COLUMBINE

[betsy]

Violence was much higher in the past. Most of those mayhem killers were also young people.

1) Young people in all western countries watch the same movies and play the same video games.

2) Young people in all other western countries kill others at a much smaller rate then young people in the United States.

EXACTLY.

And we all know that not everyone succumb to the influence of violence through media. A lot of adults these days grew up on video games and a steady diet of Arnold and Sylvester. And a lot of these people carry or own guns!

Just like we all know that not everyone becomes a monster because of sexual/physical abuse, or poverty, or bullying, etc.., A lot of people in that same environment had not only lived life as normal decent human beings, but there are also those who excelled in their achievements.

So your argument actually supports Scott's point. We come back to the same question I've asked a little earlier: Why do others have this "seed" of violence? Why are others, monsters?

Needless to say some of us Christians have the answer to that. But you won't agree with it.

Like I've said, in that question lies the problem. If you can crack that, you'll find the possible solution.

Edited February 7, 2013 by betsy

[betsy]

Violence was much higher in the past. Most of those mayhem killers were also young people.

1) Young people in all western countries watch the same movies and play the same video games.

2) Young people in all other western countries kill others at a much smaller rate then young people in the United States.

EXACTLY.

That's why all these nonsense about gun control is just that - nonsense. If society is truly serious about trying to come up with a solution, it'll have to look way beyond its nose. And start digging deeper. And consider the spiritual aspect of this.

Edited February 7, 2013 by betsy

[Wayward Son]

Funny that I practically keep the news channel on all day...and yet didn't catch mainstream media reporting on the message of Scott. I had to find out about it online, when I stumbled upon it on the christian forum! And yet I saw them covering the husband of Sen Gifford's statement, who did nothing more than repeat the stance of his wife - which had already been covered on previous days!

Giffords was in 2011. Scott in 1999. Huge difference between how many people get their news in that time. Huge difference between the way people remember events from 2 years ago compared to events from 14 years ago. Especially when ideology and worldview comes into play.

Scott's speech was covered nationally. It was carried by the AP and Scripps Howard wire services. And separate stories by the Boston Globe, Washington Times, Chicago Sun Times and so on.

Just because you think his statement is devoid of fact, doesn't make it so. Furthermore, by saying so it seems you suggest that just because you think so therefore it's okay to black it out. That's another liberal mentality - this terrible obsession to control others in all aspects!

Right. Don't control others unless they have a uterus. Right?

[betsy]

deleted.

Edited February 7, 2013 by betsy

[Wayward Son]

EXACTLY.

And we all know that not everyone succumb to the influence of violence through media. A lot of adults these days grew up on video games and a steady diet of Arnold and Sylvester. And a lot of these people carry or own guns!

Just like we all know that not everyone becomes a monster because of sexual/physical abuse, or poverty, or bullying, etc.., A lot of people in that same environment had not only lived life as normal decent human beings, but there are also those who excelled in their achievements.

So your argument actually supports Scott's point. We come back to the same question I've asked a little earlier: Why do others have this "seed" of violence? Why are others, monsters?

Needless to say some of us Christians have the answer to that. But you won't agree with it.

Like I've said, in that question lies the problem. If you can crack that, you'll find the possible solution.

My argument does not support Scott's point in the slightest. He accepts or rejects, or manipulates evidence to support and confirm his ideology-based conclusion. That conclusion is unalterable. I develop inferences based on available evidence. Those inferences change when new evidence becomes available. You can claim that different people have different reactions to watching violent movies, which is of course true, but that says nothing as to why young people in one western country are far more violent then young people in every other western country, when they all watch the same movies.

I am not interested in absolute and simplistic answers that come with political ideology or religious worldviews. They seem incredibly childish to me.

[WIP]

Well, Wayward Son, here is an excerpt from an article about that particular book by Pinker.

http://www.guardian....lence-interview

Well if you're going that far back in history....it's pretty much barbaric too using clubs and spears! See, they didn't need guns to cause that much mayhem.

