America’s mass shooters don’t fit into one political box, but they all have one common trait, that they have untreated mental health issues. In this country we don't have gun problem, we have serious mental healthcare issue. Guns are only available and easy scape goat. Even if we had absolute ban on guns, these people would use knives, baseball bats, mow people down with a car or simply buy guns illegally.
Switzerland is a country with very lax gun laws, males have to serve military, and after their service they have to take their service guns home, all males also have to do regular shooting exercises and Switzerland has no issues with mass shootings . What is the difference? Robust mental health system in Switzerland.
So guns are not an issue, sadly in US we have normalized situation where people with mental issues are left to fend for themself, with little on no support. To fix this, we need to go to pre Regan era, where people could be institutionalized against their will, because current situation leads to tragedies like this, or situation where people with mental health issues either are getting dumped on the streets where they die to drug overdoses or end up in prison.
But sadly, this will never be implemented in US, for two reasons. Solving real issues of mental health doesn't rally Democratic base as gun topic. If it did, California wouldn't be dumping its mental ill to the streets while providing them with easy access to drugs for last 20 years.
On the other side, Republicans wont do anything, due to possibility that investments in mental health will require spending American Taxpayers money on Americans at home, since they don't like that, because its better to spend money on pointless wars and proxy wars abroad. Sadly as always, Americans are and always will be last thing our Congress cares about.
It's more than that. It's a loss of community. When I was a child growing up in Brooklyn, NY it was like a small village. Everyone on my block knew everyone. People went to synagogue or church. There were bowling leagues and bridge and mah jong groups and civil associations (Moose, Elk, Masons, etc). Everyone belonged to at least one group and had many social ties to many people.
As children we were free to roam the neighborhood. We had to be home when the street lights came on. Every adult could correct us if they saw us doing something we shouldn't and we knew our parents would know before we got home. It was a huge disgrace to the family if you had to be corrected in school or by a neighbor. It shouted bad parenting.
Sure, Naomi, that was true but what changed? I think it was the all out assault by the left on our institutions. They wrecked the church. The scouts. The schools. And, sure, those institutions didn't help themselves. But now what do we have left. De Tocqueville said that the strength of America was its voluntary organizations such as churches and charities. Now we have NGOs, run by dedicated leftists and rent seekers.
Correct. The NGO's are now run by Lefties and seem hell bent on destroying the country.
Technology has been a blessing but also a curse. Radio and television brought us into our homes and away from clubs and civic gatherings. The telephone added to that. Today's electronic platforms further separate us from normal human activity.
It's such a bad idea to give children cell phones and iPads, etc. Their parents can't know who they are communicating with and what they are doing.
The more time children spend with their electronics the less attention span they have and the less ability to learn.
I read this book. I agree with most of it but find his gratuitous inserted political prejudices off the mark and annoying. He does make important observations however.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
I have no idea. Putting that aside, his points in the book are thought provoking if you can get past his obvious political prejudices and unfortunate gratuitous nasty insertions.
The most important economic and social unit in any culture is the family. Not a village. Not a racial identity. Not a gender identity. A family.
When you tell everybody in your culture to go get a job, that that is where you’ll find meaning, do not be surprised when the children are left alone to raise themselves.
We’ve taken our culture and made everything utilitarian. Utilitarianism does not have the answers for which a heart yearns.
Maybe this is the canary in the coal mine. Or maybe the canary has already passed away.
I am not sure I agree, but I like the idea or the simplicity. I always learned that our collective importance is community, family then individual. And one could argue that the community could be an important economic force?
K--the left didn't kill those institutions. The child molesters did. What has changed is that parents don't parent their children any more and America has made it hard for families to take care of their own with rising costs and stagnated salaries. There is no American dream for a vast majority of Americans right now due to the rising cost of living. This forces people to dump their kids and let other people raise them. Kids are being raised with no value on connections to humans because they are not taught that they can rely on humans (their caretakers) for a variety of reasons including moms & dads that have to put work over them, divorce, blended families, no healthy boundaries or discipline.
Well... I'd argue that the left has allowed the child molesters in with things like "drag queen story hour" and Gay Straight Alliance groups where adults talk to kids about their own sexual awakenings, weird "genders", and how cool it is to take "T", etc. I was a full time professional, had kids, and became a full time mom as soon as my first was born. I can say that schools do NOT respect parental authority.
The current administration, which I'd argue is the worst in our history, is all in with promoting leftist ideas over the heads of parents. "NSBA letter drafts called for National Guard and military to be deployed
NSBA letter to Biden, which called protesting parents 'domestic terrorists,' more extreme in its early stages"
I think that wherever you read about a school that has had push-back against CRT there has also been push-back against Gender Ideology. But, many news organizations are afraid to even mention the GI part that parents complain about.
Well, when moms were home, the law did not protect them in most states; very few states had community property laws, which protect the non-breadwinner in divorce proceerdings. If you want moms to stay home, you have to make it financially secure for them, and that would include requiring the breadwinner's paycheck to be divided equally among the spouses.
I'm not saying moms have to stay home--either parent could stay home. But, let's give families opportunities in their career tracks for caregiving children and elders. Some kind of family leave is necessary or increase in wages so that only one person needs to work--regardless of who it is. Or, just allowances for part-time work without penalties in career growth? Not sure what it would look like but families in America need help.
Another big part of it is that many young people have to move far away from support systems to get a job, and EVERYONE in a family has to work now just to get by. If you live in New York and your job is in California then off to California you go.
And how did the left "wreck the church?" There are dozens of churches in my town alone--most of them with no one under 60 in them on Sunday. The church wrecked itself with its sex abuse scandals and its failure to stay remotely relevant to those who might need it. I left the church decades ago when every question and doubt I had was ignored and I was just told things were "God's will" and not to ask so many questions.
In addition, our media FEEDS on fear--keeping people afraid keeps them inside consuming more media.
Yes, people can be stabbed or killed by ways other than guns, but no one is going to be able to stab an entire room full of children in under 60 seconds like they can with an assault weapon.
Some of what you say has merit. The churches have their own issues, I conceded that. But the left has always feared and despised religion and the Pope was a major force in bringing down the Soviet empire. As far as "assault weapons," they've been illegal in the US since the '30s. A normal pistol or rifle with many magazines is lethal. You solve that by keeping them out of the hands of lunatics.
Also, how do we predict who is a lunatic? Who gets to decide? What about people like this kid who had no previous record? Too many loop holes and gray areas for just "keeping them out of the hands of lunatics".
Woke Churches are a huge part of the problem. Those so called churches have moved away from teaching the basics to teaching Woke Ideology. Churches that go Woke eventually fail. Leaving their communities worse off than before. We need churches and synagogues run by leaders with a spine. With courage enough to stand up for the true beliefs and forget all this Woke nonsense. Catering to the popular trend of the day is a sure recipe for failure. People need guidance. Not pandering to their base desires.
"Failure to stay remotely relevant". That thought process is why churches are failing. As the next commenter states those relevant churches are the problem. The teaching and the values are the same now as they were millenia ago. It is the notion that we of this place and time are so special that we need something more relevant that is unraveling the threads that have united us for those millenia.
I don't understand how some states don't allow drinking until age 21 yet allow an 18 year old to buy a gun. It seems sensible to restrict the purchase of a gun to a teenager. But-- congress will not pass that, sadly.
I say bull! First, one just has to look at these institutions to see they have been corrupted by the very people that ran them - most recently SBC. Second, “lefties” didn’t ruin anything-!it is the collective physiology of our country that demanded change. If the institutions were so good, then people would have made them better, but yet they abandoned them because they failed in many fronts.
I have a very comfortable life because I make an upper middle class salary. My parents had the same comfortable life on a regular middle class salary. My grandparents had the same comfortable life on a lower middle class salary.
Now, people in the lower middle class work two sometimes three jobs. They're exhausted. Add kids to the mix and things become impossible. Most parents aren't ignoring their kids because they're at the country club while a nanny raises them--they're ignoring their kids because they're working two jobs to give those kids a chance at success.
This brought to mind the tv series, The Honeymooners. Ralph, although poor, belonged to the Royal Order of Raccoons, where he could feel a sense of purpose and friendship not based on hating someone else
So true. Even in NYC where I grew up, we had a community. Now, however, the communities kids belong to are online. They have 'friends' who they play video games with or 'friends' who they meet through TikTok. Or they meet 'friends' who share a love of dieting to extreme or ones that love guns. It's a sad way to grow up.
My adult son is mildly autistic. The internet has provided him a community (mostly anime) which he would never have IRL. But his issues are exceptional and we do discuss the dangers of the internet, which he is aware of.
I SO agree with this. It is one of the biggest issues I see. I am a psychotherapist and am a believer in attachment theory. The most critical years for emotional development are age 0-3. People are either dumping their kids in day care at 6 weeks and too busy to nurture and discipline. Flip side of that is people having kids in unhealthy situations where no one cares properly for them (they need parenting classes). Add on to that all the divorces and mixed families and it is an attachment recipe for disaster. We have raised 2 generations of children who do not value human connection. This is the root of the problem, but how do we fix it as a society? We have to care about kids age 0-3 and make sure their families are supported, but capitalism won't allow for it. That (& the sheer volume of guns) is the difference between us and like a Switzerland where the gun problems are not out of control. They care for their families better (parental leave, affordable health care,etc.).
I am so glad you brought this up. I have been saying this for decades. One of the worst movements in this country has been the warehousing of children in day care.
But, it goes beyond that...it's the stress levels and time that parents have to parent once they pick up those kids as well. Maxed out families do not have time to properly nurture themselves or their children. It is survival mode all the time.
It's the way you prioritize. Turn off the cell phone. Don't give your children electronic babysitting toys such as iPads. Go to the library once a week and load up on children's books. Spend one afternoon per week cooking meals for the week which you will keep in the refrigerator or the freezer ready to heat in the microwave.
When you do get the kids, pay attention to them. Talk to them. If you don't know how, buy the book, "How to Talk, How to Listen." I have worn out several copies and given them friends.
Eat together as a family. Say grace. Teach the children table manners. In fact, have them set the table and help clear after the meal. Chores anchor a child to the family.
Set up bedtime routines. Stick to them. Bath, book, prayers, bed. Same time each night as much as is possible.
In your analysis do you factor in WHY parents are “warehousing” or rather, utilizing daycare for their children? Do you consider that maybe they do so in order to work to put food on the family table at night? We have some systemic problems in this country, and racism is not it. It’s breakdown of family, breakdown of working economies, political agenda-driven education, and more. I was lucky to be able to raise my kids, but they, now parents as mothers and fathers have to work to make ends meet at bare minimum levels. My kids and their spouses are the heroes. Find where the system has gone astray and fix that and stop blaming the people who doing their damnedest in spite of systemic failures.
Our expectations today are so different. There is no way my own kids would live like I did either as a child or as a young adult.
Nowadays you don't hear the term "early apartment." It was a mattress on the floor, packing boxes for end tables, a card table and chairs for a dining table, and I cooked out of large juice cans until I could get pots and pans at the local Goodwill.
Precisely. The "two-wage household" is often driven by the "need" for this and that and the other thing...things that earlier generations did without just fine. In my parents' first apartment, they used a milk crate hung out the window as a makeshift icebox.
Very true. When I was first married we bought a used mobile home and set it up in my inlaws back yard. Dug for a septic tank and ran power to the home. We lived in that home for 2 years while I went to the local Community College and my wife worked. My mother-in-law babysat for us during the day. After a few years we sold the mobile home and used the money for a down payment on a small 2 bedroom home. We didn't have a lot of possessions at that time. But I don't remember life being particularly hard. Just seemed like what one did when starting out in life.
Why do you think that the average family cannot exist on one income today? Could it be because of so many government programs. Programs that require more and more taxes? A government that can't control spending which results in inflation? A goverment that insists on minimum wage laws that raise prices constantly? A government that spends tax revenue for idiotic programs and welfare. Welfare that encourages people not to work? A government that just printed a LOT of money with no backing. Which leads to even more inflation. All you have to do is look at your own government to see the root of all of our problems. Inefficient, ineffective and corrupt is the current status of our government in America.
It's a tough situation. When you look at how much Americans are taxed (fed and state income taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes to just name a few) it becomes very hard for households to exist without more than one wage earner.
Our government has basically bitten off more than it can chew, and is trying to do too many things, instead of doing the important things well
You are correct, Don. While we thought it hard years ago, the cost of living today is comparatively much, much higher though of course it varies somewhat depending on where one lives.
We had "capitalism" for the entirety of the nation's existence and never had this problem until recently, so that doesn't pass the smell test. The society has until recently recognized that it is in the Nation's interest for people to marry, have a nuclear family, and stay married. It has been traditionally difficult to divorce, which served the purpose of holding families together through the inevitable rough patches. Now, get your panties in a wad and it's off to the lawyer's office - no fault, no problem.
And why do people "dump their kids in daycare," when that wasn't the case before? I would submit that it is because the two parents are typically working 2-1/2 jobs between them.
Where does all that money go? Well, $85 billion of it, for example, was just abandoned in the desert, for our enemies to use to kill our soldiers with. Divide $85B by the number of taxpaying households in America, and maybe you can see why we don't have the money for family leave and healthcare. But at least the weapons manufacturers made out. (sarc)
No, our problem is not "capitalism" or stated another way, too little government. It's too much.
Capitalism is driving up stock by-backs and record CEO salaries while giving less and less back to workers. This causes families to have to work 2 jobs for rising prices of living and healthy care in America. There is no support for the average American family and kids pay the price. I am not against capitalism but today's early 1900s version of it where workers and families get screwed and the .5% get all the spoils and make 300 times more than the average employee is skewed and messing with the middle class. This also fuels shooters who know there is no viable place for them in America. You can work 40 hours/week now and not be able to afford a car, a house or health care. Where is their motivation to thrive? Unchecked capitalism is the root of almost every problem in this country. I am pro-capitalism, just not Pro-unchecked capitalism.
Globalism grafted onto capitalism. When I was young, factory jobs paid $35+ an hour and a house cost $25,000. Now factory workers make $25+ an hour and a house costs $500,000. We gave our lifestyle away, industry by industry.
But CEOs now make something like 300 times more now than they did back then...funny how that works. I just don't know where/when it was decided that the CEOs, shareholders, etc deserved 300 times more than their average worker...I mean isn't something like 100 times more enough? Think of what they could offer employees if there was a cap on how much more they were allowed to make than their workers (although, I do see the downside in this, of course). Or, if they just offered it? But, greed & wall street will never let that happen. They even have many poor and middle class people convinced this is in their best interest.
I do not think so. There are limited numbers of "CEOs" compared to "workers". And they are replaced quickly if they fail to produce. Plus many, many, many individual middle and lower class Americans benefit from stock ownership. The problem is an inept federal government that has devastated the economy that feeds us all. But hey, just print some more money (said with dripping sarcasm).
The further government (or any institution for that matter)is removed from the people it serves, the less functional and more corrupt it will be. I live I a small town. It's a mix of Democrats and Republicans on the town council but we KNOW them and they tend to listen. Then you get to the county level where the bureaucracy grows just a bit and it's slightly harder to get things done, but still possible. Then you get to the state and federal level where only people with A LOT of money or EXTREME pressure for change can accomplish things.
Initially, California, where I used to live, had the initiative process to let people vote on things directly and it was helpful but that, too, became corrupted.
Also, I don't think the founding fathers envisioned the U.S. getting so lopsided that 20% of people in the smallest states would have 50% of the power. Or, on topic, as Bari stated, that they envisioned guns capable of firing 100 shots a minute when they passed the Bill of Rights.
There are many reasons why my mom and I are so different. Her mom was strict, no nonsense parenting, education and job. My mom is the opposite, decided that parenting was to hard and just ignored us. It was only if there was a medical issue that she was present in your life. As time has gone on, our family broke down further, drugs, mental health, money, social awareness became common. I swore in the fourth grade I would never have kids. In the 1970s things were changing and there was a common thread of we will get through this no matter what race you were. It was also a time of the breakdown of the family. Unbeknownst to me other families were breaking down. Women began to work, kids became unsupervised, and predators were becoming more the norm than the exception. Also federal and state programs did not help you get out of poverty but rewarded it. The breaking up of the family is one of the defining moments in our history, and no one noticed.
Capitalism is NOT the problem. Socialism and social programs are the problem. Because those programs disconnect families from their children and encourage that disconnect. Excessive social programs have also contributed greatly to the current corruption in our government. The more money the government controls the more opportunities for corruption. There is plenty of that in our current government. That's been a huge problem for a long time. Look to the current Woke Corporations for proof.
Hi Naomi, I don’t understand your comment “capitalism won’t allow for that”? The United States is the only country in the world that does not have: parental birth leave, subsudized daycare . You write that children are in daycare at six weeks. That’s insanity and has nothing to do with the parents. I’m sure it breaks their hearts to leave their infant at daycare. What does the U.S. offer as a choice? You are also the only country in the world with private prisons and non governmental ownership of nuclear energy sites. Everything is upside down in your country. It seems like it’s citizens always, always come last, it’s shameful.
Here's a thought... you ask "What does the U.S. offer as a choice?". How about don't have the kids if you can't do JOB 1 and take care of them yourself. No birth leave of subsidized daycare? Cry me a river. It's not the governments' job to raise kids - that's what parents are for. We don't have a shortage of government subsidies - we have a shortage of adult, responsible PARENTS.
Is this response a joke? Cry you a river for no birth leave? It is almost impossible now to raise children on one income, by your definition there will be no more babies being born. Your “cry me a river” is one of the reasons that the United States has the lowest birth rate in the western world. You aren’t even replacing yourselves, population keeps dropping. But of course that’s of no interest to you. Shameful response.
In the future, you might want to check the facts before you make embarrassingly inaccurate statements in response to a post. FYI: With exception of Iceland, Sweden and Denmark, the U.S. has the HIGHEST fertility rate of any of the countries in the western world. So it would appear that 'birth leave' doesn't seem to be helping much in those 20+ countries that are trailing the U.S. in the baby department. Any other ideas?
in 2018 your (Canada's) population was 37million. The US had 326million. Your are 10% of our population. And as it goes, the southern border under the current administration has opened the flood gates with more than a million people from ALL OVER THE WORLD making there way here illegally. You have no idea what you are talking about.
We're already facing a baby bust and it's primarily immigration that is producing the generation that will pay for our Social Security and Medicare when the time comes. If more people start making the calculation you suggest we are in for a world of hurt when there are fewer working-age people to support everyone else.
So the government should start subsidizing the birth, care and rearing of children MORE than the do already? And nobody paid for my Social Security - I've been paying into it since I was 16 years old. What we need is for the morons in Washington stop raiding the SS funds to pay for useless wars (and all the other shit they waster our tax dollars on). BTW by simply increasing retirement age by one month every year - Social Security can become self-sustaining in less than 10 years...but nobody in Washing has the balls to do it. Sad.
Not sure what you mean but most companies in the USA offer paid maternity leave. I work at a church preschool and we offer scholarships or discounted rates to those that might need it. There is also a private preschool, up to kindergarten, in my city, funded by donors, for low income families....free tuition for these families. It’s staffed by certified teachers. These are just a few examples from my experience but I’m quite sure there are many, many more places like this in our country.
Too many times I see parents staring at their screens and completely ignoring their children even as the children are doing everything they can to get their attention. It’s so sad.
I agree with everything you said except the sheer volume of guns crack. The vast majority of guns are not used unlawfully and the vast majority of gun owners behave lawfully.
Would like to ask you as a therapist if you have noticed the epidemic of narcissism? As a former childbirth educator I also see the attachment issues. Besides the medical aristocracy, work & day care is part of this. But I see it going even deeper with social media selecting for narcissism among all age groups. The number of people who seem to be affected by toxic narcissism seems immense. Believe these are all connected and actually planned to serve as a convenient crisis for current attempts to grab more power. Do believe the gun problems are likely less of an issue in nations like Switzerland due to the better parenting from leave and health care - which leads to mentally and socially healthier humans.
I think you are onto something. The "me first" movement started in the 1980's I think. I remember some books about looking out for #1 (wasn't one titled that).
Children, and raising them, became a burden and a nuisance. Articles started appearing about the enormous cost of raising a child. If you had a child you had to curtail or reduce the fun aspect of your adult life from expensive toys or expensive vacations.
Motherhood and raising children at home was viewed as constraining, boring, drudgery. Motherhood lost all respect. Women were looked down on if they didn't go after careers and postponed marriage and childbirth. Women were encouraged to lead promiscuous sexual lives.
Adults were encouraged by the popular culture to become permanent adolescents.
Men were demoted from being head of the family and the stalwart rock upon which the family could always rely. Advertising began to portray men as stupid, incompetent and generally useless who had to be rescued by a woman in their lives. This is the worst thing that could happen to men. They are anchored in a family and their energy and aggression gets channeled into a positive force for their family and the community. The culture now sees men as superfluous.
The results of all this society change is chaos. Men have lost their place. Women are unhappy, children don't have stable homes with fathers. Violence and crime are at record levels and rising. Civilization is fraying at the seams.
Yes, this is my family’s observation. Even adult children who seemed so capable and strong have been subsumed by the tidal waves of epic ignorance and dystopian thinking/narratives. Our civilizations have all crumbled apart and this one isn’t any different it seems. The monied “elite” aren’t even aware they’re shooting themselves in their clay feet with all this. Believe civilization itself or what passes for it may be the real issue.
The monied elite can use their wealth to insulate themselves from the chaos and horror they have created. They can hire security and live behind gated communities. When an area they have destroyed becomes intolerable they can move to another location.
I am grateful my two grown children have good sense and are conservatives.
The gun problem is the one who pulls the trigger. There have been mass killings using automobiles (SUVs). It is the vehicle which is the problem or the person driving it intent on murdering innocent people? What about the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon? Was it the pressure cooker that was at fault? How about Oklahoma City. Was it the Ryder truck?
No, it is and always has been the guns. Why is America so attached to their guns. Your comparisons are ridiculous . Every single day, there is at least one American murdered by another with guns. That’s your problem , a gun culture exhibited no where else in the world.
Until the person commits a crime, the parents or the grandmother in this case, can't get help from the police. The young man who did the Parkland shooting is an example. His parents had called the police 47 times in a fairly short time period and the police were unable to help them.
Naomi...even if a crime committed. i lived next to Squatters for two years, police would/could do nothing. When asked if they wanted me to shot, they got upset. The police didn't do the policing because i didn't own the house...2 years, dealing with kids, i got my degree.
I have a seven year old. My four siblings all have children as well, between the ages of 0 and 13. We are all parents of Gen Alpha, in other words, and in discussions about parenting everyone seems to agree: managing our kids’ exposure to technology is absolutely fucking exhausting. So yes, you can fault some parents for abdicating responsibility, but even the earnest parents are in over their heads.
This is so true. My kids are 23 & 19. The difference in just 4 years between the 2 of them and access to technology was incredible. The younger one is definitely more addicted to it. Even though she was one of the last kids in middle
School to get her own phone, she was always on her friends’phones and surfing the internet unsupervised at other kids’ homes, which we didn’t allow in our house when they were elementary and middle school age. It got impossible to police outside of your own home. Hard to police even in your home, actually. I don’t envy you having to parent young kids now.
Being computer savvy helped us. Our kids say they never tried to get around our blocks because they didn’t know nearly enough to know where to look.
That said, my daughter has announced that her children will have smart phones when they can sign the contract—a stance I took with her that caused a good bit of angst during her teen years but it now appreciated.
Big Tech is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. Massively incentivized to profit at the expense of our children's well being. This should be a no brainer bipartisan issue. Big Tech needs to get slammed, good and hard. Imagine our society without Big Tech. Not going to happen, but imagine how much better everything would be.
Yup. Read (or listen to) Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. It covers more than just the perverse incentives of the tech industry. Everyone who wants to understand the scope of the problem and how it is impacting society and individuals should get this book. It's better than The Social Dilemma (tho Tristan Harris is a friend of Hari's, and was interviewed for the book).
There is so much technology available that it is hard to control access to it. My kids are late Millennials, and it was too often easier to let them watch TV (with vastly more programming aimed at kids) than to send them outside to play the way our own parents did. Whether they were genuinely at risk from child predators or not, it felt safer to assume that they were.
And today's kids have far more tech access than my kids did, since we limited internet access to non-private areas of the house, and also did not buy them smartphones (we couldn't afford them ourselves!).
That great age - the seven year old! We have twin seven year old grandsons who love Civilization VI, allowed "Screen" time, competing nonstop for their parents's attention, football strategy, philosophical conversations and digging for worms and treasure in the backyard.
Yes, the parents are in over their heads. We the people are under attack along with our kids and grandkids and have been for some time. We have all made a Faustian bargain with the digital world.
