[Godstud]

Canada has immense ethnic diversity but not the same history of mass shootings as the USA.

"Canada is by no means an anti-gun country. On the contrary, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research project, there were 12.7 million legal and illicit firearms in civilian hands in Canada in 2017, or 34.7 firearms per 100 residents—the fifth highest rate in the world."

[ness31]

Why don’t we ask Africans why their countries are riddled with crime? I can guarantee they will give you the most honest answer, and it won’t be, “because of Christianity”...

What an intellectually dishonest discussion. Have none of you ever met an African, from Africa?

[wat0n]

Canada has immense ethnic diversity but not the same history of mass shootings as the USA.

"Canada is by no means an anti-gun country. On the contrary, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research project, there were 12.7 million legal and illicit firearms in civilian hands in Canada in 2017, or 34.7 firearms per 100 residents—the fifth highest rate in the world."

It's not just that. The USA of 2021 isn't all that more ethnically diverse or armed than the USA of 1991, yet these shootings seem to be way more common.

[Julian658]

I see that there is no intelligent support for the idea that ethnic diversity matters when it comes to mass shootings like this.

POD

In America most shooters are mentally ill. However, most are white I will give you that. Do you know why?

[Pants-of-dog]

Also, the idea that most mass shooters are mentally ill is wrong.

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/new ... -shootings

[Julian658]

Also, the idea that most mass shooters are mentally ill is wrong.

https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/new ... -shootings

You are on a roll POD.
What causes mass shootings besides mental illness.
Incel lifestyle?
Nationalism
Crime: Did you know we have mass shootings every weekend in some cities.

[blackjack21]

I know you are not low IQ, so why are you so resistent to demographic change in the USA and diversity?

I am not resistant to demographic change, as such. I'm opposed to non-assimilation. I think a civic national culture is important for the functioning of the society. So creating a society where poor people speak Spanish or AAVE and middle and upper classes speak English is a bad idea.

I think taxes have more to do with it.

My desire to leave California is entirely financially driven, and the fact that they do not enforce non-violent crimes anymore. I see no reason to pay taxes for that sort of thing. It's just the state stealing from me.

You implied that the Little Rock nine were doing things that were ultimately a failure and there was no real change.

I didn't imply anything. I posted Minnejean Brown's observation on her return to Little Rock Central High School 50 years later. She noted that the class room was segregated. All the kids, regardless of race, said they just sat with who they felt comfortable with. The segregation was not enforced at all. It was the preferred arrangement of everyone there according to their own statements. It was not about overt or covert animus.

The issue with social mobility BJ in the USA are people born in certain zip codes restricting them to their parents social and economic circles. We are living in segregationist neighborhoods by default. Nothing has really changed. You want to make it more acute? What do you think should happen to kids who are black and so on and test high in the IQ exams?

Charter schools and vouchers. Basically, until we break the teachers unions and the Democrat political machine, nothing will change.

People really are not separate. In any group. Even when it was illegal and dangerous to mix. It still did not really work BJ.

Who mixed? And in what context? From kindergarten through the second grade, my best friends were black. Context? Sports and sense of humor. When I moved to the suburbs, it was mostly white.

You might stop thinking you have the right to judge other cultures once you realize that they have a deep love for their own thing and speaking English is not what they see as being the endall of existence in this world.

You do realize that on my own team, fully half of the team is not American, right? They all speak English. They do not all speak English as a first language. I don't need to speak another language fluently to arrive at that conclusion.

So what do you think of societies where women don't get to vote? Do you decline to judge them, or conclude that they don't have "corazon"?

Neither is it being some pureblood Irish/English/German

The Irish and English are not pureblood. They have faced many invasions, and have long fights. That's why I have pointed out that if someone asks me my first name in Ireland, they peg me as Catholic, and then they ask me my surname and they peg me as English with a bit of coolness. In England, they peg me as Cambro-Norman. White people didn't exist in Europe until very recently.

Genetically, the interesting invasion is the Viking/Danelaw invasions that more or less saw the Y chromosomes of the Celts more or less disappear from England while the female X chromosomes remained.

Have you ever realized how the Taliban think about American enemy invasive force soldiers in their eyes? You are in their nation and not the other way around at all.

