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Guns and growing anomie. The latter is theoretically much harder to tackle than the former, which itself is in practice impossible to tackle. The latter will never be debated because it doesn't lend itself to easy debate, and never will until point of extinction.
As a self-doubting nihilist, 10% of me likes this vaguely defined trend, 70% of me hates this, and 20% of me hates the 10% for liking this. Not quite accurate, but how I feel at the moment.
As much as I despise theologically informed visions of some sort of "end times", I myself am not opposed to secular predictions of a similar variety. When Newtown happened I told a friend at a poker game that Friday night that that sort of thing "was going to become much more common". This was one of a few people who I could've said those exact words to without said person "taking it the wrong way"--as in, thinking I was indicating I myself might be planning a massacre. I've said for many years now, only person I'm willing to kill is myself. But I think a growing percentage of the populace is willing to kill, and not necessarily themselves exclusively. If there was a stock or mutual fund that was tied to random killings, I'd be investing heavily in it. I say this rhetorically--basically, I predict more random violence given all the converging social factors in this country. Perhaps not catastrophic, but enough to really **** things up for a lot of people.
This conjecture is surely largely speculative, but I think it is worth discussing. So I'll leave it at that. I have no solutions, really. And I could be wrong. I realize this forum isn't necessarily the most receptive to ideas like this. But I've been thinking it since Newtown...from before it, really. Logical conclusion of our society/universe, like it or not. The Singularity better be really near, because I'm deferring to Enrico Fermi's vision of paradoxical tragedy of relatively enlightened beings such as ourselves (or to Thomas Ligotti's fatalistic vision of humanity's "being set up to fail", with which I most identify) before I trust my material salvation to a Kurzweilian experiment.
Last edited by Matt Marcinkiewicz; 06-09-2014 at 04:32 AM..
though of course it's got nothing to do with guns.
At least you recognize that fact.
Did the guns steal a car and drive to walmart? Did they sit plotting for months up on a shelf while their owners went to their jobs or contributed to society? Maybe they had secret meetings with their firearm friends to help plan the whole thing. Or they turned their owners in to zombies to do their bidding?
A firearm can't do anything, good or bad, without a person attached to it. Maybe we should make it a crime to kill someone or go on a killing spree... oh wait
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