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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Ben Carson: More Guns May Be Needed On Campus



More weapons may be needed on campus, says Carson.

"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"

Handguns At Home And The Scourge Of Suicide Among Young People

Mom Killed By 2 Year Old Child Described As "Responsible." NOT!

80% Of All Firearm Deaths In 23 Industrialized Countries Occurred In The U.S.
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/80percent-of-all-firearms-deaths-in-23.html

“Toy Guns Outlawed At Republican Presidential Convention. Real Guns Allowed”

Ben Carson Follows Up On Gun Comments: "Pompeii Victims Should Have Outrun Lava"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/ben-carson-follows-up-on-gun-comments.html

GOP Candidate Dr. Ben Carter's New Book, "One Nation": Here Is What I've Learned

Ben Carson: Guns prevent tyranny, and may belong on campus

David Weigel
October 6, 2015

Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who's fought his way to co-frontrunner status in the Republican presidential primary, told USA Today's Susan Page Tuesday that he'd "feel much more comfortable" with more guns on campus in the hands of administrators or authority figures.
"If I had a little kid in kindergarten somewhere, we'd feel much more comfortable if I knew, on that campus, there was a police officer or someone who was trained with a weapon," said Carson, musing on last week's mass shooting at an Oregon college. "If the teacher was trained with a weapon, I'd be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn't."
Carson's argument synced up perfectly with the one made by the National Rifle Association since the 2012 killings in Newtown, Conn. The NRA emerged from the debate over gun violence with a National School Shield Task Force, chaired by Asa Hutchinson, who's now the Republican governor of Arkansas. Its reported inaugurated a new NRA program to offer gun training to school safety officer. "As more [armed] officers have been assigned to schools, school death rates have decreased," argued the task force. "These numbers support the notion that the presence of armed officers positively impacts the school environment."
The NRA's lobbying and the Republican victories of 2014 were boons to the cause of arming campuses. This summer, Texas passed sought-after legislation to allow students to carry guns. But as the Oregonian reported, and as many presidential candidates have ignored, the campus where the shooting occurred was not a gun-free zone. That's left Carson and others speaking hypothetically about how more guns might have changed the calculus on campus.
"Let me ask you: What stopped the shooter from shooting anyone else?" former Arkansas Mike Huckabee asked Newsmax host Steve Malzberg in an interview last week. "The guy with a gun, that's who."
It was a police officer -- not a student -- who ended the Oregon killing spreeby exchanging fire with the shooter. In his interview with Page, however, Carson said that his own views on gun ownership grew more laissez-faire once he started  "getting more into the history of this country" and considered how an unarmed citizenry could be at risk.
"When you look at tyranny and how it occurs, the pattern is so consistent: Get rid of the guns," said Carson.
In his interview with Malzberg, Huckabee suggested that the media consider whether its own coverage was a bigger contributing factor in killings than the availability of guns.
"Rather than the president tinkering with the Second Amendment, he might want to propose tinkering with the First Amendment, and maybe say that we will not say this guy's name on the air, not put his picture on the air," said Huckabee. "Refer to him as the savage, the animal, the thug."

The Conservative Dream
Absolute Safety vouchsafed by ubiquitous firearms.
(The impossible quest to make Reality safer than God intended is the core appeal of fascism.)

If every airline passenger can "pack," then every terrorist would have a firearm and only a small percentage of citizens. 

 Would you, for example, take a firearm on board a plane?

 Didn't think so...

The percentage of American households with handguns at home has plummeted since the 1970s.

"Since 1973, The Number Of Gun-Toting American Home Has Fallen By 35%"

Those who think ubiquitous firearms are a solution to any of life's problems contribute to the problem.

The possibility that well-armed citizens will perform acts of sudden, salvific heroicism once a thug with murderous intent "has the drop on them" is vanishingly remote. 

Such wishful thinking is the product of arrested development, the vestigial puerility of children playing at "cowboys and Indians," "cops and robbers," "white hats and black."

Many more innocent Americans are killed by firearms "in the home" than the piddling number of Americans saved by domestic firearm heroics.

"The Number Of People Who Use Guns In Self Defense Is Negligible"

And when, at rare intervals, such heroics do occur, they frequently result in the death of property thieves who harbor no violent intent.

 I know no one who has used a gun in self-defense, but I do know someone who was killed while robbing a grocery store. 

 It is overwhelmingly likely that neither you -- nor anyone you know -- has successfully "defended themselves" with a firearm.

 Americans refuse to heed "the numbers."

Americans Think Foreign Aid Consumes One Third Of GNP. 