Maybe they need to work on their "corazon"?

The Taliban was one faction in a nation of warring tribes and diversity of conflicts of interest. There is an internal power struggle. Afghanistan was invaded by the French, and others like the English too, the Russians, and the reality is that nations invaded massively with long protracted wars have adapted to war-like conditions.

Or, perhaps because it is a nation in name only. Do you think the problem is that the Taliban need to stop limiting themselves to Pashto and learn Dari and Uzbek? The French, English, Russians and Americans did not create places speaking Pashto, Dari, Uzbek and so forth. That predates anything Western powers did.

I read a great book called Three Cups of Tea or something. An American who wanted to establish a school there. His entire cultural process of trying to gain trust in Afghanistani society. It is eye opening. I bet you don't read that. Because the ENEMY is complex and not a cardboard cartoon characterization that you tend to paint the baddies as.

Where have I said they are the baddies? I note what they do. For example, women being distinctly second class. I note the culture shock of American soldiers from the accounts I read from them. Why do I read those books? It's the only way to get a real picture of what's going on, because the news media is so terrible in the US.

Read "Left of Boom". A CIA guy learned how to speak Pashto, wore traditional Afghan clothing, wore a beard, attended loya jirgas, etc. I'm familiar with it, I just don't read the books of the do-gooders as I'm trying to understand what my government is doing there knowing that most of what I hear in American media is a lie.

Yes, societies in these places can be intolerant, sexist, racist, haters, they can be lovers, warm, nurturing, communal and respectful and full of good decent people too. That is the classic complexity of living a human life BJ. I hope one day you understand that.

What makes you think I don't? You try to focus on "corazon," which I take to mean emotional connections, which I take to mean the social aspect of the human brain--the limbic system, which is also where intense feelings of hatred come from.

But if you can't get Puerto Ricans need for certain things? I doubt you are going to do well with other cultures.

I'm sure that the Taliban are not thinking about the needs and wants of Puerto Ricans either. My comment on apathy was about scope. Most people are preoccupied with their immediate surroundings, not the needs and wants of people thousands of miles away.

It is war BJ. And war and the conditions of war are not normal conditions at all.

You are missing the point. They actually did win hearts and minds, but they had to adapt to the local culture. They also had to integrate the locals into their own force and pay them. They wore beards--regular army regulations would preclude that. They went to the loya jirgas and worked with the elders, etc. They ended up calling the captain "Commandon", not unlike the 1975 film "The Man who would be King" with Michael Caine and Sean Connery; or as they likely called Alexander the Great's men something similar.

lands that don't belong to them and committ to integration and love of a productive life serving other humans as their equals

How do you commit to integration if you don't belong? Politics has to go beyond mere sentimentality. Why do you get along so well in Mexico? The most important part of it is that you understand the official language and share some of its cultural heritage. I could get along just as well in England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. I would probably struggle in Turkmenistan, and I think you would to.

No, I believe their error is underestimating what it takes to conquer old warrior battered cultures.

Libya isn't an old warrior battered culture like Afghanistan. It was relatively stable until Obama deposed Qaddafi. You have to read Zero Footprint to get another aspect of that story--that the Obama administration was trying to create a force in Syria to overthrow Assad, but leave zero American footprint--that is, using non-US weapons to make it look like it was a home grown rebellion. So they were looking for non-US weapons--first in the Balkans--and then in Libya. So the official cover as told in the movie 13 Hours is that they were trying to buy the rockets and excess guns of the militias to stabilize the situation. They were actually feeding that weapons supply to Syrians.

You will not get the truth from the media or the government. You have to read extensively to figure out what they're really doing. Even 13 Hours hides the truth from the American audience.

Commitment to nation building.

Germany was largely rebuilt by 1960 after almost total devastation. There is a reason it's different in Afghanistan after 20 years, and it's not a lack of commitment.

They went to the Templo Mayor and they destroyed it. And then they stayed and married and cut their ties to Spain. Their blood coursed through the veins of the new race.

Sounds like the Normans. However, 1000 years after the Norman Conquest, people can still pick my surname out as Norman straight away.