Why do you think that is? Could it be that state, federal, local, county, real estate, automobile, telephone, electricity, sewer, excise, etc., taxes on everything are so high that it is not possible to survive on one income any more, so that the second parent is able to BE a parent? And so many of those taxes are hidden in the cost of everything. I've seen estimates that over 70% of the money that goes out your door eventually goes to some kind of gub'ment tax. No wonder our "millennials" don't work; there is no point; they can never get ahead. We have met Leviathan, and we pay for him.
On top of that, our families are dying. Thanks to LBJ's "Great Society," so many women are now married to the gub'ment instead of a man, receiving their living expenses from a husband who demands nothing; he doesn't yell at them, slap them around, demand sex or a hot meal - what's not to like? They only need a man long enough to get pregnant, and then they - and he - are happy. The nuclear family has been the default structure for tens of thousands of years, and our "leaders" have figured a way to use our own money to destroy it.
There are also expectations. When I was a child there were 7 in my family: 2 parents and 5 children. I grew up in a 3 room apartment, very small, with no telephone and no car. We walked everywhere. Dad worked and Mom was home with us. Everything was scarce. We bought our clothes and shoes at bargain basement places. Everything was a hand me down pretty much and the neighbors gave us their children's outgrown clothing.
We had plenty of food because my parents lived through the Depression and were frequently VERY hungry. However, we didn't have much of anything else.
We made good use of the library, and the local parks. We spent most all day outside, particularly in the summer because there was no such thing as air conditioning in homes. If you wanted to cool off you went to the movies. Movie theaters were air conditioned.
Very few people would be willing to live the way we did. They would consider it extreme privation to do so.
Just chiming in to offer a singular, anticdotal comment that might make 1 person think its not all bad.
My husband and I live on 1 small salary (he's a very underpaid police officer in a city going to hell in a handbasket) in a small, 2 bedroom apartment with our kids. We get lots of appreciated hand-me-downs and meal plan for every week after the Sunday ads come out. We can't afford much of anything at all right now, as I just started working after staying home to raise our kids but can't start full-time until fall when they'll both be in school.
We are super, duper grateful for all that we have, which is, when you stop to think about it, an awful lot. What wouldn't a parent give to have a happy, healthy baby? And that's what we've got. Two little firecrackers in all their glory. We dream of vacations and date nights and having two cars someday, but take great solace in knowing that we have what matters in spades. And I think the fact that folks are missing that is a signicant part of the disease. I don't know who said "some.people are so poor that all they have is money", but they were spot on. And I feel inclined to add, for my own selfish reasons, that we aren't a church-y group, just a thankful one.
Anyway, we aren't the norm, but we certainly aren't the exception, either. I know plenty of parents like us. We meet at the library :)
We lived the same way. When the children were small it was tight but the wonderful richness of raising your children and family life is inexpressible. You put your priorities in the family and not in things.
I can assure you it eases up financially over time.
Mick... church, y, might not be an answer for every living soul, i do not go to Any Church, but it is like, you might need a crutch, might not, but it helps.
It doesn't have to be church per se but a person should have a belief in God, a higher power, an ultimate authority that is not their self or the state.
Yesterday I watched Tucker's interview with a woman from England who has started a women's rights movement. She explains this better than I have ever heard it before. She talked about Maslow's hierarchy and what happens when people have all their needs met. It isn't good. Her name was Kelli Jay Keen. I recommend everyone watch this. The subscription if well worth it.
Always impressed today how many kids don't experience real conversations with adults. Amazing how the little terrors respond to subjects which can be challenging for adults. Such things as use of one's imagination in the real world, versus when gaming online. Applying imagination to formulate plans for a structure then building it, etc. They are nothing if not practical.
I remember what my children told me. One of their teachers asked the students to raise their hands if their family ate dinner together. My child was the only one in that classroom who raised her hand. We ate dinner together each night. Weekends it was brunch and dinner. I also got up and fixed my children a real breakfast before they went to school and I packed their lunches.
We had actual conversations at the dinner table. The topics ranged everywhere. We also visited all the museums and parks within a few hours driving time.
Those experiences often build resilient human beings. I too grew up poor - living in a dilapidated trailer in the middle of the field. My siblings and parents "camped" outside every summer, sleeping under the stars. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized one of my fondest memories was actually the only bearable way to sleep at night. I vaguely recall inside always being hot and stuffy, but that trailer must have been 100 degrees in the summer. Despite having nothing, my parents managed to give us everything that mattered.
It's funny how we remember old things so fondly; maybe there is one upside to aging.
We lived in an uninsulated farmhouse with a tin roof, so when the sun beat down on hot summer days, the upstairs rooms sweltered. We had livestock, so houseflies were a constant problem, and you HAD to keep screens in the windows, cutting any airflow to nearly nothing.
On the hottest of days, my mother would spread one of her homemade quilts on the cool ground beneath the apple tree in our back yard, and I would sit and play there for hours on end. My upstairs room never seemed to cool until well after midnight; I didn't realize then that all the blistering-hot air that had accumulated under the tin roof during the day was radiating down through the ceiling. I can still hear the night sounds - the owls, the bobwhite quail, the whip-poor-wills, the continuous background drone of crickets - and see the cool mist drifting over the hay fields. And the lightning-bugs! Such a show! I can see it all. So bittersweet ....
I absolutely agree. I grew up washing plastic bags and drying them next to laundry in the air… Our entire country used to wash their plastic bags and milk bottles, we didn’t have a concept of a one-time package use. When my country ceased to exist overnight and all its institutions collapsed my mom was so scared of food shortages that she made me and dad spend endless hours on our vegetable garden. After slaving an entire summer weeding a small potato field over and over we collected as much potatoes as we planted. ☺️ We turned out to be shitty farmers; my mom had a degree in English and dad was an electric engineer. Our entire country went through that experience. Then many things changed… I immigrated and ended up in the Silicon Valley. But to this day I wash and dry my plastic bags.. I know I will persevere anything. Now I just need to find the way to provide this tough experience for my children.
Yes, our expenses were lower and fortunately almost all of our neighbors were in the same boat. However, we knew we were lower middle class economically. There was no disgrace in that then.
The point I was trying to make is that if may be possible to live on one paycheck today if you were willing to live without all the toys and modern conveniences.
I am a nurse and doing home care and have been in dozens and dozens of homes. Most of my patients would be considered economically disadvantaged because today those in the lower socioeconomic stratum have the most lifestyle health issues such as diabetes, high blood pressure, morbid obesity, wounds, etc. My patients also had at least one vehicle and frequently one vehicle for each adult driver. They had TV's, washers and dryers, air conditioning, computers, cell phones, iPads, iPods, etc. They relied on fast food and ate fast food for at least one meal each day.
Expectations have changed for everyone.
I was fortunate to be able to stay at home and raise my children. We lived on one paycheck. We lived modestly. I was also able to save and saved for both children's college educations. Consequently both were able to have their college costs covered, at state schools, and graduate with no debt. It can be done.
What did we do? We drove old cars, that were paid off. The money that had gone to the car payment was saved in a "car fund." When the car finally died there was enough in the fund to purchase another vehicle for cash, or finance a portion of the cost.
We ate at home. Home cooked meals. I packed my children's lunches for school. Good food, real food. No junk, no high sugar foods.
My grandpa, my mom's dad, was a child in the Depression and sold apples out of a wagon to make extra money to help out; I think my family will likely throw away more in 5 years thn some people will own in a lifetime. I remind my kids of these things when they get whiny, and I hope it sticks. We got very spoiled and comfortable as a direct yet unforseen result of our ancestors' hard work, and we are doing nothing to try to remedy that, as far as I can see. It will be interesting if the economy tanks to see how people react. I think in a sink-or-swim situation the US is rife with swimmers. In fact not to fall too far down a rabbit hole, but I think a lot of these woke mobs are simply lacking direction and structure. They need to feel a guardrail and there are none for them so they're flopping around grasping at straws to try and make a stand on something, anything. Kids inherently have fire in their belly, but what rational thing could these kids who have virtually no life experience, no hindsight (no foresight for that matter), and very little wisdom possibly rally against? They have 1st world champagne problems so they invent some. Why on Earth we listen is beyond me.
(edited for spelling error) My uncle Omer had his entire arm torn out of the socket by a piece of mining machinery in the 'thirties. There was no welfare then; the mine just told you that you were a cripple and of no use to them and they fired you.
With his one good arm, he raised acres of gardens and sold the produce on the county courthouse parking lot. He had over a hundred stands of bees. He cleared property - with one hand, grubbing out the briers and weeds with a one-handed mattock. On that land he grew Christmas trees and sold them in town. My aunt worked and canned as much as they needed for winter, tutored her children at home and brooked no nonsense from them. This is in the mountains of rural West Virginia - in the 'forties. One son became a dentist. Another a chest surgeon in St. Louis. Another a brain surgeon - literally a brain surgeon - in Florida. One a professional photographer. Another a radiologist in St. Louis - easily the smartest man I have ever known - now in his 'nineties.
Before he died at age 101, my uncle showed his bank book to my older brother. One million dollars plus. "And this is not money my kids gave to me. I made every dollar of it myself."
Well said. Yesterday I listened to Tucker's interview with Kellie-Jay Keen. She is fighting back against Woke culture and gender issues. She spoke about Maslow's hierarchy and what happens when all your needs are met. It's not a good thing. Not at all. Good interview to listen to and well worth subscribing to Foxnation just to get Tucker's specials.
Of the five of us, three went to college. One brother has advanced degrees which makes him think he knows everything. Needless to say he is a thorough Lefty. My oldest brother did not like school and didn't go to college but managed to make a good life. None of us has ever committed a crime or been a bad citizen, except for brother #2 who votes for people who have ruined his city and community. Go figure.
Those of us we did go to college got scholarships, worked while in school, and paid our own way. No debt.
I cannot disagree with anything you have said. Allow me to give you another perspective. I became an adult in the late 60's. The women's movement was in full swing, but it was not every woman's movement. If you chose to marry, have children and be a full-time homemaker, you were a cypher. You had no value in that culture. There was lot of woman-on-woman bullying. The woman in our company who won the prize for being the strongest feminist came to work on Friday, gave birth to twins that night and was back to work on Monday. I often wonder how that worked out for her children.
My husband and I were deliberate in our decision to live on one salary. We chose to be poor. I don't regret a minute of it.
Yup...I remember those days. At parties and social events I had status when I was a retail store manager. When I became a full time, stay-at-home mother, I was a pariah and radioactive. Amazing the transformation in a year or two.
Naomi and Jeanette, this was true through the early 2000’s when I had kids. Other women scoffed when you said you wanted to stay home because the perception was that you’d become boring and obsessed with the kids. And I used to hear a guy I worked with complain daily because his wife didn’t work and he had to work harder! That culture is contributing to this rot.
I remember Hillary’s defensive comment about her choices of her career vs. staying at home and baking cookies and having teas — It was telling how that was treated (whether misunderstood or not) when neither choice was inherently wrong, but was personal and either was in that era doable/affordable for many. In contradiction today and for the last while, we have educators blaming parents for not raising their children, in an era when for many, two incomes are needed, not just for sustenance but to ensure the children are prepared to embark on their own adult lives in a world in which expectations are vastly different from those for the parents and grandparents. Such is the disintegration of our culture.
Fast forward a little and today we see “gender roles” being abolished so men can have transplanted uteruses and deliver babies and compete in women’s sports and this new reality and culture is being considered and taught as normative to the youngest school children.
Law of unintended consequences in this instance, the “women’s movement” was a few decades later seen to be net destructive to the culture norms that had been extant for time out of mind. Where this all goes? Who knows. At my age, it’s possible I shall never know but at the rate we have been going in destroying our culture, we could find out next week!
In yesterday's Common Sense essay by William Deresiewicz, he wrote, "all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up—not financially, not psychologically, not morally."
Our society's moral compass is broken. I do not care if someone is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or some other religion/belief, but we all need to believe in something greater than ourselves. We need to believe that there is a higher power, and we need to love others as we love ourselves. Serving others whether it is our family, our community, friends or strangers improves the lives of the served as well as the server. We are raising a generation of materialistic, self-centered, mentally weak young people. Young people who cannot think for themselves, who seek validation from the cesspool of social media.
I don't know how to change the course. I don't want someone telling me how to parent my 18 yo son, and others don't want me telling them how to parent their children (especially when some don't want to parent at all). I fervently believe that the removal of God and Biblical values from the mainstream of our society and the degradation of the family are primary culprits, but people can't be forced to believe in God or hold to family values of safety, structure, discipline, and love. I just have to raise my son in the best way I know how to make him a respectful, responsible, productive member of society and hope that there are a lot of parents out there doing the same.
When parents are not on the job, then we should notice that neither is the school system. How many school boards require that students be taught the criminal laws of the land? How many require field trips to prisons? How many require field trips to homeless camp grounds? How many require field trips to places where addicts try to recover?
It is my impression that if an American child is not taught right from wrong at home, he will not be taught it in school, the one place where we have the chance to mold our youth into law abiding, patriotic, productive citizens, not half crazed drug addicted gun toting gang bangers who see nothing good about America.
I think we need to knock off the generalizing and blaming of parents. And of teachers. The blame game does nothing but make matters worse pitting us against one another. “Blame” if you must, but blame those whom you elect to do the right things for your communities and demand they do what you hired them for.
Well there’s that, but more importantly, there is no longer an American culture.
Or maybe what Barri describes as rot & nihilism is our culture?
I saw a post from earlier I can’t find now, but the lady asked what she could do, besides “doing good in my small circle.”
That’s all anyone can do.
The problem is, there’s no consensus as to what’s “good” anymore.
There’s no better example than the Supreme Court leak.
A very vocal group (which I think/pray is in the minority) claim legal abortion, for any reason, right up to birth, is is a societal “good”. They think taxpayers should foot the bill and want Roe vs Wade enshrined as the 11th Commandment.
Another group view it as a societal evil under any circumstances.
I think most of us look on abortion as a tragic choice, but still a woman’s right. But it should not be a right without limits.
Killing another being, a human being, who has separate DNA, is the epitome of a culture of death. As a women, it is not my "right" take anyone's life. I know full well what can happen if I engage in sex and I know full well what to do if I'm raped. It is my job to protect ALL LIFE. When everyone realizes this, we won't have mass shootings!
True of many parents but not all. Too many mothers have been more involved in their careers than with their children. I was the child of a working mom. A mom who had time for her family as well as her job. I was lucky. Many are not so lucky, unfortunately.
Some of this has to do with the way jobs are set up. Constantly changing shifts and schedules wreck havoc with the best of parents trying to line up child care among themselves.
Interesting comment Jeannette. I am 55. My kid life was relatively simple as was my parents’. And no cell phones. My parents knew everything about us kids. I advise reduced phone function and access until after high school. A computer at home can perform many app functions at the website.
“Republicans wont do anything, due to possibility that investments in mental health will require spending American Taxpayers money on Americans at home, since they don't like that, because its better to spend money on pointless wars and proxy wars abroad”?
Almost. Put Democrats in place of Republicans in that sentence. You do realize that not a single Democrat voted against Democrat President Biden’s $33 BILLION to fund Ukraine’s war? Only Republicans voted against it.
Was “mental health” in Biden’s $3 trillion Build Back Better bill? Nope. Was it in the Infrastructure bill? The Covid bill? Both trillions. Nope.
Does California -lead by and run by Democrats for decades spend on mental health? Nope, it takes funds for homeless shelters and diverts them to “housing”. Does it let crazy people sleep and shit in public spaces. Yep. Does it spend any of its $100 Billion surplus from cover d funds and tax revenues? Nope.
You’ve fallen for some tropes. You won’t solve anything with those biases.
Plenty republicans voted for $$$ for Ukraine. And lets not forget that they got us in to mass that was Iraq. And without Rand Paul blocking the bill, they would have ramed the bill with no debate. Yes there are some good republicans, but majority are same as democrats, work for everyone and everything becides American Citizens.
I'll stipulate that there are also idiots among the elected Republicans. I'd also stipulate that Democrats lack courage - other than Manchin and sometimes Sinema - to go against leadership. Sheep nearly one and all. They vote as a unified bloc for whatever leadership wants. While many Republicans voted for the funds, 11 Senators and 57 House members, Republicans all, voted against. Democrat Hero, Chuck You Schumer, even castigated Republicans saying: “While most Senators in both parties want this package done, it is beyond troubling to see a growing circle of Senate Republicans proudly oppose Ukrainian funding,” " and, trying to blame it all on Trump, said “It appears more and more MAGA Republicans are on the same soft-on-Putin playbook that we saw used by former President Trump,."
There are things to be done to make America safe again if we have the will.
1. Armed former cops and veterans need to stand vigilant watch over every school, as many as are needed. WHEN school shootings go down we can change this.
2. Hire & train well, more cops. Stop the war on cops. (Listen to the most knowledgable Heather MacDonald.) Good guys with guns DO kill bad guys with guns.
3. Fire the Soros funded criminal-loving DAs and Attorneys General. Vote in serious crime fighters.
4. Stop the woke tyrants from demonizing the majority of Americans who were born white or have family values. Stop demonizing Black and Hispanic conservatives.
5. Do not let the Woke tyrants demonize mothers and homemakers, and stop them from indoctrinating children into their toxic ideology.
(BTW, Phillip Roth saw life thru a very nihilistic lens, listening to him will make one very pessimistic about everything.)
"2. Hire & train well, more cops. " Well said. The cops and Border Patrol who responded to the Robb Elementary shooting included 3 BP from an "elite" highly trained squad. Those three managed to get the shooter who'd locked himself in a classroom behind cinder block and a steel door. He was shooting at PB thru that door (of course they could not back through it as it was a classroom. Those BP guys got a master key, unlocked the door, entered, one was shot by the shooter, another killed the guy. That is the sort of training needed to deal with psychos.
Exactly right - and no more adults either. Too busy self pleasuring on non stop smart phone eye candy how many hours a day. Just can't get enough. Homer Simpson parents.
What's worse there is a new push from the Left to stop medicating the mentally ill. Can the Left be any more deranged than it is?
It was a huge mistake to shut down the mental health hospitals in the 1980's. Mentally ill patients were expected to take their daily meds on schedule and be able to live out in the community. Some of the savings was to go into halfway houses and community houses where the mentally ill could live, and transition back into normal life. These facilities never came to be.
Mentally ill people need help. It is tragic and a crime against humanity to allow them to live like animals on the streets.
The mental health hospitals in the country, were for the most part, clean and humane places where the mentally ill could get help. Most of them are like small children and they are vulnerable to all sorts of abuse and exploitation.
That was an unholy alliance between the left and the right. Reagan didn't want to spend the money on mental health hospitals and the left didn't think it was fair to keep people confined to them. But the people committing these crimes aren't the severely mentally ill people from mental hospitals--those people are the ones on the streets talking to themselves. It takes at least a modicum of sanity to go to a gun store, plan a shooting and then carry it out--not something likely for a severely mentally ill person.
I find it impossible to accept that a SANE person could plan and carry off this heinous crime. Intelligence and insanity are not mutually exclusive. Criminals can be brilliant and ALSO INSANE. Not all insane persons are babbling away to themselves and incapable of crime.
I think a distinction needs to be made and clarified that INSANITY is no excuse for murderous crime and we should abolish the notion that someone like this is “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
So, t takes at least a modicum of intelligence to go to a gun store… But an insane person can do that too. The insane criminal needs first to be handled as a criminal for others’ safety, then as a mentally ill patient, not the other way round. . . .
They do need help but many do not need drugs. The drugs cause changes in the brain that can cause them to be violent. They need effective therapy and human connection. When did these mass shootings become common? Since the advent of drugging children with ADHD & depression meds in the 90s.No one talks about this but the information is out there
1) I have a son on ADHD meds. He's the most docile, least risk-taking person I know. He simply needs help focusing and his meds enable him greater success. 2) Tragically, one of my younger brothers took his own life 36 years ago when he was 18. He was obviously a very depressed person but my parents did not recognize it back then. I wonder if he'd have a wife and children now at the age of 54 and work as an architect as he dreamed had he been on medication. 3) A high school friend was off her meds one day and grabbed a very large poster off the gym wall, ran after another girl trying to wrap her up in it. She also had an outburst in class that was scary. That was in 1976. She's a fine person but she needs medication to manager her mental illness. Your generalizations are not helpful.....at all.
2 book recommendations with studies sited and written by experts, which I am not. There has been more iatrogenic harm done than good by these drugs. It’s an unfortunate and underreported truth. Read Reclaiming our children by Dr Peter Breggin & Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. You might also read The Girl on the Bridge by Tracy Higgins who was cured of schizophrenia without drugs after a childhood of horrid abuse. Her “mental illness” was her brain’s protection mechanism against her abuse, basically. While the other 2 are based on professional knowledge and studies, hers is a first hand account from a patient. Eye opening
I've been thinking about your comment for a few days. I appreciate your suggestions and will look into them. My son isn't mentally ill, just can't focus. He had a stroke at birth and was diagnosed with ADHD in the first grade. My initial reaction to your comment was defensive, which is why I've held off responding. Thanks for the information; I know you are writing out of concern.
Absolutely out of concern. I understand being defensive. Your son sounds like there is an actual physical reason that he may need medication. However, they are way over prescribed. When my kids were in elementary school, I started to wonder, why are there so many kids, at a small school I might add, on meds? I discovered the book that Peter Breggin wrote called Reclaiming our Kids. I was really shocked by the content. I’m calling it divine intervention now, because one of my daughters was going through a still unknown crisis in high school. We got her to a therapist which led to a psychiatric evaluation. After 3 meetings the psychiatrist jumps to “I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong but I suspect bi polar 2 and I’m going to prescribe Lamictal and if that doesn’t work we’ll add lithium. I immediately said hold on. Remembering what I read in that book years ago, I started doing more research. Many of these drugs have horrible side effects. Suicidal and homicidal ideation is common with the anti-depressants in teens and young adults. If she has already been suicidal, how does this help? I brought up those side effects to the Dr who acted like none of them were a big deal. “Oh I treat other kids at her school with those drugs and no one has reported a problem.” It’s like experimentation. They don’t know which ones will work or if any will work at all, with the risk of very bad side effects. Anyway, that’s been my path, and why I’m on a bit of mission to get the word out to other parents just to be aware. Also, if decreasing the amount of these prescriptions to teens would help avoid a school shooting, I’ll be screaming what I’ve learned from the rooftops. Definitely no offense meant to anyone who has followed the advice of their Dr. who prescribed them to their kids or has been mislead by them, as the case may be.
Anti depressants have the black box warning that they can have this side effect in teens and adults. The drug ads say suicide but they can also cause homicidal tendencies. 2 of the most famous, the Columbine murders and Andrea Yates, all on Prozac. And many since those as notes in the article I posted
There is NO ONE panacea, no one answer for what we have in this day and age and we cannot roll back time to pastoral days of yore.
All your points are good ones that should be taken up in a full-scale analysis of the vulnerability that exists in which school shootings like this latest can happen. This tragedy was preventable starting with having the doors to the school locked and security guards in place, and had there been a clear and known line on which anyone could report to authorities any of the clear signs concerning this disturbed individual.
EVERYTHING needs thorough study, analysis, and review so that intelligent preventive plans and programs can be put in place. Somehow we need to make this a priority for our elected representatives of all political persuasions.
The Parkland shooter's parents called the police to their home over this disturbed young man 47 times. An Obama program prevented the school from reporting incidents involving certain categories on youth based on skin color and ethnicity.
There are many factors to these incidents but there are some common findings. They are all men, mostly young. They are losers who want to become famous. They spend inordinate amounts of time online with violent video games and pornography. They are all heavy marijuana users.
There have been studies of what marijuana does to the prefrontal cortex when used by people before the age of 25. It can cause paranoid schizophrenia. There was an excellent book published a few years ago that carefully documented this phenomenon. Alex Berenson wrote one such book but there are others.
Yes, exactly. The knee jerk reaction to take very registered gun doesn't begin to solve this problem. Registered gun owners are the least likely to commit these atrocious acts.
The safest place in my county is also the area with the most gun owners and the most guns. NO ONE breaks into these people's homes.
Concealed carry is also very popular where I live. It can be a real crime deterrent. A few years ago a young man came into a local restaurant and demanded money from the cash register. He was brandishing a gun. Two customers at different locations in the restaurant stood up, pulled out their hand guns and fired at him. They missed. He ran out and was not seen again. Needless to say that restaurant was NEVER robbed again. Safest place in the county to eat, although all our restaurants are safe places to be.
