"Gun Control" is Socially Non-Sustainable.

[hearthstone]

"Gun Control" is Socially Non-Sustainable.

The ideal world is a sustainable world (sustainable both--ecologically and socially) where each action (both--ecological and political) makes the world more balanced.

Currently the world is mostly being shaped by decisions made with only a shortsighted concern about those decisions' effects. We are inured to this non-sustainable way of dealing with the majority of our problems.

The campaign against the ownership of weapons is socially non-sustainable, because it does not deal with the underlying causes of problems connected with gun ownership. It creates a large group of people who feel, undoubtedly, that they being wronged. Their discontent will be creating many new problems ceaselessly.

Socially sustainable solution to this would be to deal with the causes--try to do away with the *need* for having to own guns, and to find and deal with the causes of societal stress that causes most of antisocial behavior.

All parties to any conflict should "sit down" together to workout together what their mutual, to all agreeable co-existence should be, and from there start making it a reality. They would address the causes of the whichever problem, and deal with those to resolve those.

Thank you, Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org .

[rekarp]

What a bizarre argument!. It seems like you're trying to parlay your opinion into some sort of quasi logical sequence of events that have to take place to solve this problem.

You're also making many assumptions that you use to justify your opinion, i.e. "The ideal world is a sustainable world...", "...the world is mostly being shaped...."

In fact, work will continue on many fronts and levels, by lots of people, interacting in ways that are complex and difficult or impossible to understand.

There will simultaneously be a number of efforts to combat the gun violence. We won't agree which work and which hinder the efforts. Facts will be disputed and other facts will be used to disprove them.

Meanwhile, by all means continue to work in the ways that support your beliefs, and please have tolerance for the ideas of those that choose other paths of action.

"Gun Control" is Socially Non-Sustainable.

The ideal world is a sustainable world (sustainable both--ecologically and socially) where each action (both--ecological and political) makes the world more balanced.

Currently the world is mostly being shaped by decisions made with only a shortsighted concern about those decisions' effects. We are inured to this non-sustainable way of dealing with the majority of our problems.

The campaign against the ownership of weapons is socially non-sustainable, because it does not deal with the underlying causes of problems connected with gun ownership. It creates a large group of people who feel, undoubtedly, that they being wronged. Their discontent will be creating many new problems ceaselessly.

Socially sustainable solution to this would be to deal with the causes--try to do away with the *need* for having to own guns, and to find and deal with the causes of societal stress that causes most of antisocial behavior.

All parties to any conflict should "sit down" together to workout together what their mutual, to all agreeable co-existence should be, and from there start making it a reality. They would address the causes of the whichever problem, and deal with those to resolve those.

Thank you, Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org .

[hearthstone]

Could one conceive of a better than an ecologically and socially sustainable world ideal?

What would that be?

Thank you, Hearthstone.

[Star Man]

"Socially sustainable solution to this would be to deal with the causes--try to do away with the *need* for having to own guns, and to find and deal with the causes of societal stress that causes most of antisocial behavior.

Perhaps we can get a better understanding of the causes by looking at the metaphorical meaning of guns. This might help us understand why some people need to have guns and why some resort to gun violence when they are stressed. This examination might also help us understand the resistance to any discussion of gun control and the vehemence with which gun advocates react when they feel threatened.

As I was putting this little essay together I was reminded of the bit of Army boot camp doggerel that goes like this: "This is my rifle/And this is my gun/This one's for fightin'/And this one's for fun."

The handgun, rifle, assault weapon, and bazooka are all metaphors for the penis. Men in particular identify their masculinity with their weapons. D. Kennedy-Kollar and C.A.D. Charles, reported in The Southwest Journal of Criminal Justice on a study of 28 men who had committed mass murder. (I believe that with one exception, all mass murderers have males. I am certain someone will fact-check me.) The authors report that for the majority, stressors threatened the murderer's "hegemonic masculine identity" and that the men committed mass murder to protect their identity. You can read the article at
https://www.academia.edu/1199492/Heg..._United_States

The football player, Jovan Belcher, who murdered his girlfriend and then committed suicide, reportedly owned 8 handguns.