Unless the Americans want to become the new Afghanistanis and live there forevermore with their Afghan wives and children they will be forever strangers in a strange land.

It didn't work out that way in Germany or Japan. There are some real differences, and it isn't just "corazon."

But there are no shortcuts to nation building. The Americans are not understanding how hard it is. They never did understand it.

Japan, Germany, South Korea, China, Taiwan, etc. are all examples of US nation building. You can look at the flip side of that reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. When it's China doing the same thing, you speak of it in more glowing terms. The reality is that China was a backwater until the US opened up trading relationships with them.

For me BJ most wars in human history are about fantasies made up by men who don't have to do the dirty and hard task of fighting and conquest. It is a terrible lack of intelligence about human nature.

Really? It's just fantasies? Only men have these fantasies? Catherine the Great? Margaret Thatcher? Queen Elizabeth I? What I'm describing in the Afghanistan case is the detachment of the senior command, or the CIA, as juxtaposed from people with boots on the ground and danger close to battle. Politicians even have a hard time keeping political support for wars, because they haven't asked Congress for a declaration of war since 1941. So war legally speaking doesn't exist, but the reality is that it does. You can abolish it by treaty, legal documents, etc. That's why there have been so few genocides since WWII. It's illegal. Or... we call it "ethnic cleansing" when we do not want to invoke treaties that require us to do something about it. The Rwanda genocide was a classic case of that. Nobody wants to fight a land war in China, which is why we'll not do anything militarily about Xinjiang.

So the pressure needs to come from outside those structures.

That's what Donald Trump was. In some respects, I think it's fine that we have a president with Lewy body dementia, because it shows people the country functions with a president who is totally out to lunch, because the technocratic neoliberal/neoconservative types have been de facto running things for quite some time.

I see that there is no intelligent support for the idea that ethnic diversity matters when it comes to mass shootings like this.

"Mass shooting" is just a definition that three or more people have been shot. What we have in the Colorado case is a paranoid schizophrenic, and these instances get used by the media to push gun control narratives. In fact, there is regular gun violence across ethnic groups. For example, in San Francisco's Bay View/Hunter's Point area, the blacks and the Samoans have been fighting each other since WWII when they both were paid to work in the shipyards during the war. Part of the reason that violence is declining is because those population groups are declining due to "gentrification."

[ingliz]

@blackjack21

As I have said before, what you do in your own backyard is your business. But I am curious as to why you think there are so many mass shootings in the US. It can't be Black angst as most mass shooters are White. And I can't see it being White angst when most shooters are middle-class, and the middle classes have nothing to be angsty about. PoD says they are not mentally ill. You say poverty/inequality is not a contributing factor.

So what is it?

the fifth highest rate in the world

With approximately 28 civilian firearms per 100 people, Malta is the 18th most armed country in the world.

[Julian658]

@blackjack21

As I have said before, what you do in your own backyard is your business. But I am curious as to why you think there are so many mass shootings in the US. It can't be Black angst as most mass shooters are White. And I can't see it being White angst when most shooters are middle-class, and the middle classes have nothing to be angsty about. PoD says they are not mentally ill. You say poverty/inequality is not a contributing factor.

So what is it?


With approximately 28 civilian firearms per 100 people, Malta is the 18th most armed country in the world.

The article quoted by POD is written by a non-psychiatrist that reviewed a psych article. In any event this are the numbers mentioned:

Brucato and his colleagues analyzed 1,315 mass murders of all types that occurred worldwide and found that only 11% of all mass murderers were psychotic.

And only 8% of mass shooters had serious mental illness.

The rate was 18% among people who committed mass murder through non-firearms.

IN other words The paper states psychotic disorders that range from 8-18%.

The researchers also found that mass shooters in the United States were more likely to have legal histories, use recreational drugs, abuse alcohol, and have histories of non-psychotic psychiatric or neurologic symptoms.

These shooters were more likely to have non--pyschotic mental illness but they do not give a percent. They simply say MOST. BTW, there is a big difference between a neurosis and a psychosis.

I agree with POD: Only a small percent of shooters are psychotic which is basically totally nuts and out of touch with reality. However, MANY others have a neurosis, drug abuse, and other personality disorders.

