Why would anyone need an AK-47? We started with muskets but the founding
mothers could't dream of what would come. Time for some sort of sanity
here.
Now to be clear, I realize prohibition simply doesn't work. But in this
case, it might make a difference, small, but none the less.
I don't want a neighbor with a bazooka. Or hand-grenade. I'm fine with
well educated gun owners with hand guns and hunting rifles. But do we
really want neighbors with ground-to-air rocket launchers?
-- Owen
On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> Jochen, et al -
>
> I think that both of the issues you describe (gun access and surrogate
> violence in youth) are significant risk factors but neither are necessary
> nor sufficient to explain (or prevent) these kinds of incidents. I am
> fairly confident that limiting either or both of these factors would likely
> reduce the number and/or severity of these incidents. But I think this is
> *barely* the beginning... and may be as much symptoms as causes.
>
> The next dozen paragraphs are more of my anecdotal rattlings framing the
> basis of my opinions. For the impatient, you might jump to the punchline
> at the end. Or 2/3 of the way in for my musings about individual vs group
> rights and responsibilities.
>
> I come from a culture deeply steeped in the ownership and use of
> firearms. I do believe the sincerity of many of those who wish to and
> believe they have a right to (at least in most of the US) own firearms. I
> also believe that despite that sincerity, there are others whose sincerity
> is not even a little informed... they are at best "aping" the convenient
> explanations and excuses for why *they* need to and deserve to own as many
> guns (and more importantly as much ammunition) of as many types (focusing
> primarily on concealable, high capacity, rapid firing, human-stopping or
> armor piercing examples). While these folks will insist that their
> firearms are "tools", they have all the qualities of "toys", and in many
> cases, have few qualities of tools. So while I'm sympathetic with the
> underlying "right to bear arms", various concepts of individual rights and
> self-defense, I know through extensive experience that most contemporary
> gun ownership is a self-indulgent (and potentially risky) behaviour. But
> I also understand that the Pandora's box of personal gun ownership has been
> open for a very long time and closing it is never going to be easy or
> without collateral harms.
>
> I also have spent decades developing tools and systems for synthesizing
> experiences (computer graphics, scientific and information visualization,
> virtual reality, etc.) and believe in the power of inducing new states of
> understanding and awareness through synthetic "experiences". Watching
> movies or even reading stories about extreme violence can be very risky,
> but the immediacy of a computer game makes something that can be
> experienced in the third person a definite first person experience. That
> is the very point of it, naturally. VR has been used by the military
> effectively in everything from skill training
> (flight/driving/weapons-systems) to mission familiarization/planning
> (providing perceptual and even kinesthetic memory of a location and a
> sequence of events) to after-action, debriefing and even PTSD treatment.
> So it should not be surprising (to anyone?) that first person shooters can
> make it *much* easier (technically, socially, and emotionally) for someone
> to carry out the kinds of massacres that we have seen in the last 20
> years or so<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers#School_massacres>.
> The US Government Sponsored first-person Shooter "Americas Army<http://gamepipe.usc.edu/%7Ezyda/pubs/ShillingGameon2002.pdf>"
> was overtly designed as a recruiting tool, but was also designed to provide
> a strong "socialization" element, to not only identify potential "soldiers"
> but to help lead (or even train) them into the desired
> mentality/emotional-state long before signing up or arriving at boot camp.
>
> A classmate of mine, on the Thanksgiving weekend of 1972, shot and killed
> his elderly parents in their home with his "varmit rifle", a single shot
> .22 that they had given him several years before to "plink" at the ground
> squirrels, rabbits, coyotes and bobcats in the rural areas near our
> homes. This shooting required that he reload several times (manually) to
> kill them as he did. This was neither high caliber nor high capacity or
> rapid-fire. I happened to be in the mountains hunting for deer (with a
> Bow) with a friend while this was happening, and heard about it when I
> returned. It was a small town and probably all anyone talked about for
> months. Everyone was very shocked. Bernie was a amiable, well adjusted,
> thoughtful young man. He was a year older than me and he was in national
> honor society, played in the school band, and on the school baseball team
> and worked as a lifeguard at the local public pool. He was neither an
> overly aggressive nor overly shy young man. He seemed well adjusted. He
> had two somewhat older sisters who were high performers in many ways, and
> Bernie was raised somewhat as an only child, at least through his teen
> years. The best understanding I have of his actions were a consequence of
> the (relative) stress he apparently felt to perform up to his older
> sister's standards. His parents were in their 60's which separated them
> somewhat from our generation, even more than the 30 or 40-something parents
> the rest of us had. There was no indication of abuse, physical or
> emotional.
>
> Bernie called the Sheriff himself and waited quietly for them to arrive.
> He described his actions as if he were a third person watching. He
> described in detail what he did, but claimed he did not know "who that was"
> who was doing it. As a juvenile (16 years old) he was put into a juvenile
> detention facility and released when he was 18 with closed records. He
> apparently passed the mental health standards of the time or else he might
> have been put into a mental health facility which does not distinguish
> adolescent from adult in quite the same way as the criminal system. I
> knew several of our peers who had contact with him after he was released
> who reported that he was quite normal. 30 years later I encountered
> someone who had been in limited contact with him who said that he was
> rather strange but not obviously out of normal range. Unfortunately he
> had also taken to collecting guns despite his history and apparently being
> considered by legal standards unfit for gun ownership, even by the US
> fairly liberal standards. I suggested to the person who gave me this
> information that it might be a good thing to alert someone in authority.
> I'd not be terribly shocked if he ended up on the front page of the paper
> again. Bernie can't be a lone example. He very likely has a growing gun
> collection and a growing estrangement from his peers. But I could be
> wrong, I have very little data.
>
> Several of the mass shootings have been close to me in one way or another,
> so they are not abstract to me. When the Columbine thing happened, my
> girlfriend at the time had a brother with kids just a few years too young
> to be at Columbine, but lived in the community and were nearby when the
> shootings occurred, knew some of the victims families, etc. A good friend
> of mine had a son going to school at Virginia Tech, my daughter lives 1/2
> mile from the Denver theater and could have as easily been at the theater
> that night as not, and I have cousins who live between New Haven and Sandy
> Hook, I do not know if they have any personal connections with the victims.
>
> The small town I grew up in is the county seat of the infamous Catron
> County, NM where a County ordinance <http://www.hcn.org/issues/19/550>was proposed *requiring* all heads of household to own a firearm. For the
> most part they were acting in the spirit of local celebrity legend Elfego
> Baca <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfego_Baca>. It seemed to be an
> annual occurrence during hunting season for one or another of the local
> badass elements to end up in a shooting accident, often at the hands of
> their own family... a cousin or an uncle... maybe not unlike southern
> Sicily? Frontier Justice well into the second half of the 20th century? I
> don't glorify gun ownership (or use) but do recognize it as a reality in
> most of the rural USA and much of suburbia (especially people coming from
> rural experiences). As wrong-headed as those who have little or no direct
> experience with gun-ownership or use may find gun-culture, it is painfully
> clear how deep and wide gun culture is in the US. I feel badly and
> responsible for our culture exporting this kind of culture (through movies
> and video games) to other cultures who have a much better literal
> relationship with their firearms (e.g. Canada, Europe, etc.)
>
> I do believe that the depiction and practice of gunplay, especially in the
> context of killing other human beings (is there much other contemporary use
> of guns except to either kill or threaten to kill other humans?), is an
> obvious and huge contributor to the gun violence (singular or massive) in
> the United States and I presume the rest of Western culture. Yes I know
> "hunting"... but even in a semi-rural environment in the heart of the old
> west I find that to be less real and relevant than some might think (not to
> be entirely dismissed, but maybe discounted somewhat?). Of my friends who
> hunt, I'd say 3/4 prefer archery over firearms. The licenses are more
> available and despite modern compound bow technology, it *is* a bit more
> sportsmanlike than rifles with scopes with ranges on the order of hundreds
> of yards).
