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Why the gun issues will never be resolved in the US

Since the shootings in Newtown, perhaps the most horrific incident of a gunman shooting up a school ever (with 20 elementary school children being killed), the issue of guns in America is front and center yet again.

The PR Storm Begins...

This time, according to Obama, something must be done.

The only problem is that nothing likely will be done. Sure, they'll ban semi-automatics, but handguns probably won't be touched. Which means these incidents will happen again, just with handguns instead of semi-autos.

The PR aftermath of this incident has been predictably chaotic.

The news has jumped from one focus to another over recent days hypothesizing over what could drive a 20 year old man to do something like this.

The focus lately has been on violent video games because he played Call of Duty.
They've focused on the fact that his mother was a 'prepper' (someone who prepares for the breakdown of society).
They've focused on the breakup of his family unit.
They've focused on how he was a loner.
They've focused on how guns allowed this to happen.

For all the 'focus' the narrative is highly unfocused for obvious reasons, no one really knows why this happened.  So you get folks with their favourite 'theories' - video games, movies, medications, family issues, etc. - who serve that up as the reason why this happened.

I mean, the PR push for these various things is so strong that you had movie cancelings and tv changes.

The core issue: Mental Illness

The truth is that nothing 'caused' this person to do what he did other than mental illness.

40+ million people play Call of Duty and they don't go on real-life shooting rampages.
Millions watch shows like Dexter and they don't become serial killers.
Millions have their parents divorce and don't shoot up a school.
Millions of people have guns and don't use them in this fashion.
There are millions of 'loners' who never hurt anyone (heck most prolific writers were loners).

However, when you take someone who has a mental health issue and expose them to all of the things mentioned above, there's no telling how those confluence of variables will manifest in their behavior.

The reason why people want to latch on to these various things (guns, video games, etc.) is because they are far easier to address than the issue of mental health.

If you really want to stop these events from happening in the future, the only solution is a mental health solution. One that identifies people who are having mental health issues and gets them the help they need and monitors them until such time as they achieve a healthy state of mental health and no longer pose a threat to themselves or others.

By no means is that an easy thing to accomplish though, you're talking serious resources to help someone with mental health issues. Such a solution would probably cost upwards of a trillion dollars annually (to address the problem nation wide). You'd literally have to cut the military budget in half and divert all the funds to that cause.

On the plus side though you'd not only help millions of people who suffer from mental illness, but you'd probably stop these mass shootings all together.

Anyway, as a society the US (and other countries as well) aren't prepared to spend significant amounts of money on the issue of mental health, so this problem is never going to go away.

Instead they'll fight over the various correlates to these events, such as violent video games or various types of guns.

The gun issue will go on forever

Right now all the talk is about gun laws.

Let me first state that I'm a Canadian and I tend to hold Canadian views on this issue. If you want to stop gun violence, then remove all guns (except those used for hunting) from your society. Japan, UK, Australia, Canada, all these countries have extremely low annual death rates due to firearms because people don't have the firearms!

So the problem is unbelievably simple in that regards.

Yet in the US, even after this horrific incident and all the PR puffery over something needing to be done, nothing of substance will actually get done.

The reason is simple and two-fold.

1) From a PR perspective the issue confuses correlation with causality

Something can correlate but not cause an event. For instance, you might look at all individuals who commit acts of mass murder and find that they all drank milk. There is a clear correlation there, yet we all know that drinking milk didn't cause them to do what they did.

So violent movies, video games, and the like appear to be correlates, but whether they cause this behavior is unclear (although it's fairly clear that it doesn't cause such behavior in 99.99 per cent of folks). Yet, it's just to easy for the media to latch on to these stories and confuse things.

Afterall, if you play a violent video game and then go and commit violence it seems as though surely there must be a connection. But as I mentioned above, why aren't the 40+ million other people who play these games committing acts of violence also then?

So until you can zero in on the root cause - which in my opinion is mental illness - you never really get anywhere. You just get a lot of noise in the media until the story runs its course and then people move on with life.

The issue of guns, while on the hot seat right now, will fade as time goes on. These types of tragedies have happened so much that if the will was there to do something, something would have been done by now.

2) Americans are afraid

The other reason nothing significant will happen is because of the American psyche, which is one of fear. They fear the 'terrorists', they fear each other, they fear the future... and the one thing they associate with safety is a gun.

The irony to this type of thinking is that the worse things get, the more gun violence there is for instance, the more afraid people get and the more they want a gun to protect themselves.

On a societal level the PR activity of the government over the past 10 years has only helped foster fear within the American people. They've had 10 years of war, 10 years of being told they might be attacked by terrorists at any time, four years of a financial crash that left them afraid that they could lose their job/house at any time.... heck, the Obama/Romney election ads were almost all fear based "If so-and-so gets elected America is ruined."