Raziel, I agree--we need to bring back forced institutionalization of the mentally ill. When the law was changed in 1975 with O'Conner v. Donaldson, the attitude of psychiatrists and civil libertarians was that with new (at the time) anti-psychotic drugs, mental illness would be a thing of the past. Patients would visit their local psychiatrist and pick up their meds. Sadly, as one psychiatrist, who testified in front of Congress in favor of deinstitutionalization in the early seventies, wrote a mea culpa in the New York Times ten years later, about his the realization that "patients" do not have a sense that they are mentally ill, and do not bother to show up and get their meds...in fact, once free, they are hard to track. Today, many families exhaust all LEGAL means to deal with family members who show signs of severe mental illness and potential violence--and simply pray their loved one does not commit the kind of heinous acts we see in the headlines today. It is utterly facile to argue that "Reagan did it". That is not the whole story. Before the Lanternmen Act was passed, California had semi-self sufficient mental health hospitals. IN the early 1970s, the ACLU filed suit against the State of California arguing that the "patient/inmates" rights were being violated by making them work on the physical plant of the hospital--gardening, cooking, cleaning etc. Furthermore, the ACLU also insisted that the patients/inmates should be free to engage in 'adult activities (i.e. sex)' as an expression of their rights. This is when Mentally Disordered Sex Offenders were housed on the same campus as people who were Mentally Retarded and/or Severely Mentally Ill. That Reagan happened to be governor when all this went down created that most useless rhetoric about the real reasons for the extreme change in the LAW regarding the mentally ill. Simply put--if you cannot hold anyone (except a criminal) against their will, the mental hospitals will likely sit empty. The presiding justice of O'Conner v. Donaldson (the nail in the coffin of institutionalization) said he was greatly influenced by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a popular work of fiction at the time, with a deinstitutionalization theme. If one is looking for the differences between the USA and other countries, it is our inability to hold those who are unaware of their own mental illness and could prove to be a danger to others. We've come a long way from the early days of mental health treatment, but most psychiatrists will tell you that the inability to "hold" a patient has created the crises we witness today in mass shootings and homelessness.
As a lawyer, I remember well two sets of parents who sat in tears in my office. Both of them were convinced that their late adolescent sons were mentally ill and would do something horrible. Both sets of parents had done everything that they knew to do, including counseling and medication. These were good people who wanted their sons involuntarily committed in order to protect their sons and the community. Under the laws as they existed at the time....after we made involuntary institutionalization practically impossible...there was nothing that could be done to help them or their sons. Ultimately, I think both boys committed suicide.
Yes. And that is so sad. I know of a family who did everything they could under the current law, including having their 18 year-old son living in a monitored home, but that didn't stop him from committing a murder-suicide. Another friend has spent 20+ years monitoring her schizophrenic son--as a full-time job, which she believes has prevented him from committing crimes and/or suicide. The resistance from many parties to understanding how difficult institutionalization is nowadays is really frustrating. And on the other hand, the number of households that own guns hasn't actually changed significantly in 200 years. The deinstitutionalization laws set in 1975 very clearly correlate to mass shootings and homelessness. The homelessness sort of proves that point--because that isn't about guns. And if I thought disarming citizens would make the world "safer" I would advocate for that--but my question would be...how do you get the genie back in the bottle as there are millions of guns in the USA, many of which are "illegal" and in the hands of criminals? So much hand-wringing when the "solutions" are politicized--and yet to me the answer is clear--make institutionalization of the mentally ill easier, and more transparent once institutionalized. I'm tired of the excuses from the left and the right. The left says: you can't take away the right to be insane, or to "be free" even if you are severely mentally ill and a danger to others, etc. and on the right it is "but the Democrats will lock up Republicans because they'll argue that not voting Democrat is a sign of mental illness"--I think we have to consider the bigger picture--the severely mentally ill must be institutionalized until they are determined to be able to live in society without being a danger to others (and themselves) and hope that neither side use institutionalization as a political weapon.
I agree. We have turned our streets into open air mental institutions. There has always been a balancing act between personal liberty and safety. The fear that people will be declared "mentally ill" and institutionalized for trumped up reasons (political viewpoint, for example) is a real and legitimate fear. But surely we are smart enough to be able to build in safeguards and checks and balances to to prevent that. I keep hoping that both the 2nd Amendment folks and the Mental Health Advocates could at least get together on the issue of proper treatment of the mentally ill.
While I completely agree with you, the severely mentally ill on the streets are not the ones committing mass shootings. They don't have the mental capacity to go to a gun store, complete paperwork for a background check, and then plan and execute the shooting. Most of them just wander the streets all day, some more threatening and dangerous than others. It's definitely another problem that needs to be solved but I just don't see the severely mentally ill being the ones responsible.
I understand that, but there are thousands of families in this country with severely emotionally disturbed (adult) children who are living at home. The Gabby Giffords shooter is a good example. The family did seek psychiatric help, but because the institutionalization laws are so stringent, they were unable to have their son committed. Same with the UCSB shooter. I truly pity those families that did everything they could under the law, but we’re unsuccessful because they couldn’t commit their mentally ill child once they turned 18 years of age.
We are on the same page. One of the most powerful "advocates" for the homeless in Los Angeles, a lawyer by the name of Carol Sobel, continues to sue the city for more camping rights, etc. for the homeless, rather than addressing the issues that force them to live on the streets like wild animals. Too many people consider such things as "housing" or "gun rights" issues rather than addressing the root cause. When I see all the headlines after a tragedy like yesterday's, I find it so disheartening that even the media in general refuses to address what is clearly the actual cause of mass shootings (and homelessness)--which is the loss of our mental institutions because of laws passed 45+ years ago.
Brilliant LA Conservative! (As am I.) I remember from the 1960s and 70s, Dr. Thomas Szasz, who, I believe, instigated the entire argument to never institutionalize the mentally ill. He received the Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged (1974). As I recall his influence was immense.
Conservatives want the mentally ill who are a danger to themselves and to others to be institutionalized. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s. We saw the very rare "bum," and no homeless. For that matter no one was allowed to wander in a neighborhood aimlessly they did not live in. It was called loitering and it was against the law. Guess what? I was free to roam from 6 years old on - what a dream it was!
Yes—Even Dr Szasz had no idea the disaster that would unfold over a couple of generations. I think the laws passed pre-1980 should be revisited since todays technology should prevent most of the abuses that civil libertarians feared back in the 60s and 70s.
There is a very good book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin Olasky. He details the various social programs that existed in the US from before the Civil War into the 1920's and 1930's.
We seem to go through these cycles. It got so bad after the Civil War that the temperance movement joined up with those concerned about vagrancy. They made the distinction between the "deserving and undeserving" poor.
I bought it when it came out but only read a little. I will revisit, the lessons from the Civil War aftermath sound very interesting for today. Thank you.
It's almost as if the "all males are evil" rhetoric that feminists have been spouting for the last 30 years is having some kind of effect on how boys view themselves....
It was not Reagan who put all the mentally ill out on the street. That happened earlier, in the 70's, as an overreaction, primarily by Democrats, to the very real problem of abusive conditions within some mental hospitals. This was also influenced strongly by an intellectual movement that insisted that there was no such thing as mental illness, that those we call insane just saw the world differently and were in many ways superior to us normies. Reagan was simply the first Republican president after the problem became apparent, so the media blamed him for it.
this was less a political response than a medical reality, which coincided with my medical school years that included psychiatry in the curriculum. What happened is that the phenothiazines, tricyclics, and lithium were transforming what was possible in psychiatric care. There were still the shell shocked of WW1 who stayed at the VA psychiatric warehouses, but for schizophrenics, manics, the suicidally depressed, and substance abusers, restoration to function became by far the largest outcome. The state and VA centers held thousands of people with no meaningful treatment and no end points. The successful use of medication, and advancements since, greatly changed their prospects. We don't get outraged, or even notice, the treated patients who go to work every day with outpatient followup and management of their medications and its side effects. Those people, warehoused in my medical school years as untreatable, far exceed the number of homeless and other untreated or untreatable schizophrenics whose presence we do notice in our cities. The ability to transform psychiatric care on that scale, mistakes and limitations aside, was one of the remarkable advances in 20th century medical care. I think our elected officials, social agencies, and mental hygiene community do need better accountability for how they mishandled the consequences of what did not go as well.
I think this is a very good point. It's quite important to avoid binary thinking on these kinds of issues. But policy decisions are always political. Science can inform policymakers, but not dictate policy. The problem here is that the reforms were responding to a very real problem, and as you point out, were quite successful in many ways. But they also failed terribly in other ways, and those failures became apparent pretty early on. Most importantly, there doesn't appear to have been any interest in fixing the reforms, to say, how can we preserve what is good, but repair what isn't working. And this appears to have been a political decision, both on the part of government, and the mental health professionals. There's even extreme reluctance to concede that mental illness is a central factor in most homelessness. There's similarly extreme reluctance to protect people who are getting harassed by mentally ill people. The police will shake their heads and say, until they actually kill you, there's nothing we can do. And the mental health professionals seem quite complicit in this, eager to declare clearly dangerous people "no longer a threat." (I have some personal anecdotal experience with this). It's presented as a binary "we can't go back to the bad old days," which is then used as a pretext for allowing the current intolerable situation to continue.
I don't have any easy solutions to offer, and I'm acutely aware of the potential dangers to personal liberties that can come from improperly calibrating this. But we need a way to institutionalize people who either can't take care of themselves, or are a danger to others. This is where some constructive input from the medical community could be very useful, but they don't seem interested in providing it. And that is political rather than scientific.
Yes, you are correct. I remember those days and the arguments. It was said that now there were drugs to control mental illness there was no reason to institutionalize the mentally ill. And, yes it wasn't Reagan although the Left just loves to blame him. The movement came, as usual, from the do gooder bleeding hearts on the Left.
Everybody please check out Fredrik de Boer’s Substack. He has a very eloquent voice in the discussion of mental illness and treatment. He’s also getting quoted all over the place, including in Common Sense, WSJ, City Journal, so I think he’s making an impression. Certainly has with me.
Switzerland is also a much smaller and tight knit country, as well as being mostly socially homogenous. One could probably compare, say, rural New England to Switzerland in this regard, but the whole of the U.S.? That's a wide comparison gap there.
Spot on. Hopefully a leader like Michael Schellenberger, whose running for Governor of California, can win and bring his state back from the mental health insanity it finds itself in today. If California can make strides towards an improvement in how we're treating the mentally ill and addicted, so too can America. On the other end of the spectrum, we have bumbling, bungling, Joe Biden who used the tragedy yesterday to barf a bunch of tired and dangerous talking points on gun control that my Democrat friends have become addicted to. Guns are not the root cause. In fact, gun laws can only keep honest people honest. They do ABSOLUTELY nothing to curb violent crime, and I'd argue that gun laws are making violent crime even more violent because the dishonest miscreants have become emboldened knowing that their victims are likely unarmed. I love Bari but she's back on the establishment reservation when she goes right to more gun control gobbledygook. It's wrong and it's dangerous because there's ABSOLUTELY nothing to worry about when a gun is in the hands of a law-abiding citizen. 18 children would not be dead today if more citizens were trained and armed to handle unthinkable tragedies like this. Please stop with the gun control nonsense. Please!
I agree with you about the mental illness issue. Such people will commit violent acts regardless of weapon and violence among homeless is an issue. But a knife won’t kill 20 people from 30 feet away in less than a minute.
This. Violent people are everywhere, and sometimes they can do a lot of damage with knives and similar weapons. It's a big problem in Britain and China. But a knife rampage rarely matches the amount of damage that can be carried out with a gun.
Mass killers in countries with tough gun laws can instead kill and injure many people by ramming them with cars or trucks, but that's another story. (Sadly, as we saw in Waukesha, it's sometimes the weapon of choice in the US, too.)
It is both. But then again... one of the reasons why individuals are allowed to own weapons of war, is because the government is allowed to, as well. There really is no reason for a cop to have possession of a firearm with a 50-shot magazine. The second amendment exists to balance the scales between the governing and the governed. If the cops laid down their killing machines, it would be easier to ban them outright.
That may be one point of view - but the militia clause of the 2A is built upon the premise of unbalanced power and tyranny from the government. Militias aren't formed to go after schoolkids or random carjackers, they exist to defend against unchecked powers. As long as there is an imbalance of firepower between the government and the governed, the 2A allows individuals to have the same armaments. If, perchance, all guns were limited to six-shooters...
Actually Psych drugs are almost always involved in school shootings. Something like 75% of shooters are either medicated, just started the drug or just discontinued. Furthermore those drugs carry a black box warning for suicidal ideation (violence) at start of treatment, discontinuation or dose change. How many parents are made aware of the black box warning? VERY FEW
would love to see a citation for this statement: Actually Psych drugs are almost always involved in school shootings. Something like 75% of shooters are either medicated, just started the drug or just discontinued."
Go to page 37 of this report. This was presented to the FBI PRIOR to the black box being added. I have information on more recent shootings as well somewhere
Thanks. I appreciate the citation and the response.
I am cautioned, however, by the lack of clear findings in the study. From the abstract: "Currently, no conclusive scientific evidence exists to definitively support a link between psychopharmacological treatment and de novo or intensified suicidality and/or homicidal impulsivity. Meaningful analysis of the effects of psychostimulant and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant medications on behavior has been thwarted by difficulties distinguishing reported side effects from underlying psychiatric disorders and preexisting conditions and deficiencies in public health, policy, and reporting practices. enough anecdotal evidence and a growing body of research strongly suggest a causal connection between psychoactive medication and violent ideation and/or behavior in adolescents."
I am loathe to draw any firm conclusions from "anecdote" as such conclusion is as likely to reflect author bias as anything else. Jesse Singal, noted lefty psychologist wrote a great book on crappy psychological studies. "The Quick Fix". Worth a read. Not saying Vanessa Leggett's paper is of a piece with Singal's examples, but as I wrote it does provide a cautionary instruction.
Like I said this was PRIOR to the black box warning being issued on SSRIS- it was quite literally the first to brooch the subject. It is a topic of HOT debate. Just look at a chart of school shootings pre 1997 (prozacs entrance) to now. I’m not saying it’s the ONLY cause but I find it very foolish to simply dismiss as our pharma friendly media and pharma paid politicians have.
Exactly right. I remember when this happened in Washington State. The Democrats push for de-institutionalization under the banner of civil rights combined with the Republicans' desire to save money by closing state mental hospitals. We will treat them in their communities, they said. But the operational definition of community was geographic, so they just emptied the mental hospitals onto the streets. That was quickly followed by alchoholics and drug addicts and it just built from there. So mental illness has been normalized. When someone starts acting coo-coo you can't just make a phone call and have them brought in for evaluation and - if appropriate - detention and commitment. We need to pass laws and fund institutions that can incarcerate and treat those who are a danger to themselves and others. I suppose the problem, at this point in our history, is how to keep that apparatus from becoming politicized, defining political differences as insanity - something you see every night on TV.
This is what has frozen us as a society: "I suppose the problem, at this point in our history, is how to keep that apparatus from becoming politicized, defining political differences as insanity - something you see every night on TV."
Just as you mention about mental health laws, I don't want to see stricter gun laws because I know they will be abused to gradually but forcibly remove guns from civilian populations. I don't want the civilian populations unarmed because our government is corrupt beyond comprehension and has little regard for the basic rights and welfare of the average citizen, and if COVID policy and enforcement didn't make everyone aware of that, nothing will. But the point is we can't give government any way to monopolize the possession of weapons, no matter how many school shootings there are, because they will abuse that monopoly.
I am, in general, a liberal, but as I've watched the increased hyperpartisan nature of politicians and the authoritarian bent of particularly the left these days, I find any liberalization of laws dangerous for the population as a whole. We're better shrinking the federal government down to nothing and finding ways among ourselves to work this out.
The founders' approch to faction was division of powers. It would be necessary to provide counsel and to specify a cause of action for false imprisonment and other damages. Maybe there are other ways, but it would surely be expensive but filling up every empty space with demented people has a cost as well.
I agree with your ideas, though the blame on repubs is not settled fact. That doesn’t matter as much as the fact that whatever was done by whomever unleashed a lot of ill people onto the streets without ensuring a replacement system was in place. A colossal error.
I needed a project to fill out some hours in grad school so I just went through all of the local newspaper articles from about 1970-1978 and summarized it. That is the basis of my opinion that it was bipartisan, at least in this state. Short-sighted indeed.
I was thinking along the same lines; while mass institutionalization and the stigmatization of mental illness are far from ideal, we have completely lost the balance toward the opposite direction. Issues surrounding mental health at least partly explain the homeless crisis in CA (which I witnessed while on vacation), the current situation with the nyc subways (I used to take the subway frequently. Lately, I avoid when I can), and—yes— the mass shootings in Buffalo and TX (worth noting, the onset of severe mental illness like schizophrenia in males is late teens/early 20s). I also agree with you in terms on the following; we should model those countries with a more comprehensive and proactive approach to issues pertaining to mental health.
There is another element worth investigating. It has been proven but is not generally popularized that regular marijuana use in the teens causes changes to the prefrontal cortex. This is the area of the brain that deals with judgement. It can also cause paranoid schizophrenia in previously mentally normal young adults.
I agree with much of what you say but the state of America's politicized mental health system is such that if a young person/teen were brought in for help of any kind the most likely outcome is that he/she would quickly be understood as/labeled "trans" - all problems solved now! Lets make the "social transition", get new pronouns, kill the "dead name", eliminate the parents, and make plans for cross sex hormone treatment. So easy!
I can't like this post due to the last paragraph, which is much more a Democrat talking point than anything close to the reality of the Republican party. Republicans oppose the sort of spending that Democrats promote because it's a bad idea, not because they don't care about Americans. You might not care to notice, but it's Republicans who are in the news for opposing foreign spending because we need the money at home right now. This is true regarding both Ukraine and the southern border.
There's also a real concern that Democrats will steer any effort to institutionalize the mentally ill into an effort to describe "not voting Democrat" as a mental illness.
And, the blaming compulsion is a big contributor to our systemic problems which WE ALL own. We elect people to lead and facilitate dealing with problems at their root causes. That ideal from the Founders has apparently long been abandoned.
I agree but also disagree. The current Dem Party seems to love war. Most Republicans that I know are anti-war. As a Conservative I have NO issue with helping the mentally ill or spending my tax dollars for that kind of help. BUT, I am not for another wasteful government program that awards cronies with high paying bureaucratic jobs while accomplishing very little. A government program has to be effective and efficient or it is not worth my tax contributions. Michael Schellenberger, who is running for Governor of CA appears to have ideas that will work. I pray that he gets elected and is able to implement his ideas in that state. Many could be helped if that happens.
Well you are 100% correct. In fact, the California mental hospitals pre-1975 were substantially self-sufficient because the inmate/patients had jobs to keep the place running. The only staffers were doctors, nurses, a couple of administrators and security. The inmates gardened, cooked, cleaned, etc. but the ACLU stepped in and sued the state, calling these therapeutic tasks a violation of civil rights. The ACLU has done considerable harm and literally has blood on its hands. At least the psychiatrists admitted they were wrong about deinstitutionalization.
This kind of thing did not happen 40 years ago, despite the fact that many young men kept long guns in their vehicles in the school parking lot, to facilitate hunting before or after school.
What has changed is that the mentally ill can no longer be locked up.
What has changed is that we are constantly bombarded with messages that everything wrong in our lives is someone else's fault.
What has changed is that parents have abdicated their responsibility to before- and after-school programs that constrain children instead of allowing them free time to solve problems for themselves while they are still young enough not to have started blaming their problems on everyone else.
What has changed is that we give media attention to the violent, and we have taught our children that attention is the have-all and be-all of life.
What else has changed is that we are in the midst of tremendous societal chaos as the Woke seek to fundamentally transform America--and note that "funda--mentally" is composed of "mentally."
This fundamental (emphasis on "fundamental"--basic--transformation ) transformation can e seen the Woke's program to dishonor our founders, our religions, our patriotism, our respect for the law.
As Yeats observed shortly after WWI, "The center does not hold." And this tips the mentally ill in to madness, while the rest of us cling desperately to our sanity as the nation self-destructs under the careful tutelage of Wokeness which has devoted itself to the unravelling of every thread of our civilization and society.
I agree with you that this Woke phenomenon is particularly destructive, and I always wonder what gives it such a virulent force in our society.
So yes, it does derive from the academic Critical Theory that all cultural norms are relative and simply a product of the dominant culture. But the potency of it comes from using this abstract idea to justify a politics of inverting the existing hierarchy, hence the social chaos you describe. It’s nothing more profound than a reversion to the baseline ethnic strife seen throughout human history. It’s discouraging.
It's one thing to say, Celia, that the 'mentally ill can no longer be locked up' - but at the same time ignore the means by which they kill. It's obvious that no one anywhere will stop a potential shooter even if he broadcasts his intention on Facebook or Instagram. No one gives a damn - everybody's too busy living their lives. So if a mentally disturbed kid like in Texas can buy a weapon in less than an hour, as in NY last week - whose fault is it? His? Or ours as a society that I would hope would want to protect innocent people?
The fault is ours. We allow weapons to be bought by anyone, anywhere, at anytime. As I responded to a post two weeks ago re Buffalo, this will happen again, and again, and again..
Forget the stupid prayers..It doesn't matter anymore because we as a nation do not have the will to even attempt to stop the carnage.
The mentally ill who want to kill are allowed to do so because we *legally* cannot stop them. They kill people in many different ways, not merely with guns. And they are allowed to buy guns because mentally ill people cannot be placed in the background check database unless they have been *legally* committed to a mental institution against their will at some point in the past. Since it is nearly impossible to have anyone committed to a mental institution against their will, no amount of background checks (which are *already* required for all dealer gun sales) will prevent them from buying guns.
Unless we are willing to change THAT, all you are doing is disarming victims.
I worked a primary precinct last night and the dems started chattering about this and went straight after Trump Cruz and the NRA. Nothing about the two years of lockdowns, school security and the mental health of our children. Two seconds to go full on political just like Biden. They have no shame.
If we had to wait a respectful amount of time before looking for a solution to mass shootings, the search would never commence. They are to frequent. This country has a grave problem.
A solution to mass shootings. Its too late I fear. She’s right. The rot is way too deep. Tte leaders and media make too much money from it. There is no good solution. We have a collapsing republic.
There are good solutions, but you are right people are too dug into their gun bubble to work on solving the issue - sadly. When we look at most states, one has more restrictions around driving a car than they do around guns🤷♂️ Responsible gun owners should want certain restrictions and the gun owners I know are frustrated with the nra and congress unwillingness to act.
So, We Decide - mental health of children? When nineteen of them (latest count) are dead? Did their lack of mental health kill them? Gee, in all the photos of the slain I saw smiling faces.
GUNS are the ISSUE, not Covid..
Shame? - ask the NRA in Houston in a day or two how they respond to the latest two mass shootings.
SUV’s, knives and brass knuckles are not the choice of mass murders. You know that first statement means nothing. Guns are a tool, although for what it isn’t clear to me- perhaps hunting. Some clear responsible restrictions on guns - licensing and training come to mind - would help identify and slow the getting of guns. Also, I just read and article on the number of guns that are stolen each year - perhaps owners taking responsibility for securing these weapons🤷♂️
No SUV entered the school in Texas, or the church in South Carolina, or the supermarket in Buffalo or the concert in Vegas or in any of the other hundred or so gun massacres in the last few years. Only a deluded killer with an all too easily attainable weapon in his hands.
Bari, why do you say: "Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently"? What does that 'inadvertently' mean? The reality is that the government cannot get guns out of America. They can only restrict them to those willing to break the law. Where has the government shown its ability to stop illegal activity? The war on drugs? Illegal immigration? You can stop law-abiding citizens from having guns, but the mentally ill and criminals will still have them. It's true that fewer mentally ill people may have access, but right now the laws we already have on the books to stop that haven't worked very well. Why will new ones? And mentally ill people can still use knives and push people onto subway tracks and make homemade bombs and, and, and.
We should not compare ourselves to other countries with more homogeneous populations and with different cultures. We should compare ourselves to the United States 60 years ago and ask what changed.
One thing that changed is the way we treat mental illness. Another thing that changed is the rejection of Judeo-Christian values as the basis of our culture. There may be a strong tail wind to the idea of the sacredness of life, but when the head of ethics at Princeton posited (Peter Singer, years ago already) that disabled people and the elderly are a drain on society and perhaps we'd be better off without them and when women discuss getting abortions for the purpose of showing how empowered they are, and when we are reintroducing racism at a shocking rate, we are not a society that values human life. Judeo-Christian principles served us rather well, but too many Americans agitated to get rid of them because they saw them as an impediment to progress (heavily in the family and sexual arena). Or they wanted to keep idea A but get rid of B and they liked C but abhorred D. That's not how real life works.
A real discussion has to cover all these bases and more as well as look at statistics of how many lives are saved by guns each year, both actively and through prevention. We need to ask why the biggest rise in gun ownership is female. Could it possibly have to do with attempts to destroy the police and DAs refusing to jail criminals? There's a lot to discuss that is uncomfortable and gun control legislation is at worst a power grab and virtue-signaling, and at best hopeless optimism with little relationship to the real world.
