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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (4842)	11/10/1999 2:40:00 PM
From: pezz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 6418

<<Let's take guns out of the argument and focus on why we are such a violent society.>> This of course would be the ideal approach. But as you well know we have been attempting to do this for quite some time now...... easier said than done!...In the meantime senseless killing continues. I have never made the absurd claim that guns are the cause of this violence. But death being so final if we can take away the means of some of this killing even at the cost of some freedoms perhaps it might be a sacrifice that we can live with. << address the root causes of our society's violence,>> All suggestions will be welcome. We live in a very complex society...Like rats stuffed into a small space. Our evolutionary tendency toward "me first" responding to emotional and cultural situations often lead to violence. What to do? True taking away the guns is putting a band aid on a festering wound. Only a symptom fighter at best. But until some real solutions are found.... pez

To: Bill who wrote (4842)	11/10/1999 2:44:00 PM
From: Null Dog Ago	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6418

Here's something that isn't being taken into consideration: Our leniency on crime and judgment. Remember that caning incident in Singapore? Many countries are much harsher with their judgment and thus their people are more likely to avoid getting in trouble. Am I saying we should be as strict as them? HELL NO! Our system is far less likely to punish an innocent who's been wrongly accused. The point is, it just isn't a cut and dry comparison when you compare the U.S. with other countries.

To: Bill who wrote (4842)	11/14/1999 7:12:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

We are not a violent society. There is nothing I know of in us as a society that makes us prone to violence. We have several million really violent people. The overwhelming majority of us are completely peaceful and law abiding. Many of the violent people can readily be identified by their histories, police records, and observable behavior. Many of them have suffered from frontal brain lobe damage (maybe ten percent of people have some form of frontal lobe damage -- mosat of them are not violent.) Many of the potentially violent can be identified by neurological and characterological tests (many can't). Many suffer from schizophrenia or schizoid states, many suffer from bipolar disorder. Many of the brain-damaged and mentally ill people (violent or not) can have their behavior materially improved by therapy, especially drugs. A large proportion of violent adults grew up from disturbed, violent, abused, and neglected children. I have studied particular cases where children in public foster care were abused (raped) in their foster homes and grew up so disturbed that they both collected millions from suing the state and were judged by psychatrists to be potential mass murderers (but were released to the public because there was no law under which they could be held. I have not yet seen them commit any murders -- yet). A very large proportion of the prisoners who get long sentences here have multiple violent crimes. We do not allow the death penalty and punish most crimes lightly by American standards. This state (Hawaii) has a very low rate of violent crime and murder, and a relatively small proportion of the population in prison. We have relatively few people in poverty (11%) and below average public schools. Our child mental health and special education programs are under federal consent decrees because of their inadequacy, and our adult mental hospital is unaccredited and desperately need improvement. I calculate we spend $370,000 per inmate-year in our very small juvenile custodial system. Even so, judging by the amount of crime in the state, we are doing very well. Most people believe that this is a quite safe place. A recent sample showed that 80% of the school children feel safe a school. Yet a long-time worker walked into his office and shot seven fellow workers dead with a Glock 9mm pistol. The killer was seriously disturbed and a gun collector with a history of violent property crime and what will turjn out to be a screwy personality. I believe he could have been identified long before his murderous outburst and could have been treated or imprisoned if we understood violence better than we do. I hope we will use this opportunity to learn more about why certain people do these terrible things, and learn to predict and to predict their violence. I wish we could study Klebold and Harris too.