The average US citizen has been swamped with fear-based messages now for over 10 years.

So despite a horrific event like this which should have people saying 'We need to become a gun-free society' people nonetheless still want their guns.

Heck, guns sales SURGED after the Newton shootings.

So unless you remove that fear - which can only be done by creating a rational society where the public trusts elected officials - then you can't resolve the gun issue.

The desire for a gun-free society must come from the populous themselves.

In Canada, if one of our provinces suddenly allowed folks to buy handguns, I'm pretty sure 90 per cent of the populous would leave the province and move to a different province.

In Canada, we don't fear our government or each other generally speaking. Toss in universal healthcare, which while not perfect at least deals with the mental health issue on some level, and you have a broadly supported mandate of creating a 'healthy society'.

If, however, you were to flood Canada with handguns and flood our government with corrupt politicians and take away our universal healthcare so people with health problems couldn't receive treatment... we'd become just like the US. And just like our US counterparts, when faced with a scary world around us, we'd be demanding our right to bear arms also because we would see a gun as means of securing our safety.

The tragedies will continue

As much as Newton should be enough to wake people up - then again, they should have woken up after Columbine, Sikh temple, the Aurora movie theatre shooting, Virginia Tech, etc. - the will to remove guns from American society is not there.

The country is stuck in a catch-22. They've flooded their nation with guns, which has created a culture of violence and fear, and the populous views guns as their only means of safety within such a culture. But to change the culture you have to take the guns away. So you have to get them to first trust you - which is near impossible since Americans trust their government less now than in the past 100 years or something.

So the tragedies will continue because this situation is a PR nightmare.

There's no will to address the real causes behind the violence, mostly mental health issues and environmental factors.

And the people are too afraid to give up their guns (mostly because they want protection from other people who have guns and from the government itself should it become tyrannical, which people only fear because the government has used so much fear-based messaging on them).

Imagine...

This is why I've said before that PR is one of the most important aspects that determines how our world unfolds. Imagine for a second that the US government had never broken the trust of the US citizens. Imagine that there were WMD in Iraq, or imagine if bankers had gone to jail in 2008, or imagine that politicians didn't say anything just to get elected but said what they actually believed.

Imagine if the American people truly trusted their government?

In that situation you probably could ask all Americans to turn in their guns. You could pass laws that made guns illegal and everyone would be ok with that. You could actually address this issue because you could rally public support.

If the government had been practising good PR practices over the past 10-20 years, you could probably address this issue. But because it hasn't, I don't think they will be able to do anything of substance.

I think US society has broken down to the point where the irrational is seen as rational by many. The more gun violence there is, the more people go out and buy a gun to protect themselves.

And nothing is going to break that pattern until the US shuffles how it allocates resources to different priorities. Stop fighting wars and propping up corrupt bankers and divert those resources (which amount to trillions, plural) to positive aspects of society (healthcare, mental health, infrastructure, education, etc.).

It will be interesting to see what the US government does regarding guns. I suspect they will ban assault rifles and call it a day. Which will do nothing to stop future violence other than gunmen will use handguns instead of rifles.

And the cycle of ineffective policies will go on for years. At some point they might ban violent video games, or ban violent movies, or do a dozen other things. And none of it will do anything until they actually remove guns from the population and/or address the issue of mental illness, both of which there is no will or money to actually do.


Comments

  1. Yes it would all be nice if we could as all 7,000,000,000 of us just un-invent the gun and go back to swords. But it's just like warfare. For there to be world peace EVERYBODY has to quit war cold-turkey. So by your argument f the headless broken condom killed 20 children with his bare hands/fists it'd would be cool if the teacher did not have a gun to put this defective unit off our phase (dead). It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Sure the project of illegitamacy will die but 20 children will live. The problem with the liberals is that everything is "BEAUTIFUL" to them, as in you lost the little league championship, just cry, I'll still get you a trophy, someone is living on a feeding tube at great cost to society and no benefit to the patient, deny him suicide because all life is beautiful, have a gaping vagina and 300 sexual partners and 20 terrorist children with guns? It's beautiful to the liberals they will just give her food stamps and welfare so she can raise more mentally ill children, beautiful aspergers units---these people are at war with us on a local level and ARE TRYING TO KILL the sane kids. But just like liberals, they have contradictions, a death by the hands of an insane indivdual is sweet blood in a liberal's eye. I've known a schoolteacher that was stabbed to death by an abortion failure and the government gave him a slap on the wrists. Killing the brat won't bring the teacher back, but it will stop future deaths. The problem is that in liberal-land, you are never a failure--it's society's fault. I say they should hand you a blackpowder pistol when you board an airplane, if someone tries to deviate and fly the plane into a building, he will be outnumbered. In real life not all things are beautiful.

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