The big difference comes from the fact that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to have a person committed. The law changed in 1975 (O'Conner v Donaldson), and since that time, we've seen the numbers of mass shootings and homelessness increase substantially--it all correlates to deinstitutionalization--a huge mistake that must be revisited if there is ANY chance at stopping this madness. Other countries can actually lock up a severely mentally ill person for more than 72 hours. A century ago in the United States, a person who authorities believed could have a predisposition to violence could be institutionalized. A good history of mental health in the US : My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill by Clayton Cramer.
I liked the point in your reply where you stated we need to ask what is different in our country from 60 years ago. While there are obviously a lot of things different, this is definitely something that should be studied.
Few stolen guns are used by mass murders- perhaps drug gangs🤷♂️ according to the atf most illegal guns are gotten through straw purchases and family/friend purchases.
Judeo/christ. isn’t a solution- perhaps you mean common ethics and social norms. Religion has prove a itself unable/unwilling to solve these issues. Collectively we could all choose to humanitarianism, which you might argue j/c ethics is a subset.
Lastly, we have already looked at “lives saved by guns”- the numbers tell us relatively few.
Susan, a weapon in the hands of every American (we have close to 350 million of them now) is why we have the highest gun murder rate in the world. Bar none. Whites kill whites. Blacks kill blacks. Children die in schools. Church goers die. Food shoppers die. Concert goers die.
Facts are facts. Americans kill their own best. Try to pin it on anything you want, and I see that you have, but the incredibly easy entry to owning a weapon isn't mentioned.
And that's the problem in this discussion and throughout this thread. We can regulate people driving cars for God's sake (since they can also kill) but we can't bring ourselves to even contemplate doing the same re weapons that can kill thirty people in a minutes time.
I love the articles you put out and am in no way disagreeing with the core message of this one. America has major problems right now in terms of violence, nihilism, etc. I watched the news yesterday and again marveled at how depraved human beings can be.
However, I don’t think the issue should immediately turn to firearms. A gun is merely a tool. A dangerous tool, to be sure, but still just an inanimate object. If someone decides to commit this heinous act, then the last thing he does is grab his gun before walking out the door. Instead, I think the focus should be on what has led this man to commit this crime, rather than on the implementation of the crime itself.
That probably won’t happen, however, since to evaluate and condemn that would be in part to condemn the society of which we have all helped to create.
Again, good article, but I don’t think the focus on firearms will help to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
Fixing the multiple and complicated causes of this issue will take years and lot of cultural and political work from all of us. At this point we need to take action in all fronts, we should not be complacent with living in a society with random murder suicides. We certainly shouldn't get distracted by left vs right bullshit which is blinding our ability to make progress. What about some short term things we can do to reduce recurrence? Raising age requirements, increase security guards in schools, etc.. I wish I had a magic wand and make this problem go away, I'm here and willing to discuss learn how it can be fixed.
Raising the age, yes. Absolutely. And I would add, Manny, background checks and gun instruction that would take a few weeks to complete - to discourage the impulsive, the unstable, and the insane.
Like many who want to ban guns, you have a very uninformed view of background checks.
In addition to discouraging "the impulsive, the unstable, and the insane," making it take weeks for a sane and stable person to get a gun would deprive domestic violence victims of *any* chance to protect themselves from a murderous ex. Because hey, who cares if thousands of woman are killed in individual crimes, as long as you can prevent a dozen from being killed at once.
And there is nothing in your new "rules" that would have prevented this young man from buying his gun. He passed a background check. You think he wouldn't have *welcomed* a few weeks of gun instruction? He had already waited patiently for his 18th birthday. You think he wouldn't have happily jumped through your hoops?
Celia, I respectfully think it is you that are not aware of the numbers or as you said “uninformed”. The numbers support background checks and anyone wanting the comfort of a gun can take a buy a gun easier than getting you drivers license.
But I would go further- anyone buying a gun should register, get background checked and take training and finally prove they can secure it! The statistics back this idea up!
Wrong, Celia. I do not want to ban guns. I only want to make it more difficult for the people who have no business buying a weapon to get to keep one.
If there was required training for a weapon of that killing power, perhaps the instructor would have a chance to understand why this person bought it. For target practice at a nearby facility? Or for shooting humans in a school or a church.
If the law requires you to need instruction and pass tests to drive a car or truck, it stands to reason that this should apply to a weapon purchase.
It should not be beyond words; it is imperative that we find the words to connect the tipping into madness of our mentally unstable due to the chaos created by the Woke.
We have most assuredly not helped to create this Woke society; many of the sane among us can see clearly the chaos and instability the Woke have bred on the way to their fundamentally transformed society.
He waited until just after his 18th birthday when he could buy two assault rifles to commit this massacre. I wonder why? Maybe because guns make it easier to kill lots of people very quickly.
OK. Somehow ban all firearms. But as part of that ban, require that anyone who kills with a gun thereafter (other than provable self-defense) be subject to a mandatory death sentence. The SJWs would never allow it. They know the killings would not stop.
I don't think anyone seriously questions that guns make it a hell of a lot easier to kill people. The big question is, how do we limit the amount of times this sort of thing happens?
The "eliminating guns" idea is a non starter, Constitutionally, politically, and even practically speaking. So what do you think we should do? I am totally open to gun reform, just want common sense, practical, and just as importantly likely enforceable regulations.
The crime took place because a mentally ill person was tipped into madness. Why was he tipped into madness? Because of societal dissolution under the Woke revolution.
I agree on focusing on the why. But I don't agree that guns are just an object that you can separate out from the why. The further you are from somebody the easier it is psychologically to kill them. Guns provide distance. They are the consistent weapon of choice for a reason.
And have you not noticed that there are millions of illegally owned guns that our government even today can do nothing about? In the end your idea would only remove legally held weapons from those who buy them for self defense in their homes and businesses. When the government figures out how to get rid of the illegally owned guns, then we'll talk. Until then you are just diverting attention from the societal chaos that is leading too many of our mentally ill to madness.
And you don't think that hours and hours of shooting people in first-person-shooter games has anything at all to do with their willingness to mow people down?
Sorry, but one of the reasons that the Nazis had to create gas chambers is because too many young soldiers were unwilling to open fire on unarmed Jewish women and children. They may been carefully taught a psychological distance from Jews, but even with a gun their hands, a lot of them could not commit cold-blooded murder.
I think the gas chambers had more to do with economy of scale for the Nazis. They wanted to exterminate an entire group of people as quickly and efficiently as possible. Has chambers sadly provide that efficiency. One could argue with the illegalization of guns without the concomitant effort to fix the root cause of America's violence issue, will lead to more mass bombings, etc. I imagine at some point chemical bombs may be implemented by these monsters as they'll be equally as effective as gas chambers.
Because answering the Why is much more complicated than just the How. I agree with you. The Why-is very important, and like a bleeding wound, stop the blood loss and then see why it happened...?
For sure. I really don't think that guns should be part of the central debate over this tragedy. However, from reading a lot of the other comments, it seems that it was inevitable that we would turn to blaming the objects used for this mass murder rather than the societal factors that led him and others to commit these atrocious acts of violence.
We need to decide what the priorities are with it and everyone has their own ideas of what those should be. Some say gun violence will only be solved by getting rid of guns, that’s probably not feasible, we must be pragmatic about these issues. It’s about what we can do in the short term versus what we do in the long term and all of us beginning to change our ways of being together in this broken country. We need a great healing of the social fabric of our society. I’m not sure we have the will to do it. We’d all have to decide to put the screens away… like really away. And that doesn’t seem feasible either.
"Here’s where I think they are right..." You were referring to gun rights activists and said they might be right even inadvertently. Two years ago there was a "defund the police" movement nationwide. Police were demonized, as was ICE. At the Democratic National Convention there was zero mention of this or the riots in Portland and other cities. Many cities actually did defund the police. Police recruiting is down significantly - who would want to be a policeman in an environment where police are vilified and receive zero support from the city? In my town here (Norman, Oklahoma) the city council took $900,000 from the police budget to send it to "community outreach," whatever that is. Six senior police officers resigned the next day, and recruiting is of course way down. A judge did overturn the action later, but the damage was done. In this environment, I absolutely will have a gun to defend my wife and my home. I cannot state that strongly enough.
They're fairly common. There's not good data for various reasons, including that in at least some cases, there's no need to actually fire the gun and nothing is reported to the police. The most common estimates I've seen, from a report commissioned by the CDC, are 500,000–3 million annually, “in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008” (p. 15, https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18319/priorities-for-research-to-reduce-the-threat-of-firearm-related-violence).
This is where I’m at. Most of my life I was always sympathetic to gun rights though it was never my top issue. I felt Democrats often mischaracterized the issue but I was open to “common sense” gun control measures. A few years ago these mounting tragedies wore me down to the point that I started to come around to the “something must be done” argument and began opening up to the prospect of drastic action on guns.
But after seeing how quickly a social-media-fueled moral panic could turn large swaths of the population and government against law enforcement, after seeing cities abandoned to disorder and chaos and mob violence condoned by Democrats, after seeing police departments defunded or demoralized and unrehabilitated criminals released en masse and crime spike and “progressive” prosecutors refuse to put them back in jail no matter how many times they get arrested, after seeing mobs go through residential neighborhoods shouting at residents to join them (or else, is the implication), and follow home robberies, and flash mob robberies (that would definitely target homes if this country weren’t so notoriously over-armed) clearly we’re all on our own.
And so in the past two years I have bought a couple more guns and now cannot envision a world where I do not own them. I now rail against any attempt at gun control and give money to pro-gun lobbying groups. I wish it were easier to concealed carry in my blue state but given how leniently criminals are treated, it starts to feel like one might as well just carry illegally since laws are so poorly enforced. (I kid, of course, obviously someone using a gun in self defense would be held far more accountable than someone using a gun for a crime.) At this point I honestly cannot see the logic in not owning a gun. How else are you going to protect your family? Seriously, how? Call the police? Those racists?! Who ideally would no longer exist?
So for one thing I will not give up my guns in a world that has been surrendered to crime and chaos and disorder. But here’s the even bigger problem. Even if our voters and leaders could regain sense and turn things around and make our cities feel safe again, we now know they are capable of abandoning us and our safety at the drop of a hat. Never again can we depend on them to protect us. Not to mention we have also seen how governments in China and Australia are capable of treating their citizens when they know they are safely disarmed. So the guns must stay.
Yet at the same time I cannot ignore events like the shootings of the past two weeks. It is difficult to engage with these things with humanity because the talk turns to political rhetoric so quickly that I’m immediately defensive, instead of thinking about the victims and grappling with the true human cost and giving that the weight it deserves. I have to force myself to do that, and honestly this is all a lot to struggle with. Lately I have become such a confident second amendment absolutist, and of course this does shake me. How do we weigh keeping our families safe from one threat versus keeping our families safe from the opposite threat? Maybe there are certain measures we need. But the fact remains that the red flag laws we have keep failing, the magazine capacity limitations keep failing, the background checks we already have keep failing. These laws don’t seem to work. And yet gun ownership remains non-negotiable to me for the reasons above. I don’t know the answer.
I’ve noticed a lot of people reacting with anger about these recent atrocities. Anger seems to be where people go when the solution seems obvious to them. Like how I get angry about rising crime because it’s so clearly being fueled by terrible, deliberately destructive policies! But on this issue the solution escapes me so I am just sad.
It seems like the mental illness angle is the most important to me. Now you may say “you just want to keep your guns” and, well, yes, that is entirely the point. But more and more, mental illness treatment seems to be the underlying issue behind everything, from gun violence to crime and homelessness and drug addiction. There needs to be a comprehensive system for taking care of them and keeping them off the streets, for their benefit and the benefit of society.
I suspect at 13-17 the perpetrators of these acts were detached from their peers, immersed themselves in the meta-verse of video games and social media, didn’t play team sports nor attended church regularly. I say often this is an adult problem: from parents, to teachers, neighbors and our congregations we must exert the effort to embrace and engage these folk, preventing these perverse seeds from taking root in their souls.
And we should not be surprised these persons were all men, the most denigrated and besieged of the genders the past 25-30 years.
I totally agree. What led this kid to commit this horrible crime? What was his background? What was his social life?
I’m the hurlyburly of debate, I think these questions are being skimmed over and the focus is centered on guns, which is like focusing on a clogged toilet when the septic tank is full.
It is a feature of growing up that the oddball, the child who can't seem to make friends, will be excluded and/or bullied. It is easy to say, include them, but how do you get public school bullies and excluders to comply?
School choice. Seriously, I think it may be as simple as that.
I was bullied all through elementary school and into junior high. Everyone I had grown up with knew that I was the kid to pick on.
Then I skipped from 7th grade to 8th grade. Not only did my grades improve (due to actually being taught something that wasn't endless review of things I already knew), the bullying lessened. Those 8th graders from other elementary schools didn't know I was the designated victim. It helped that that they were more mature by a year. Of course, I still had to deal with my bullies on the bus...until I decided to walk home from school instead.
In 9th grade, the bullies were left behind--they were still in 8th grade. The two junior highs in our town had different boundaries than the two high schools. Most of my friends in high school had gone to the other junior high.
Stable societies change gradually, the avalanche of radical changes introduced by the Left can only do one thing: destroy the society. But that's their objective no? There's no mass shootings in China or N Korea.
Yes that is clearly their objective: to "fundamentally change our society--their own words-- first they must destroy it and they have attacked virtually every aspect of it that lent itself to stability in order to tear it down before they rebuild it in their orwellian image.
When you kill God, as Nietsche said mankind has done, what do you get? An immoral people. A lost people. Nietsche said each person should create his own morality. How is that working out?
When you replace the family, the father, with government, what do you expect?
When you keep blaming the weapon instead of the system that creates people who are capable of such violence, you delude yourself.
Are all the shooters young men? Why are they so screwed up? Because we destroyed their role models, their heroes? Because we made being a MAN a bad thing?
There is deep societal rot at the root here, and sadly there will be more violence because we can’t turn this around quickly.
NC, when you have more weapons in America than actual citizens - what do you expect? There will be more people being killed by guns. Period. Simple mathematics. Your deep 'societal rot' exists everywhere - from Canada to Europe to Japan (I can keep on going) - but killing sprees like ours do not happen elsewhere. We own that and we're good at it. Why? Because we have the means.
The Buffalo shooter was MENTALLY DERANGED as his 180 page rambling manifesto attests. He was NOT a white supremacist. When that lie is continually repeated it seeks to become the truth. It is not. Bari Weiss I am surprised at you.
We need an all of the above approach to gun violence. Getting guns off the streets, banning assault rifles, and working on mental health. And this needs to be done in every state, because guns don't stay in the state in which they are bought.
Unfortunately few politicians seem motivated to get things done. The only motivation with any issue is how to use it against the other party and accumulate power.
The first thing we could do for mental health is restore stability to society. The Woke who are causing the instability want to distract us with the gun argument; is is an instability issue.
Anyone blaming guns shows intellectual laziness. And gun owners will never allow us get to a point that only bad guys have guns. It seems like we could avoid many of these shootings if FBI and anyone else in charge of verification if the gun buyer is fit to own one just did their job. Parkland shooter was flagged, Buffalo shooter was clearly crazy. This last murderer killed his grandma before murdering the kids. Don’t you think that perhaps there is correlation between emptying state insane asylums in 70’s and increase in mass shootings? Most of them belong to nurse Ratched.
Victims weren't even identified before the President and many Democrats in Congress immediately turned this into a political issue - namely that any Republican who supports gun rights are to blame. As if gun laws are the sole reason why these murders continue to happen.
Once again, rather than reflect on the reason of this murderous spree, the Democrats couldn't help themselves and had to wave the bloody shirt.
Never let a crisis go to waste. Not when you can score political points.
The Democrats don't care about a few Hispanic kids dying in southern Texas. In fact they're ecstatic about it. Gives them more ammo for banning firearms.
We know they don't care because of the weekly carnage in the inner cities across the country, far more lives than this one tragic incident (not meaning to trivialize, but rather to remind us of the greater horrors), yet they not only don't talk about it, but call anyone who does talk about it (e.g., Donald Trump) a racist.
This is where nihilism leads. It's not social rot Bari its moral rot.
Politicization and propaganda is all anyone knows in America about the gun issue. Even the Times article you site was counting kids up to 19 years of age so must include almost every Gangland shooting victim. Is that really a fair representation of the average "child" in America? The problem we have is a lack of sincerity which gets back to the moral question. I get the sadness in your writing and so don't want to pick a fight. It's easy to pick up those talking points and condemn people for wanting to feel safe by arming themselves. It's easy to berate people as "gun addicts" who simply want to protect their families in their home.
Covid exposed the truth that our government does not have our best interest at heart. The Government has no intention of protecting us but rather protecting a certain class of people that they feel are more important. This extends down to the community level and is evidenced by the fact that more young people will die this weekend most likely in the south side of Chicago then died in that mass shooting. That happens every week or at least every month in many cities around the country. We don't hear about it because those lives really don't matter. They are not reflective of the elites children who would never venture to such places... they're not worth talking about. We only become horrified when the victims look like us. When the victims possibly could be our children. Then somehow it matters. All of our kids go to school so a school shooting horrifies even the elites in their gated communities in "super zip codes"
Child sacrifice happens every day in our "neo-Pagen" country. Covid was an example of mass child sacrifice on an almost unprecedented scale. The UN estimates that millions of children will die as a result of the downstream effects of Covid measures. Because of Covid measures, the war in Ukraine and America's energy policy making the production of fertilizer unprofitable for most of the world because of rising fuel cost we are about to witness worldwide famine and starvation on an unprecedented scale. The most vulnerable are the youngest and we will be inundated with images of the Starving dying Children of the third world... But again those children we can't relate to.
I am only arguing that our moral outrage surfaces only when the victim could have been one of us or our children. Public shootings scare us but only in places we might visit. School shootings however touch everyone because we all send our kids to school.
I am saddened also by the loss of those families but let us not confuse our selective compassion with morality because we have no problem sacrificing children as a society,
"The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here." Insane governmental policies, like lockdowns, did not help mental health.
‘Social rot’ = moral rot. Moral rot comes from Moral relativism which comes with affluence. When society becomes affluent enough to break away from subsistence living, you get people who have time on their hands to question the basic moral building blocks of society. Soon society says ‘live how you want’, with less and less responsibility. People then abdicate responsibility to the government, work, schools, healthcare systems, etc.
Imagine if you had to be a responsible employee - show up to work and contribute. What about being responsible for your own health - atleast attempting to live a somewhat healthy lifestyle? What if you and your church or your neighborhood were actually responsible for the homeless people in your town? What if your didn’t abdicate your parental responsibilities to the school system?
Guns are tools that are often used for evil. But true root cause requires us to look a lot deeper.
Mass shooters have another common trait that began decades ago…Fatherlessness. The uncoupling of sex and childbirth to marriage has created generations of chaos, increased violence, mental health problems, drug use/abuse, educational struggles, crime. It’s politically inconvenient to remember that statistics clearly show that children grow up healthier and stronger on almost all metrics, in a married, 2 bio/adoptive parent home, (who stay married even when they think they “no longer love” the other…don’t get me started 🤦🏼♀️).
Often, (not always), the mental health of our children starts when we are on a date years prior. Let’s teach our young women to be more discerning. Let’s back up on living together (pretending to be committed without any commitment. As soon as the rubber hits the road, as it does predictably after a child is born, the relationship is over). Let’s not glorify “single” mothers. Forget “broken” families…we have a “never forming families” problem, too.
Baby-Momma’s boyfriends who come and go only add to the chaos, probability of abuse and early sexualization of children, and yes, mental health issues.
Human nature hasn’t changed for millennia, but we think we can remake the social mores without consequence.
Our republic was created for a moral, self-controlled people. We decided self-control was overrated.
No one wants to discuss this because somehow it’s taboo , but the stats don’t lie. Kids do turn out better on all fronts with a 2 parent bio/ adoptive family intact. This selfishness maddens me that it’s what matters for ME ME ME. How about having a larger perspective on what you’ve committed to when you have a child?? Where’s the responsibility to our higher values? I sound so old fashioned but I don’t care. It’s what had been proven to keep us stable. Everyone wants to ignore trade offs but we can’t keep doing that. There are so many unintended consequences if our societies values on making ourselves happy and living our dreams blah blah blah. What has become the reality of these values?? Look around…
America’s mass shooters don’t fit into one political box, but they all have one common trait, that they have untreated mental health issues. In this country we don't have gun problem, we have serious mental healthcare issue. Guns are only available and easy scape goat. Even if we had absolute ban on guns, these people would use knives, baseball bats, mow people down with a car or simply buy guns illegally.
Switzerland is a country with very lax gun laws, males have to serve military, and after their service they have to take their service guns home, all males also have to do regular shooting exercises and Switzerland has no issues with mass shootings . What is the difference? Robust mental health system in Switzerland.
So guns are not an issue, sadly in US we have normalized situation where people with mental issues are left to fend for themself, with little on no support. To fix this, we need to go to pre Regan era, where people could be institutionalized against their will, because current situation leads to tragedies like this, or situation where people with mental health issues either are getting dumped on the streets where they die to drug overdoses or end up in prison.
But sadly, this will never be implemented in US, for two reasons. Solving real issues of mental health doesn't rally Democratic base as gun topic. If it did, California wouldn't be dumping its mental ill to the streets while providing them with easy access to drugs for last 20 years.
On the other side, Republicans wont do anything, due to possibility that investments in mental health will require spending American Taxpayers money on Americans at home, since they don't like that, because its better to spend money on pointless wars and proxy wars abroad. Sadly as always, Americans are and always will be last thing our Congress cares about.
Parents, for the greater part, have not been on the job for at least 50 years. Nobody is paying attention to our children.
It's more than that. It's a loss of community. When I was a child growing up in Brooklyn, NY it was like a small village. Everyone on my block knew everyone. People went to synagogue or church. There were bowling leagues and bridge and mah jong groups and civil associations (Moose, Elk, Masons, etc). Everyone belonged to at least one group and had many social ties to many people.
As children we were free to roam the neighborhood. We had to be home when the street lights came on. Every adult could correct us if they saw us doing something we shouldn't and we knew our parents would know before we got home. It was a huge disgrace to the family if you had to be corrected in school or by a neighbor. It shouted bad parenting.
That doesn't exist in most places any more.
Sure, Naomi, that was true but what changed? I think it was the all out assault by the left on our institutions. They wrecked the church. The scouts. The schools. And, sure, those institutions didn't help themselves. But now what do we have left. De Tocqueville said that the strength of America was its voluntary organizations such as churches and charities. Now we have NGOs, run by dedicated leftists and rent seekers.
Correct. The NGO's are now run by Lefties and seem hell bent on destroying the country.
Technology has been a blessing but also a curse. Radio and television brought us into our homes and away from clubs and civic gatherings. The telephone added to that. Today's electronic platforms further separate us from normal human activity.
It's such a bad idea to give children cell phones and iPads, etc. Their parents can't know who they are communicating with and what they are doing.
The more time children spend with their electronics the less attention span they have and the less ability to learn.
I read this book. I agree with most of it but find his gratuitous inserted political prejudices off the mark and annoying. He does make important observations however.
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari | Jan 25, 2022
Was he ever absolved or exonerated of his plagiarism charges? I can’t listen to or read anything from Hari until he’s fully exonerated or atones.
I have no idea. Putting that aside, his points in the book are thought provoking if you can get past his obvious political prejudices and unfortunate gratuitous nasty insertions.
The most important economic and social unit in any culture is the family. Not a village. Not a racial identity. Not a gender identity. A family.
When you tell everybody in your culture to go get a job, that that is where you’ll find meaning, do not be surprised when the children are left alone to raise themselves.
We’ve taken our culture and made everything utilitarian. Utilitarianism does not have the answers for which a heart yearns.
Maybe this is the canary in the coal mine. Or maybe the canary has already passed away.
I am not sure I agree, but I like the idea or the simplicity. I always learned that our collective importance is community, family then individual. And one could argue that the community could be an important economic force?
K--the left didn't kill those institutions. The child molesters did. What has changed is that parents don't parent their children any more and America has made it hard for families to take care of their own with rising costs and stagnated salaries. There is no American dream for a vast majority of Americans right now due to the rising cost of living. This forces people to dump their kids and let other people raise them. Kids are being raised with no value on connections to humans because they are not taught that they can rely on humans (their caretakers) for a variety of reasons including moms & dads that have to put work over them, divorce, blended families, no healthy boundaries or discipline.
Well... I'd argue that the left has allowed the child molesters in with things like "drag queen story hour" and Gay Straight Alliance groups where adults talk to kids about their own sexual awakenings, weird "genders", and how cool it is to take "T", etc. I was a full time professional, had kids, and became a full time mom as soon as my first was born. I can say that schools do NOT respect parental authority.
