Here is a case in point. One of many that you say does not happen or does not matter or are trying to blow this off with your sanguine reply.

The shooter @ MSU who killed three and injured 5 had a 2019 felony gun possession charge dropped to a misdemeanor by a Soros inspired prosecutor.  Had the charge been pursued the shooter would not have been able to purchase the gun he shot the students with.

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MSU shooter Anthony McRae had prior felony gun charge dropped, would have been barred from owning gun if convicted

 steeler wrote: 
Murder isn't the only crime committed with guns.

.....

The police (good ones and bad ones, some in our family and some that we're friends with) are all put much more severely in harm's way by the proliferation of armed citizens. So, why aren't the police and their family at the forefront of the "we need to control guns" movement? It's counterintuitive that the police would be in any way 2ndA proponents, since it makes their job so much more dangerous. And yet, they absolutely aren't in the voices asking for reasonable restrictions to keep artillery off the streets.

So the folks that push for us all to be armed are really...hurting...our law enforcement personnel.

First sweeping federal gun crime report in 20 years released

 Lazy8 wrote:
Who in their right mind would use a closed fist to hit the hard parts of a potential attacker?     Drunk, macho idiots in the bar?   Men of Great Stature who enjoy fighting for fun?    The knuckles would be used to strike soft tissue areas such as the neck/wind pipe.

The latest Jon Stewart podcast episode is as entertaining as always, despite the serious and complex subject matter.

Regarding guns, there's a moment when they talk about how much money is diverted to enhancing the police force weaponry in order to combat the rising violence of the citizenry - and then a very good point is made:

The police (good ones and bad ones, some in our family and some that we're friends with) are all put much more severely in harm's way by the proliferation of armed citizens. So, why aren't the police and their family at the forefront of the "we need to control guns" movement? It's counterintuitive that the police would be in any way 2ndA proponents, since it makes their job so much more dangerous. And yet, they absolutely aren't in the voices asking for reasonable restrictions to keep artillery off the streets.

So the folks that push for us all to be armed are really...hurting...our law enforcement personnel.

You said knuckles, I figured brass. Fighting with a bare, closed fist is a good way to break fingers.

A knife is a good tool and a difficult weapon. I feel naked without mine, but I'm not going to kid myself that I can protect myself with it.

You'd think with it being perfectly legal for any sniveling coward to carry weapons here the streets would be running with blood. They're not. The usual prediction that liberalizing carry laws will lead to every conflict devolving into a gun battle simply isn't born out by events. Turns out hysterical fear doesn't drive reality.

2.   Brass knuckles!?!!   If you constantly carry brass knuckles around with you, please share why you do this.   Do you use them to tenderize meat?   Perhaps smash dried-out fertilizer clumps?   Crush nuts and seeds for muesli?

Knives:  Some of us have been actively using knives since a very young age.  We carry them as multi-tools when not dressing/skinning animals or cleaning/filleting fish.   The knives are there all the time.

@Lazy8:  Here is the theory.   For most of us, violent attacks are an extremely low probability event.   So the idea is to be able live one's life without hiring a permanent security guard or having to lug around what could be kilos of weapons.     

This strategy is hard.  For one, who understands mathematical reasoning?  Is not math just 'arithmetic'?   Why think strategically when all your fellow patriots, i.e., the peer group, are thinking about instant moral gratification?  

This strategy is hard because assessing a situation quickly is hard and acting to maim or kill another fellow human being without hesitation is incredibly hard for most ordinary and likable people.

The problem with guns is that it makes it easy for untrained, snivelling cowards to not bother assessing the situation (because they do not know how) and to empty the gun into whoever presumambly because a river of blood distracts from the feces and urine in the shooter's underwear.

4.  Gee, I thought Egypt, Israel and Morocco provided sufficient precedent for denying fundamental rights.    

Your suggestion 1 is ongoing. We don't have a consensus on what counts as political violence: it's a protest if it comes from our tribe, it's a riot/insurrection if it comes from The Other.

Suggestion 2 is a mixture of good and awful. We have really good non-lethal weapons now, but where they are needed most they're banned. Which predictably disadvantages the law-abiding.

Teaching people to carry knives and brass knuckles? Seriously? Knives as fighting tools are for experts and pretty useless against anyone armed with something with more range,. I don't expect we'll convince people to become experts at hand-to-hand combat any more than we'll get 80 year old grandmothers into excellent physical condition. You can use pepper spray or a taser from a wheelchair tho,

Suggestion 3: Instead of surrendering the streets to violent elements how about we try and have fewer violent elements? We will never appease our way out of violence.

Suggestion 4: You start out condemning political violence and end by proposing it on a massive scale. Yeah, tell me how safe the streets are in North Korea. Now go negotiate with those black leaders about how their neighborhood needs all its doors kicked in to sweep for contraband, but the suburb where the white people live doesn't and see how quick you get buy-in. Not interested.

Movies are not the problem.  (...)

Teens around the globe are playing at similar levels, but the murders are almost all in the US.  Guns don't kill people, but access sure does. 

There might be a few measures that could be contemplated in the USA and other countries.

1.  Start a debate on political violence and politically punish political leaders that support political violence. Socially trash celebrity narcissists like Elon Musk who support political violence.

2.  Educate people about security and the limitations of firearms.   Propose alternatives to firearms such as excellent physical conditioning, knives, mace, pens, pencils, knuckles, heels of the hand, knees, etc.  