Anyway, I'm talking about modern times. Senseless brutal killings by those I refer to as, monsters. We may've been used to the likes of Hitler, Ghaddafi, Pol Pot....but we're not talking dictators, or artrocities of war. That's why I told you to discount wartime crimes. We're talking about what's been happening in our civilised society.

Let's set aside violence in modern times for a moment, because I want to focus on that link you provided from the Guardian, because you are not likely going to hear this from any other atheist/humanists....at least here on this forum!

First, John Gray points out something that almost all new atheist writers do: using the 'Enlightenment' as their example of the pivotal moment in human history when reason overtook superstition and paved the way forward for potentially unending human progress and improvement. As Gray notes, Pinker, just like Dawkins, Hitchens, A.C. Grayling etc., are very selective in how they cherry-pick their way through the list of so called enlightenment thinkers, in order to create the myth of the birth of humanism:

"These are highly disparate thinkers," says Gray, "and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have 'coalesced' from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of 'Enlightenment values', Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs — 'aborigines in the heart of Europe' — would be wiped out."

Gray makes the point that some of these, like the Jacobins, Marx and Bukunin were "illiberal" but I would add that a large part of the reason for their exclusion from Pinker's list is because they are also radical leftists, while today's modern secular humanist movement is tightly constrained between liberalism and libertarianism....so their scorn for the development of capitalism was another reason why Pinker would ignore their contributions.

Pinker himself is a libertarian, and being an evolutionary psychologist, he is as prone as the rest in that stream of thought to claim to have evidence for an arc of human progress. We hear the same from Jared Diamond and Michael Shermer (founder of Skeptic Magazine) has also chimed in with his own book "Believing Brains" that includes the claim that the scientific and technological progress of the human race is leading us towards moral perfection.

Second point would be: this whole argument is constructed on a flimsy foundation right from the start. The Guardian doesn't go back beyond the Enlightenment, but the claims of Pinker, Diamond, Shermer and others who make this argument, are building it in large part of Jared Dimond's work in New Guinea and the Amazon, where he pretty much claims that primitive hunter/gatherers are all savages, who frequently engage in murder, infanticide, rape etc. Somehow Diamond could work and gather data in the western half of the island of New Guinea - administered by Indonesia, and disregard the impact of genocide and forced colonization by the Indonesians on the natives, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 on that half of the Island. And in the Amazon, a lot of his data was taken from a long discredited anthropologist - Napolean Chagnon, who identified one tribe - the Yanomami as "the fierce people" ....bloodthirsty savages, so to speak, but did not include in his field notes the impact he and his assistants had in creating tensions and rivalries among groups by giving metal knives and axes to those they favoured.

In a critical review of Pinker's book in Huffop, psychologist Christopher Ryan, who has a background in anthropology, notes that only one of Pinker's chosen example of hunter/gatherer tribes would really fit the description of true hunter/gatherers, because early accounts on hunter/gatherers are so biased and prejudicial, while more modern accounts fail to acknowledge the cultural contamination from outside influences. It's pretty much impossible for a group of people today to live as prehistoric hunter/gatherers would have thousands of years ago, because the world today is just too crowded, with no open, uninhabited (but inhabitable) territories for people to live out their lives undisturbed by others.

And Ryan notes in that review, what a few others have - that Pinker misrepresents the modern age as well, by ignoring most of the genocides that have occurred away from the developed world....from the rape of Nanking during WWII to the genocides that have occurred in Africa over the last century.

And I would add that, since Shermer is chiming in now with his own vision of a Star Trek Future; that this libertarian-to-liberal capitalism model of scientific and technological progress is indeed like the observations of someone falling off a building being asked how things are going for them....as someone else noted somewhere in this thread. The cold hard facts are that this world is facing a number of converging threats and many of them have been created by the scientific and technological progress that these humanist writers hold dear! Thanks to using up half of the stored carbon fuels in the Earth, our world is getting hotter and the climate is changing rapidly to a new and still undetermined equilibrium, while the use of that carbon as fertilizers has enabled the human population to expand above 7 billion....a population that cannot be sustained for more than a few more decades regardless of what technological rabbits the wizards think they can pull out of the hat!