The current administration, which I'd argue is the worst in our history, is all in with promoting leftist ideas over the heads of parents. "NSBA letter drafts called for National Guard and military to be deployed
NSBA letter to Biden, which called protesting parents 'domestic terrorists,' more extreme in its early stages"
https://www.foxnews.com/media/nsba-letter-called-national-guard-military-deployed
I think that wherever you read about a school that has had push-back against CRT there has also been push-back against Gender Ideology. But, many news organizations are afraid to even mention the GI part that parents complain about.
Well, when moms were home, the law did not protect them in most states; very few states had community property laws, which protect the non-breadwinner in divorce proceerdings. If you want moms to stay home, you have to make it financially secure for them, and that would include requiring the breadwinner's paycheck to be divided equally among the spouses.
I'm not saying moms have to stay home--either parent could stay home. But, let's give families opportunities in their career tracks for caregiving children and elders. Some kind of family leave is necessary or increase in wages so that only one person needs to work--regardless of who it is. Or, just allowances for part-time work without penalties in career growth? Not sure what it would look like but families in America need help.
Another big part of it is that many young people have to move far away from support systems to get a job, and EVERYONE in a family has to work now just to get by. If you live in New York and your job is in California then off to California you go.
And how did the left "wreck the church?" There are dozens of churches in my town alone--most of them with no one under 60 in them on Sunday. The church wrecked itself with its sex abuse scandals and its failure to stay remotely relevant to those who might need it. I left the church decades ago when every question and doubt I had was ignored and I was just told things were "God's will" and not to ask so many questions.
In addition, our media FEEDS on fear--keeping people afraid keeps them inside consuming more media.
Yes, people can be stabbed or killed by ways other than guns, but no one is going to be able to stab an entire room full of children in under 60 seconds like they can with an assault weapon.
Some of what you say has merit. The churches have their own issues, I conceded that. But the left has always feared and despised religion and the Pope was a major force in bringing down the Soviet empire. As far as "assault weapons," they've been illegal in the US since the '30s. A normal pistol or rifle with many magazines is lethal. You solve that by keeping them out of the hands of lunatics.
Also, how do we predict who is a lunatic? Who gets to decide? What about people like this kid who had no previous record? Too many loop holes and gray areas for just "keeping them out of the hands of lunatics".
The left does not despise religion only the people that look more at doctrine and rules than the humans in front of them and use it as a weapon.
Woke Churches are a huge part of the problem. Those so called churches have moved away from teaching the basics to teaching Woke Ideology. Churches that go Woke eventually fail. Leaving their communities worse off than before. We need churches and synagogues run by leaders with a spine. With courage enough to stand up for the true beliefs and forget all this Woke nonsense. Catering to the popular trend of the day is a sure recipe for failure. People need guidance. Not pandering to their base desires.
"Failure to stay remotely relevant". That thought process is why churches are failing. As the next commenter states those relevant churches are the problem. The teaching and the values are the same now as they were millenia ago. It is the notion that we of this place and time are so special that we need something more relevant that is unraveling the threads that have united us for those millenia.
Bombs can. Cars driven through crowds can. Toxic substances can. . . .
I don't understand how some states don't allow drinking until age 21 yet allow an 18 year old to buy a gun. It seems sensible to restrict the purchase of a gun to a teenager. But-- congress will not pass that, sadly.
Hunting is a time-honored tradition in many parts of the country. And may become a necessity. The best hunters start in their youth.
They wrecked the family too. By far the most important variable.
I say bull! First, one just has to look at these institutions to see they have been corrupted by the very people that ran them - most recently SBC. Second, “lefties” didn’t ruin anything-!it is the collective physiology of our country that demanded change. If the institutions were so good, then people would have made them better, but yet they abandoned them because they failed in many fronts.
I have a very comfortable life because I make an upper middle class salary. My parents had the same comfortable life on a regular middle class salary. My grandparents had the same comfortable life on a lower middle class salary.
Now, people in the lower middle class work two sometimes three jobs. They're exhausted. Add kids to the mix and things become impossible. Most parents aren't ignoring their kids because they're at the country club while a nanny raises them--they're ignoring their kids because they're working two jobs to give those kids a chance at success.
Your grandparents almost certainly did not find as much "stuff" necessary.
Many times people work multiple jobs because they want more stuff than they need.
This brought to mind the tv series, The Honeymooners. Ralph, although poor, belonged to the Royal Order of Raccoons, where he could feel a sense of purpose and friendship not based on hating someone else
Viewers in that day could empathize because it was something most adults did, join fraternal organizations.
So true. Even in NYC where I grew up, we had a community. Now, however, the communities kids belong to are online. They have 'friends' who they play video games with or 'friends' who they meet through TikTok. Or they meet 'friends' who share a love of dieting to extreme or ones that love guns. It's a sad way to grow up.
My adult son is mildly autistic. The internet has provided him a community (mostly anime) which he would never have IRL. But his issues are exceptional and we do discuss the dangers of the internet, which he is aware of.
My niece is severely handicapped and it's true-- the internet has been wonderful for her to find a community.
I would be very careful. Autistic children are the most vulnerable to groomers and influencers on the internet
Naomi...yep, family and church went south
They are still pretty important down South. 😉
Yes! This 100%!
Social contracts. Seeing humanity in real life
I would just point out that most families read the same news 📰 too.
I SO agree with this. It is one of the biggest issues I see. I am a psychotherapist and am a believer in attachment theory. The most critical years for emotional development are age 0-3. People are either dumping their kids in day care at 6 weeks and too busy to nurture and discipline. Flip side of that is people having kids in unhealthy situations where no one cares properly for them (they need parenting classes). Add on to that all the divorces and mixed families and it is an attachment recipe for disaster. We have raised 2 generations of children who do not value human connection. This is the root of the problem, but how do we fix it as a society? We have to care about kids age 0-3 and make sure their families are supported, but capitalism won't allow for it. That (& the sheer volume of guns) is the difference between us and like a Switzerland where the gun problems are not out of control. They care for their families better (parental leave, affordable health care,etc.).
I am so glad you brought this up. I have been saying this for decades. One of the worst movements in this country has been the warehousing of children in day care.
But, it goes beyond that...it's the stress levels and time that parents have to parent once they pick up those kids as well. Maxed out families do not have time to properly nurture themselves or their children. It is survival mode all the time.
It's the way you prioritize. Turn off the cell phone. Don't give your children electronic babysitting toys such as iPads. Go to the library once a week and load up on children's books. Spend one afternoon per week cooking meals for the week which you will keep in the refrigerator or the freezer ready to heat in the microwave.
When you do get the kids, pay attention to them. Talk to them. If you don't know how, buy the book, "How to Talk, How to Listen." I have worn out several copies and given them friends.
Eat together as a family. Say grace. Teach the children table manners. In fact, have them set the table and help clear after the meal. Chores anchor a child to the family.
Set up bedtime routines. Stick to them. Bath, book, prayers, bed. Same time each night as much as is possible.
Discipline, routine and vigilance: the core competencies of parenthood.
BTW my boys had shotguns at age 13 and neither would even have the thought “I wanna go kill someone.”
In your analysis do you factor in WHY parents are “warehousing” or rather, utilizing daycare for their children? Do you consider that maybe they do so in order to work to put food on the family table at night? We have some systemic problems in this country, and racism is not it. It’s breakdown of family, breakdown of working economies, political agenda-driven education, and more. I was lucky to be able to raise my kids, but they, now parents as mothers and fathers have to work to make ends meet at bare minimum levels. My kids and their spouses are the heroes. Find where the system has gone astray and fix that and stop blaming the people who doing their damnedest in spite of systemic failures.
Our expectations today are so different. There is no way my own kids would live like I did either as a child or as a young adult.
Nowadays you don't hear the term "early apartment." It was a mattress on the floor, packing boxes for end tables, a card table and chairs for a dining table, and I cooked out of large juice cans until I could get pots and pans at the local Goodwill.
Precisely. The "two-wage household" is often driven by the "need" for this and that and the other thing...things that earlier generations did without just fine. In my parents' first apartment, they used a milk crate hung out the window as a makeshift icebox.
Very true. When I was first married we bought a used mobile home and set it up in my inlaws back yard. Dug for a septic tank and ran power to the home. We lived in that home for 2 years while I went to the local Community College and my wife worked. My mother-in-law babysat for us during the day. After a few years we sold the mobile home and used the money for a down payment on a small 2 bedroom home. We didn't have a lot of possessions at that time. But I don't remember life being particularly hard. Just seemed like what one did when starting out in life.
Why do you think that the average family cannot exist on one income today? Could it be because of so many government programs. Programs that require more and more taxes? A government that can't control spending which results in inflation? A goverment that insists on minimum wage laws that raise prices constantly? A government that spends tax revenue for idiotic programs and welfare. Welfare that encourages people not to work? A government that just printed a LOT of money with no backing. Which leads to even more inflation. All you have to do is look at your own government to see the root of all of our problems. Inefficient, ineffective and corrupt is the current status of our government in America.
You left out the trade deficits.
Yup.
It's a tough situation. When you look at how much Americans are taxed (fed and state income taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes to just name a few) it becomes very hard for households to exist without more than one wage earner.
Our government has basically bitten off more than it can chew, and is trying to do too many things, instead of doing the important things well
You are correct, Don. While we thought it hard years ago, the cost of living today is comparatively much, much higher though of course it varies somewhat depending on where one lives.
and yet we have Biden and his crew calling for billions more for " child care"
While at the same time decimating the spending power of the American.family.
Further show of misappropriation of tax dollars.
We had "capitalism" for the entirety of the nation's existence and never had this problem until recently, so that doesn't pass the smell test. The society has until recently recognized that it is in the Nation's interest for people to marry, have a nuclear family, and stay married. It has been traditionally difficult to divorce, which served the purpose of holding families together through the inevitable rough patches. Now, get your panties in a wad and it's off to the lawyer's office - no fault, no problem.
And why do people "dump their kids in daycare," when that wasn't the case before? I would submit that it is because the two parents are typically working 2-1/2 jobs between them.
Where does all that money go? Well, $85 billion of it, for example, was just abandoned in the desert, for our enemies to use to kill our soldiers with. Divide $85B by the number of taxpaying households in America, and maybe you can see why we don't have the money for family leave and healthcare. But at least the weapons manufacturers made out. (sarc)
No, our problem is not "capitalism" or stated another way, too little government. It's too much.
Capitalism is driving up stock by-backs and record CEO salaries while giving less and less back to workers. This causes families to have to work 2 jobs for rising prices of living and healthy care in America. There is no support for the average American family and kids pay the price. I am not against capitalism but today's early 1900s version of it where workers and families get screwed and the .5% get all the spoils and make 300 times more than the average employee is skewed and messing with the middle class. This also fuels shooters who know there is no viable place for them in America. You can work 40 hours/week now and not be able to afford a car, a house or health care. Where is their motivation to thrive? Unchecked capitalism is the root of almost every problem in this country. I am pro-capitalism, just not Pro-unchecked capitalism.
Globalism grafted onto capitalism. When I was young, factory jobs paid $35+ an hour and a house cost $25,000. Now factory workers make $25+ an hour and a house costs $500,000. We gave our lifestyle away, industry by industry.
But CEOs now make something like 300 times more now than they did back then...funny how that works. I just don't know where/when it was decided that the CEOs, shareholders, etc deserved 300 times more than their average worker...I mean isn't something like 100 times more enough? Think of what they could offer employees if there was a cap on how much more they were allowed to make than their workers (although, I do see the downside in this, of course). Or, if they just offered it? But, greed & wall street will never let that happen. They even have many poor and middle class people convinced this is in their best interest.
I do not think so. There are limited numbers of "CEOs" compared to "workers". And they are replaced quickly if they fail to produce. Plus many, many, many individual middle and lower class Americans benefit from stock ownership. The problem is an inept federal government that has devastated the economy that feeds us all. But hey, just print some more money (said with dripping sarcasm).
The further government (or any institution for that matter)is removed from the people it serves, the less functional and more corrupt it will be. I live I a small town. It's a mix of Democrats and Republicans on the town council but we KNOW them and they tend to listen. Then you get to the county level where the bureaucracy grows just a bit and it's slightly harder to get things done, but still possible. Then you get to the state and federal level where only people with A LOT of money or EXTREME pressure for change can accomplish things.
Initially, California, where I used to live, had the initiative process to let people vote on things directly and it was helpful but that, too, became corrupted.
Also, I don't think the founding fathers envisioned the U.S. getting so lopsided that 20% of people in the smallest states would have 50% of the power. Or, on topic, as Bari stated, that they envisioned guns capable of firing 100 shots a minute when they passed the Bill of Rights.
I guess that we could have the socialism of Venezuela where everybody is "equal".
I am a proponent of traditional capitalism but giving corporations "rights" and treating them like people is assinine.
Jim, are you telling me; that from July 4, 1776, two today, the way capitalism is practiced hasn’t changed?
Nice troll attempt. Do your homework, formulate your question, and get back to us.
Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Marie, the way we practice capitalism, creates income inequality, which is connected to mass shootings!
There are many reasons why my mom and I are so different. Her mom was strict, no nonsense parenting, education and job. My mom is the opposite, decided that parenting was to hard and just ignored us. It was only if there was a medical issue that she was present in your life. As time has gone on, our family broke down further, drugs, mental health, money, social awareness became common. I swore in the fourth grade I would never have kids. In the 1970s things were changing and there was a common thread of we will get through this no matter what race you were. It was also a time of the breakdown of the family. Unbeknownst to me other families were breaking down. Women began to work, kids became unsupervised, and predators were becoming more the norm than the exception. Also federal and state programs did not help you get out of poverty but rewarded it. The breaking up of the family is one of the defining moments in our history, and no one noticed.
Capitalism is NOT the problem. Socialism and social programs are the problem. Because those programs disconnect families from their children and encourage that disconnect. Excessive social programs have also contributed greatly to the current corruption in our government. The more money the government controls the more opportunities for corruption. There is plenty of that in our current government. That's been a huge problem for a long time. Look to the current Woke Corporations for proof.
Hi Naomi, I don’t understand your comment “capitalism won’t allow for that”? The United States is the only country in the world that does not have: parental birth leave, subsudized daycare . You write that children are in daycare at six weeks. That’s insanity and has nothing to do with the parents. I’m sure it breaks their hearts to leave their infant at daycare. What does the U.S. offer as a choice? You are also the only country in the world with private prisons and non governmental ownership of nuclear energy sites. Everything is upside down in your country. It seems like it’s citizens always, always come last, it’s shameful.
Here's a thought... you ask "What does the U.S. offer as a choice?". How about don't have the kids if you can't do JOB 1 and take care of them yourself. No birth leave of subsidized daycare? Cry me a river. It's not the governments' job to raise kids - that's what parents are for. We don't have a shortage of government subsidies - we have a shortage of adult, responsible PARENTS.
Is this response a joke? Cry you a river for no birth leave? It is almost impossible now to raise children on one income, by your definition there will be no more babies being born. Your “cry me a river” is one of the reasons that the United States has the lowest birth rate in the western world. You aren’t even replacing yourselves, population keeps dropping. But of course that’s of no interest to you. Shameful response.
In the future, you might want to check the facts before you make embarrassingly inaccurate statements in response to a post. FYI: With exception of Iceland, Sweden and Denmark, the U.S. has the HIGHEST fertility rate of any of the countries in the western world. So it would appear that 'birth leave' doesn't seem to be helping much in those 20+ countries that are trailing the U.S. in the baby department. Any other ideas?
in 2018 your (Canada's) population was 37million. The US had 326million. Your are 10% of our population. And as it goes, the southern border under the current administration has opened the flood gates with more than a million people from ALL OVER THE WORLD making there way here illegally. You have no idea what you are talking about.
We're already facing a baby bust and it's primarily immigration that is producing the generation that will pay for our Social Security and Medicare when the time comes. If more people start making the calculation you suggest we are in for a world of hurt when there are fewer working-age people to support everyone else.
So the government should start subsidizing the birth, care and rearing of children MORE than the do already? And nobody paid for my Social Security - I've been paying into it since I was 16 years old. What we need is for the morons in Washington stop raiding the SS funds to pay for useless wars (and all the other shit they waster our tax dollars on). BTW by simply increasing retirement age by one month every year - Social Security can become self-sustaining in less than 10 years...but nobody in Washing has the balls to do it. Sad.
well we could have Fidel Jr as our leader who freezes protesters bank accounts if they dare to beep their horns while he hides. he is shameful
Not sure what you mean but most companies in the USA offer paid maternity leave. I work at a church preschool and we offer scholarships or discounted rates to those that might need it. There is also a private preschool, up to kindergarten, in my city, funded by donors, for low income families....free tuition for these families. It’s staffed by certified teachers. These are just a few examples from my experience but I’m quite sure there are many, many more places like this in our country.
That is very encouraging to hear, thanks
What country are you from?
Canada
Thanks. Probably best to focus your criticisms on your own country and experience then especially since your information is not wholly accurate.
Too many times I see parents staring at their screens and completely ignoring their children even as the children are doing everything they can to get their attention. It’s so sad.
I agree with everything you said except the sheer volume of guns crack. The vast majority of guns are not used unlawfully and the vast majority of gun owners behave lawfully.
Would like to ask you as a therapist if you have noticed the epidemic of narcissism? As a former childbirth educator I also see the attachment issues. Besides the medical aristocracy, work & day care is part of this. But I see it going even deeper with social media selecting for narcissism among all age groups. The number of people who seem to be affected by toxic narcissism seems immense. Believe these are all connected and actually planned to serve as a convenient crisis for current attempts to grab more power. Do believe the gun problems are likely less of an issue in nations like Switzerland due to the better parenting from leave and health care - which leads to mentally and socially healthier humans.
I think you are onto something. The "me first" movement started in the 1980's I think. I remember some books about looking out for #1 (wasn't one titled that).
Children, and raising them, became a burden and a nuisance. Articles started appearing about the enormous cost of raising a child. If you had a child you had to curtail or reduce the fun aspect of your adult life from expensive toys or expensive vacations.
Motherhood and raising children at home was viewed as constraining, boring, drudgery. Motherhood lost all respect. Women were looked down on if they didn't go after careers and postponed marriage and childbirth. Women were encouraged to lead promiscuous sexual lives.
Adults were encouraged by the popular culture to become permanent adolescents.
Men were demoted from being head of the family and the stalwart rock upon which the family could always rely. Advertising began to portray men as stupid, incompetent and generally useless who had to be rescued by a woman in their lives. This is the worst thing that could happen to men. They are anchored in a family and their energy and aggression gets channeled into a positive force for their family and the community. The culture now sees men as superfluous.
The results of all this society change is chaos. Men have lost their place. Women are unhappy, children don't have stable homes with fathers. Violence and crime are at record levels and rising. Civilization is fraying at the seams.
Yes, this is my family’s observation. Even adult children who seemed so capable and strong have been subsumed by the tidal waves of epic ignorance and dystopian thinking/narratives. Our civilizations have all crumbled apart and this one isn’t any different it seems. The monied “elite” aren’t even aware they’re shooting themselves in their clay feet with all this. Believe civilization itself or what passes for it may be the real issue.
Check this out:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/warren-farrell-absent-fathers-big-factor-in-mass-shootings_4506882.html
EpochTV is by subscription but well worth it. I have a subscription to The Epoch Times which includes EpochTV.
The monied elite can use their wealth to insulate themselves from the chaos and horror they have created. They can hire security and live behind gated communities. When an area they have destroyed becomes intolerable they can move to another location.
I am grateful my two grown children have good sense and are conservatives.
The gun problem is guns!
The gun problem is the one who pulls the trigger. There have been mass killings using automobiles (SUVs). It is the vehicle which is the problem or the person driving it intent on murdering innocent people? What about the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon? Was it the pressure cooker that was at fault? How about Oklahoma City. Was it the Ryder truck?
No, it is and always has been the guns. Why is America so attached to their guns. Your comparisons are ridiculous . Every single day, there is at least one American murdered by another with guns. That’s your problem , a gun culture exhibited no where else in the world.
BW...ok good points, but did this Texas kid have parents, i've not heard. Those around this kid, did know.
Switzerland does have the Volume of guns, along with Israel, i would think.
Until the person commits a crime, the parents or the grandmother in this case, can't get help from the police. The young man who did the Parkland shooting is an example. His parents had called the police 47 times in a fairly short time period and the police were unable to help them.
Naomi...even if a crime committed. i lived next to Squatters for two years, police would/could do nothing. When asked if they wanted me to shot, they got upset. The police didn't do the policing because i didn't own the house...2 years, dealing with kids, i got my degree.
His mother is a drug addict and his father is a convicted felon.
JimW...hello!!...irksome. thanks.
Indeed. Mind you, they have both apologized for his act.
Bingo. Their parents are now Tik Tok, Instrgram, etc ad nauseum. Some parents welcome the relief of having to raise their kids.
I have a seven year old. My four siblings all have children as well, between the ages of 0 and 13. We are all parents of Gen Alpha, in other words, and in discussions about parenting everyone seems to agree: managing our kids’ exposure to technology is absolutely fucking exhausting. So yes, you can fault some parents for abdicating responsibility, but even the earnest parents are in over their heads.
This is so true. My kids are 23 & 19. The difference in just 4 years between the 2 of them and access to technology was incredible. The younger one is definitely more addicted to it. Even though she was one of the last kids in middle
School to get her own phone, she was always on her friends’phones and surfing the internet unsupervised at other kids’ homes, which we didn’t allow in our house when they were elementary and middle school age. It got impossible to police outside of your own home. Hard to police even in your home, actually. I don’t envy you having to parent young kids now.
Being computer savvy helped us. Our kids say they never tried to get around our blocks because they didn’t know nearly enough to know where to look.
That said, my daughter has announced that her children will have smart phones when they can sign the contract—a stance I took with her that caused a good bit of angst during her teen years but it now appreciated.
Big Tech is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. Massively incentivized to profit at the expense of our children's well being. This should be a no brainer bipartisan issue. Big Tech needs to get slammed, good and hard. Imagine our society without Big Tech. Not going to happen, but imagine how much better everything would be.
Children should not use the Internet.
Yup. Read (or listen to) Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. It covers more than just the perverse incentives of the tech industry. Everyone who wants to understand the scope of the problem and how it is impacting society and individuals should get this book. It's better than The Social Dilemma (tho Tristan Harris is a friend of Hari's, and was interviewed for the book).
There is so much technology available that it is hard to control access to it. My kids are late Millennials, and it was too often easier to let them watch TV (with vastly more programming aimed at kids) than to send them outside to play the way our own parents did. Whether they were genuinely at risk from child predators or not, it felt safer to assume that they were.
And today's kids have far more tech access than my kids did, since we limited internet access to non-private areas of the house, and also did not buy them smartphones (we couldn't afford them ourselves!).
That great age - the seven year old! We have twin seven year old grandsons who love Civilization VI, allowed "Screen" time, competing nonstop for their parents's attention, football strategy, philosophical conversations and digging for worms and treasure in the backyard.
Yes, the parents are in over their heads. We the people are under attack along with our kids and grandkids and have been for some time. We have all made a Faustian bargain with the digital world.
Why do you think that is? Could it be that state, federal, local, county, real estate, automobile, telephone, electricity, sewer, excise, etc., taxes on everything are so high that it is not possible to survive on one income any more, so that the second parent is able to BE a parent? And so many of those taxes are hidden in the cost of everything. I've seen estimates that over 70% of the money that goes out your door eventually goes to some kind of gub'ment tax. No wonder our "millennials" don't work; there is no point; they can never get ahead. We have met Leviathan, and we pay for him.
On top of that, our families are dying. Thanks to LBJ's "Great Society," so many women are now married to the gub'ment instead of a man, receiving their living expenses from a husband who demands nothing; he doesn't yell at them, slap them around, demand sex or a hot meal - what's not to like? They only need a man long enough to get pregnant, and then they - and he - are happy. The nuclear family has been the default structure for tens of thousands of years, and our "leaders" have figured a way to use our own money to destroy it.
There are also expectations. When I was a child there were 7 in my family: 2 parents and 5 children. I grew up in a 3 room apartment, very small, with no telephone and no car. We walked everywhere. Dad worked and Mom was home with us. Everything was scarce. We bought our clothes and shoes at bargain basement places. Everything was a hand me down pretty much and the neighbors gave us their children's outgrown clothing.
We had plenty of food because my parents lived through the Depression and were frequently VERY hungry. However, we didn't have much of anything else.
We made good use of the library, and the local parks. We spent most all day outside, particularly in the summer because there was no such thing as air conditioning in homes. If you wanted to cool off you went to the movies. Movie theaters were air conditioned.
Very few people would be willing to live the way we did. They would consider it extreme privation to do so.
Just chiming in to offer a singular, anticdotal comment that might make 1 person think its not all bad.
My husband and I live on 1 small salary (he's a very underpaid police officer in a city going to hell in a handbasket) in a small, 2 bedroom apartment with our kids. We get lots of appreciated hand-me-downs and meal plan for every week after the Sunday ads come out. We can't afford much of anything at all right now, as I just started working after staying home to raise our kids but can't start full-time until fall when they'll both be in school.