>
> The kicker, in my opinion, is twofold: First, how do we draw a line for
> the implied censorship, whether it be censoring gun ownership or censoring
> "speech" in the sense of the creation, publication, purchasing, and playing
> of computer games; Second, even if we figure out what the "there, there"
> might be, how do we get from "here" to "there"? I'm not saying we don't
> have to try, and I'm not saying there might not be a path... just that it
> is much more subtle and hard than many would like to imagine.
>
> This may seem academic to those of you who live in Western Europe where
> the problem of private gun ownership has been mostly settled long ago. It
> may also seem academic to those who have never lived amongst a gun-culture
> and who believe it is simply a matter of changing some laws and jacking up
> the enforcement of them.
>
> The USA and I think most of Europe has settled the question of censorship
> on the extreme liberal side... it seems to be (almost?) never appropriate
> to limit speech, especially when the speech is "passive" or third person or
> fictitious or descriptive rather than prescriptive. Perhaps we do use
> peoples' direct incitement to violence and sedition as an indicator of
> their intentions or a surrogate for their actions, but it doesn't take much
> to make such things indirect and therefore only subject to (legal or
> social) suspicion, not direct reaction. The neo-nazi skinheads might be
> the best example of groups who have learned how to play right up to that
> line without going far enough over to get their asses handed to them by the
> rest of us. In this spirit, I don't know how we can get the violent games
> out of the hands of teens... perhaps the same way got alcohol, drugs, and
> tobacco out of their hands (not so effectively)? The movie rating systems
> already try to deal with this and I would claim to a fairly ineffective
> level. 80's action-drama TV series such as the A-Team in the US are
> examples of glorifying contemporary gunplay, even if the bad guys were
> always very bad and also bad shots.
>
> - Steve
>
> Footnote to James' response: I think I agree with your point that there
> is a much deeper problem exposed in this kind of violence. However I still
> think that there are *qualitative* if not quantitative problems with the US
> Gun Culture, whether exhibited in our fetish around handguns and assault
> and sniper style rifles, or in the violence and gore and cold-bloodedness
> of our movies and our computer games. The arguements (which I think you
> only reference but not necessarily endorse) about various forms of violent
> activity (contact sports or computer games) being an important way to
> redirect or sublimate otherwise natural violent instincts are at least
> misleading if not very wrong. mil
>
> Footnote to Eric's response: I also know lots of young people who were
> trained in the use of and have access to guns who are also exposed to
> violent movies and video games. Statistically I feel fairly safe, you are
> correct that despite the high profile and tragic nature of these events,
> they are fairly infrequent (but on the increase?), but that does not mean I
> am not disturbed by the potential in every one of those kids to blur the
> line between their fantasy lives and their real lives. Oh yeah... and the
> adults born and raised to this as well... it's not like turning 18 or 30
> necessarily removes the risk... though maybe some of the more questionable
> hormones.
>
>
>
>
> The recent shooting at Sandy Hook, Conneticut,
> reminded me of the shooting in Winnenden 3 years ago.
> In 2009, a teenager killed 15 people at a School
> in southern Germany. It turned out his father owned
> many guns legally and took him occasionally to a shooting
> club. The son played frequently shooting games like
> "Counter Strike". The combination of learning to
> kill people in virtual worlds and learning to shoot
> in the real world was toxic for the young troubled
> teenager.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting
>
> The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting now
> seems to be similar: the mother owned many guns
> legally and used them, she went through target
> shooting with her son. The son apparently liked
> violent video games (probably first-person shooter
> as well). Again the combination of learning to kill
> people in virtual worlds and learning to shoot in the
> real world was toxic for the young person and
> certainly contributed to the disaster
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting
>
> If we want to prevent these shootings happening
> again, then we must either make it much harder
> for children to go to shooting clubs and to
> participate in shooting sport, or we must make it
> much harder for underage persons to get first-person
> shooter games. Or both. What do you think?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_sport
>
> -J.
>
>
>
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>
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