Many problems in America result from our national challenges with masculine identity. As a society we refuse to teach parenting skills in schools from K through 12. These skills are left to higher education where they are marginalized. Often parents only get to parenting classes when they are court-ordered to do so. Over 51% of families in America are affected by divorce, and in 26% of families, mother is the sole parent in the home. Both men and women begin life in a state of merger with mother. Women's identity does not have to undergo the traumatic breaking of the merger as men's identities do. Having a father present and involved facilitates the transformation of the male child's gender identification. As a nation our dysfunctional national hegemonic masculine identity manifests in the militarization of our society and the expansion of the police state.

Many men need a handgun to feel manly. Many men resist attempt to control handguns, magazine size, and assault weapons because their masculinity is threatened, although unfortunately since these motivations are unconscious, these are the very men who are not aware of how they identify their masculinity with their guns. Furthermore, they would resist any attempt to help them see that. Since we have a Congress, a Supreme Court (with the exception of Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg), and an Executive that appear to have serious problems with their hegemonic masculine identity, I doubt that any real progress will be made on gun control.

Star Man

[hearthstone]

In fact, work will continue on many fronts and levels, by lots of people, interacting in ways that are complex and difficult or impossible to understand.

This describes, almost perfectly, that which is the usual way of dealing with our (humanity's) problems-- "... interacting in ways that are complex and difficult or impossible to understand. ..."

This way, employed throughout humanity's existence, brought us to the current state of things in the world; a state of things that no longer is possible to deal with successfully, efficiently. In this way differences among us get sorted out in real life, superficially, causing real damage.

As pertaining to "gun control", it is foreseeable that more laws will be made, while the causes for people wanting to be armed, and the reasons for the increasing societal stress causing anti-social behavior will hardly be addressed in any profound way, this leading to creating more and more problems, leading, in turn, to more laws to be made ...

What is needed is to find new ways that would be not opaque, but transparent, not complex, but as simple as possible, understandable to all, not just to a few ...

Thank you, Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org .

[John b]

Jan,
It's great that you see the unsustainability in the enterprise. The war on drugs was another unsustainable enterprise.
in both cases the damage exceeds the benefit. But now that the drug war has become a raging failure, having destroyed millions of lives and far surpassing the limits of its sustainability, it seems that insane society is bent on commencing another disaster to suppress the resolution of underlying conditions.

Love your website and your approaches. There is a potential synthesis with your ideas and Seasteading.
I e-mailed you.
John Bechtol

"Gun Control" is Socially Non-Sustainable.

The ideal world is a sustainable world (sustainable both--ecologically and socially) where each action (both--ecological and political) makes the world more balanced.

Currently the world is mostly being shaped by decisions made with only a shortsighted concern about those decisions' effects. We are inured to this non-sustainable way of dealing with the majority of our problems.

The campaign against the ownership of weapons is socially non-sustainable, because it does not deal with the underlying causes of problems connected with gun ownership. It creates a large group of people who feel, undoubtedly, that they being wronged. Their discontent will be creating many new problems ceaselessly.

Socially sustainable solution to this would be to deal with the causes--try to do away with the *need* for having to own guns, and to find and deal with the causes of societal stress that causes most of antisocial behavior.

All parties to any conflict should "sit down" together to workout together what their mutual, to all agreeable co-existence should be, and from there start making it a reality. They would address the causes of the whichever problem, and deal with those to resolve those.

Thank you, Hearthstone - ModelEarth.Org .

[hearthstone]

Dear John,

thank you for the compliment ...

I just had a peak at the Seasteading site - www.seasteading.org/ ...

I can see the possibility of "seasteading communities" becoming a reality ...

Would their existence contribute to a better Earth future?