We are super, duper grateful for all that we have, which is, when you stop to think about it, an awful lot. What wouldn't a parent give to have a happy, healthy baby? And that's what we've got. Two little firecrackers in all their glory. We dream of vacations and date nights and having two cars someday, but take great solace in knowing that we have what matters in spades. And I think the fact that folks are missing that is a signicant part of the disease. I don't know who said "some.people are so poor that all they have is money", but they were spot on. And I feel inclined to add, for my own selfish reasons, that we aren't a church-y group, just a thankful one.
Anyway, we aren't the norm, but we certainly aren't the exception, either. I know plenty of parents like us. We meet at the library :)
We lived the same way. When the children were small it was tight but the wonderful richness of raising your children and family life is inexpressible. You put your priorities in the family and not in things.
I can assure you it eases up financially over time.
Mick... church, y, might not be an answer for every living soul, i do not go to Any Church, but it is like, you might need a crutch, might not, but it helps.
10 commandments, not a bad start...thanks.
It doesn't have to be church per se but a person should have a belief in God, a higher power, an ultimate authority that is not their self or the state.
Yes kids today have EVERYTHING they want, but in the end virtually nothing they need
Yesterday I watched Tucker's interview with a woman from England who has started a women's rights movement. She explains this better than I have ever heard it before. She talked about Maslow's hierarchy and what happens when people have all their needs met. It isn't good. Her name was Kelli Jay Keen. I recommend everyone watch this. The subscription if well worth it.
I'm familiar with her, I saw her on Triggernometry and have since watched her YouTube channel. I'll check it out.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is everything. We all need to go back to an understanding and appreciation of it.
Love her ❤️
I agree completely.
Always impressed today how many kids don't experience real conversations with adults. Amazing how the little terrors respond to subjects which can be challenging for adults. Such things as use of one's imagination in the real world, versus when gaming online. Applying imagination to formulate plans for a structure then building it, etc. They are nothing if not practical.
I remember what my children told me. One of their teachers asked the students to raise their hands if their family ate dinner together. My child was the only one in that classroom who raised her hand. We ate dinner together each night. Weekends it was brunch and dinner. I also got up and fixed my children a real breakfast before they went to school and I packed their lunches.
We had actual conversations at the dinner table. The topics ranged everywhere. We also visited all the museums and parks within a few hours driving time.
Those experiences often build resilient human beings. I too grew up poor - living in a dilapidated trailer in the middle of the field. My siblings and parents "camped" outside every summer, sleeping under the stars. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized one of my fondest memories was actually the only bearable way to sleep at night. I vaguely recall inside always being hot and stuffy, but that trailer must have been 100 degrees in the summer. Despite having nothing, my parents managed to give us everything that mattered.
It's funny how we remember old things so fondly; maybe there is one upside to aging.
We lived in an uninsulated farmhouse with a tin roof, so when the sun beat down on hot summer days, the upstairs rooms sweltered. We had livestock, so houseflies were a constant problem, and you HAD to keep screens in the windows, cutting any airflow to nearly nothing.
On the hottest of days, my mother would spread one of her homemade quilts on the cool ground beneath the apple tree in our back yard, and I would sit and play there for hours on end. My upstairs room never seemed to cool until well after midnight; I didn't realize then that all the blistering-hot air that had accumulated under the tin roof during the day was radiating down through the ceiling. I can still hear the night sounds - the owls, the bobwhite quail, the whip-poor-wills, the continuous background drone of crickets - and see the cool mist drifting over the hay fields. And the lightning-bugs! Such a show! I can see it all. So bittersweet ....
I absolutely agree. I grew up washing plastic bags and drying them next to laundry in the air… Our entire country used to wash their plastic bags and milk bottles, we didn’t have a concept of a one-time package use. When my country ceased to exist overnight and all its institutions collapsed my mom was so scared of food shortages that she made me and dad spend endless hours on our vegetable garden. After slaving an entire summer weeding a small potato field over and over we collected as much potatoes as we planted. ☺️ We turned out to be shitty farmers; my mom had a degree in English and dad was an electric engineer. Our entire country went through that experience. Then many things changed… I immigrated and ended up in the Silicon Valley. But to this day I wash and dry my plastic bags.. I know I will persevere anything. Now I just need to find the way to provide this tough experience for my children.
Very true. I remember growing up much the same, but our expenses were low, too. In the Depression, my dad made literally a dollar a day.
Yes, our expenses were lower and fortunately almost all of our neighbors were in the same boat. However, we knew we were lower middle class economically. There was no disgrace in that then.
The point I was trying to make is that if may be possible to live on one paycheck today if you were willing to live without all the toys and modern conveniences.
I am a nurse and doing home care and have been in dozens and dozens of homes. Most of my patients would be considered economically disadvantaged because today those in the lower socioeconomic stratum have the most lifestyle health issues such as diabetes, high blood pressure, morbid obesity, wounds, etc. My patients also had at least one vehicle and frequently one vehicle for each adult driver. They had TV's, washers and dryers, air conditioning, computers, cell phones, iPads, iPods, etc. They relied on fast food and ate fast food for at least one meal each day.
Expectations have changed for everyone.
I was fortunate to be able to stay at home and raise my children. We lived on one paycheck. We lived modestly. I was also able to save and saved for both children's college educations. Consequently both were able to have their college costs covered, at state schools, and graduate with no debt. It can be done.
What did we do? We drove old cars, that were paid off. The money that had gone to the car payment was saved in a "car fund." When the car finally died there was enough in the fund to purchase another vehicle for cash, or finance a portion of the cost.
We ate at home. Home cooked meals. I packed my children's lunches for school. Good food, real food. No junk, no high sugar foods.
Good quality clothes but no designer stuff.
Inexpensive vacations.
My grandpa, my mom's dad, was a child in the Depression and sold apples out of a wagon to make extra money to help out; I think my family will likely throw away more in 5 years thn some people will own in a lifetime. I remind my kids of these things when they get whiny, and I hope it sticks. We got very spoiled and comfortable as a direct yet unforseen result of our ancestors' hard work, and we are doing nothing to try to remedy that, as far as I can see. It will be interesting if the economy tanks to see how people react. I think in a sink-or-swim situation the US is rife with swimmers. In fact not to fall too far down a rabbit hole, but I think a lot of these woke mobs are simply lacking direction and structure. They need to feel a guardrail and there are none for them so they're flopping around grasping at straws to try and make a stand on something, anything. Kids inherently have fire in their belly, but what rational thing could these kids who have virtually no life experience, no hindsight (no foresight for that matter), and very little wisdom possibly rally against? They have 1st world champagne problems so they invent some. Why on Earth we listen is beyond me.
Welp that's my rant for the day!
(edited for spelling error) My uncle Omer had his entire arm torn out of the socket by a piece of mining machinery in the 'thirties. There was no welfare then; the mine just told you that you were a cripple and of no use to them and they fired you.
With his one good arm, he raised acres of gardens and sold the produce on the county courthouse parking lot. He had over a hundred stands of bees. He cleared property - with one hand, grubbing out the briers and weeds with a one-handed mattock. On that land he grew Christmas trees and sold them in town. My aunt worked and canned as much as they needed for winter, tutored her children at home and brooked no nonsense from them. This is in the mountains of rural West Virginia - in the 'forties. One son became a dentist. Another a chest surgeon in St. Louis. Another a brain surgeon - literally a brain surgeon - in Florida. One a professional photographer. Another a radiologist in St. Louis - easily the smartest man I have ever known - now in his 'nineties.
Before he died at age 101, my uncle showed his bank book to my older brother. One million dollars plus. "And this is not money my kids gave to me. I made every dollar of it myself."
By God, where are these people now?
Well said. Yesterday I listened to Tucker's interview with Kellie-Jay Keen. She is fighting back against Woke culture and gender issues. She spoke about Maslow's hierarchy and what happens when all your needs are met. It's not a good thing. Not at all. Good interview to listen to and well worth subscribing to Foxnation just to get Tucker's specials.
And now this makes me recall your comment to the previous article, when you were telling how to put kids through college without debt.. 🤗
Of the five of us, three went to college. One brother has advanced degrees which makes him think he knows everything. Needless to say he is a thorough Lefty. My oldest brother did not like school and didn't go to college but managed to make a good life. None of us has ever committed a crime or been a bad citizen, except for brother #2 who votes for people who have ruined his city and community. Go figure.
Those of us we did go to college got scholarships, worked while in school, and paid our own way. No debt.
I cannot disagree with anything you have said. Allow me to give you another perspective. I became an adult in the late 60's. The women's movement was in full swing, but it was not every woman's movement. If you chose to marry, have children and be a full-time homemaker, you were a cypher. You had no value in that culture. There was lot of woman-on-woman bullying. The woman in our company who won the prize for being the strongest feminist came to work on Friday, gave birth to twins that night and was back to work on Monday. I often wonder how that worked out for her children.
My husband and I were deliberate in our decision to live on one salary. We chose to be poor. I don't regret a minute of it.
Yup...I remember those days. At parties and social events I had status when I was a retail store manager. When I became a full time, stay-at-home mother, I was a pariah and radioactive. Amazing the transformation in a year or two.
Naomi and Jeanette, this was true through the early 2000’s when I had kids. Other women scoffed when you said you wanted to stay home because the perception was that you’d become boring and obsessed with the kids. And I used to hear a guy I worked with complain daily because his wife didn’t work and he had to work harder! That culture is contributing to this rot.
I was fortunate my husband supported this. A mom at home was such a rarity that our house became an after school magnet.
I remember Hillary’s defensive comment about her choices of her career vs. staying at home and baking cookies and having teas — It was telling how that was treated (whether misunderstood or not) when neither choice was inherently wrong, but was personal and either was in that era doable/affordable for many. In contradiction today and for the last while, we have educators blaming parents for not raising their children, in an era when for many, two incomes are needed, not just for sustenance but to ensure the children are prepared to embark on their own adult lives in a world in which expectations are vastly different from those for the parents and grandparents. Such is the disintegration of our culture.
Fast forward a little and today we see “gender roles” being abolished so men can have transplanted uteruses and deliver babies and compete in women’s sports and this new reality and culture is being considered and taught as normative to the youngest school children.
Law of unintended consequences in this instance, the “women’s movement” was a few decades later seen to be net destructive to the culture norms that had been extant for time out of mind. Where this all goes? Who knows. At my age, it’s possible I shall never know but at the rate we have been going in destroying our culture, we could find out next week!
Jeannette... nice link
Jim, one of the leading causes of divorce is money; dealing with income inequality will result in fewer divorces!
In yesterday's Common Sense essay by William Deresiewicz, he wrote, "all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up—not financially, not psychologically, not morally."
Our society's moral compass is broken. I do not care if someone is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or some other religion/belief, but we all need to believe in something greater than ourselves. We need to believe that there is a higher power, and we need to love others as we love ourselves. Serving others whether it is our family, our community, friends or strangers improves the lives of the served as well as the server. We are raising a generation of materialistic, self-centered, mentally weak young people. Young people who cannot think for themselves, who seek validation from the cesspool of social media.
I don't know how to change the course. I don't want someone telling me how to parent my 18 yo son, and others don't want me telling them how to parent their children (especially when some don't want to parent at all). I fervently believe that the removal of God and Biblical values from the mainstream of our society and the degradation of the family are primary culprits, but people can't be forced to believe in God or hold to family values of safety, structure, discipline, and love. I just have to raise my son in the best way I know how to make him a respectful, responsible, productive member of society and hope that there are a lot of parents out there doing the same.
Wholeheartedly agree!
There is no single moral compass anymore.
There’s a lot of different ones, and each has its own “North”.
When parents are not on the job, then we should notice that neither is the school system. How many school boards require that students be taught the criminal laws of the land? How many require field trips to prisons? How many require field trips to homeless camp grounds? How many require field trips to places where addicts try to recover?
It is my impression that if an American child is not taught right from wrong at home, he will not be taught it in school, the one place where we have the chance to mold our youth into law abiding, patriotic, productive citizens, not half crazed drug addicted gun toting gang bangers who see nothing good about America.
I think we need to knock off the generalizing and blaming of parents. And of teachers. The blame game does nothing but make matters worse pitting us against one another. “Blame” if you must, but blame those whom you elect to do the right things for your communities and demand they do what you hired them for.
Sometimes great parents have terrible kids. It definitely happens.
Well there’s that, but more importantly, there is no longer an American culture.
Or maybe what Barri describes as rot & nihilism is our culture?
I saw a post from earlier I can’t find now, but the lady asked what she could do, besides “doing good in my small circle.”
That’s all anyone can do.
The problem is, there’s no consensus as to what’s “good” anymore.
There’s no better example than the Supreme Court leak.
A very vocal group (which I think/pray is in the minority) claim legal abortion, for any reason, right up to birth, is is a societal “good”. They think taxpayers should foot the bill and want Roe vs Wade enshrined as the 11th Commandment.
Another group view it as a societal evil under any circumstances.
I think most of us look on abortion as a tragic choice, but still a woman’s right. But it should not be a right without limits.
Killing another being, a human being, who has separate DNA, is the epitome of a culture of death. As a women, it is not my "right" take anyone's life. I know full well what can happen if I engage in sex and I know full well what to do if I'm raped. It is my job to protect ALL LIFE. When everyone realizes this, we won't have mass shootings!
True of many parents but not all. Too many mothers have been more involved in their careers than with their children. I was the child of a working mom. A mom who had time for her family as well as her job. I was lucky. Many are not so lucky, unfortunately.
Some of this has to do with the way jobs are set up. Constantly changing shifts and schedules wreck havoc with the best of parents trying to line up child care among themselves.
Spot on Jeannette.
Interesting comment Jeannette. I am 55. My kid life was relatively simple as was my parents’. And no cell phones. My parents knew everything about us kids. I advise reduced phone function and access until after high school. A computer at home can perform many app functions at the website.
“Republicans wont do anything, due to possibility that investments in mental health will require spending American Taxpayers money on Americans at home, since they don't like that, because its better to spend money on pointless wars and proxy wars abroad”?
Almost. Put Democrats in place of Republicans in that sentence. You do realize that not a single Democrat voted against Democrat President Biden’s $33 BILLION to fund Ukraine’s war? Only Republicans voted against it.
Was “mental health” in Biden’s $3 trillion Build Back Better bill? Nope. Was it in the Infrastructure bill? The Covid bill? Both trillions. Nope.
Does California -lead by and run by Democrats for decades spend on mental health? Nope, it takes funds for homeless shelters and diverts them to “housing”. Does it let crazy people sleep and shit in public spaces. Yep. Does it spend any of its $100 Billion surplus from cover d funds and tax revenues? Nope.
You’ve fallen for some tropes. You won’t solve anything with those biases.
Plenty republicans voted for $$$ for Ukraine. And lets not forget that they got us in to mass that was Iraq. And without Rand Paul blocking the bill, they would have ramed the bill with no debate. Yes there are some good republicans, but majority are same as democrats, work for everyone and everything becides American Citizens.
I'll stipulate that there are also idiots among the elected Republicans. I'd also stipulate that Democrats lack courage - other than Manchin and sometimes Sinema - to go against leadership. Sheep nearly one and all. They vote as a unified bloc for whatever leadership wants. While many Republicans voted for the funds, 11 Senators and 57 House members, Republicans all, voted against. Democrat Hero, Chuck You Schumer, even castigated Republicans saying: “While most Senators in both parties want this package done, it is beyond troubling to see a growing circle of Senate Republicans proudly oppose Ukrainian funding,” " and, trying to blame it all on Trump, said “It appears more and more MAGA Republicans are on the same soft-on-Putin playbook that we saw used by former President Trump,."
There are things to be done to make America safe again if we have the will.
1. Armed former cops and veterans need to stand vigilant watch over every school, as many as are needed. WHEN school shootings go down we can change this.
2. Hire & train well, more cops. Stop the war on cops. (Listen to the most knowledgable Heather MacDonald.) Good guys with guns DO kill bad guys with guns.
3. Fire the Soros funded criminal-loving DAs and Attorneys General. Vote in serious crime fighters.
4. Stop the woke tyrants from demonizing the majority of Americans who were born white or have family values. Stop demonizing Black and Hispanic conservatives.
5. Do not let the Woke tyrants demonize mothers and homemakers, and stop them from indoctrinating children into their toxic ideology.
(BTW, Phillip Roth saw life thru a very nihilistic lens, listening to him will make one very pessimistic about everything.)
Let's find the will.
"2. Hire & train well, more cops. " Well said. The cops and Border Patrol who responded to the Robb Elementary shooting included 3 BP from an "elite" highly trained squad. Those three managed to get the shooter who'd locked himself in a classroom behind cinder block and a steel door. He was shooting at PB thru that door (of course they could not back through it as it was a classroom. Those BP guys got a master key, unlocked the door, entered, one was shot by the shooter, another killed the guy. That is the sort of training needed to deal with psychos.
I think we simply don't know each other any more.
We communicate through social media instead of face to face conversations.
We have everything delivered to our house, instead of interacting with other people in stores and restaurants.
Even when people go to restaurants (I own one) they are texting/gaming
Kids are isolated all day playing games that involve killing as many 'whatevers' as possible
Politicians have ratcheted up hysterical, incendiary rhetoric that causes significant division.
We've normalized anonymity and desensitized our view of violence.
We are reaping what we've sown.
Yes, again. part of the problem. We are together piecing together the whole.
The problem is, in politics, there are no 'pieces'. The left says 'take all guns away!', the right says 'Claymore mines for everyone!'
No middle ground, as nuance can't be fit into a 20 second sound bite, or 10 word headline.
Also, virtue signalers can't process more than one thought at a time.
Exactly right - and no more adults either. Too busy self pleasuring on non stop smart phone eye candy how many hours a day. Just can't get enough. Homer Simpson parents.
What's worse there is a new push from the Left to stop medicating the mentally ill. Can the Left be any more deranged than it is?
It was a huge mistake to shut down the mental health hospitals in the 1980's. Mentally ill patients were expected to take their daily meds on schedule and be able to live out in the community. Some of the savings was to go into halfway houses and community houses where the mentally ill could live, and transition back into normal life. These facilities never came to be.
Mentally ill people need help. It is tragic and a crime against humanity to allow them to live like animals on the streets.
The mental health hospitals in the country, were for the most part, clean and humane places where the mentally ill could get help. Most of them are like small children and they are vulnerable to all sorts of abuse and exploitation.
That was an unholy alliance between the left and the right. Reagan didn't want to spend the money on mental health hospitals and the left didn't think it was fair to keep people confined to them. But the people committing these crimes aren't the severely mentally ill people from mental hospitals--those people are the ones on the streets talking to themselves. It takes at least a modicum of sanity to go to a gun store, plan a shooting and then carry it out--not something likely for a severely mentally ill person.
I find it impossible to accept that a SANE person could plan and carry off this heinous crime. Intelligence and insanity are not mutually exclusive. Criminals can be brilliant and ALSO INSANE. Not all insane persons are babbling away to themselves and incapable of crime.
I think a distinction needs to be made and clarified that INSANITY is no excuse for murderous crime and we should abolish the notion that someone like this is “not guilty by reason of insanity.”
So, t takes at least a modicum of intelligence to go to a gun store… But an insane person can do that too. The insane criminal needs first to be handled as a criminal for others’ safety, then as a mentally ill patient, not the other way round. . . .
In my humble opinion.
They do need help but many do not need drugs. The drugs cause changes in the brain that can cause them to be violent. They need effective therapy and human connection. When did these mass shootings become common? Since the advent of drugging children with ADHD & depression meds in the 90s.No one talks about this but the information is out there
1) I have a son on ADHD meds. He's the most docile, least risk-taking person I know. He simply needs help focusing and his meds enable him greater success. 2) Tragically, one of my younger brothers took his own life 36 years ago when he was 18. He was obviously a very depressed person but my parents did not recognize it back then. I wonder if he'd have a wife and children now at the age of 54 and work as an architect as he dreamed had he been on medication. 3) A high school friend was off her meds one day and grabbed a very large poster off the gym wall, ran after another girl trying to wrap her up in it. She also had an outburst in class that was scary. That was in 1976. She's a fine person but she needs medication to manager her mental illness. Your generalizations are not helpful.....at all.
Very sorry about your younger brother by the way. It’s tragic
Thank you kindly!
2 book recommendations with studies sited and written by experts, which I am not. There has been more iatrogenic harm done than good by these drugs. It’s an unfortunate and underreported truth. Read Reclaiming our children by Dr Peter Breggin & Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. You might also read The Girl on the Bridge by Tracy Higgins who was cured of schizophrenia without drugs after a childhood of horrid abuse. Her “mental illness” was her brain’s protection mechanism against her abuse, basically. While the other 2 are based on professional knowledge and studies, hers is a first hand account from a patient. Eye opening
I've been thinking about your comment for a few days. I appreciate your suggestions and will look into them. My son isn't mentally ill, just can't focus. He had a stroke at birth and was diagnosed with ADHD in the first grade. My initial reaction to your comment was defensive, which is why I've held off responding. Thanks for the information; I know you are writing out of concern.
Absolutely out of concern. I understand being defensive. Your son sounds like there is an actual physical reason that he may need medication. However, they are way over prescribed. When my kids were in elementary school, I started to wonder, why are there so many kids, at a small school I might add, on meds? I discovered the book that Peter Breggin wrote called Reclaiming our Kids. I was really shocked by the content. I’m calling it divine intervention now, because one of my daughters was going through a still unknown crisis in high school. We got her to a therapist which led to a psychiatric evaluation. After 3 meetings the psychiatrist jumps to “I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong but I suspect bi polar 2 and I’m going to prescribe Lamictal and if that doesn’t work we’ll add lithium. I immediately said hold on. Remembering what I read in that book years ago, I started doing more research. Many of these drugs have horrible side effects. Suicidal and homicidal ideation is common with the anti-depressants in teens and young adults. If she has already been suicidal, how does this help? I brought up those side effects to the Dr who acted like none of them were a big deal. “Oh I treat other kids at her school with those drugs and no one has reported a problem.” It’s like experimentation. They don’t know which ones will work or if any will work at all, with the risk of very bad side effects. Anyway, that’s been my path, and why I’m on a bit of mission to get the word out to other parents just to be aware. Also, if decreasing the amount of these prescriptions to teens would help avoid a school shooting, I’ll be screaming what I’ve learned from the rooftops. Definitely no offense meant to anyone who has followed the advice of their Dr. who prescribed them to their kids or has been mislead by them, as the case may be.
I wonder how many school shooters were on meds you say can make the mentally ill violent. which are they?
Anti depressants have the black box warning that they can have this side effect in teens and adults. The drug ads say suicide but they can also cause homicidal tendencies. 2 of the most famous, the Columbine murders and Andrea Yates, all on Prozac. And many since those as notes in the article I posted
That last comment should have said teens and young adults
https://www.drugawareness.org/school-shootings-the-evidence-antidepressants-are-the-cause/?fbclid=IwAR2pYwVCGIO8OQD1ei4aVfqYJ1VTDlFvCctpAbthY4sKjiNBx0IEeq3qxHE&fs=e&s=cl
Naomi, Gretchen, madaboutmd, and note to self:
There is NO ONE panacea, no one answer for what we have in this day and age and we cannot roll back time to pastoral days of yore.
All your points are good ones that should be taken up in a full-scale analysis of the vulnerability that exists in which school shootings like this latest can happen. This tragedy was preventable starting with having the doors to the school locked and security guards in place, and had there been a clear and known line on which anyone could report to authorities any of the clear signs concerning this disturbed individual.
EVERYTHING needs thorough study, analysis, and review so that intelligent preventive plans and programs can be put in place. Somehow we need to make this a priority for our elected representatives of all political persuasions.
The Parkland shooter's parents called the police to their home over this disturbed young man 47 times. An Obama program prevented the school from reporting incidents involving certain categories on youth based on skin color and ethnicity.
There are many factors to these incidents but there are some common findings. They are all men, mostly young. They are losers who want to become famous. They spend inordinate amounts of time online with violent video games and pornography. They are all heavy marijuana users.
There have been studies of what marijuana does to the prefrontal cortex when used by people before the age of 25. It can cause paranoid schizophrenia. There was an excellent book published a few years ago that carefully documented this phenomenon. Alex Berenson wrote one such book but there are others.
Right. All of which should be part of the analyses.
Yes, exactly. The knee jerk reaction to take very registered gun doesn't begin to solve this problem. Registered gun owners are the least likely to commit these atrocious acts.
The safest place in my county is also the area with the most gun owners and the most guns. NO ONE breaks into these people's homes.
