Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking (2012)

diegobasch.com

4 pointsdiego3 comments

Really? On this day, when people have died, senselessly, you want to link to an article that says, basically, "It's not a big deal. Even if it were a big deal, there's nothing we can do about it. Even if we try to do something, we'll probably just make it worse".

Mass shootings are a big deal, not just because of the direct cost, but because of the secondary cost - everyday fear for millions.

We can pass meaningful, sensible legislation, that could make a difference that cannot make things worse. For example, we could allow the government to actually study gun violence. That would at least allow us to postulate some answers, and it'd be cheap, with no negative side effects. There's a lot of other things we can do that wouldn't make things worse, too.

Sorry, defeatism and accusations of "magical thinking" are a ridiculous response to a mass shooting.

That is part of my point: I'm afraid of accidents, heart disease and cancer more than anything. I'm somewhat afraid of gun violence. Given that I live in a relatively safe neighborhood, I'm more afraid of swimming pools. I'm not afraid of mass shootings like I'm not afraid of shark attacks because they are statistically rare.

Gun crime and gun suicides are problems addressable with public policy. Mass shootings are too statistically infrequent to be addressed without potentially worse side effects. As for the "everyday fear for millions" is that really an issue? If you're disproportionally afraid of rare things, the solution is either education, psychotherapy or both.

"Mass shootings are too statistically infrequent to be addressed without potentially worse side effects" - really? How do you know that? It's a position like the people who no longer can deny climate change have; they shifted from "it's not happening" to "we can't do anything about it". Sorry, I don't accept defeatism as the starting point. By using the word "potentially", you signaled you don't really buy that argument, either.

Yes, everyday fear for millions is really an issue. Who asks that kind of question? People are afraid. Think about every person who has a family member in an Oregon college; think how they felt when they heard, "A mass shooting at an Oregon college has led to 10 people's deaths".

The minimizing the impact, the "let's focus on heart disease not guns" are ridiculous deflections, but hey, if you want to go down that path, lets do it. The President suggested we compare gun violence to terrorism in his address on this topic today.

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/9437187/obama-guns-terrorism-de...

In the US, there have been over 10k deaths, per year, by gun violence every year since 2001. In that same amount of time, 2.6k deaths were caused by terrorism.

So, let's stop fighting terrorism and start taking care of gun violence. It's much scarier than terrorism, right? I mean, terrorism is much, much rarer than gun violence. Why are people scared of it? If they are,"the solution is either education, psychotherapy or both".

Even though they are rare, we don't ignore shark attacks. We try to prevent them. We study why sharks sometimes attack people. Why don't we do that for gun violence?

The right answer is to spend a little money on looking into why we have so many mass shootings. We need to let the CDC study gun violence. Let's do some research and see if there is something we can do.

It's time to stop shrugging our shoulders, like the article writer did, and try something. Ignoring the problem isn't working.

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