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sour taste...
It follows that secular folk, who are infecting the nation with a terrible spirit of moral relativism, will not fully understand the concept of evil, except in glimmerings when something terrible happens.
As Mr Mohler put it:
It is both telling and reassuring that secular people, faced with moral horror as we see now in Las Vegas, can…speak of evil as a moral fact—even if they continue to deny moral facts in the classrooms and courtrooms.
Another clear implication of the stress on “evil” is that there is no point trying to stop its effects through regulation. If evil is an inexorable feature of a fallen plane of existence, one that has been tainted from the very start of things by human sin, then no policy measures will ever remove it. The only response to evil is to identify it clearly, to avoid secular soft-headedness, and perhaps to mitigate its effects as and when they arise, without presuming to abolish it. In other words, gun control will not work.
That is almost the opposite of the thinking that has prevailed among America’s Catholic bishops for several decades. According to a roundup by Crux, a Catholic news service, as early as 1975 the nation’s bishops were calling for a national firearms policy that would make it harder to buy and use guns on impulse. Last year Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas praised the gun-control initiatives of President Barack Obama as a welcome change from congressional deference to the “gun lobby”.
In its most radical pronouncements, the Vatican under Pope Francis has shown sympathy for the view that the “structural violence” implicit in unjust and unequal societies is as much to blame for gun deaths as any individual moral calculus. The Pope has particularly condemned the sale of weapons for profit, whether within countries or internationally, as a huge moral scourge.
...
Either end of this religious-ideological spectrum can go to funny extremes. An approach that puts overwhelming emphasis on the structural or regulatory context of violence can leave itself open to mockery by seeming to deny that individuals have moral choices. But whatever you may think about the causes of badness in the world, it seems manifestly absurd to suggest that the legislator should not try, at least, to reduce the scope for evil to prevail.
read more:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2017/10/guns-and-god
---------------
This article (Guns and God) in the economist is, as usual for the pseudo-moralistic press, a half-way house to do nothing while not being against prevention, and not presenting any real arguments.
The US constitution mentions “militias” not individuals in regard to the right to “bear arms”. It’s a trick of the trade to believe otherwise. Question: what is more evil, selling $300 billions worth of arms to the Saudis so they can crush a rebellion they dislike in Yemen or killing 59 people at a Country and Western concert in Las Vegas “for no reason”?...
What puzzles us is the “no reason” reason. for many this is the real “evil”... No reason... Which means that this Las Vegas event could happen somewhere else, because there are many people with no reason (to live) — and with guns. We will try to find reasons under any rock, any cupboards, any kitchen sink. We can’t accept “no reason” because we have had religious gobbledegook since Adam and Eve pumped down our throat and that should be enough to kill-off the no reason in all of us, while we know deep in our psyche that there is no reason for us to exist, beyond a manufactured brainwashing of “good and evil”...
The point is that most learned secular people who don’t believe in god — atheists like myself — don’t believe in “evil”. Evil here is not a moral fact. Evil should not enter the realms of psychoanalysis. That some people are deranged is not new. Obsession is not a new concept. History is full of mad men (4 to 1 more in comparison to the number of women) who have committed acts with a subtext of being lunatic and psychopath but presented to us as glorious when it suited our side of the story. Adding the ability to acquire guns to lunatic obsession is our social stupidity.
The side of the story in the USA is that guns are good. We are not going to let a few idiots stop our love of guns. The complex relationship between our normalising violence in our theatres and our video gaming in which pain is not felt — and real life in which pain is real can become very close, in our “lunacy”. . On average we are stupid monkeys, holding to various ways to make our life a bit more enjoyable and less painful. That should be reason enough. The reason of individual gun ownership to defend ourselves is tenuous in this context. At one stage or another, this will come undone. Innocent people will die, whether in Las Vegas or in Yemen, for “no reason” except we need to manufacture a “reason”, including the concept of evil. Evil does not exist.
Cummings’s business strategy was that the military market is based on human folly -- not normal market precepts. Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists -- and its depths have never been plumbed.
And the human folly is not exclusive to the military...
- By Gus Leonisky at 4 Oct 2017 - 7:33am
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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reading matter...
Snow-capped mountains with a fringe on top, all in the clouds.http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/24266
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30436
http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/24185
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33205
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/8961
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/6533
and many more on this site...
looking for "a reason"...
The Las Vegas Shooter Didn’t Just “Snap.” They Never Do.
Psychopathy and suicidal behaviorAs investigators seek deeper insight into what could explain the attack, perhaps the most intriguing background on Paddock goes way back: His father was a notorious bank robber once on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, classified by the bureau in 1969 as a dangerous psychopath with suicidal tendencies. (Suicidal behavior is also common among mass shooters—a majority take their own lives, as Paddock did.) According to threat assessment expert Dr. Reid Meloy, research indicates that psychopathic traits can be inherited, and that this is more likely to happen the more severe the trait. That condition “wouldn’t explain specifics of the act,” says Meloy, “but may explain the detachment and cruelty to carry out such an act.”
Evidence may yet emerge as to what was going on inside Paddock’s mind as he plotted his slaughter. It was without a doubt a hideous and evil act, and it was hardly inexplicable.
Read more:
http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2017/10/the-las-vegas-shooter-d...
Gus: First, let's reiterate that "evil" does not exist (see top article). We all can do things that are contrary to the social code — so-called moral or civil. It is inbuilt in our human nature that we posess a critical level of rationality/irrationality (often of survival, desperation and deluded self-awareness) that can overcome the censorship of our psyche-inhibitors, most learned from childhood. This is where sadists get their kicks. This is where masochists get their enjoyment of pain — moral or physical. This is where MOST rulers make decisions which are contrary to human nature — for profit, for glory, for self-promotion, or impose ruthless religious decrees. This is where psychopaths live. Psychopaths are difficult to pinpoint, especially those in power, because at most point they will act normally while their psyche is not. Some will act loony and still get the gong. The following extract is from a book called Psychopathology and Politics by Harold D. Lasswell. This was published in 1930, before Hitler came to power but at a time when there was already a sniff of "white supremacy" and Nazism.
This is from :
Chapter X (10) — The Politics of Prevention (Psychopathology and Politics)
....
The state is a symbol of authority, and as such is the legatee of attitudes which have been organised in the life of the individual within the intimate interpersonal sphere of the home and friendship group. At one phase of childhood development the wisdom and might of the physical symbol of authority, typically the father, is enormously exaggerated by the child. Eder [Gus bold] traces the significance of this for the state in the following words:
"What occurs as we come more in touch with the external world, when the principle of reality develops, is the finding of surrogates for this ideal father. We discover that the parent is not all-wise, all powerful, all good, but we still need to find persons or abstractions upon which we can distribute these and similar attributes. By a process of fission these feelings are displaced on to and may be distributed amongst a number of surrogates. The surrogates may be persons, animals, things or abstract ideas; the headmaster, the dog, the rabbit, the Empire, the Aryan race or any particular “ism”."
He comments that it is upon this self-ideal that is formed the possibility of leadership, of leaders, and of the supreme leader, who is the one capable of doing all that the child once thought the physical father could do. The unconscious motivation is reflected in the sober formula of blackstone, “The sovereign is not only incapable of doing wrong, but even thinking wrong: he can never mean to do an improper thing; in him is no folly or weakness.”
end of quote from Lasswell
Gus: In 1932, David Eder presented his concept of the Myth of Progress. Writing in the British Journal of Medical Psychology, Eder argued that while civilization is moving forward due to advances in science, politics and technology, these advances are actually contributing to greater unhappiness as man perceives a loss of control over his environment.
Eder was a rabid Zionist bent on creating an exclusive Israel: “There can be only one national home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs.”
Here one can see the confusing hypocrisy of Eder — one that leads to a supremacist of some sorts... here Jewish, instead of Aryan (or Arab). When Eder says "The surrogates may be persons, animals, things or abstract ideas; the headmaster, the dog, the rabbit, the Empire, the Aryan race or any particular “ism”." one can easily add "the gun" to this list of surrogates. If you are looking for a "reason" for the shooting, it has nothing to do with "evil" but to a man who wants to control his environment and be in charge of whatever, including the misery and death of people. This is the psychopathy of leadership in which sadism and self-eradication merge is a last act of life...This is why there is a strong need to control guns in the USA. Simple.
gun sights and accessories...