I personally doubt that, if only because there seems to be so little time to do anything decisive and profoundly transformative. The end of the Earth has been with us for a very long time, only we can't see it, because we "write the history"--we see everything from the top of the heap; the view from the bottom of it would never sell ...

I feel that only a global enlightenment* that would include all (those who are still OK and those who already lost) organically and sustainably would help. There still is a little interest in enlightening the whole world; what we see is what always decided our collective fate--everyone trying to shape the world in their own partisan interest; that's why no-one sees their own vision ever realized--there is too much competition ...

Those who write the future don't, usually, include everyone it. When everyone who would like to have a stake in the future is encouraged in the designing of the future, then we have a chance--that would mean to accommodate everyone else in the common design; the 1% lying down aside the 99% cooperatively, not fighting.

Well ...

What do you think?

Thanks, sincerely Hearthstone.
N.B.
* "illumination" would be a more apt term, perhaps; lest someone misconstrue "enlightenment":

the act or means of enlightening : the state of being enlightened

to enlighten:
a : to furnish knowledge to
...
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary)

Jan,
It's great that you see the unsustainability in the enterprise. The war on drugs was another unsustainable enterprise.
in both cases the damage exceeds the benefit. But now that the drug war has become a raging failure, having destroyed millions of lives and far surpassing the limits of its sustainability, it seems that insane society is bent on commencing another disaster to suppress the resolution of underlying conditions.

Love your website and your approaches. There is a potential synthesis with your ideas and Seasteading.
I e-mailed you.
John Bechtol

[John b]

Jan,
Humanity tends to wander through history in a single file of groups. In this regard the 1% are about the same as the rest. The same is true with enlightenment.

Real direction comes from the 0.0001% at the head of the line. That's 7,000 people. The critical mass to change the direction of that 7,000 has been diminished by relatively satisfying conditions. The "power hitters" of that group are twiddling their thumbs. I've had a chance to speak with many thought leaders, including Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen. They have pretty much "built out" the available thoughtspace.

The real intent of Seasteading is to inspire those few who can and will make all the difference. "Floating cities at sea" is both a metaphor and a vehicle for a new paradigm on land, where those few can see new opportunities.

Meanwhile the industrialization of the oceans is much more significant than anything that has happened on land. Global sustainability will proceed from that enterprise. Of course there are problems with sustainability when the most abundant source of resources is used as a trash pile with no command of its thermal and chemical conditions. I ran the numbers once but I have since forgotten. The oceans have something like a million times the thermal and CO2 influences of all the land and all the atmosphere.

The popular discussion of those issues is as ridiculous as trying to keep the bathroom floor dry with a walrus in the bathtub. It doesn't matter what you do with the towels, it only matters what you do with the walrus. And nobody is even looking at the walrus in the discussion, except to say maybe its a bit stressed.

John
707-623-6005

Dear John,

thank you for the compliment ...

I just had a peak at the Seasteading site - www.seasteading.org/ ...

I can see the possibility of "seasteading communities" becoming a reality ...

Would their existence contribute to a better Earth future?

I personally doubt that, if only because there seems to be so little time to do anything decisive and profoundly transformative. The end of the Earth has been with us for a very long time, only we can't see it, because we "write the history"--we see everything from the top of the heap; the view from the bottom of it would never sell ...

I feel that only a global enlightenment that would include all (those who are still OK and those who already lost) organically and sustainably would help. There still is a little interest in enlightening the whole world; what we see is what always decided our collective fate--everyone trying to shape the world in their own partisan interest; that's why no-one sees their own vision ever realized--there is too much competition ...

Those who write the future don't, usually, include everyone it. When everyone who would like to have a stake in the future is encouraged in the designing of the future, then we have a chance--that would mean to accommodate everyone else in the common design; the 1% lying down aside the 99% cooperatively, not fighting.

Well ...

What do you think?

Thanks, sincerely Hearthstone.

N.B. lest someone misconstrue "enlightenment":

the act or means of enlightening : the state of being enlightened

to enlighten:
a : to furnish knowledge to
...
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary)