Beamer wrote on Aug 13, 2012, 14:37:
Sepharo wrote on Aug 12, 2012, 19:10:
Matshock wrote on Aug 12, 2012, 18:46:
...and here are the gears of government healthcare turning on guns:
http://www.ajc.com/health/doctors-target-gun-violence-1497342.html
—Disease patterns, observing how a problem spreads. Gun ownership — a precursor to gun violence — can spread "much like an infectious disease circulates," said Daniel Webster, a health policy expert and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore.
And then he explains the metaphor...
"There's sort of a contagion phenomenon" after a shooting, where people feel they need to have a gun for protection or retaliation, he said.
Are you going to say that gun sales don't jump up after mass shootings?
Typically when people say something is "contagious" like this, they mean in the way Malcolm Gladwell describes in The Turning Point. The story he tells there is of contagious suicides on some pacific island. Essentially suicide rates amongst young boys are skyhigh because it's just a thing there. Someone does it, then someone else does it, and it becomes a culturally accepted thing. Somene doing it puts the ideas in the next boy's head and makes him think it's an acceptable choice.
That's what these shootings become. They are contagious, as the more common they are the more that will occur, and the more that occur the more common they become.
Hence the Texas shooting going on as I'm posting this.
You're using the correct concept. The doctor in the article is trying to dumb it down to gun ownership as the ultimate cause here because again, the people funding his "research" want that result.
I'm saying if it weren't guns it would be knives and if if weren't knives it would be hammers, etc. because it is the people doing the killing that are the ultimate cause, not the tools they use. Just wait until these kooks get some explosives.
IMO these people are all ideologues that aren't constrained by the kind of ethics normally associated with kind-minded Christian or Buddhist and the like faiths- or at a minimum a nurturing atomic or at a bare minimum a nurturing extended family. More and more of us have none of the above- the state is our mother and our father and it is a cold, distant household.