Top congressional Republicans, who have for decades resisted any legislative limits on guns, signaled on Wednesday that they would be open to banning the firearm accessory that the Las Vegas gunman used to transform his rifles to mimic automatic weapon fire.
For a generation, Republicans in Congress — often joined by conservative Democrats — have bottled up gun legislation, even as the carnage of mass shootings grew ever more gruesome and the weaponry ever more deadly. A decade ago, they blocked efforts to limit the size of magazines after the massacre at Virginia Tech. Five years later, Republican leaders thwarted bipartisan legislation to expand background checks of gun purchasers after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
Last year, in the wake of the Orlando nightclub massacre, they blocked legislation to stop gun sales to buyers on terrorism watch lists.
But in this week’s massacre in Las Vegas, lawmakers in both parties may have found the part of the weapons trade that few could countenance: previously obscure gun conversion kits, called “bump stocks,” that turn semiautomatic weapons into weapons capable of firing in long, deadly bursts.
read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/us/politics/bump-stock-fire-legal-republicans-congress.html
See also:
A T-34 as a garden-gnome replacement for christmas...
some of them have more guns than others...
American citizens make up 42 percent of the 650 million civilian firearms owners in the world, according to the Small Arms Survey, an independent research project based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Stephen Paddock, architect of last week’s mass shooting in Nevada, had 43 guns stocked between his hotel suite and two homes, Las Vegas police said Tuesday evening at a news conference. The weapons were bought in Nevada, California, Utah and Texas, officials said.
Fifty-nine people were slain and at least 527 injured when Paddock opened fire in Las Vegas Sunday night. The shooting was the deadliest in US history.
Read more:
https://sputniknews.com/us/201710051057958210-guns-americans-plurality-f...
Change the Way You Play...
SLIDE FIRE SOLUTIONS SSAR-15.MPG
SlideFireSolutions.com - Prepare to Change the Way You Play
read more:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120604073136/http://www.slidefire.com:80/m...
going for a new record... sports, guns and mad competition...
Las Vegas: How US mass shootings are getting worseDeadly rampages are happening more often and claiming more American lives. Here's how the US changed.
Video by the BBC's Franz Strasser
see more at:
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-41474594/las-vegas-how-us-mas...
Read above:
looking for "a reason"...
rapid fire in the cross-hair...
For more than a year, the Georgia Gun Store in Gainesville had no requests for a bump stock — an accessory that transforms a semi-automatic rifle into a weapon capable of firing hundreds of rounds a minute.
Key pointsBut following Sunday's mass shooting in Las Vegas, the shop fielded several calls from customers asking about the product.
The store's owner, Kellie Weeks, said several distributors were out of stock when she called them seeking supplies.
"Anybody that wants to get them is probably just worried that they're going to be banned," Ms Weeks said.
Authorities say the shooter, Stephen Paddock, had 12 rifles outfitted with bump stocks among the arsenal of weapons in his hotel room, and audio of the attack suggested he used weapons with rapid-fire capabilities.
read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-05/us-gun-stores-sell-out-of-bump-sto...
the inverse of the square in a barrel...
The pattern is by now numbingly familiar. A lone lunatic murders a mass of innocent people in some public location. There is a heartfelt cry for tighter control on gun ownership. Then state legislatures swing into action. They pass a series of laws loosening controls on gun ownership.
As David Frum points out in The Atlantic, the five years since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School “have seen one of the most intense bursts of gun legislation in U.S. history.” More than two dozen states have passed new gun laws. And in almost all cases these laws have made it easier to buy or carry guns.
Wisconsin eliminated its 48-hour waiting period to buy handguns. Ohio allowed concealed-carry weapons to be brought into day care facilities and airports. Florida changed its “stand your ground” law to make it harder to prosecute gun owners.
The expansion of gun rights is directly related to the epidemic of mass shootings. A study by Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra and Christopher Poliquin of Harvard Business School found that a single mass shooting leads to a 15 percent increase in firearm bills introduced in the same state’s legislature within a year.
read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/guns-soul-of-america.html
prevention...
Four years after then-President Barack Obama responded to the shooting deaths of 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, by ordering U.S. health agencies to sponsor gun research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has let lapse a funding program probing firearm violence and how to prevent it, Science has learned. Renewal of the program, which has funded 22 projects for $18 million over the past 3 years, "is still under consideration" a NIH spokesperson said on 6 September, although the agency stopped accepting proposals in January and the last new awards are now being launched.
