It is long, long overdue but still it is a good thing to see an article concerning firearm violence which attempts to deal with motives rather than methods and means. I would put before any such researchers this thought… the unknown factor driving at least half of the randomness seen is an emotion I’ve never seen addressed in all of the verbiage associated… not in the pontifications of the fauxLiberal, not in the limited and lame justifications of the psuedoConservatives… and that factor is the actual nature and mechanisms of the emotion FEAR.
The fact of the matter is that people turn to weapons (of any sort) as a way to counter a fear. Gun, knife, club… a weapon is what allows some degree of emotional security in the presence of a threat assumed to be of such intensity as to be assured death and defeat if confronted without some form of equalizer.
If the fear is real and rational the weapon is as well, but… if the fear is not real and rational then the weapon chosen to counter that fear is, by inheritance of motive, an innately irrational thing as well. Massively complicating the situation are two factors: fear is a primal emotion and linked into the body’s endocrine responses (where the environmental factors enter the picture, the poorly understood impact of micro-exposure to pollutants skewing the emotional response curves; and, the fact that in a psychological sense fear is the most commonly concealed and sublimated of emotions… often very difficult to expose for the driving factor that it actually is. In that the shrink set has their work cut out for them. How do you get a culture that prides itself on courage to admit there are things to be afraid of? (answer? courage only exists in the presence of fear, but… another point BOTH sides avoid like the plague).
Until the shrink-shrank-shrunk set is willing to accurately and dispassionately confront the true nature and dynamic of fear, INCLUDING THEIR OWN, little to nothing can be done about the consequences of irrational fears acting within a high compression society. Not an encouraging assessment, but the world as I see it.
June 6, 2022 @ 10:37 am
It is long, long overdue but still it is a good thing to see an article concerning firearm violence which attempts to deal with motives rather than methods and means. I would put before any such researchers this thought… the unknown factor driving at least half of the randomness seen is an emotion I’ve never seen addressed in all of the verbiage associated… not in the pontifications of the fauxLiberal, not in the limited and lame justifications of the psuedoConservatives… and that factor is the actual nature and mechanisms of the emotion FEAR.
The fact of the matter is that people turn to weapons (of any sort) as a way to counter a fear. Gun, knife, club… a weapon is what allows some degree of emotional security in the presence of a threat assumed to be of such intensity as to be assured death and defeat if confronted without some form of equalizer.
If the fear is real and rational the weapon is as well, but… if the fear is not real and rational then the weapon chosen to counter that fear is, by inheritance of motive, an innately irrational thing as well. Massively complicating the situation are two factors: fear is a primal emotion and linked into the body’s endocrine responses (where the environmental factors enter the picture, the poorly understood impact of micro-exposure to pollutants skewing the emotional response curves; and, the fact that in a psychological sense fear is the most commonly concealed and sublimated of emotions… often very difficult to expose for the driving factor that it actually is. In that the shrink set has their work cut out for them. How do you get a culture that prides itself on courage to admit there are things to be afraid of? (answer? courage only exists in the presence of fear, but… another point BOTH sides avoid like the plague).
Until the shrink-shrank-shrunk set is willing to accurately and dispassionately confront the true nature and dynamic of fear, INCLUDING THEIR OWN, little to nothing can be done about the consequences of irrational fears acting within a high compression society. Not an encouraging assessment, but the world as I see it.