Guys: common sense would indicate that a mass shooters are not likely to have a normal personality. However, when it comes to a psychosis I agree with POD, the percent is small.

[wat0n]

But even then, even if all shooters are mentally ill in some way, why have shootings increased over time in the US? Has there been an increase in the prevalence of mental illnesses across the board (not just psychosis or psychiatric ones) that could plausibly explain the much greater number of mass shootings?

[ingliz]

@Julian658

You don't think it odd that the US has so many more firearm-related deaths per 100,000 compared to other high-income countries?

Take Malta as an example and its guns.

It's not as if we don't have the opportunity to go on killing sprees. And there are plenty of mad buggers here too.

Our mortality rate is around 8 times lower than yours.

[Doug64]

[Pants-of-dog]

This cartoon seems racist.

Why should it matter if he was Syrian? Why is the illustrator so obsessed with the race of the shooter?

It seems like an odd thing to focus on, unless you are trying to focus on preserving gun rights for white people only.

[Julian658]

But even then, even if all shooters are mentally ill in some way, why have shootings increased over time in the US? Has there been an increase in the prevalence of mental illnesses across the board (not just psychosis or psychiatric ones) that could plausibly explain the much greater number of mass shootings?

I agree! You make a great point.

What we are seeing is the result of NIHILISM in a segment of society. We are talking about people that have given up due to a large number of factors that include INCEL lifestyle, lack of job opportunities, social isolation, crappy parenting, social pressures, drug use, etc.

Life in 2021 is not the same as the 1940s and 50s where a male had few choices that provided a plan for life. Many men work in the same factory (or business) dad worked, married the high school girlfriend and have three kids by age 26. They also had much more reliable family structure. Up until 1960 most people in the USA were married and had a two parent home. That provides massive stability and avoids the LONER syndrome. The NIHILISM causes this lonely men to commit suicide by cop.

By the way we have mass shootings every weekend in the large American cities that is related to crime. These are not counted as mass shootings because the shootings happen 1-2 at a time and spread over 2-3 days in several cities. The reasons for these shooting is a different form NIHILISM.

[Julian658]

@Julian658

You don't think it odd that the US has so many more firearm-related deaths per 100,000 compared to other high-income countries?

No, it is not odd. Societal pressures in the USA are much greater than in other Western nations. This causes nihilism, see my post above on the subject. America is a pressure packed nation when compared to other countries. The motto here is "you are on your own" and "we only celebrate those that are extremely successful". This is lethal for men with average or below average talent.

[Julian658]

This cartoon seems racist.

Why should it matter if he was Syrian? Why is the illustrator so obsessed with the race of the shooter?

It seems like an odd thing to focus on, unless you are trying to focus on preserving gun rights for white people only.

You totally miss the point POD. Why should it matter if the shooter was white. That was the point of the cartoon. By the way many Syrians are actually white. European DNA found a way to get there.

[Pants-of-dog]

This is the third time that conservatives have brought up the issue of the race or religion of the shooter as an issue.

Why is it so important?

[Julian658]

This is the third time that conservatives have brought up the issue of the race or religion of the shooter as an issue.

Why is it so important?

The ethnicity is not important POD. The reason people bring it up is that if the shooter had been white the left would have claimed white supremacy as the cause of the shooting.

[Pants-of-dog]

I would agree that the ethnicity matters insofar as it disproves a motive of white supremacy, but since white nationalists are not the sole cause of mass shootings, this seems like an odd point to keep harping on.

[Doug64]

@Pants-of-dog, as Julian658 points out, the cartoon is actually anti-racist, and points to the racist attitudes of many on the Left. When initial word of the Colorado shooting spread, much of the Left’s response was “Another mass shooting by a White guy!” And then the heritage of the shooter was revealed, and suddenly the attention shifts from race to gun laws. The simple fact is that the two shootings involve two mentally disturbed—though probably not psychotic—individuals, and neither apparently had anything to do with race. But that’s not how either were initially treated—and is still being treated, in the case of the massage parlor shootings—in spite of the facts (or lack of facts). In both cases assumptions were made by many on the Left based on race in the absence of facts, which can itself be considered racist.