I've seen many religious fundamentalist writers sift through the work of Dawkins, Pinker and so many others, looking for evidence of an atheist/humanist religion, when it has been staring them in the face all along! It is right in the modern humanist's worship of technology as the means to solve all of our problems. In the past, we thought that technology was about making the material aspects of our lives better, but the new atheists are adding to the faith with claims that technology makes us more peaceful and moral as well. The ultimate absurdity is found in the vision of techno-nirvana of the future - The Singularity - which I think is the level that the more pragmatic humanists aren't willing to accept yet. It is the techno version of a 2nd coming! But if they become more anxious and desperate when contemplating the future, they just might start making that leap into the absurd!

[BubberMiley]

A lot of adults these days grew up on video games and a steady diet of Arnold and Sylvester.

My diet was more Tweety and Sylvester.

[Mighty AC]

Betsy, the numbers show that population, population density, lack of religion, the media, movies and games are not the cause of abnormally high US murder rates, compared to other developed nations. What about abortion then? Do nations that allow abortion, value life less and then turn to murder? Well apparently not.

Abortion is legal upon request in pretty much the entire northern hemisphere. So countries like Canada, Sweden Norway, Denmark, almost all of Europe, China, etc. all have a murder rate far lower than the US. World Abortion Laws and Policies Map

If not guns, what else do you think could be behind the murder problem in the US?

[betsy]

Let's set aside violence in modern times for a moment, because I want to focus on that link you provided from the Guardian, because you are not likely going to hear this from any other atheist/humanists....at least here on this forum!

First, John Gray points out something that almost all new atheist writers do: using the 'Enlightenment' as their example of the pivotal moment in human history when reason overtook superstition and paved the way forward for potentially unending human progress and improvement. As Gray notes, Pinker, just like Dawkins, Hitchens, A.C. Grayling etc., are very selective in how they cherry-pick their way through the list of so called enlightenment thinkers, in order to create the myth of the birth of humanism:

"These are highly disparate thinkers," says Gray, "and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have 'coalesced' from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of 'Enlightenment values', Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs — 'aborigines in the heart of Europe' — would be wiped out."

Gray makes the point that some of these, like the Jacobins, Marx and Bukunin were "illiberal" but I would add that a large part of the reason for their exclusion from Pinker's list is because they are also radical leftists, while today's modern secular humanist movement is tightly constrained between liberalism and libertarianism....so their scorn for the development of capitalism was another reason why Pinker would ignore their contributions.

Pinker himself is a libertarian, and being an evolutionary psychologist, he is as prone as the rest in that stream of thought to claim to have evidence for an arc of human progress. We hear the same from Jared Diamond and Michael Shermer (founder of Skeptic Magazine) has also chimed in with his own book "Believing Brains" that includes the claim that the scientific and technological progress of the human race is leading us towards moral perfection.

Second point would be: this whole argument is constructed on a flimsy foundation right from the start. The Guardian doesn't go back beyond the Enlightenment, but the claims of Pinker, Diamond, Shermer and others who make this argument, are building it in large part of Jared Dimond's work in New Guinea and the Amazon, where he pretty much claims that primitive hunter/gatherers are all savages, who frequently engage in murder, infanticide, rape etc. Somehow Diamond could work and gather data in the western half of the island of New Guinea - administered by Indonesia, and disregard the impact of genocide and forced colonization by the Indonesians on the natives, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 on that half of the Island. And in the Amazon, a lot of his data was taken from a long discredited anthropologist - Napolean Chagnon, who identified one tribe - the Yanomami as "the fierce people" ....bloodthirsty savages, so to speak, but did not include in his field notes the impact he and his assistants had in creating tensions and rivalries among groups by giving metal knives and axes to those they favoured.

In a critical review of Pinker's book in Huffop, psychologist Christopher Ryan, who has a background in anthropology, notes that only one of Pinker's chosen example of hunter/gatherer tribes would really fit the description of true hunter/gatherers, because early accounts on hunter/gatherers are so biased and prejudicial, while more modern accounts fail to acknowledge the cultural contamination from outside influences. It's pretty much impossible for a group of people today to live as prehistoric hunter/gatherers would have thousands of years ago, because the world today is just too crowded, with no open, uninhabited (but inhabitable) territories for people to live out their lives undisturbed by others.