This % Is Totally Hallucinated


If you ask each and every friend and associate until the day you die, the chances are virtually nil that you will come across someone (outside the military) who has repelled an aggressor with a firearm. 

 The belief that Americans use firearms in self-defense is mostly Middle School fantasy conjured by essentially fearful people trapped by arrested development.

I am 68 years old and have friends "on both sides of the aisle." 

Yet I have never heard any of them say that a firearm saved their life.

I have never heard any of them say that they know someone who was saved by a firearm.

And in those rare instances of "salvation-through-firearm," it remains over-archingly true that isolated anecdotes do not establish "general rules." 

On the other hand, I have heard several friends say that firearms were used by family members to kill themselves and one friend whose neighbor's boy accidentally killed a friend by putting a bullet in his head.

Whether by accident... sudden eruption of anger... or by psychological disease... firearms in the home exact a terrifyingly high toll  with correspondingly trivial benefit.

The belief that "individual heroes" will "save the day" is essentially self-ish, a subset of rugged individualism.

Yes, an occasional hero will "save the day."

Guns Save Lives

The Number Of People Who Use A Gun In Self-Defense Is Pretty Much Negligible

But choosing to arm an entire society only increases the cumulative carnage.

Gun Tweet In Wake Of Umpqua Slaughter


Opportunities for "gun-toting heroism" are vanishingly rare, and when they do present, they are likely to exacerbate the violence-in-progress. 

Consider the following case in point.

Armed Veteran Explains Why He Didn't Confront Oregon Shooter With His "Good Guy" Gun


The human psyche prefers "clutching at straws" to admitting the unpalatable truth that many threatening situations are simply "outside our control."

Furthermore, attempts to "control the uncontrollable" -- either by enhanced "security" measures "taken in advance" or "taken while an aggressive act is unfolding" -- do not contribute to security and routinely become risk factors in themselves. 

Consider the flood of handguns in American homes, a deluge whose potential benefit pales alongside the actual number of American suicides and "domestic homicides" that would not have taken place if handguns were not in the home.

The situation is analogous to the conservative desire to disenfranchise 11% of American voters in order to prevent several hundred cases of demonstrable voter fraud - a textbook illustration of "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face."
How Frequent Is Voter Fraud?
How Frequent Is Voter Suppression?
Voter I.D. Laws Could Disenfranchise 11% Of The Electorate

In the absence of firearms, most young people who attempt suicide do not succeed.

Keep in mind that the suicides I am focusing are not "potential threats" like an attack on your neighborhood school. 

 Rather, they are "done deeds."

 Dependable statistics year in, year out.

 Needless statistics year in, year out.

Lamentably, most Americans believe that "heroic last minute intervention" will prevent criminals from perpetrating carnage -- which is highly unlikely to occur in the first place -- simultaneously ignoring the actual avalanche of carnage in American homes - carnage that would not take place if the availability of handguns in the home did not facilitate suicide. 

The make-believe heroicism that afflicts Second Amendment Evangelists recalls the bizarre supposition that the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein (Ronald Reagan's geopolitical ally) would "make the world safe for democracy."

"Bush's Toxic Legacy In Iraq"

"If An Abundance Of Guns Makes Us Safe, 
Why Isn't The United States The Safest Place In The World?"

I await your reply.

American conservatives are terrified of Statistical Truth because it invalidates the apparent significance of heroic anecdotes. 

As right-wing friend Georgie C. puts it: "I like being partly right." 

 In the overarching context of Truth, many anecdotes are "partly right" and so it is that this "wiff of rightness" moves conservatives to prefer the "inspiration" of anecdotal truths even though they fly in the face of Statistical Truth which is where The Common Good resides.

Anecdotes are those heartwarming "chestnuts" (many of them apocryphal) on which conservatives hang their ruggedly individualistic hopes.

 In the poorly-formed minds of contemporary conservatives, anecdotes overthrow statistical truth, whether the anecdotes are true or false.

Instruction And Education Aim At Antipodes


 It only matters that anecdotes play on heartstrings, not that they be true.
"Brazen Lies About Obama"

"Obama Hatred"


Statistical Truth is that cold calculation which tells us "what is best" (or "what is worst") "for most people, most of the time." 

Anecdotes, on the other hand, require eager listeners who -- in the absence of any learning that does not arise from church sermons and storytelling -- pay more attention to "heat" than "light" because they prefer the hot passion of emotional "feelies" over the dispassionate conclusions of "best knowledge."

Alternatively, Statistical Truth requires well-rounded and well-integrated knowledgeability joined with perspective and the intellectual rigor to sort wheat from chaff. 

The GOP: Governing By Anecdote

***
"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . .  The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake." 
"A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable." Thomas Merton - New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964 



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