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oraxx's avatar

The last thing this country suffers from is a lack of religion. Christian apologists always see their religion as the solution to almost every problem, and yet it's hard to identify a single occasion when it ever has been. The more religious a society, the more intolerant, backward looking, and stagnant it becomes. Magical thinking never solved a single real-world problem.

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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

Sorry, this is a long one, hopefully you’ll get something out of it.

There’s a parable about a monk who comes to a river and finds a drowning man. The monk pulls him from the river only to find another drowning man. The monk saves him and stays at the river to pull these people out, saving who he can and burying who he cannot save. When his leader comes to see how the monk is doing he suggested that the monk wasn’t using his time and energy properly , though he was compassionate. He suggests to the monk that he ought to have gone upstream to find out why there were so many people being washed away by the river and address the problem at its root.

Most folks think that this means that we should be dealing with mental health issues and kids who feel left out in regards to gun violence. And then the anti-gun control folks make excuses not to address those problems either. They also ignore that we can find folks who are willing to be violent and take their guns, domestic abuse is a huge red flag that we cannot acknowledge because taking their guns away would mean our police force would be decimated.

To go back to the parable and add my take, the monks walk upriver to find a group of folks taking away the safety rails, tearing out the bridges, and encouraging passersby to jump into the river, claiming it is their unequivocal right to do so and that everything wrong in their life will be better if they do. So the monks try to stop the group from sending these people to the river. Added my safety rails and safer bridges and finding better (real) solutions to people’s problems. But the group (who are politicians) beat them up, call them names, dehumanize them, tell everyone the monks are trying to destroy their river way of life. So the people start fighting the monks. All the while many many people go into the river, with no monk down the way to pull them out and refusing any help they might come across as a conspiracy to keep them from their river way of life despite actively drowning. Nothing gets done, no one gets saved, too many folks drown, and the group of politicians get rich from the corporations no one realized was paying them to shove people into the river for financial reasons (I don’t know why a corporation or lobby group would make money off people drowning in a river, but it doesn’t make sense that the NRA enables mass shootings and suicides and children accidentally shooting their siblings and parents).

The thing is, we need to keep saving people from the river, address the safety issues on the river and provide help to folks who feel like their only option is jumping in. Stop making it easy for folks to obtain guns, restricting law abiding folks will help keep the guns out of the criminal hands - many times the ease in purchasing guns allows criminals to get them without raising the red flags needed to stop the crimes. And most of the mass shooters would not raise a red flag as they are not yet criminals, but putting obstacles in their way could avert a tragedy. And as I mentioned above, there are a lot of folks who still qualify for guns that aren’t so law abiding, but being privileged lowers the like likelihood that they trigger a red flag. Gun control is like putting safety rails on the river. Mental health care and social safety nets can address the motivations for the violence, but that solution would entail totally revamping our healthcare system and probably making it single payer, which is socialism (really just a dog whistle for folks who are racist and don’t want people of color to get their basic human needs met). That’s building the bridges. Voting the GOP and bought and paid for democrats out of office will eliminate the group from talking folks into jumping in the river. Holding the NRA accountable for their immorality will help as well.

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