And Ryan notes in that review, what a few others have - that Pinker misrepresents the modern age as well, by ignoring most of the genocides that have occurred away from the developed world....from the rape of Nanking during WWII to the genocides that have occurred in Africa over the last century.

And I would add that, since Shermer is chiming in now with his own vision of a Star Trek Future; that this libertarian-to-liberal capitalism model of scientific and technological progress is indeed like the observations of someone falling off a building being asked how things are going for them....as someone else noted somewhere in this thread. The cold hard facts are that this world is facing a number of converging threats and many of them have been created by the scientific and technological progress that these humanist writers hold dear! Thanks to using up half of the stored carbon fuels in the Earth, our world is getting hotter and the climate is changing rapidly to a new and still undetermined equilibrium, while the use of that carbon as fertilizers has enabled the human population to expand above 7 billion....a population that cannot be sustained for more than a few more decades regardless of what technological rabbits the wizards think they can pull out of the hat!

I've seen many religious fundamentalist writers sift through the work of Dawkins, Pinker and so many others, looking for evidence of an atheist/humanist religion, when it has been staring them in the face all along! It is right in the modern humanist's worship of technology as the means to solve all of our problems. In the past, we thought that technology was about making the material aspects of our lives better, but the new atheists are adding to the faith with claims that technology makes us more peaceful and moral as well. The ultimate absurdity is found in the vision of techno-nirvana of the future - The Singularity - which I think is the level that the more pragmatic humanists aren't willing to accept yet. It is the techno version of a 2nd coming! But if they become more anxious and desperate when contemplating the future, they just might start making that leap into the absurd!

Thanks for that explanation, WIP.

Edited February 7, 2013 by betsy

[Wayward Son]

EXACTLY.

That's why all these nonsense about gun control is just that - nonsense. If society is truly serious about trying to come up with a solution, it'll have to look way beyond its nose. And start digging deeper. And consider the spiritual aspect of this.

I am prepared to accept that a multifaceted solution based on the best evidence to a complex problem may or may not involve changes to gun control legislation, and that the solution devised may include aspects that challenge beliefs I hold. Pinker's book, by the way, both challenges many long held Conservative and Liberal views about violence, crime and punishment. It also upholds many long held Conservative and Liberal views about violence, crime and punishment. He trampled several views I held, and under the weight of the evidence I gladly accepted the death of sacred cows.

You seem unprepared to accept that a multifaceted solution based on the best evidence to a complex problem might involve changes to gun control legislation, or for that matter, that the solution may involve anything that challenged your worldview.

[The_Squid]

And consider the spiritual aspect of this.

If it is a "spiritual" issue, why do countries that are much less religious also have much lower murder rates? As has been stated, if religion helped a country be less violent, the USA would lead in these categories in the western world. It does not. It is more violent than less religious countries.

[betsy]

You seem unprepared to accept that a multifaceted solution based on the best evidence to a complex problem might involve changes to gun control legislation, or for that matter, that the solution may involve anything that challenged your worldview.

I'm not interested in a band-aid solution - using dirty band-aid at that.

Gun control will not change anything - so never mind your multi-faceted solution. Your complex problem is definitely not solved by this very simplistic solution - such as gun control. What it does will be to endanger more people, by removing their means of protection!

If monsters are targetting to kill people without any motives at all - everyone is a sitting duck! Americans are wasting their time and effort debating over this. It's all just political posturing.

[Guest Manny]

There could be many influential reasons why the right to life is not held as supreme. Capital punishment means they have a general cultural attitude that the State has the right to terminate the life of an individual. They think it is ok to kill under certain circumstances. The circumstances matter more than the persons life.This cheapens the value of life.