Concealed carry is also very popular where I live. It can be a real crime deterrent. A few years ago a young man came into a local restaurant and demanded money from the cash register. He was brandishing a gun. Two customers at different locations in the restaurant stood up, pulled out their hand guns and fired at him. They missed. He ran out and was not seen again. Needless to say that restaurant was NEVER robbed again. Safest place in the county to eat, although all our restaurants are safe places to be.
Raziel, I agree--we need to bring back forced institutionalization of the mentally ill. When the law was changed in 1975 with O'Conner v. Donaldson, the attitude of psychiatrists and civil libertarians was that with new (at the time) anti-psychotic drugs, mental illness would be a thing of the past. Patients would visit their local psychiatrist and pick up their meds. Sadly, as one psychiatrist, who testified in front of Congress in favor of deinstitutionalization in the early seventies, wrote a mea culpa in the New York Times ten years later, about his the realization that "patients" do not have a sense that they are mentally ill, and do not bother to show up and get their meds...in fact, once free, they are hard to track. Today, many families exhaust all LEGAL means to deal with family members who show signs of severe mental illness and potential violence--and simply pray their loved one does not commit the kind of heinous acts we see in the headlines today. It is utterly facile to argue that "Reagan did it". That is not the whole story. Before the Lanternmen Act was passed, California had semi-self sufficient mental health hospitals. IN the early 1970s, the ACLU filed suit against the State of California arguing that the "patient/inmates" rights were being violated by making them work on the physical plant of the hospital--gardening, cooking, cleaning etc. Furthermore, the ACLU also insisted that the patients/inmates should be free to engage in 'adult activities (i.e. sex)' as an expression of their rights. This is when Mentally Disordered Sex Offenders were housed on the same campus as people who were Mentally Retarded and/or Severely Mentally Ill. That Reagan happened to be governor when all this went down created that most useless rhetoric about the real reasons for the extreme change in the LAW regarding the mentally ill. Simply put--if you cannot hold anyone (except a criminal) against their will, the mental hospitals will likely sit empty. The presiding justice of O'Conner v. Donaldson (the nail in the coffin of institutionalization) said he was greatly influenced by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a popular work of fiction at the time, with a deinstitutionalization theme. If one is looking for the differences between the USA and other countries, it is our inability to hold those who are unaware of their own mental illness and could prove to be a danger to others. We've come a long way from the early days of mental health treatment, but most psychiatrists will tell you that the inability to "hold" a patient has created the crises we witness today in mass shootings and homelessness.
As a lawyer, I remember well two sets of parents who sat in tears in my office. Both of them were convinced that their late adolescent sons were mentally ill and would do something horrible. Both sets of parents had done everything that they knew to do, including counseling and medication. These were good people who wanted their sons involuntarily committed in order to protect their sons and the community. Under the laws as they existed at the time....after we made involuntary institutionalization practically impossible...there was nothing that could be done to help them or their sons. Ultimately, I think both boys committed suicide.
Yes. And that is so sad. I know of a family who did everything they could under the current law, including having their 18 year-old son living in a monitored home, but that didn't stop him from committing a murder-suicide. Another friend has spent 20+ years monitoring her schizophrenic son--as a full-time job, which she believes has prevented him from committing crimes and/or suicide. The resistance from many parties to understanding how difficult institutionalization is nowadays is really frustrating. And on the other hand, the number of households that own guns hasn't actually changed significantly in 200 years. The deinstitutionalization laws set in 1975 very clearly correlate to mass shootings and homelessness. The homelessness sort of proves that point--because that isn't about guns. And if I thought disarming citizens would make the world "safer" I would advocate for that--but my question would be...how do you get the genie back in the bottle as there are millions of guns in the USA, many of which are "illegal" and in the hands of criminals? So much hand-wringing when the "solutions" are politicized--and yet to me the answer is clear--make institutionalization of the mentally ill easier, and more transparent once institutionalized. I'm tired of the excuses from the left and the right. The left says: you can't take away the right to be insane, or to "be free" even if you are severely mentally ill and a danger to others, etc. and on the right it is "but the Democrats will lock up Republicans because they'll argue that not voting Democrat is a sign of mental illness"--I think we have to consider the bigger picture--the severely mentally ill must be institutionalized until they are determined to be able to live in society without being a danger to others (and themselves) and hope that neither side use institutionalization as a political weapon.
I agree. We have turned our streets into open air mental institutions. There has always been a balancing act between personal liberty and safety. The fear that people will be declared "mentally ill" and institutionalized for trumped up reasons (political viewpoint, for example) is a real and legitimate fear. But surely we are smart enough to be able to build in safeguards and checks and balances to to prevent that. I keep hoping that both the 2nd Amendment folks and the Mental Health Advocates could at least get together on the issue of proper treatment of the mentally ill.
While I completely agree with you, the severely mentally ill on the streets are not the ones committing mass shootings. They don't have the mental capacity to go to a gun store, complete paperwork for a background check, and then plan and execute the shooting. Most of them just wander the streets all day, some more threatening and dangerous than others. It's definitely another problem that needs to be solved but I just don't see the severely mentally ill being the ones responsible.
I understand that, but there are thousands of families in this country with severely emotionally disturbed (adult) children who are living at home. The Gabby Giffords shooter is a good example. The family did seek psychiatric help, but because the institutionalization laws are so stringent, they were unable to have their son committed. Same with the UCSB shooter. I truly pity those families that did everything they could under the law, but we’re unsuccessful because they couldn’t commit their mentally ill child once they turned 18 years of age.
We are on the same page. One of the most powerful "advocates" for the homeless in Los Angeles, a lawyer by the name of Carol Sobel, continues to sue the city for more camping rights, etc. for the homeless, rather than addressing the issues that force them to live on the streets like wild animals. Too many people consider such things as "housing" or "gun rights" issues rather than addressing the root cause. When I see all the headlines after a tragedy like yesterday's, I find it so disheartening that even the media in general refuses to address what is clearly the actual cause of mass shootings (and homelessness)--which is the loss of our mental institutions because of laws passed 45+ years ago.
Brilliant LA Conservative! (As am I.) I remember from the 1960s and 70s, Dr. Thomas Szasz, who, I believe, instigated the entire argument to never institutionalize the mentally ill. He received the Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged (1974). As I recall his influence was immense.
Conservatives want the mentally ill who are a danger to themselves and to others to be institutionalized. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s. We saw the very rare "bum," and no homeless. For that matter no one was allowed to wander in a neighborhood aimlessly they did not live in. It was called loitering and it was against the law. Guess what? I was free to roam from 6 years old on - what a dream it was!
Yes—Even Dr Szasz had no idea the disaster that would unfold over a couple of generations. I think the laws passed pre-1980 should be revisited since todays technology should prevent most of the abuses that civil libertarians feared back in the 60s and 70s.
Yes, there were loitering and vagrancy laws.
There is a very good book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin Olasky. He details the various social programs that existed in the US from before the Civil War into the 1920's and 1930's.
We seem to go through these cycles. It got so bad after the Civil War that the temperance movement joined up with those concerned about vagrancy. They made the distinction between the "deserving and undeserving" poor.
I bought it when it came out but only read a little. I will revisit, the lessons from the Civil War aftermath sound very interesting for today. Thank you.
I applaud you. Well said.
Excellent comments throughout this thread. Thank you LA Conservative, et al.
They have another GLARING common trait: the perpetrators are all male.
It's almost as if the "all males are evil" rhetoric that feminists have been spouting for the last 30 years is having some kind of effect on how boys view themselves....
Or how about the men put down the porn and video games and start raising better men?
Why should they bother? They CANNOT win.
These days, men can have vaginas, you know.
Ban all Males!!!! That'll fix it!!!
It was not Reagan who put all the mentally ill out on the street. That happened earlier, in the 70's, as an overreaction, primarily by Democrats, to the very real problem of abusive conditions within some mental hospitals. This was also influenced strongly by an intellectual movement that insisted that there was no such thing as mental illness, that those we call insane just saw the world differently and were in many ways superior to us normies. Reagan was simply the first Republican president after the problem became apparent, so the media blamed him for it.
this was less a political response than a medical reality, which coincided with my medical school years that included psychiatry in the curriculum. What happened is that the phenothiazines, tricyclics, and lithium were transforming what was possible in psychiatric care. There were still the shell shocked of WW1 who stayed at the VA psychiatric warehouses, but for schizophrenics, manics, the suicidally depressed, and substance abusers, restoration to function became by far the largest outcome. The state and VA centers held thousands of people with no meaningful treatment and no end points. The successful use of medication, and advancements since, greatly changed their prospects. We don't get outraged, or even notice, the treated patients who go to work every day with outpatient followup and management of their medications and its side effects. Those people, warehoused in my medical school years as untreatable, far exceed the number of homeless and other untreated or untreatable schizophrenics whose presence we do notice in our cities. The ability to transform psychiatric care on that scale, mistakes and limitations aside, was one of the remarkable advances in 20th century medical care. I think our elected officials, social agencies, and mental hygiene community do need better accountability for how they mishandled the consequences of what did not go as well.
I think this is a very good point. It's quite important to avoid binary thinking on these kinds of issues. But policy decisions are always political. Science can inform policymakers, but not dictate policy. The problem here is that the reforms were responding to a very real problem, and as you point out, were quite successful in many ways. But they also failed terribly in other ways, and those failures became apparent pretty early on. Most importantly, there doesn't appear to have been any interest in fixing the reforms, to say, how can we preserve what is good, but repair what isn't working. And this appears to have been a political decision, both on the part of government, and the mental health professionals. There's even extreme reluctance to concede that mental illness is a central factor in most homelessness. There's similarly extreme reluctance to protect people who are getting harassed by mentally ill people. The police will shake their heads and say, until they actually kill you, there's nothing we can do. And the mental health professionals seem quite complicit in this, eager to declare clearly dangerous people "no longer a threat." (I have some personal anecdotal experience with this). It's presented as a binary "we can't go back to the bad old days," which is then used as a pretext for allowing the current intolerable situation to continue.
I don't have any easy solutions to offer, and I'm acutely aware of the potential dangers to personal liberties that can come from improperly calibrating this. But we need a way to institutionalize people who either can't take care of themselves, or are a danger to others. This is where some constructive input from the medical community could be very useful, but they don't seem interested in providing it. And that is political rather than scientific.
Yes, you are correct. I remember those days and the arguments. It was said that now there were drugs to control mental illness there was no reason to institutionalize the mentally ill. And, yes it wasn't Reagan although the Left just loves to blame him. The movement came, as usual, from the do gooder bleeding hearts on the Left.
Everybody please check out Fredrik de Boer’s Substack. He has a very eloquent voice in the discussion of mental illness and treatment. He’s also getting quoted all over the place, including in Common Sense, WSJ, City Journal, so I think he’s making an impression. Certainly has with me.
I only recently learned about him and have subscribed to his Substack.
In Massachusetts it was a sacred mission for Michael Dukakis. Remember him.
Switzerland is also a much smaller and tight knit country, as well as being mostly socially homogenous. One could probably compare, say, rural New England to Switzerland in this regard, but the whole of the U.S.? That's a wide comparison gap there.
Spot on. Hopefully a leader like Michael Schellenberger, whose running for Governor of California, can win and bring his state back from the mental health insanity it finds itself in today. If California can make strides towards an improvement in how we're treating the mentally ill and addicted, so too can America. On the other end of the spectrum, we have bumbling, bungling, Joe Biden who used the tragedy yesterday to barf a bunch of tired and dangerous talking points on gun control that my Democrat friends have become addicted to. Guns are not the root cause. In fact, gun laws can only keep honest people honest. They do ABSOLUTELY nothing to curb violent crime, and I'd argue that gun laws are making violent crime even more violent because the dishonest miscreants have become emboldened knowing that their victims are likely unarmed. I love Bari but she's back on the establishment reservation when she goes right to more gun control gobbledygook. It's wrong and it's dangerous because there's ABSOLUTELY nothing to worry about when a gun is in the hands of a law-abiding citizen. 18 children would not be dead today if more citizens were trained and armed to handle unthinkable tragedies like this. Please stop with the gun control nonsense. Please!
I agree with you about the mental illness issue. Such people will commit violent acts regardless of weapon and violence among homeless is an issue. But a knife won’t kill 20 people from 30 feet away in less than a minute.
This. Violent people are everywhere, and sometimes they can do a lot of damage with knives and similar weapons. It's a big problem in Britain and China. But a knife rampage rarely matches the amount of damage that can be carried out with a gun.
Mass killers in countries with tough gun laws can instead kill and injure many people by ramming them with cars or trucks, but that's another story. (Sadly, as we saw in Waukesha, it's sometimes the weapon of choice in the US, too.)
Tell that to Crocodile Dundee.
It is both. But then again... one of the reasons why individuals are allowed to own weapons of war, is because the government is allowed to, as well. There really is no reason for a cop to have possession of a firearm with a 50-shot magazine. The second amendment exists to balance the scales between the governing and the governed. If the cops laid down their killing machines, it would be easier to ban them outright.
That may be one point of view - but the militia clause of the 2A is built upon the premise of unbalanced power and tyranny from the government. Militias aren't formed to go after schoolkids or random carjackers, they exist to defend against unchecked powers. As long as there is an imbalance of firepower between the government and the governed, the 2A allows individuals to have the same armaments. If, perchance, all guns were limited to six-shooters...
Actually Psych drugs are almost always involved in school shootings. Something like 75% of shooters are either medicated, just started the drug or just discontinued. Furthermore those drugs carry a black box warning for suicidal ideation (violence) at start of treatment, discontinuation or dose change. How many parents are made aware of the black box warning? VERY FEW
Very true. Another factor is the perpetrator has been a heavy user of video games, and often pornography.
And they probably watched television and had a bible in their house.
would love to see a citation for this statement: Actually Psych drugs are almost always involved in school shootings. Something like 75% of shooters are either medicated, just started the drug or just discontinued."
Page 37 of attachment below. By Vanessa Leggett
Go to page 37 of this report. This was presented to the FBI PRIOR to the black box being added. I have information on more recent shootings as well somewhere
https://hrwg1991.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/homicide2000-2.pdf
Thanks. I appreciate the citation and the response.
I am cautioned, however, by the lack of clear findings in the study. From the abstract: "Currently, no conclusive scientific evidence exists to definitively support a link between psychopharmacological treatment and de novo or intensified suicidality and/or homicidal impulsivity. Meaningful analysis of the effects of psychostimulant and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant medications on behavior has been thwarted by difficulties distinguishing reported side effects from underlying psychiatric disorders and preexisting conditions and deficiencies in public health, policy, and reporting practices. enough anecdotal evidence and a growing body of research strongly suggest a causal connection between psychoactive medication and violent ideation and/or behavior in adolescents."
I am loathe to draw any firm conclusions from "anecdote" as such conclusion is as likely to reflect author bias as anything else. Jesse Singal, noted lefty psychologist wrote a great book on crappy psychological studies. "The Quick Fix". Worth a read. Not saying Vanessa Leggett's paper is of a piece with Singal's examples, but as I wrote it does provide a cautionary instruction.
Like I said this was PRIOR to the black box warning being issued on SSRIS- it was quite literally the first to brooch the subject. It is a topic of HOT debate. Just look at a chart of school shootings pre 1997 (prozacs entrance) to now. I’m not saying it’s the ONLY cause but I find it very foolish to simply dismiss as our pharma friendly media and pharma paid politicians have.
I think ADD drugs are the far more likely culprit.
Also I just realized a page is missing. I’ve contacted the author to ask about this.
Exactly right. I remember when this happened in Washington State. The Democrats push for de-institutionalization under the banner of civil rights combined with the Republicans' desire to save money by closing state mental hospitals. We will treat them in their communities, they said. But the operational definition of community was geographic, so they just emptied the mental hospitals onto the streets. That was quickly followed by alchoholics and drug addicts and it just built from there. So mental illness has been normalized. When someone starts acting coo-coo you can't just make a phone call and have them brought in for evaluation and - if appropriate - detention and commitment. We need to pass laws and fund institutions that can incarcerate and treat those who are a danger to themselves and others. I suppose the problem, at this point in our history, is how to keep that apparatus from becoming politicized, defining political differences as insanity - something you see every night on TV.
This is what has frozen us as a society: "I suppose the problem, at this point in our history, is how to keep that apparatus from becoming politicized, defining political differences as insanity - something you see every night on TV."
Just as you mention about mental health laws, I don't want to see stricter gun laws because I know they will be abused to gradually but forcibly remove guns from civilian populations. I don't want the civilian populations unarmed because our government is corrupt beyond comprehension and has little regard for the basic rights and welfare of the average citizen, and if COVID policy and enforcement didn't make everyone aware of that, nothing will. But the point is we can't give government any way to monopolize the possession of weapons, no matter how many school shootings there are, because they will abuse that monopoly.
I am, in general, a liberal, but as I've watched the increased hyperpartisan nature of politicians and the authoritarian bent of particularly the left these days, I find any liberalization of laws dangerous for the population as a whole. We're better shrinking the federal government down to nothing and finding ways among ourselves to work this out.
The founders' approch to faction was division of powers. It would be necessary to provide counsel and to specify a cause of action for false imprisonment and other damages. Maybe there are other ways, but it would surely be expensive but filling up every empty space with demented people has a cost as well.
I agree with your ideas, though the blame on repubs is not settled fact. That doesn’t matter as much as the fact that whatever was done by whomever unleashed a lot of ill people onto the streets without ensuring a replacement system was in place. A colossal error.
I needed a project to fill out some hours in grad school so I just went through all of the local newspaper articles from about 1970-1978 and summarized it. That is the basis of my opinion that it was bipartisan, at least in this state. Short-sighted indeed.
I was thinking along the same lines; while mass institutionalization and the stigmatization of mental illness are far from ideal, we have completely lost the balance toward the opposite direction. Issues surrounding mental health at least partly explain the homeless crisis in CA (which I witnessed while on vacation), the current situation with the nyc subways (I used to take the subway frequently. Lately, I avoid when I can), and—yes— the mass shootings in Buffalo and TX (worth noting, the onset of severe mental illness like schizophrenia in males is late teens/early 20s). I also agree with you in terms on the following; we should model those countries with a more comprehensive and proactive approach to issues pertaining to mental health.
There is another element worth investigating. It has been proven but is not generally popularized that regular marijuana use in the teens causes changes to the prefrontal cortex. This is the area of the brain that deals with judgement. It can also cause paranoid schizophrenia in previously mentally normal young adults.
I agree with much of what you say but the state of America's politicized mental health system is such that if a young person/teen were brought in for help of any kind the most likely outcome is that he/she would quickly be understood as/labeled "trans" - all problems solved now! Lets make the "social transition", get new pronouns, kill the "dead name", eliminate the parents, and make plans for cross sex hormone treatment. So easy!
I can't like this post due to the last paragraph, which is much more a Democrat talking point than anything close to the reality of the Republican party. Republicans oppose the sort of spending that Democrats promote because it's a bad idea, not because they don't care about Americans. You might not care to notice, but it's Republicans who are in the news for opposing foreign spending because we need the money at home right now. This is true regarding both Ukraine and the southern border.
There's also a real concern that Democrats will steer any effort to institutionalize the mentally ill into an effort to describe "not voting Democrat" as a mental illness.
And, the blaming compulsion is a big contributor to our systemic problems which WE ALL own. We elect people to lead and facilitate dealing with problems at their root causes. That ideal from the Founders has apparently long been abandoned.
I agree but also disagree. The current Dem Party seems to love war. Most Republicans that I know are anti-war. As a Conservative I have NO issue with helping the mentally ill or spending my tax dollars for that kind of help. BUT, I am not for another wasteful government program that awards cronies with high paying bureaucratic jobs while accomplishing very little. A government program has to be effective and efficient or it is not worth my tax contributions. Michael Schellenberger, who is running for Governor of CA appears to have ideas that will work. I pray that he gets elected and is able to implement his ideas in that state. Many could be helped if that happens.
Well you are 100% correct. In fact, the California mental hospitals pre-1975 were substantially self-sufficient because the inmate/patients had jobs to keep the place running. The only staffers were doctors, nurses, a couple of administrators and security. The inmates gardened, cooked, cleaned, etc. but the ACLU stepped in and sued the state, calling these therapeutic tasks a violation of civil rights. The ACLU has done considerable harm and literally has blood on its hands. At least the psychiatrists admitted they were wrong about deinstitutionalization.
LA...great point, opened my eyes
This kind of thing did not happen 40 years ago, despite the fact that many young men kept long guns in their vehicles in the school parking lot, to facilitate hunting before or after school.
What has changed is that the mentally ill can no longer be locked up.
What has changed is that we are constantly bombarded with messages that everything wrong in our lives is someone else's fault.
What has changed is that parents have abdicated their responsibility to before- and after-school programs that constrain children instead of allowing them free time to solve problems for themselves while they are still young enough not to have started blaming their problems on everyone else.
What has changed is that we give media attention to the violent, and we have taught our children that attention is the have-all and be-all of life.
What else has changed is that we are in the midst of tremendous societal chaos as the Woke seek to fundamentally transform America--and note that "funda--mentally" is composed of "mentally."
This fundamental (emphasis on "fundamental"--basic--transformation ) transformation can e seen the Woke's program to dishonor our founders, our religions, our patriotism, our respect for the law.
As Yeats observed shortly after WWI, "The center does not hold." And this tips the mentally ill in to madness, while the rest of us cling desperately to our sanity as the nation self-destructs under the careful tutelage of Wokeness which has devoted itself to the unravelling of every thread of our civilization and society.
I agree with you that this Woke phenomenon is particularly destructive, and I always wonder what gives it such a virulent force in our society.
So yes, it does derive from the academic Critical Theory that all cultural norms are relative and simply a product of the dominant culture. But the potency of it comes from using this abstract idea to justify a politics of inverting the existing hierarchy, hence the social chaos you describe. It’s nothing more profound than a reversion to the baseline ethnic strife seen throughout human history. It’s discouraging.
Bravo Celia! You nailed it imo!
It's one thing to say, Celia, that the 'mentally ill can no longer be locked up' - but at the same time ignore the means by which they kill. It's obvious that no one anywhere will stop a potential shooter even if he broadcasts his intention on Facebook or Instagram. No one gives a damn - everybody's too busy living their lives. So if a mentally disturbed kid like in Texas can buy a weapon in less than an hour, as in NY last week - whose fault is it? His? Or ours as a society that I would hope would want to protect innocent people?
The fault is ours. We allow weapons to be bought by anyone, anywhere, at anytime. As I responded to a post two weeks ago re Buffalo, this will happen again, and again, and again..
Forget the stupid prayers..It doesn't matter anymore because we as a nation do not have the will to even attempt to stop the carnage.
The mentally ill who want to kill are allowed to do so because we *legally* cannot stop them. They kill people in many different ways, not merely with guns. And they are allowed to buy guns because mentally ill people cannot be placed in the background check database unless they have been *legally* committed to a mental institution against their will at some point in the past. Since it is nearly impossible to have anyone committed to a mental institution against their will, no amount of background checks (which are *already* required for all dealer gun sales) will prevent them from buying guns.
Unless we are willing to change THAT, all you are doing is disarming victims.
I worked a primary precinct last night and the dems started chattering about this and went straight after Trump Cruz and the NRA. Nothing about the two years of lockdowns, school security and the mental health of our children. Two seconds to go full on political just like Biden. They have no shame.
If we had to wait a respectful amount of time before looking for a solution to mass shootings, the search would never commence. They are to frequent. This country has a grave problem.
A solution to mass shootings. Its too late I fear. She’s right. The rot is way too deep. Tte leaders and media make too much money from it. There is no good solution. We have a collapsing republic.
There are good solutions, but you are right people are too dug into their gun bubble to work on solving the issue - sadly. When we look at most states, one has more restrictions around driving a car than they do around guns🤷♂️ Responsible gun owners should want certain restrictions and the gun owners I know are frustrated with the nra and congress unwillingness to act.
Um, Do unto others is derived from the Hebrew bible.
Ug, Christianity solves nothing! Just look at the stats- most crazy gun owners self report themselves chistian🤪
Judeo-Christian
New motto for country "It's the Left stupid"
So, We Decide - mental health of children? When nineteen of them (latest count) are dead? Did their lack of mental health kill them? Gee, in all the photos of the slain I saw smiling faces.
GUNS are the ISSUE, not Covid..
Shame? - ask the NRA in Houston in a day or two how they respond to the latest two mass shootings.
They'll usher you out the door.
If guns are THE issue: explain the mass murder in Wisconsin using an SUV.
Guns are just the tool. They aren't the cause or the problem - though I agree that some changes to our gun laws and mental health are necessary.
SUV’s, knives and brass knuckles are not the choice of mass murders. You know that first statement means nothing. Guns are a tool, although for what it isn’t clear to me- perhaps hunting. Some clear responsible restrictions on guns - licensing and training come to mind - would help identify and slow the getting of guns. Also, I just read and article on the number of guns that are stolen each year - perhaps owners taking responsibility for securing these weapons🤷♂️
No SUV entered the school in Texas, or the church in South Carolina, or the supermarket in Buffalo or the concert in Vegas or in any of the other hundred or so gun massacres in the last few years. Only a deluded killer with an all too easily attainable weapon in his hands.
