Quote:
Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling
I just want to add one last comment.
I don't understand the line of reasoning that it isn't meaningful to address gun control because that wouldn't solve anything when there are so many other problems: poverty, too many guns on the street already, drugs, etc.
Mike Cantor put it wisely in an early post. You have to start somewhere.
You have to start. Somewhere.
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Janice,
I am not sure if this in part refers to my post above, but to be clear, I do heartily, desperately, support gun control. And I support it to an incredibly strict degree -- I'd say hunting rifles, strictly defined and regulated, and nothing else. I support the repeal of the Second Amendment and have told my Congressional representatives so.
But I still believe social inequality is the biggest problem, and the one from which nearly all others stem. The ways in which it contributesnto the gun problem are numerous. It leads to money-motivated crime. It leads to drug traffic. It leads to unbearable stress, trauma, and psychological pressure. It leads to a lack of diagnosis and treatment mental illness. It leads to chronic, deep-seeded, pathological anger and resentment.
Violence is to be sure a special cultural sickness of our society -- along with racism and a pathological species of individualism -- but I am pretty well convinced that these pathologies are manifestations of social inequality more than they are causes of it or problems separate from it. So, what I said before -- that gun control is a stop gap -- is not to say it is not a measure to be desired, but just that there are deeper more powerful ills -- violence, inequality -- that need to be addressed if we hope for lasting solutions.
I am not sure if this post is particularly cogent (or any other of my posts in this thread for that matter) and I know I am asserting things without sufficient argument and evidence, but I will have to ask that you require better arguments from me at some later time. I need to stop participating in this thread because it is interfering with the delicately constructed "critical optimism" I have to maintain in order function without succumbing to nausea and depression.
Carry on the good fight.
David R.