On 2009-Feb-03, at 14:29, Chuck Bennett wrote: > In effect, the guy on the left benefits from the doubt that that > causes in the criminals mind. We call it the "umbrella effect".
Yes I have to say as someone living in the UK, guns abhor me. But when I was living in South Africa, and particularly now, when basically guns alone are not enough so you have to hire militias with many guns to protect farms, I find emotionally his arguments are compelling and, assuming the data and stats are correctly done, I'd have to go with it and agree. South Africa is known as the rape capital of the world; women need all the protection they can get. I think the guns are a symptom, not the problem. Guns exist like jails exist. The jails don't cause criminals, as such, but a country that has many many jails obviously has a problem. America seems to need guns like the world seems to need armies and nukes. The nukes are not the cause but the symptom of a world that is still too fractured. In an Integral/Ken Wilber/AQAL diagram, the big picture is always that the material world is one half, and the psychological world is the other. So with any problem you approach it both materially and psychologically. You could say that guns are the material side, and people's moral character is the psychological side. Your point Chuck is in essence that changing the material side does little if nothing to change the psychological side, ie. you can ban guns, but does that improve the moral character of people? Does banning the "bad" guns make bad people good? And as we live in a democracy and abhor draconian control, how would you even effect a complete ban anyway? The bad guys will still get the guns, and the only people left observing the law, and defenseless, are the good guys. Now there is always some relationship between the material and the psychological sides, and the question with crimes and guns is, what is the nature of that relationship? If Lott's research is correct, then that relationship in America appears to be that the psychology of the criminals is such that having an armed citizenry will tend to reduce violent crimes. So that's a good thing. Unless there is anything else anyone can add, then I agree with you, and frankly, if I moved to America, to one of those gun states, then I'd be sure to get some training and get armed. Speaking as someone who lives in the UK, that's an abhorrent thought, but from what I remember of South Africa, I know that when you live somewhere different, your feelings can change pretty quickly. The interesting question is whether it would be a good thing for the UK to have an armed citizenry. Again, using the AQAL diagram, we'd have to start by noticing that America's psychological makeup is different to Britain's in many respects. We have much more Green in Europe, and our cultural psychology is different. We don't have a long standing tradition of gun ownership, so I wonder that even if, tomorrow the Government did a massive turn around and recommended everyone get armed, most people simply wouldn't. You might call this our "sheep" mentality. For all we know, it might simply encourage all the Red parts of UK society to arm themselves, whiles all the good people (Blue, Orange, Green) never do. Then precisely all the people who you don't want armed are armed, and all the people who you do want armed aren't. It could be a complete nightmare. But that is just a guess at a possibility. Stefano _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