NIH told Science that scientists may still apply to do firearm research outside the program. Gun researchers say that's not enough, noting that thematic funding programs signal NIH priorities to scientists. They can also help tilt grant decisions toward those in the highlighted area over others that are equally good, but outside it. "It's really critically important to renew that program if we want more firearms research," says Rina Das Eiden, a developmental psychologist at the State University of New York in Buffalo.
Das Eiden and several collaborators won an award to study whether violence exposure and substance use raise the odds of gun violence in high-risk adolescents. "It would have been much harder for us to get funding for this research without that specific program announcement on firearm violence," she says.
read more:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/nih-quietly-shelves-gun-research-...
read also:
looking for "a reason"...
Unfortunately for "some of" the Americans who believe in the right to carry a guns, comes a temptation to use them. The better access to guns, the more danger to society in regard to the same proportion of comparable population. Guns are sophisticated machines DESIGNED TO KILL SOMETHING and/or SOMEONE. In this regard, there is no point of owning a gun if you do not use it or not prepared to use it. This is the rationale that will invade the space between the ears of psychopaths, of which four per cent of the human population are. As we all are psychos in our own way to various degrees, sanity appears a long long long way away. Gun availability creates its own culture of shooting SOMETHING OR SOMEONE. Most studies of the gun problem would come to the starting conclusion that guns can incite people to kill by virtue of ease and of the subconscious psyche engendered by the possession thereof.
It's time to limit gun ownership in the USA.
child sacrifice started with abraham...
How can we determine whether we are in bondage to an idol? Intensity of reaction is a sure-fire marker that we traffic with the sacred. We know that the gun has become a sacred object because it commands unquestioning reverence. Interrogating its sacral status triggers anger and even death threats because the sacred calls for unconditional loyalty and obedience.
Theologians sort out true worship from false by insisting that the true God demands justice and mercy, never blood sacrifice. By contrast, the flag, the market and the gun - the true American trinity - cannot be questioned, and all three require blood.
Only by recognizing the gun as an idol can we explain why we stand in helpless thrall to it even though more Americans have been killed by it, children included, than in all of America's foreign wars combined. Idols are bloodthirsty; they are never satisfied.
Apart from a religious analysis, the NRA's power defies comprehension. Money alone affords insufficient explanation. Campaign contributions from gun manufacturers funnelled through the NRA exercise powerful influence over legislators, but for the 3% of the American population who own 50% of America's guns, and others who read the Second Amendment as holy writ that sanctifies the inalienable right to individual gun ownership, something more primal is at work.
On Sunday, many Americans may worship in church. But the rest of the week, the God whom Americans actually worship and in whom they find refuge, is Smith & Wesson.
John J. Thatamanil is Associate Professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament.
Read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/10/12/4748791.htm
Worshipping of any sorts, a stone, a cross, a god, anything is IDOLATRY...
remembering bushit gun thingy...
mad america .....
mad people with sensible guns...
Donald Trump has blamed Sunday’s deadly mass shooting at a Baptist church in Texas on the mental health of the perpetrator and claimed that gun ownership was not a factor.
Asked during a press conference in Tokyo what policies he would support to tackle mass shootings in the US, the president said: “I think that mental health is a problem here. Based on preliminary reports, this was a very deranged individual with a lot of problems over a very long period of time.
“We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries, but this isn’t a guns situation … we could go into it but it’s a little bit soon to go into it. Fortunately somebody else had a gun that was shooting in the opposite direction, otherwise it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was, it would have been much worse.
“This is a mental health problem at the highest level. It’s a very sad event … these are great people at a very, very sad event, but that’s the way I view it.”
read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/06/this-isnt-a-guns-situation-says-trump-after-texas-church-shooting
---------------
Yep... "We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries..." Trump is sort of correct though one could suggest there are more mad opportunistic (psychopaths) people in the USA. Bu the main point is that THERE ARE FAR MORE GUNS available to mad people IN THE USA than say in Australia. This is a simple equation that eludes the law makers in the USA. The next problem is to have Trump and his bunch of loonies in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet...