Bari, why do you say: "Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently"? What does that 'inadvertently' mean? The reality is that the government cannot get guns out of America. They can only restrict them to those willing to break the law. Where has the government shown its ability to stop illegal activity? The war on drugs? Illegal immigration? You can stop law-abiding citizens from having guns, but the mentally ill and criminals will still have them. It's true that fewer mentally ill people may have access, but right now the laws we already have on the books to stop that haven't worked very well. Why will new ones? And mentally ill people can still use knives and push people onto subway tracks and make homemade bombs and, and, and.
We should not compare ourselves to other countries with more homogeneous populations and with different cultures. We should compare ourselves to the United States 60 years ago and ask what changed.
One thing that changed is the way we treat mental illness. Another thing that changed is the rejection of Judeo-Christian values as the basis of our culture. There may be a strong tail wind to the idea of the sacredness of life, but when the head of ethics at Princeton posited (Peter Singer, years ago already) that disabled people and the elderly are a drain on society and perhaps we'd be better off without them and when women discuss getting abortions for the purpose of showing how empowered they are, and when we are reintroducing racism at a shocking rate, we are not a society that values human life. Judeo-Christian principles served us rather well, but too many Americans agitated to get rid of them because they saw them as an impediment to progress (heavily in the family and sexual arena). Or they wanted to keep idea A but get rid of B and they liked C but abhorred D. That's not how real life works.
A real discussion has to cover all these bases and more as well as look at statistics of how many lives are saved by guns each year, both actively and through prevention. We need to ask why the biggest rise in gun ownership is female. Could it possibly have to do with attempts to destroy the police and DAs refusing to jail criminals? There's a lot to discuss that is uncomfortable and gun control legislation is at worst a power grab and virtue-signaling, and at best hopeless optimism with little relationship to the real world.
Interestingly stories where guns save lives are ignored or given scant coverage
You said it better than I did in my post. Well done, sir
As a wife and the mother of seven, I actually don't identify as sir. :)
Lol my bad, ma’m
This ^^
The big difference comes from the fact that it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to have a person committed. The law changed in 1975 (O'Conner v Donaldson), and since that time, we've seen the numbers of mass shootings and homelessness increase substantially--it all correlates to deinstitutionalization--a huge mistake that must be revisited if there is ANY chance at stopping this madness. Other countries can actually lock up a severely mentally ill person for more than 72 hours. A century ago in the United States, a person who authorities believed could have a predisposition to violence could be institutionalized. A good history of mental health in the US : My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill by Clayton Cramer.
I liked the point in your reply where you stated we need to ask what is different in our country from 60 years ago. While there are obviously a lot of things different, this is definitely something that should be studied.
Few stolen guns are used by mass murders- perhaps drug gangs🤷♂️ according to the atf most illegal guns are gotten through straw purchases and family/friend purchases.
Judeo/christ. isn’t a solution- perhaps you mean common ethics and social norms. Religion has prove a itself unable/unwilling to solve these issues. Collectively we could all choose to humanitarianism, which you might argue j/c ethics is a subset.
Lastly, we have already looked at “lives saved by guns”- the numbers tell us relatively few.
Susan, a weapon in the hands of every American (we have close to 350 million of them now) is why we have the highest gun murder rate in the world. Bar none. Whites kill whites. Blacks kill blacks. Children die in schools. Church goers die. Food shoppers die. Concert goers die.
Facts are facts. Americans kill their own best. Try to pin it on anything you want, and I see that you have, but the incredibly easy entry to owning a weapon isn't mentioned.
And that's the problem in this discussion and throughout this thread. We can regulate people driving cars for God's sake (since they can also kill) but we can't bring ourselves to even contemplate doing the same re weapons that can kill thirty people in a minutes time.
And that's the 'real world'.
Bari,
I love the articles you put out and am in no way disagreeing with the core message of this one. America has major problems right now in terms of violence, nihilism, etc. I watched the news yesterday and again marveled at how depraved human beings can be.
However, I don’t think the issue should immediately turn to firearms. A gun is merely a tool. A dangerous tool, to be sure, but still just an inanimate object. If someone decides to commit this heinous act, then the last thing he does is grab his gun before walking out the door. Instead, I think the focus should be on what has led this man to commit this crime, rather than on the implementation of the crime itself.
That probably won’t happen, however, since to evaluate and condemn that would be in part to condemn the society of which we have all helped to create.
Again, good article, but I don’t think the focus on firearms will help to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
Fixing the multiple and complicated causes of this issue will take years and lot of cultural and political work from all of us. At this point we need to take action in all fronts, we should not be complacent with living in a society with random murder suicides. We certainly shouldn't get distracted by left vs right bullshit which is blinding our ability to make progress. What about some short term things we can do to reduce recurrence? Raising age requirements, increase security guards in schools, etc.. I wish I had a magic wand and make this problem go away, I'm here and willing to discuss learn how it can be fixed.
God bless.
Raising the age, yes. Absolutely. And I would add, Manny, background checks and gun instruction that would take a few weeks to complete - to discourage the impulsive, the unstable, and the insane.
Like many who want to ban guns, you have a very uninformed view of background checks.
In addition to discouraging "the impulsive, the unstable, and the insane," making it take weeks for a sane and stable person to get a gun would deprive domestic violence victims of *any* chance to protect themselves from a murderous ex. Because hey, who cares if thousands of woman are killed in individual crimes, as long as you can prevent a dozen from being killed at once.
And there is nothing in your new "rules" that would have prevented this young man from buying his gun. He passed a background check. You think he wouldn't have *welcomed* a few weeks of gun instruction? He had already waited patiently for his 18th birthday. You think he wouldn't have happily jumped through your hoops?
Celia, I respectfully think it is you that are not aware of the numbers or as you said “uninformed”. The numbers support background checks and anyone wanting the comfort of a gun can take a buy a gun easier than getting you drivers license.
But I would go further- anyone buying a gun should register, get background checked and take training and finally prove they can secure it! The statistics back this idea up!
If you believe that background checks are not ALREADY required to buy a gun from ANY gun dealer in the U.S., it is you who is uninformed.
Wrong, Celia. I do not want to ban guns. I only want to make it more difficult for the people who have no business buying a weapon to get to keep one.
If there was required training for a weapon of that killing power, perhaps the instructor would have a chance to understand why this person bought it. For target practice at a nearby facility? Or for shooting humans in a school or a church.
If the law requires you to need instruction and pass tests to drive a car or truck, it stands to reason that this should apply to a weapon purchase.
Amen. But the Left doesn't want to talk about that. What they have done to this country is beyond words.
It should not be beyond words; it is imperative that we find the words to connect the tipping into madness of our mentally unstable due to the chaos created by the Woke.
We have most assuredly not helped to create this Woke society; many of the sane among us can see clearly the chaos and instability the Woke have bred on the way to their fundamentally transformed society.
He waited until just after his 18th birthday when he could buy two assault rifles to commit this massacre. I wonder why? Maybe because guns make it easier to kill lots of people very quickly.
OK. Somehow ban all firearms. But as part of that ban, require that anyone who kills with a gun thereafter (other than provable self-defense) be subject to a mandatory death sentence. The SJWs would never allow it. They know the killings would not stop.
Please clarify what you mean by SJW. Inquiring minds would like to know.
Anyone who believes it is skin color and not values which are "holding back" minority communities.
Most mass shooters are already dead when it ends. Death sentences are often part of their goal.
I think smits is making the point that Democrats would not agree to subject the killers in places like Chicago to the death penalty.
I don't think anyone seriously questions that guns make it a hell of a lot easier to kill people. The big question is, how do we limit the amount of times this sort of thing happens?
The "eliminating guns" idea is a non starter, Constitutionally, politically, and even practically speaking. So what do you think we should do? I am totally open to gun reform, just want common sense, practical, and just as importantly likely enforceable regulations.
No doubt. I’m just suggesting that instead of focusing on how the crime took place, we should focus on why the crime took place.
I can already see from a majority of other comments, however, that the focus is centered on the question of firearms.
The crime took place because a mentally ill person was tipped into madness. Why was he tipped into madness? Because of societal dissolution under the Woke revolution.
I agree on focusing on the why. But I don't agree that guns are just an object that you can separate out from the why. The further you are from somebody the easier it is psychologically to kill them. Guns provide distance. They are the consistent weapon of choice for a reason.
And have you not noticed that there are millions of illegally owned guns that our government even today can do nothing about? In the end your idea would only remove legally held weapons from those who buy them for self defense in their homes and businesses. When the government figures out how to get rid of the illegally owned guns, then we'll talk. Until then you are just diverting attention from the societal chaos that is leading too many of our mentally ill to madness.
And you don't think that hours and hours of shooting people in first-person-shooter games has anything at all to do with their willingness to mow people down?
Sorry, but one of the reasons that the Nazis had to create gas chambers is because too many young soldiers were unwilling to open fire on unarmed Jewish women and children. They may been carefully taught a psychological distance from Jews, but even with a gun their hands, a lot of them could not commit cold-blooded murder.
I think the gas chambers had more to do with economy of scale for the Nazis. They wanted to exterminate an entire group of people as quickly and efficiently as possible. Has chambers sadly provide that efficiency. One could argue with the illegalization of guns without the concomitant effort to fix the root cause of America's violence issue, will lead to more mass bombings, etc. I imagine at some point chemical bombs may be implemented by these monsters as they'll be equally as effective as gas chambers.
Because answering the Why is much more complicated than just the How. I agree with you. The Why-is very important, and like a bleeding wound, stop the blood loss and then see why it happened...?
For sure. I really don't think that guns should be part of the central debate over this tragedy. However, from reading a lot of the other comments, it seems that it was inevitable that we would turn to blaming the objects used for this mass murder rather than the societal factors that led him and others to commit these atrocious acts of violence.
We need to decide what the priorities are with it and everyone has their own ideas of what those should be. Some say gun violence will only be solved by getting rid of guns, that’s probably not feasible, we must be pragmatic about these issues. It’s about what we can do in the short term versus what we do in the long term and all of us beginning to change our ways of being together in this broken country. We need a great healing of the social fabric of our society. I’m not sure we have the will to do it. We’d all have to decide to put the screens away… like really away. And that doesn’t seem feasible either.
He also wore body armor, did he not? What does that say about his own greatest fear?
He did not. He had a vest that can be fitted with an armor plate, but he did not have the plate.
Thanks for the info, Celia!
"Here’s where I think they are right..." You were referring to gun rights activists and said they might be right even inadvertently. Two years ago there was a "defund the police" movement nationwide. Police were demonized, as was ICE. At the Democratic National Convention there was zero mention of this or the riots in Portland and other cities. Many cities actually did defund the police. Police recruiting is down significantly - who would want to be a policeman in an environment where police are vilified and receive zero support from the city? In my town here (Norman, Oklahoma) the city council took $900,000 from the police budget to send it to "community outreach," whatever that is. Six senior police officers resigned the next day, and recruiting is of course way down. A judge did overturn the action later, but the damage was done. In this environment, I absolutely will have a gun to defend my wife and my home. I cannot state that strongly enough.
Definitely going to buy a gun. The events of the last few years demonstrated that you must be ready and willing to defend yourselves and your families
I haven't seen any cases where armed people actually stopped an attacker, I'm asking this with no sarcasm. Are those scenarios common?
They are very common. The media largely ignores it when it happens.
You’ve proved my point. Happen all the time. Just read a story of a 69 year old shooting a person breaking into her house.
They're fairly common. There's not good data for various reasons, including that in at least some cases, there's no need to actually fire the gun and nothing is reported to the police. The most common estimates I've seen, from a report commissioned by the CDC, are 500,000–3 million annually, “in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008” (p. 15, https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18319/priorities-for-research-to-reduce-the-threat-of-firearm-related-violence).
Amy Swearer at the Heritage Foundation maintains a database of defensive gun uses (https://datavisualizations.heritage.org/firearms/defensive-gun-uses-in-the-us/) and a Twitter account of stories from it (https://twitter.com/dailydgu). Amy also recently published “a non-exhaustive list of armed good guys stopping mass shootings” on her personal Twitter account (https://twitter.com/AmySwearer/status/1525976906952318990).
Search Heather MacDonald who has done oodles of research and stats on all of this. (Manhattan Institute)
This is where I’m at. Most of my life I was always sympathetic to gun rights though it was never my top issue. I felt Democrats often mischaracterized the issue but I was open to “common sense” gun control measures. A few years ago these mounting tragedies wore me down to the point that I started to come around to the “something must be done” argument and began opening up to the prospect of drastic action on guns.
But after seeing how quickly a social-media-fueled moral panic could turn large swaths of the population and government against law enforcement, after seeing cities abandoned to disorder and chaos and mob violence condoned by Democrats, after seeing police departments defunded or demoralized and unrehabilitated criminals released en masse and crime spike and “progressive” prosecutors refuse to put them back in jail no matter how many times they get arrested, after seeing mobs go through residential neighborhoods shouting at residents to join them (or else, is the implication), and follow home robberies, and flash mob robberies (that would definitely target homes if this country weren’t so notoriously over-armed) clearly we’re all on our own.
And so in the past two years I have bought a couple more guns and now cannot envision a world where I do not own them. I now rail against any attempt at gun control and give money to pro-gun lobbying groups. I wish it were easier to concealed carry in my blue state but given how leniently criminals are treated, it starts to feel like one might as well just carry illegally since laws are so poorly enforced. (I kid, of course, obviously someone using a gun in self defense would be held far more accountable than someone using a gun for a crime.) At this point I honestly cannot see the logic in not owning a gun. How else are you going to protect your family? Seriously, how? Call the police? Those racists?! Who ideally would no longer exist?
So for one thing I will not give up my guns in a world that has been surrendered to crime and chaos and disorder. But here’s the even bigger problem. Even if our voters and leaders could regain sense and turn things around and make our cities feel safe again, we now know they are capable of abandoning us and our safety at the drop of a hat. Never again can we depend on them to protect us. Not to mention we have also seen how governments in China and Australia are capable of treating their citizens when they know they are safely disarmed. So the guns must stay.
Yet at the same time I cannot ignore events like the shootings of the past two weeks. It is difficult to engage with these things with humanity because the talk turns to political rhetoric so quickly that I’m immediately defensive, instead of thinking about the victims and grappling with the true human cost and giving that the weight it deserves. I have to force myself to do that, and honestly this is all a lot to struggle with. Lately I have become such a confident second amendment absolutist, and of course this does shake me. How do we weigh keeping our families safe from one threat versus keeping our families safe from the opposite threat? Maybe there are certain measures we need. But the fact remains that the red flag laws we have keep failing, the magazine capacity limitations keep failing, the background checks we already have keep failing. These laws don’t seem to work. And yet gun ownership remains non-negotiable to me for the reasons above. I don’t know the answer.
I’ve noticed a lot of people reacting with anger about these recent atrocities. Anger seems to be where people go when the solution seems obvious to them. Like how I get angry about rising crime because it’s so clearly being fueled by terrible, deliberately destructive policies! But on this issue the solution escapes me so I am just sad.
It seems like the mental illness angle is the most important to me. Now you may say “you just want to keep your guns” and, well, yes, that is entirely the point. But more and more, mental illness treatment seems to be the underlying issue behind everything, from gun violence to crime and homelessness and drug addiction. There needs to be a comprehensive system for taking care of them and keeping them off the streets, for their benefit and the benefit of society.
Exactly where I am. Have never been a gun owner but definitely getting one now. No faith in our police or justice system. We are on our own
Thanks for your frank comments, with which I wholly concur.
I suspect at 13-17 the perpetrators of these acts were detached from their peers, immersed themselves in the meta-verse of video games and social media, didn’t play team sports nor attended church regularly. I say often this is an adult problem: from parents, to teachers, neighbors and our congregations we must exert the effort to embrace and engage these folk, preventing these perverse seeds from taking root in their souls.
And we should not be surprised these persons were all men, the most denigrated and besieged of the genders the past 25-30 years.
I totally agree. What led this kid to commit this horrible crime? What was his background? What was his social life?
I’m the hurlyburly of debate, I think these questions are being skimmed over and the focus is centered on guns, which is like focusing on a clogged toilet when the septic tank is full.
It is a feature of growing up that the oddball, the child who can't seem to make friends, will be excluded and/or bullied. It is easy to say, include them, but how do you get public school bullies and excluders to comply?
School choice. Seriously, I think it may be as simple as that.
I was bullied all through elementary school and into junior high. Everyone I had grown up with knew that I was the kid to pick on.
Then I skipped from 7th grade to 8th grade. Not only did my grades improve (due to actually being taught something that wasn't endless review of things I already knew), the bullying lessened. Those 8th graders from other elementary schools didn't know I was the designated victim. It helped that that they were more mature by a year. Of course, I still had to deal with my bullies on the bus...until I decided to walk home from school instead.
In 9th grade, the bullies were left behind--they were still in 8th grade. The two junior highs in our town had different boundaries than the two high schools. Most of my friends in high school had gone to the other junior high.
Stable societies change gradually, the avalanche of radical changes introduced by the Left can only do one thing: destroy the society. But that's their objective no? There's no mass shootings in China or N Korea.
Yes that is clearly their objective: to "fundamentally change our society--their own words-- first they must destroy it and they have attacked virtually every aspect of it that lent itself to stability in order to tear it down before they rebuild it in their orwellian image.
“Thou shall not kill”.
Does anyone learn the 10 commandments any more?
When you kill God, as Nietsche said mankind has done, what do you get? An immoral people. A lost people. Nietsche said each person should create his own morality. How is that working out?
When you replace the family, the father, with government, what do you expect?
When you keep blaming the weapon instead of the system that creates people who are capable of such violence, you delude yourself.
Are all the shooters young men? Why are they so screwed up? Because we destroyed their role models, their heroes? Because we made being a MAN a bad thing?
There is deep societal rot at the root here, and sadly there will be more violence because we can’t turn this around quickly.
I think a return to faith is desperately needed.
NC, when you have more weapons in America than actual citizens - what do you expect? There will be more people being killed by guns. Period. Simple mathematics. Your deep 'societal rot' exists everywhere - from Canada to Europe to Japan (I can keep on going) - but killing sprees like ours do not happen elsewhere. We own that and we're good at it. Why? Because we have the means.
The Buffalo shooter was MENTALLY DERANGED as his 180 page rambling manifesto attests. He was NOT a white supremacist. When that lie is continually repeated it seeks to become the truth. It is not. Bari Weiss I am surprised at you.
It worked in World War II, and we have seen it work with COVID and with the 2020 election.
We need an all of the above approach to gun violence. Getting guns off the streets, banning assault rifles, and working on mental health. And this needs to be done in every state, because guns don't stay in the state in which they are bought.
Unfortunately few politicians seem motivated to get things done. The only motivation with any issue is how to use it against the other party and accumulate power.
The first thing we could do for mental health is restore stability to society. The Woke who are causing the instability want to distract us with the gun argument; is is an instability issue.
Anyone blaming guns shows intellectual laziness. And gun owners will never allow us get to a point that only bad guys have guns. It seems like we could avoid many of these shootings if FBI and anyone else in charge of verification if the gun buyer is fit to own one just did their job. Parkland shooter was flagged, Buffalo shooter was clearly crazy. This last murderer killed his grandma before murdering the kids. Don’t you think that perhaps there is correlation between emptying state insane asylums in 70’s and increase in mass shootings? Most of them belong to nurse Ratched.
Darek - the kid who killed yesterday was 18 years old. The 1970's were fifty years ago. I'm trying to understand your correlation.
Victims weren't even identified before the President and many Democrats in Congress immediately turned this into a political issue - namely that any Republican who supports gun rights are to blame. As if gun laws are the sole reason why these murders continue to happen.
Once again, rather than reflect on the reason of this murderous spree, the Democrats couldn't help themselves and had to wave the bloody shirt.
Never let a crisis go to waste. Not when you can score political points.
If only there were laws against murdering others, oh wait……….
The Democrats don't care about a few Hispanic kids dying in southern Texas. In fact they're ecstatic about it. Gives them more ammo for banning firearms.
We know they don't care because of the weekly carnage in the inner cities across the country, far more lives than this one tragic incident (not meaning to trivialize, but rather to remind us of the greater horrors), yet they not only don't talk about it, but call anyone who does talk about it (e.g., Donald Trump) a racist.
This is where nihilism leads. It's not social rot Bari its moral rot.
Politicization and propaganda is all anyone knows in America about the gun issue. Even the Times article you site was counting kids up to 19 years of age so must include almost every Gangland shooting victim. Is that really a fair representation of the average "child" in America? The problem we have is a lack of sincerity which gets back to the moral question. I get the sadness in your writing and so don't want to pick a fight. It's easy to pick up those talking points and condemn people for wanting to feel safe by arming themselves. It's easy to berate people as "gun addicts" who simply want to protect their families in their home.
Covid exposed the truth that our government does not have our best interest at heart. The Government has no intention of protecting us but rather protecting a certain class of people that they feel are more important. This extends down to the community level and is evidenced by the fact that more young people will die this weekend most likely in the south side of Chicago then died in that mass shooting. That happens every week or at least every month in many cities around the country. We don't hear about it because those lives really don't matter. They are not reflective of the elites children who would never venture to such places... they're not worth talking about. We only become horrified when the victims look like us. When the victims possibly could be our children. Then somehow it matters. All of our kids go to school so a school shooting horrifies even the elites in their gated communities in "super zip codes"
Child sacrifice happens every day in our "neo-Pagen" country. Covid was an example of mass child sacrifice on an almost unprecedented scale. The UN estimates that millions of children will die as a result of the downstream effects of Covid measures. Because of Covid measures, the war in Ukraine and America's energy policy making the production of fertilizer unprofitable for most of the world because of rising fuel cost we are about to witness worldwide famine and starvation on an unprecedented scale. The most vulnerable are the youngest and we will be inundated with images of the Starving dying Children of the third world... But again those children we can't relate to.
I am only arguing that our moral outrage surfaces only when the victim could have been one of us or our children. Public shootings scare us but only in places we might visit. School shootings however touch everyone because we all send our kids to school.
I am saddened also by the loss of those families but let us not confuse our selective compassion with morality because we have no problem sacrificing children as a society,
"The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here." Insane governmental policies, like lockdowns, did not help mental health.
‘Social rot’ = moral rot. Moral rot comes from Moral relativism which comes with affluence. When society becomes affluent enough to break away from subsistence living, you get people who have time on their hands to question the basic moral building blocks of society. Soon society says ‘live how you want’, with less and less responsibility. People then abdicate responsibility to the government, work, schools, healthcare systems, etc.
Imagine if you had to be a responsible employee - show up to work and contribute. What about being responsible for your own health - atleast attempting to live a somewhat healthy lifestyle? What if you and your church or your neighborhood were actually responsible for the homeless people in your town? What if your didn’t abdicate your parental responsibilities to the school system?
Guns are tools that are often used for evil. But true root cause requires us to look a lot deeper.
Mass shooters have another common trait that began decades ago…Fatherlessness. The uncoupling of sex and childbirth to marriage has created generations of chaos, increased violence, mental health problems, drug use/abuse, educational struggles, crime. It’s politically inconvenient to remember that statistics clearly show that children grow up healthier and stronger on almost all metrics, in a married, 2 bio/adoptive parent home, (who stay married even when they think they “no longer love” the other…don’t get me started 🤦🏼♀️).
Often, (not always), the mental health of our children starts when we are on a date years prior. Let’s teach our young women to be more discerning. Let’s back up on living together (pretending to be committed without any commitment. As soon as the rubber hits the road, as it does predictably after a child is born, the relationship is over). Let’s not glorify “single” mothers. Forget “broken” families…we have a “never forming families” problem, too.
Baby-Momma’s boyfriends who come and go only add to the chaos, probability of abuse and early sexualization of children, and yes, mental health issues.
Human nature hasn’t changed for millennia, but we think we can remake the social mores without consequence.
Our republic was created for a moral, self-controlled people. We decided self-control was overrated.
Bingo🎯
No one wants to discuss this because somehow it’s taboo , but the stats don’t lie. Kids do turn out better on all fronts with a 2 parent bio/ adoptive family intact. This selfishness maddens me that it’s what matters for ME ME ME. How about having a larger perspective on what you’ve committed to when you have a child?? Where’s the responsibility to our higher values? I sound so old fashioned but I don’t care. It’s what had been proven to keep us stable. Everyone wants to ignore trade offs but we can’t keep doing that. There are so many unintended consequences if our societies values on making ourselves happy and living our dreams blah blah blah. What has become the reality of these values?? Look around…
YES!
This is heartbreaking, and I’m afraid, true. I’m so very sad for our sons. The feminist movement is indeed hateful.