02-22-2018, 07:14 PM
Sure, of course changing gun laws will help. The fallacy would be in attributing the problem to one cause alone. There are several leading causes of the excessive gun violence and other violence in the USA. The technology of social media may be one, but I doubt it. It enables loners like us to have some connection. So lonely millennials and homelunders have an advantage there, over Boomers, Xers, Silents, and GIs. Social media does reduce face to face in-person contact though, and increases distractions from real life, just as TV does.
Cliques certainly existed in the Silent and early Boomer youth culture, and the hippie culture broke some of them down for a time. When the 3T succeeded the 2T, separation culture returned as peace and love receded back into the normalcy of alienated American life and commerce. That endemic modern and especially American alienation has been studied by psychologists and sociologists for decades. Capitalism, which reduces all values to money, is a major factor in it, and the mobility that technology has brought is another. The extended family life of the 19th century and the cohesion brought by religion have eroded too in the 20th and 21st centuries. Greater individual freedom of a democratic market society brings many benefits, but it certainly decreases the power of traditions and the authority of the aristocratic class systems of the past, and this freedom increases loneliness. Many commentators have remarked about the increasing number of people going solo, but this is not something new in the millennial generation, which if anything is much more group-oriented than Xers and Boomers are.
The fact that this gun problem is a uniquely USA problem is a major clue to the fact that the USA gun culture and its Second Amendment is the main cause. The USA has the major portion of the guns of the entire world, and it's almost one per person. This unique dysfunction corresponds with the unique scale of gun violence in America. There can't be any doubt that guns and gun culture/2nd Amendment are in large part to blame. The violent gun culture of the USA is also promoted by TV and movies and by gangsta rap.
But part of the recent rise in mass shootings and gun violence is due to the pressures of Reaganomics. Inequality is rising due to this pall, and economic mobility is falling. Help from government social institutions has dried up-- replaced with gun-happy and fearful police whom libertarian gun lovers resent. Outsourcing and computer automation are economic pressures for which the Reaganomic free market offers no cure. Millennials in particular are subject to the constraints that libertarian economics has wrought, and so that would be a definite generational factor. Add to that the even-more recent phenomenon of a presidential candidate and president who deliberately stokes ethnic hatreds, which have played a role in many recent mass shootings, and you have a volatile mix.
Cliques certainly existed in the Silent and early Boomer youth culture, and the hippie culture broke some of them down for a time. When the 3T succeeded the 2T, separation culture returned as peace and love receded back into the normalcy of alienated American life and commerce. That endemic modern and especially American alienation has been studied by psychologists and sociologists for decades. Capitalism, which reduces all values to money, is a major factor in it, and the mobility that technology has brought is another. The extended family life of the 19th century and the cohesion brought by religion have eroded too in the 20th and 21st centuries. Greater individual freedom of a democratic market society brings many benefits, but it certainly decreases the power of traditions and the authority of the aristocratic class systems of the past, and this freedom increases loneliness. Many commentators have remarked about the increasing number of people going solo, but this is not something new in the millennial generation, which if anything is much more group-oriented than Xers and Boomers are.
The fact that this gun problem is a uniquely USA problem is a major clue to the fact that the USA gun culture and its Second Amendment is the main cause. The USA has the major portion of the guns of the entire world, and it's almost one per person. This unique dysfunction corresponds with the unique scale of gun violence in America. There can't be any doubt that guns and gun culture/2nd Amendment are in large part to blame. The violent gun culture of the USA is also promoted by TV and movies and by gangsta rap.
But part of the recent rise in mass shootings and gun violence is due to the pressures of Reaganomics. Inequality is rising due to this pall, and economic mobility is falling. Help from government social institutions has dried up-- replaced with gun-happy and fearful police whom libertarian gun lovers resent. Outsourcing and computer automation are economic pressures for which the Reaganomic free market offers no cure. Millennials in particular are subject to the constraints that libertarian economics has wrought, and so that would be a definite generational factor. Add to that the even-more recent phenomenon of a presidential candidate and president who deliberately stokes ethnic hatreds, which have played a role in many recent mass shootings, and you have a volatile mix.