Summations Only

Perhaps the psychology is a symptom of social dysfunction and treating the psychology without treating the dysfunction will have negligible effect.Curiously I saw this on Facebook yesterday, and I find I agree with it on many points:

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Jonathan Byrd (Facebook)
August 30

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I grew up with guns. Country guns. Shotguns. .45s and .38s and beer cans on fence posts. That was back before public gun violence became a daily routine. If somebody got shot, it was a drug deal or domestic violence. There were guns all around me, practically under my pillow, and nobody got hurt. No one I know ever threatened another person with a gun. The few violent men I knew fought with their fists. Pulling a gun to settle a score wouldn't be worth the shame. Guns were for targets and critters. It seems like some kind of mythical world now.

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From my experience traveling in northern Europe consistently the past few years, I offer a theory that is beginning to take shape in my mind. I'm in the UK now; their gun laws are famously rigid. The Olympic pistol team had to leave the country to practice. Intentional homicide rate is maybe a third to a quarter of the U.S., but I don't think the stringent gun laws are entirely responsible.

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More interesting to this essay are other countries I've been to regularly: The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland. Canada is notably similar in that there are a lot of guns, but not much gun violence compared to the U.S. Almost every grown man in Switzerland has an assault rifle issued by the military. They have gun festivals with shooting competitions for the kids.

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All these countries also take care of their citizens. You can go to school, see a doctor, or take a year off work and have a baby without worrying about losing your home or other financial catastrophes. Taxes are high, of course. Gotta pay for that stuff. Canada is closer on the scale to the U.S.: lower taxes and less social spending than most of northern Europe, but more than the U.S.

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In the U.S. you are mostly on your own. If you have a strong family and/or community, you're set. If you don't you're screwed. 50% of foster kids become homeless when they turn 18. Three million U.S. citizens are homeless. That's one percent of us, sleeping on the ground, going to jail to get a decent night's sleep and breakfast. College? You know how that goes. I have friends in their forties who are finally paying off their student loans. Need mental health care? That's not covered. The ACA is not a national health care plan. It's a way to force everyone to pay for the same miserable shit that was available before. Very few people are better off with it. I'm one of them and I can still see it's a bad deal for the country. If you lose your job in the U.S., it can be life-threatening. How would you react to a life-threatening situation?

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When millions of people live close to the bone in a country that doesn't seem to care about them, and the most effective weapons in the world are widely available, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to paint the resulting picture. It's not much harder to own a gun in Germany than it is to own one here. We have laws that prohibit convicted felons, the mentally ill, and non-citizens from owning guns. There are loopholes, but that's also true elsewhere. For instance, self-defense is not an acceptable reason to own a gun in the Netherlands, but being a member of a shooting club is. If you want a gun for self defense, you join a shooting club. Duh.

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The availability of guns seems to be a problem in our country, but not a problem in others. As always, extreme viewpoints are suspect- "Guns are the problem" is just as extreme as "I should be able to openly carry an assault rifle into a department store." We do have laws. Colorado, one of the most gun-lovin', property-rights-conservative states in the union, passed a great piece of legislation after the school shooting in Columbine, legislation that was successful largely because part of its focus was to protect the rights of gun owners.

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I appreciate everyone's passion on the issue. Sharing links from far-left and far-right sources is not likely to generate a productive discussion. Real people don't think that way. Real conversations don't happen in platitudes and memes.

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Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms. Elected officials have a directive to ensure public safety. Humans have a responsibility to take care of each other. We're not all keeping our end of the bargain. I think socialism and the second amendment ought to meet and work things out. Education, health care, and a living wage might make guns fun again.

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I'm not a political guy but it seems important to talk about this national crisis- a spiritual crisis, really. Does this sound foolish to anyone? Does it feel like a new way of looking at it? Did anybody else have a time in their lives when guns were kind of innocent and fun?

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Please no yelling, name-calling, or other horseshit on my Facebook page. Imagine we're all gathered around after a funeral. Because we kind of are. Just share and let share. Thanks

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So my thinking is that what we need is a happy functional society, that it is a moral goal for government to promote (ie - enabling the "pursuit of happiness" not just paying lip service to it).This requires a functional socially responsible economic system, something unregulated capitalism is NOT. One that provides real justice to all citizens, along with respect and equality under the law.We can also borrow some ideas from that socialist messiah who advocated feeding and housing the poor, treating disease ...... respecting the "least of us" as fellow humans with a right to universal health care (including mental and dental), the right to a living annual salary, the right to shelter, the right to free education to pursue whatever interests them. The socialist democracies in Europe point the way: a regulated capitalist economy with a social conscience.The solution to gun violence is social. It is not market driven, but morally driven.Enjoy

This is from someone that was in the room. Not some sensationalist reporter or preacher raising money to buy a new house.

