Catarrhini. Perhaps we should have hoped the Coronavirus was MORE virulent, and killed off more of the too-brave-to-wear-a-mask "alpha" males — then we might have enjoyed social progress like that lucky baboon troop.

I wonder about what, if any, role genetics played in this shift in baboon culture. Were the less dominant male baboons genetically less aggressive? More cooperative?

Also wonder about the affect of the male to female ratio after the dominant males died. My presumption is that there were then a higher proportion of female baboons. This is unlikely to have continued over the decades but still, I wonder if that had any effect.