During half a decade of hitchhiking and backpacking through South American and Africa, the only people who asked and then expressed shock that I was unarmed were Americans.  These well intentioned individuals had no understanding of how dangerous it would be to pack a firearm while travelling, let alone the challenges of illegally crossing borders with the weapon.   The whole notion of strategic interactions never occured.   

The problems:

- the usefulness of firearms can be severely limited in close quarter conflict. 
- uneducated and poorly trained security forces in low-resource countries can be nervous and trigger happy 
- popular American cultural imports exhort people to shoot first and ask questions later.    
- a hidden firearm takes time and effort to access.

3.   Teach people how to read a street.    Teach people how to avoid gratuitously antagonizing someone carrying a firearm or other deadly weapon.  

4.   Invade and occupy the problem areas in Chicago and Washington DC.  Completely sweep all homes and buildings for weapons.  Establish the equivalent of Martial Law for a period.   Ignore non-violent narcotics offenses while providing increased levels of public health services.    Ramp up capital available for local entrepreneurs.

Turn the neighbourhoods into weapons-free zones.  Use a massive police and military presence in order to accomplish that.    Make sure key Black American leaders and communities are on side before proceeding.  Evacuate the area of unarmed civilians before sending armed units in.    Clean house.   Setup community-based security organizations that share the function with municipal police forces going forward.  

Set up a perimeter and keep the weapons out, at least until the court issues an injunction.  


My suggestions are silly and they have no hope of being realized.        Next?  

Yes, smoking still appears in some films but I wouldn't say it's being "glorified".  The amount of smoking shown in films in the last 20 or 30 years is dramatically lower than it was before (compared to the 1940s-1960s when everyone smoked in movies) - and most of it appears in R-rated films, not youth-oriented films.  Smoking on television has been almost non-existent for about 40 years.

I think you have it backwards - at least for the people most at risk of becoming extremely violent. Sure, wimps like myself can't deal with seeing lots of violence, or actually more to the point, lots of cruelty, but many people brought up or exposed to a culture of violence become hardened to it and become extremely violent, too. Look at how people come out of prison after years of living in a violent environment. They are the recidivists. Especially sexual violence - many men who were assaulted in prison come out and commit violence on their partners. (Sorry, I can't cite statistics so if you doubt it you will have to read up yourself.)

Look at the people who hold dog fights and cock fights. Look at the men subjected to violence in their homes and witnessing violence against their mothers. They are the most likely to follow in their father's footsteps. Look at combat veterans who have a higher than average rate of becoming abusers. Hollywood gore isn't going to change that and I believe it in fact makes it worse.

..- the entertainment industry (Hollywood for short) would stop glorifying tobacco.  All kinds of characters smoke tobacco on screen these days that one would not expect to see addicted to tobacco in 'real life'.  This glorification of tobacco risks hurting those of low and modest socio-economic status more than others.  Not cool.  ...

I think I heard my cue. I know you were just being snidely dismissive, but I'm going to take this response seriously for a moment.

This may not make sense to most of you reading this, but you can apply moral suasion without coercion. Something can be a good idea and not be mandatory,

Tarantino, I'd submit, is not part of the problem I'm talking about. Violence in his films is shocking. It hurts. There are consequences.

Take, for instance, Pulp Fiction. Two of the protagonists (unintentionally) shoot someone inside a car. The scene is bloody, and they spend a good part of the film figuring out how to hide and then dispose of the body. One of them decides to give up the gangsta life in the process.

Or the cartoonish revenge fantasy Inglorious Basterds. The protagonists beat captured prisoners to death with a baseball bat in realistic detail and carve swastikas into the foreheads of others. Never mind how absurd it is that they carried a baseball bat into a secret mission behind enemy lines (or Brad Pit's awful allegedly Tennessee Jewish accent), or the ridiculous counterhistorical plot, he depicts violence without sanitizing it. Or consider Django Unchained. Or just skip it. Whatever.

My point is that his work stands counter to the normal depictions of violence, the tidy deaths of most war films/westerns/gangster movies. You could watch Arnold Schwarzenegger's complete ouvre (save, perhaps, for the Terminator franchise) without seeing anyone actually suffer in a gunfight. They get shot and they drop, mostly without blood. The body counts would be appalling if you ever saw the bodies to count them. Gunshot wounds are gruesome, but you'd hardly know that from TV and cinema.

All that said...I would never propose forcing Ahnold to make movies like Quentin, and you don't have too.

Going back to the example of gay marriage (and acceptance of gays generally) you don't have to go back very far to see gay people caricatured as buffoons or depicted strictly as villains in Hollywood movies. That still happens now and then but for the most part Hollywood is over that stereotype. And that transition happened on the way to getting Prop. 8  overturned. That happened without legal stricture, it just became...uncool.

And the same thing could happen with violence.  Sanitized violence could become uncool. And it would, for the most part, stop.

This thought first came to me as a teenager when I saw a showing of Scorsese's Taxi Driver. I was no stranger to the genre of action movies where the hero blasts all the bad guys in the finale, saving the heroine. Scorsese made me reassess that ending by showing what that would actually mean to the human beings those bad guys are, what a toll it would take on the hero of that vignette, and how actually crazy the idea is. I'd like to see more Scorsese and less Schwarzenegger. And I'd like to see us repelled (rather than entertained) by violence.