Violence in American Society

P1234567890 · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 4:57 am Post subject:

RevJP, I've got a question for you: Do you own any guns?

Pondering, you said in a previous post that you don't. Why not?
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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
-Blaise Pascal
"...with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil -that takes religion..."
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-Someone who shall remain anonymous.

Pondering · King of the Jungle Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 1506

Pondering · King of the Jungle Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 1506

and just to de-bunk the "Tighter Gun Control Laws would have prevented this" argument:

After the 1989 École Polytechnique Massacre shooting
Wiki Here
Canada adopted much tighter laws. The shooter there took 20 minutes to kill 14 women and wound another 14 people before shooting himself.

On September 13, 2006 at Dawson College, near downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Kimveer Gill,
entered the college with 3 legally purchased and LICENSED firearms.

Fortunetaly, he was a bad shot. He only killled 1 person (other than himself) but wounded another 19. He was stopped by two police officers who happened to be visiting the school at the time regarding an unrelated incident, heard the gunfire, and rushed to the scene.
(Good luck or Providence probably saved a much worse potential carnage)

Like the VT shooter, Gill was probably crazy, raging at the world, considered himself a loner, and had delusions of grandeur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_College_shooting
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Pete · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:16 am Post subject:

When I was a kid (1930's), almost every household had rifles, shotguns, 22's and good old Daisy air rifles. In all that time, I don't recall ever hearing about the kind of insanity that goes on today. I don't even remember anyone being accidentally shot, although it must have happened.

We were all taught at an early age to be very careful with such things. Oh, every kid also had a homemade sling shot or two. The difference? Education. Also, infringements were met with a good kick in the hind end, and not with, "Let's take this poor boy to a psychologist and see where we as parents have been in neglect."

I don't own a gun now, since I don't live in deer or pheasant country, nor am I interested. If you claim that banning guns will solve the problem, you obviously don't live around Chicago.

RevJP · Moderator Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 7003 Location: USA

45degreeN · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 10:47 am Post subject:

Pete your citing of education is not a simple idea and probably more correct than even you might think.
Starting in the 30's there was something new called
"Progressive Education" it came primarily out of University of Chicago. It's roots were out of the kindergarden movement which tried dealing with children's emotional condition as well as their intellectual development. It also attempted to bring the individual into the process of their own education making it seem more relevant than simple rote learning.

Unfortunately its philosophical point of view was Eastern mysticism not Christianity and with that point of view came many value judgements concerning who we are as people and the nature of reality. The out growth was moral relativism and the US educational system has not recovered from this way of thinking.

After the Depression began, a group of politically oriented progressive educators, led by George Counts, dared schools to "build a new social order" and published a provocative journal called The Social Frontier to advance their "reconstructionist" critique of laissez faire capitalism. At Teachers College, Columbia University, William H. Kilpatrick and other students of Dewey taught the principles of progressive education to thousands of teachers and school leaders, and in the middle part of the century, books such as Dewey's Experience and Education (1938) Boyd Bode's Progressive Education at the Crossroads (1938), Caroline Pratt's I Learn from Children (1948), and Carlton Washburne's What is Progressive Education? (1952) among others, continued to provide a progressive critique of conventional assumptions about teaching, learning and schooling. A major research endeavor, the "eight-year study," demonstrated that students from progressive high schools were capable, adaptable learners and excelled even in the finest universities.
http://www.uvm.edu/~dewey/articles/proged.html

Information retention was no longer important but was being replaced with being "adaptable". According to Dr. Gene Scott of Stanford PHD in philosophy of education, these progressives basically replaced facts with process and as long as a student knew the process of educating themselves they graduated. Which was all fine and good if they also had a foundation in Christianity.

How this relates to violence is the same question of moral relevancy. Who decides what is right or wrong? Since morals no longer interfered with the decision making process, people were set adrift in a moral free country. Or at least thats what they were taught and believed.
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theseldomscene · Banned Joined: 17 Mar 2005 Posts: 7817

Pondering · King of the Jungle Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 1506

TSS...nice post and really do agree with you...I'm a big fan of "can't we all just get along"....but clearly, we can't, and when crisis comes no one can rely on the police to "be there" instantaneously (unless you want ALOT more police)
nor is there a reasonable expectation for God to through up a "shield"....even if He does do this sometimes, it's capricious at best and sure looks alot more like statistical probability (i.e. "luck") than divine intervention...

On a similar note, Australia tightened it's gun policy in 1996 ( in response to 1 tourist being shot and killed by 1 murderer)...by 2000, gun crime had increased by 45%, an illegal black market developed, the citizenry was disarmed and the predators (armed with guns of course) prowled thru the herd....

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=15304

P#s, don't ya just hate it when facts get in the way of ideals?
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theseldomscene · Banned Joined: 17 Mar 2005 Posts: 7817

theseldomscene · Banned Joined: 17 Mar 2005 Posts: 7817

that could be a fortune cookie... Laughing

Pondering · King of the Jungle Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 1506

Pete · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 12:48 pm Post subject:

In Chicago, banning guns would not have much of an effect, since most are owned by gang members who are constantly at war over drug turf. It seems that every day some innocent bystander is shot, especially little kids who are just looking out of a window.

Drive by shootings are all the rage and it seems that half the time an innocent person is shot. I would hazzard a guess that most, if not all of these weapons are unregistered to start with. Banning guns wouldn't slow this mayhem down one iota.

Personally, I don't care if they banned guns or not, but it would not solve a thing. During WW2, as a member of the AAF, I handled 30 and 50 caliber machine guns as well as 20 mm cannons, and got my fill of that, so I don't care to own a gun.

Interestingl, those air cooled 50's that they have on top of armoured vehicles in Iraq, look exactly the same as those we had on B-24 bombers back in the big one.

Pondering · King of the Jungle Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 1506

P1234567890 · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:41 pm Post subject:

P1234567890 · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:43 pm Post subject: