Re: America, will they ever learn?
Good post.
mrposhman said:Its scary how unaffected Americans have become to this sort of stuff. If this happened in Australia (either one of the shootings over the weekend) the outrage would have been out of the stratosphere.
I grew up in the UK and the more of these shootings that occur in America the more it reminds of when the wars began in Afghanistan and Iraq. Initially every time a soldier was killed, it was the first news story on every channel, it was on every front page. As the war continued on the news stories of soldiers slowly kept creeping further back into the news programmes and the newspapers and people seemed to become desensitised to the death that was occurring. The US is going through this now. These killings will (as with all the others) have no effect on a country drunk on guns and with a psyche that is ingrained from a young age that gun culture is fine.
I was reading comments earlier on facebook related to the Cristina Grimmie killing, an American claimed that banning guns would have no affect on murdering people as they would find other ways to do so. When challenged on what isn't occurring in other western countries he said that they would kill people with incendiary devices, yes incendiary devices. For all of the ludicrous things I had thought I had heard about gun culture in the US this is clearly the craziest. I mean how do we live in our great country with gun laws whilst all these bombs are going off murdering people we want to murder!!
What they don't seem to grasp is that guns do not provide an opportunity to rethink what you want to do. Someone posted a few pages back of a shooting in a cinema over something so small. If that was Australia, words would have been said, popcorn would have been thrown and both parties would likely just sit down and watch the movie but the US end up with a dead body.
There is evidence that shooting a gun desensitises even the person shooting it. That person if they so wished would find it harder to murder someone with a knife or through sheer physical strength as its far more personal.
The US is a great country in a lot of ways, but a seriously scary country in other ways.
Good post.