Read from top...
pray more pray less — it won't do a fucking thing...
See:
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34487#comment-40265
guns, guns, guns...
Florida mayors have been trying to implement stricter gun-control laws for years, but have been unable to do so — because it’s illegal.
“I think it’s outrageous,” said South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard.
“Why should the cities be prohibited from protecting their citizens?”
Speaking to the Miami Herald this week — just days after the Parkland school massacre — Stoddard and several others lashed out at a local 2011 law, which gives Florida’s governor the power to remove an elected official and fine them $5,000 for creating gun-control policies.
While the state has banned mayors from doing so since the 1980s, it wasn’t until six years ago that lawmakers in Tallahassee started adding fines and other penalties.
“A number of cities and local counties decided they were going to break the law,” explained Sean Caranna, volunteer director of the gun owners advocacy group Florida Carry.
“They made the conscious decision to say: ‘We don’t care what the law is. We’re going to break it,’” he said. “We put teeth into the law.”
Before 2011, there had been a wide range of local gun laws, ordinances and other rules in effect throughout Florida.
Residents in the city of Groveland, for example, had been barred from firing their guns into the air in celebration. People living in Palm Beach County were previously forced to leave their weapons at home or in their car when visiting government buildings and local parks.
“Now you can have a shooting gallery in your backyard,” Shelley Vana, a Palm Beach County commissioner, told the New York Times after the 2011 law was passed.
“We are really urban areas here,” she said. “I understand that guns are appropriate in a lot of places with no problems. But in an urban area, it’s different.”
Read more:
https://nypost.com/2018/02/19/florida-mayors-could-be-removed-from-offic...
Sing "GUNS, GUNS, GUNS" to the tune of "girls, girls, girls..."
I'm going to eat my cartoon at top...
President Trump stunned Democrats and Republicans alike on Wednesday by pushing for gun-control measures that have long been poison pills for the GOP and pipe dreams for their opponents.
The president, during a televised, hourlong sitdown at the White House with a bipartisan group of lawmakers, appeared to back a bill proposed in 2013 by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania that would expand background checks for weapons purchases.
The bill — written in response to the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Conn. — failed in the Senate due to intense Republican opposition.
But Trump called it a good starting point and even questioned whether other ideas championed by Democrats, such as an assault-weapons ban and raising the minimum age to buy a gun to 21, could be included in one bill everyone could agree on.
“Fellas, if you can all get together and we can get one great piece of legislation — people want to see something happen. It would be so beautiful to have one bill that everyone could support,” Trump said as California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein sat with a stunned smile on her face.
“I think it’s time that a president stepped up. I’m talking Democrat and Republican presidents, they’ve not stepped up,” Trump said.
Trump also shot down the GOP’s proposed Conceal Carry Reciprocity Act, which would allow people with permits to carry guns across state lines.
“I just don’t think you’re going to get it approved. Amy and Dianne and a lot of other people — they’re never going to consider it,” he told House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), referring to Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Feinstein.
Trump was in the midst of saying that some lawmakers were “petrified” of the National Rifle Association — while insisting that it should be easy to get 100 votes in the Senate to pass gun-safety laws, not just the filibuster-proof 60 needed to pass most legislation — when he was interrupted by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
Read more:
https://nypost.com/2018/02/28/trump-to-senators-you-are-petrified-of-the...
Trump knows that he can push to get a "deal"... The populace has had enough of inaction and THIS WILL MAKE HIM MORE POPULAR (populist —except with the gun-toting christians) THAN ANY PRESIDENT BEFORE HIM. He's going to "kill" 'em!... Of course the liberal progressive media will spit chips...
looking down the barrel...
America's oldest gunmaker, Remington, has filed for bankruptcy protection and Donald Trump is partly to blame.
Key points:The company's problems started long before the recent calls for tighter gun control in the wake of the Parkland shooting in Florida last month.
The company said sales fell significantly in the year before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Some are calling it the "Trump slump".
"When there is a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, there is more fear that gun control will pass and therefore firearms will be harder to obtain, as a result people rush out, they buy more guns," said Polly Mosendz, firearms industry reporter for Bloomberg News.
Read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-28/america-oldest-gunmaker-remington-...
Read from top...