When I was a kid in high school, [View all]

[MadHound]

The deer hunters would bring their guns to school, on a rack in the back window of their pickup truck. In fact a lot of farmers would have a long gun or two in one of those window racks.

When I was a kid in high school, there was probably a gun in every other home, with ownership rates between forty five and fifty percent of households.

When I was a kid in high school, support for the Second Amendment was bipartisan, and those few souls looking to push through gun control legislation faced a huge uphill battle.

Finally, when I was a kid in high school, there were no mass shootings of the type you see today. Yeah, in 1969 there was Charles Whitman up in the bell tower of the University of Texas, but hell, that was considered a major aberration, and besides, it was well over a decade done by the time I was in high school, and there wouldn't be another mass shooting for a decade plus after I graduated.

So what was different between now and then?

Many things, but the overarching conclusion that I've come to is that our country, our society has degenerated into a behavioral sink. In your classic behavioral sink, you take a population, any population, be it mice or men, and start putting them under ever increasing pressure. In time you start to observe strange behaviors, up to and including mass violence. This experiment has been done time and again, and it always winds up the same, with some mouse(or man) going off on a spree of violence.

Our country, our society has been under increasing stress since the late seventies. Flat or decreasing wages, fewer resources available to people, economic shock after economic shock, climate change, ever increasing partisan divides, demagogues constantly haranguing us on the radio and in the media, the list of stress in our modern society has become huge.

Is it any wonder that individuals are starting to crack under the pressure?

Perhaps the answer doesn't lie in more laws, or vast ideological fights. Perhaps the answer we seek is the overarching answer to a lot of our current problems.

Our society is making us sick, and we need to fix it before we're all victims of it. Time to remake our society into the promised land that has long been held out as the American ideal. Not only would that solve our gun problem, but a lot of others as well.

Something to think about.