There is currently a division between the political left and the right in America regarding gun control. There is one point about humans that separates the left and the right, particularly when it comes to mass shootings committed with AR-15s.
The left believes that banning the weapon of choice is the solution to the problem, whereas the right believes that banning AR-15s because of mass shooters is punishing good citizens for the actions of criminals.
Now it might be easy to laugh at the idea of banning AR-15s being the solution as, in my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to punish legal gun owners for the action of mass shooters, but there is a more profound ideology at work here.
Generally, the left in America, in my experience, are essentially pro-hippies (with the real hippies of the 70s becoming Republican voters in their later years). Like hippies, they believe all human beings are nearly excellent and moral.
They often believe that the causes of crime in America are due to systemic racism and poverty or just poverty in the case of Caucasians as well as having access to guns themselves, and the driving force of the ideology seems to be that if we get rid of the guns, there will be no more mass shootings.
They will ask questions like why you need an AR-15 and will erroneously call it an assault rifle, but the rights response to mass shootings is quite different.
They condemn the mass shooters and decry them as evil beings, calling them things like psychos and treating these mass shooters as if they are not human beings and acting as if they would never do such things.
Now the problems of SSRIs aside, which I touch on later, there is a fundamental truth about human beings that has historical evidence backing it: human beings do not appear to have an inbuilt empathy for others of the human race.
As someone who has studied history, if you like to look at history throughout humanity’s ascendance to society, you will see barbarism, rape and slavery in all eras undertaken by almost every human race throughout history.
Africans enslaved other Africans. Europeans enslaved other Europeans, Arabs, and almost every other race that participated in the slave trade before it started in Europe and America and even after the slave trade was outlawed in those countries.
Now the question has to be asked: if human beings have inbuilt empathy, how do you explain this history of barbarism? Now it’s true that human beings have compassion, but it is most certainly subjective.
What I mean by this is that take the Africans who enslaved other African tribes. Where was their empathy when they were doing that? Well, it probably came from the fact that those other tribes were not seen as fellow human beings because they were from a different tribe, and thus it was ok to enslave them.
Not to go on a side rant, but my point is this. Humans are not intrinsically moral and have the great potential to inflict horrendous harm and barbarism on each other.
So why do people need AR-15s because bad people exist? How do we eliminate bad people or diagnose all these evil people before they become mass shooters? I cannot say.
Better mental health treatment could help, but the reality is that humans need to protect each other from flawed human beings. Psychologists can not root these potential mass shooters out before they become a problem.
There’s another fundamental question: if humanity has a history of barbarism, why does modern Western society have all these rules against slavery and oppression and try to protect the innocent and help the oppressed and helpless?
Well, that’s an interesting question, and I don’t think I can offer a complete answer, but I would say a lot of it concerns culture or ideas.
I would say that modern Western culture has its root in ideas from the ancient world, like the ancient Greeks and judeo-christian values and enlightenment ideology, all combined into a stirring pot by the founding fathers to create the system of values we hold today.
Ideas include freedom of speech, equal rights, the sanctity of human life (and for some animal life), and protecting the helpless, weak and disabled, but where did these ideas come from?
Also, if most of society is barbaric, where did manners come from? Well, manners came from the code of chivalry, and why was the principle of chivalry created? To stop knights (not the noble knights of King Arthur’s court that we think of today) from going around and raping and pillaging fields.
A knight was a guy with a sword. In my opinion, a combination of judeo-christian values and the code of chivalry created what we call manners today.
The term gentleman was created to separate the gentleman from the raping and pillaging other knights of their day. In other words, the rest of the men were not gentle
In conclusion, human beings are not intrinsically moral, but they have the potential to be, but they also have the possibility not to be.
I cannot say what created the hippy generation and the modern leftist ideologies, but unfortunately, two extremes would end mass shootings.
Banning all firearms or removing gun-free zones and making it clear to the mass shooters that there is nowhere they can go where someone won’t shoot back if they try to commit a mass shooting.
And even if you ban all guns, you will still get mass violence. They’ll use other things like knives and cars.
It’s unfortunate, but whether human beings want to accept this or not, if you are a good human being, you need to understand that some are not and be able to protect yourself accordingly.
The left believes that banning the weapon of choice is the solution to the problem, whereas the right believes that banning AR-15s because of mass shooters is punishing good citizens for the actions of criminals.
Now it might be easy to laugh at the idea of banning AR-15s being the solution as, in my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to punish legal gun owners for the action of mass shooters, but there is a more profound ideology at work here.
Generally, the left in America, in my experience, are essentially pro-hippies (with the real hippies of the 70s becoming Republican voters in their later years). Like hippies, they believe all human beings are nearly excellent and moral.
They often believe that the causes of crime in America are due to systemic racism and poverty or just poverty in the case of Caucasians as well as having access to guns themselves, and the driving force of the ideology seems to be that if we get rid of the guns, there will be no more mass shootings.
They will ask questions like why you need an AR-15 and will erroneously call it an assault rifle, but the rights response to mass shootings is quite different.
They condemn the mass shooters and decry them as evil beings, calling them things like psychos and treating these mass shooters as if they are not human beings and acting as if they would never do such things.
Now the problems of SSRIs aside, which I touch on later, there is a fundamental truth about human beings that has historical evidence backing it: human beings do not appear to have an inbuilt empathy for others of the human race.
As someone who has studied history, if you like to look at history throughout humanity’s ascendance to society, you will see barbarism, rape and slavery in all eras undertaken by almost every human race throughout history.
Africans enslaved other Africans. Europeans enslaved other Europeans, Arabs, and almost every other race that participated in the slave trade before it started in Europe and America and even after the slave trade was outlawed in those countries.
Now the question has to be asked: if human beings have inbuilt empathy, how do you explain this history of barbarism? Now it’s true that human beings have compassion, but it is most certainly subjective.
What I mean by this is that take the Africans who enslaved other African tribes. Where was their empathy when they were doing that? Well, it probably came from the fact that those other tribes were not seen as fellow human beings because they were from a different tribe, and thus it was ok to enslave them.
Not to go on a side rant, but my point is this. Humans are not intrinsically moral and have the great potential to inflict horrendous harm and barbarism on each other.
So why do people need AR-15s because bad people exist? How do we eliminate bad people or diagnose all these evil people before they become mass shooters? I cannot say.
Better mental health treatment could help, but the reality is that humans need to protect each other from flawed human beings. Psychologists can not root these potential mass shooters out before they become a problem.
There’s another fundamental question: if humanity has a history of barbarism, why does modern Western society have all these rules against slavery and oppression and try to protect the innocent and help the oppressed and helpless?
Well, that’s an interesting question, and I don’t think I can offer a complete answer, but I would say a lot of it concerns culture or ideas.
I would say that modern Western culture has its root in ideas from the ancient world, like the ancient Greeks and judeo-christian values and enlightenment ideology, all combined into a stirring pot by the founding fathers to create the system of values we hold today.
Ideas include freedom of speech, equal rights, the sanctity of human life (and for some animal life), and protecting the helpless, weak and disabled, but where did these ideas come from?
Also, if most of society is barbaric, where did manners come from? Well, manners came from the code of chivalry, and why was the principle of chivalry created? To stop knights (not the noble knights of King Arthur’s court that we think of today) from going around and raping and pillaging fields.
A knight was a guy with a sword. In my opinion, a combination of judeo-christian values and the code of chivalry created what we call manners today.
The term gentleman was created to separate the gentleman from the raping and pillaging other knights of their day. In other words, the rest of the men were not gentle
In conclusion, human beings are not intrinsically moral, but they have the potential to be, but they also have the possibility not to be.
I cannot say what created the hippy generation and the modern leftist ideologies, but unfortunately, two extremes would end mass shootings.
Banning all firearms or removing gun-free zones and making it clear to the mass shooters that there is nowhere they can go where someone won’t shoot back if they try to commit a mass shooting.
It’s unfortunate, but whether human beings want to accept this or not, if you are a good human being, you need to understand that some are not and be able to protect yourself accordingly.