I think among the western workd they have the highest (or maybe, 'only') rates of capital punishment. Plus the rates of incarceration are among the highest. Life is cheap there. People are treated as commodities, and they respond in kind. It hints that the violence is coming from the state somehow.

[betsy]

If it is a "spiritual" issue, why do countries that are much less religious also have much lower murder rates? As has been stated, if religion helped a country be less violent, the USA would lead in these categories in the western world. It does not. It is more violent than less religious countries.

Your interpretation of "religious" may not jive with a Christian's view of being, "religious." Of course I'm speaking from a Christian standpoint, very much the same as Scott.

Matthew 7:21-23

New King James Version (NKJV)

I Never Knew You

²¹ “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. ²² Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

This is just a speculation on my part: The USA is one of the most - if not the most - influential country in all the world. It has the power to influence and shape morality. Practically everything it legislates is copied by a lot of countries....even countries that are predominantly Christians have turned their backs on some of God's laws.

Edited February 7, 2013 by betsy

[Canuckistani]

If it is a "spiritual" issue, why do countries that are much less religious also have much lower murder rates? As has been stated, if religion helped a country be less violent, the USA would lead in these categories in the western world. It does not. It is more violent than less religious countries.

spirituality =/ religion

[Wayward Son]

Let's set aside violence in modern times for a moment, because I want to focus on that link you provided from the Guardian, because you are not likely going to hear this from any other atheist/humanists....at least here on this forum!

First, John Gray points out something that almost all new atheist writers do: using the 'Enlightenment' as their example of the pivotal moment in human history when reason overtook superstition and paved the way forward for potentially unending human progress and improvement. As Gray notes, Pinker, just like Dawkins, Hitchens, A.C. Grayling etc., are very selective in how they cherry-pick their way through the list of so called enlightenment thinkers, in order to create the myth of the birth of humanism:

"These are highly disparate thinkers," says Gray, "and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have 'coalesced' from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of 'Enlightenment values', Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs — 'aborigines in the heart of Europe' — would be wiped out."

Gray makes the point that some of these, like the Jacobins, Marx and Bukunin were "illiberal" but I would add that a large part of the reason for their exclusion from Pinker's list is because they are also radical leftists, while today's modern secular humanist movement is tightly constrained between liberalism and libertarianism....so their scorn for the development of capitalism was another reason why Pinker would ignore their contributions.

Pinker himself is a libertarian, and being an evolutionary psychologist, he is as prone as the rest in that stream of thought to claim to have evidence for an arc of human progress. We hear the same from Jared Diamond and Michael Shermer (founder of Skeptic Magazine) has also chimed in with his own book "Believing Brains" that includes the claim that the scientific and technological progress of the human race is leading us towards moral perfection.

Second point would be: this whole argument is constructed on a flimsy foundation right from the start. The Guardian doesn't go back beyond the Enlightenment, but the claims of Pinker, Diamond, Shermer and others who make this argument, are building it in large part of Jared Dimond's work in New Guinea and the Amazon, where he pretty much claims that primitive hunter/gatherers are all savages, who frequently engage in murder, infanticide, rape etc. Somehow Diamond could work and gather data in the western half of the island of New Guinea - administered by Indonesia, and disregard the impact of genocide and forced colonization by the Indonesians on the natives, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 on that half of the Island. And in the Amazon, a lot of his data was taken from a long discredited anthropologist - Napolean Chagnon, who identified one tribe - the Yanomami as "the fierce people" ....bloodthirsty savages, so to speak, but did not include in his field notes the impact he and his assistants had in creating tensions and rivalries among groups by giving metal knives and axes to those they favoured.

In a critical review of Pinker's book in Huffop, psychologist Christopher Ryan, who has a background in anthropology, notes that only one of Pinker's chosen example of hunter/gatherer tribes would really fit the description of true hunter/gatherers, because early accounts on hunter/gatherers are so biased and prejudicial, while more modern accounts fail to acknowledge the cultural contamination from outside influences. It's pretty much impossible for a group of people today to live as prehistoric hunter/gatherers would have thousands of years ago, because the world today is just too crowded, with no open, uninhabited (but inhabitable) territories for people to live out their lives undisturbed by others.