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Rand McGowan stayed still amid the gunfire.

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The 18-year-old was in the writing class where a killer opened fire Thursday, killing nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon's deadliest mass shooting.

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McGowan told family members that the gunman didn't specifically target Christians but asked them about faith. The shooter, apparently planning to die during the massacre, told students: "I'll see you soon" or "I'll meet you soon."

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McGowan's mother, Stephanie Salas, shared her son's account Friday. The teenager, one of triplet boys, was shot in the right hand and released from Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg.

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McGowan heard gunshots before he knew what was happening, his mother said.

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The 26-year-old gunman, Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, told everyone to move toward the center of the room.

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"The shooter would call a person: 'You, stand up,'" Salas said, recalling what her son told her. "And then he would ask them if they were a Christian, knew God, or had religion. And it wasn't like it was stated on TV. It wasn't about that he was just trying to pinpoint Christians, no."

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The shooter would tell them it wouldn't hurt.

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"And then he would shoot them," she said.

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Gunman in Oregon college shooting executed classmates, saying 'I'll see you soon' - oregonlive.comPut it to rest.

The earlier reports were also from someone in the room.

America has deteriorated in many ways over the last half century or so. I have my theories, I'm sure you have yours.I think there is a studied conspiracy to get rid of the Second Amendment to make America even more helpless than we've already been made over the last few decades, also by studied propaganda, and all the arguments based on how nice things are in gun-controlled nations are part of the propaganda to disarm us.We don't need more of the same kinds of solutions, we need something radically different. What that is I'm not exactly sure but Christians should be praying our hearts out for it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, that should help. It has always worked in the past, right?

Praying in God's will ALWAYS works. The problem is we don't really do it, don't know how to do it, don't do it with the right aims, don't do it with clean hands as it were and so on.

Great, that should be really easy to prove. Let's have the evidence.

Well, in this case, there should be no problem. If God didn't want us shooting each other, he would not have invented gunpowder or started the NRA or inspired the 2nd amendment and so forth.

Billy Graham once said that God always answers prayer - sometimes the answer is "no".The problem is that in praying for God to "do His will" you don't always know what His will is. Maybe His will is that Americans should thin the herd.

The studied conspiracy I see is to destroy the middle-class and drive everyone not in the elite class into abject poverty, where the don't own any property, work excessive hours for starvation wages at jobs with no respect, as near slavery as anyone would care to get -- your only choice is which mind-numbing starvation wage jobs you take to survive.The propaganda includes that the liberals want to take your guns, and this is enough to keep you accepting their terms of employment, mortgages, etc etc etc.That this also destroys society is readily obvious. So you just became a Bernie Sanders supporter ... we also need a solution that is an evolution of our society to a more socially respectful and responsible one rather than our current capitalistic oligarchy with a patina of democracy, and if we can't change it then there will likely be a bloody revolution. Rather than acting against the best interests of themselves, other individuals, the society and the country as a whole.Enjoy

Did you bother reading the article? It gives context to the earlier reports.

My prayers get answers very frequently, especially prayers for theological understanding, or knowledge in general. And lately I've been praying for God's love toward my enemies, including you all here, because I have so little of it, and He's actually answered, even for the hardest ones here for me to love. I have to keep up the prayer though or I'll lose it.That's the kind of prayer God reliably answers, prayer to be able to do what He wants us to do. Specific prayer for a political end may not be answered, but if a bunch of us prayed for His will to be done, getting ourselves straightened out first, something wonderful WOULD happen politically.As I thought about the kind of evidence I'm aware of I realized most of it is along those lines, and just about everybody here wouldn't like it to happen here: prayer for Christian revival for instance. That's where the kind of changes we need in America would have to start. A lot of Christians do pray for revival but obviously we aren't meeting God's requirements because revival hasn't been happening.The first prayer meeting I think of that brought revival started in New York City right before the Civil War -- it brought a huge revival.In 1949 as a result of intense prayer, revival also swept the Hebrides, not so large a place as New York City but quite an event anyway. The revival didn't get going until they realized they all had to get sin out of their own lives, and then it came straight from God.The last one I know of that was a genuine revival in response to genuine prayer was in Saskatchewan in the 70s (Ringo's "frozen wasteland") started by pastor Bill Mc Leod. He describes it on You Tube HERE. I never get tired of listening to it myself.Prayer IN GOD'S WILL is what works. Sure He does answer some prayers for practical things too.

I can agree with that, though I'm sure we have a different understanding of the causes.Some of the causes I've supported I'm beginning to realize are part of the engineered conspiracy. But I can guarantee you that yours are.

No I didn't read it. It's really not all that important to me. But maybe I'll read it later.

If the idea has already been debunked, and you know it, then why did you repeat the argument in this discussion? Even more weird, you think people would be interested in more information about an idea you concede is debunked?--Percy