And Ryan notes in that review, what a few others have - that Pinker misrepresents the modern age as well, by ignoring most of the genocides that have occurred away from the developed world....from the rape of Nanking during WWII to the genocides that have occurred in Africa over the last century.

And I would add that, since Shermer is chiming in now with his own vision of a Star Trek Future; that this libertarian-to-liberal capitalism model of scientific and technological progress is indeed like the observations of someone falling off a building being asked how things are going for them....as someone else noted somewhere in this thread. The cold hard facts are that this world is facing a number of converging threats and many of them have been created by the scientific and technological progress that these humanist writers hold dear! Thanks to using up half of the stored carbon fuels in the Earth, our world is getting hotter and the climate is changing rapidly to a new and still undetermined equilibrium, while the use of that carbon as fertilizers has enabled the human population to expand above 7 billion....a population that cannot be sustained for more than a few more decades regardless of what technological rabbits the wizards think they can pull out of the hat!

I've seen many religious fundamentalist writers sift through the work of Dawkins, Pinker and so many others, looking for evidence of an atheist/humanist religion, when it has been staring them in the face all along! It is right in the modern humanist's worship of technology as the means to solve all of our problems. In the past, we thought that technology was about making the material aspects of our lives better, but the new atheists are adding to the faith with claims that technology makes us more peaceful and moral as well. The ultimate absurdity is found in the vision of techno-nirvana of the future - The Singularity - which I think is the level that the more pragmatic humanists aren't willing to accept yet. It is the techno version of a 2nd coming! But if they become more anxious and desperate when contemplating the future, they just might start making that leap into the absurd!

Typical critical response to Pinker's book. Zero evidence or statistics to refute his claims that violence has been dramatically falling for a couple hundred years.

First we hear from Gray, one of the strongest anti-enlightenment philosophers on the planet complaining that Pinker is an advocate of enlightenment thinking, but some enlightenment thinkers used political violence. Anything to counter Pinker's actual facts...you know about violence levels? No, too busy poisoning the well.

Next we hear that Pinker is a libertarian and an evolutionary psychologist. Well that must prove his statistics and evidence is wrong right? No logical fallacy there.

Next is the association, lumping Pinker in with other people who believe (supposedly) that we are marching towards moral perfection. A view that Pinker explicitly rejects in his book...but why should that matter.

Next we hear that Pinker's work is largely based on Diamond's work. The book barely mentions Diamond's work, concentrating almost exclusively on western countries in the last couple years. Pinker does talk about the evidence for violence levels in ancient civilization, and to a lesser extent the evidence for violence in hunter gatherer societies making clear that the evidence is scarce and therefore highly tentative. I would say he spends significantly more time on the evidence for violence found in skeletal remains then he does with Diamond works, however, those who criticize Diamond's work spend far more time complaining that Diamond concentrates on more violent hunter-gatherer societies then they do providing actual evidence for the violence levels of the hunter-gatherer societies they claim are more peaceful. Perhaps they could mention the studies and evidence that Pinker missed...but they don't. I wonder why?

Next we hear from Ryan, whose book "Sex at Dawn" is both one of favorites and critical of Pinker in one of its chapters. Who is his review complains that Pinker is overly focused on the west, even though Pinker states from the first page that his book would concentrate on the west for the reasons that the best data over the past several hundred years is found there, and there is a relatively common cultural evolution among western countries. Violence levels in Africa or the Rape of Nanking have nothing to do with supporting or opposing his thesis. It is as stupid as claiming that violence levels in the United States refute claims about violence levels in Canada.

And the post continues on with the views of Shermer. But not a single speck of evidence to counter the central claim of Pinker's work. Not one. You might think that such evidence would play at least some part in the criticism, instead of just nonstop well poisoning. But it never does.

[Wayward Son]

I'm not interested in a band-aid solution - using dirty band-aid at that.

Gun control will not change anything - so never mind your multi-faceted solution. Your complex problem is definitely not solved by this very simplistic solution - such as gun control.

And if gun control would change something? Is it possible for your mind to even contemplate that you might be wrong about something? Australia strengthened gun control laws 16 years ago. In terms of mass killings there 11 in the 10 years before, and zero in the 16 after. That doesn't give me a certainty that changes to gun control laws would result in the same thing in the US. I will accept where the evidence leads. But do you at least have the intellectual honesty to admit that it is possible that gun controls may change something?

Edited February 7, 2013 by Wayward Son

[Canuckistani]

Gun control isn't a panacea to stop the insane levels of violence in the US. But it sure couldn't hurt either. Americans following the actual teachings of Jesus, as his early Jewish followers did, i.e., "turn the other cheek, give away all that you have and follow me, look not for the mote in other's eyes but at the log in yours, judge not lest ye be judged, the kingdom of heaven is within" etc would stop the violence, but it would collapse the economy. Besides, the Americans aren't big on communalism.

[bush_cheney2004]

Americans would pop a cap in Jesus too if he tried to ban their guns. The U.S. has already been through this in the 1930's and 1960's. The "cure" would be worse than the disease, and a citizen's 2nd Amendment rights will not be infringed because of criminals or the mentally ill.

[Mighty AC]

There could be many influential reasons why the right to life is not held as supreme. Capital punishment means they have a general cultural attitude that the State has the right to terminate the life of an individual. They think it is ok to kill under certain circumstances. The circumstances matter more than the persons life.This cheapens the value of life.

I think among the western workd they have the highest (or maybe, 'only') rates of capital punishment. Plus the rates of incarceration are among the highest. Life is cheap there. People are treated as commodities, and they respond in kind. It hints that the violence is coming from the state somehow.

Several countries that still retain retain the death penalty have much lower murder rates.

Country (Murders per 100k)

China (1.0)

Japan (0.4)

India (3.4)

USA (4.8)

Though China, Japan and India have restrictive gun laws.

[bush_cheney2004]

Canada has a higher "murder rate" than China or Japan, despite restrictive gun laws:

Statistics Canada said on Tuesday the number of murders rose by 44 to 598 in 2011, or about 1.73 murders per 100,000 people.

http://bangordailyne...in-three-years/

The correlation remains unclear, as many murders are committed without firearms.

Edited February 7, 2013 by bush_cheney2004

[Sleipnir]

Though China, Japan and India have restrictive gun laws.

Shouldn't be a surprise for anyone that China has restrictive gun laws.

Edited February 7, 2013 by Sleipnir

[Mighty AC]

Canada has a higher "murder rate" than China or Japan, despite restrictive gun laws:

Statistics Canada said on Tuesday the number of murders rose by 44 to 598 in 2011, or about 1.73 murders per 100,000 people.

http://bangordailyne...in-three-years/

The correlation remains unclear, as many murders are committed without firearms.

Unfortunately our gun laws are not near as restrictive as those in China and Japan. As a result Canada has 6x more guns per capita than China and 5x more than Japan. Though Americans still have almost 3x as many firearms as Canadians per capita. In the US, 60% of the murders are committed with a gun, in Canada it drops to 32%, Hell more Americans have been killed by guns in the US since 1968 than have died in all wars combined. What are these guns protecting you from?

http://www.politifac...re-killed-guns/

http://www.guardian....ship-world-list

http://en.wikipedia....pita_by_country

[Bonam]

Unfortunately our gun laws are not near as restrictive as those in China and Japan. As a result Canada has 6x more guns per capita than China and 5x more than Japan.

Why is that unfortunate? China is the precise example of a country where a dictator butchered millions of his own people, people that were defenseless against such tyranny. China is the place people point to (along with Russia and Germany) when they make the whole argument of "if only people had guns to oppose a tyrannical government!".

[bush_cheney2004]

Hell more Americans have been killed by guns in the US since 1968 than have died in all wars combined. What are these guns protecting you from?

And a helluva lot more Americans have been killed in motor vehicle accidents than that, but we still drive cars. As for the guns, they are the tools of liberty, sport, hunting, robbery, homicide, and suicide. Also came in handy when getting rid of you guys and your monarchy.