there’s a very wide middle ground of options between “do nothing” and “take all guns away”. This is not a binarry issue.

Sure.

However, most of the gun-related “solutions” I’ve seen wouldn’t actually solve anything, or there’s very little supporting evidence that they’re actually effective (see this Twitter post by the RAND Corporation, media bias for RAND Corporation).

When it comes to suicide prevention, the most effective solution I’ve seen presented and implemented are red flag laws, yet suicide and mass shooting rates don’t seem particularly impacted by that. It turns out people are really bad at taking advantage of those laws, and there’s always the risk that innocent people get hit as well.

We already have laws in place in most (all?) of the country that, if actually followed, would prevent a lot of these cases (not suicide, but access to guns). You already can’t own guns if you have a felony, if you’re on certain medications, or have a history of mental illness. The problem is that many people don’t actually get officially evaluated for mental health, don’t report medications, etc, so the laws end up missing the very people they’re intended to prevent from getting guns.

And then when we look at suicide statistics, the US isn’t all that different from European countries at 15.6 per 100k, France at 16.6, Germany at 12.9, and Belgium at 18.4 (IIRC, guns are largely banned in those countries). The US is higher than its neighbors (i.e. Canada has 9.4, and Mexico has 7), but I don’t think that’s a smoking gun here since Europe also has a wide range (UK is 9.5 and Spain is 8.7). Guns existing doesn’t seem like a major factor in suicide rates, it just happens to be the most convenient method so it gets used the most. If guns were effectively restricted from suicidal people, the biggest change we’d likely see would be shifting from firearms to other methods of suicide, not a significant drop in overall suicide rates (though maybe an initial drop due to delayed suicides).

Real solutions here are hard, and banning guns is comparatively easy, but I really don’t think it would actually solve the problem.

Sure, and sensible things like barriers at bridges makes a ton of sense because doing that doesn’t negatively impact anyone and merely gives people more time to rethink their choice.

That said, even with those safeguards, tons of people kill themselves. I had a friend do it by hanging, others use drugs, and some use cops.

If we look at statistics, the US has 15.6 suicides per 100k, compared to 18.4 in Belgium, 12.9 in Germany, and 16.6 in France (not trying to cherry pick here, please look up the stats yourself). Each of those countries has (largely) banned guns, yet the US’s numbers aren’t all that different, so surely guns aren’t a major contributor here.

What we need is to address the core issues here, such as access to mental health resources, more social interaction, etc. Banning guns isn’t going to meaningfully impact suicide, it’ll just shift the statistics to other methods and maybe delay it a bit. People like easy solutions, and treating the symptoms is very attractive, but it’s not a real solution.

If you’re referring to the Kirk shooting, this was before that.

And it makes everything take twice as long. Just leave the right size scoop in the can (don’t drink coffee, so idk how much, maybe 1/4 cup?) and you don’t need to find anything, just do the one or two scoops.

That’s how I learned and it’s fantastic when my kids “help”. I never know whether we did 4 or 6 cups (we aim for 5) because they keep doing little half scoops. So I guess and use the finger method after rinsing the rice. Perfect rice every time.

Yeah, we used to live right next to one and it was fantastic. Then we moved and now it’s about 20 min away, so I now go to Costco and the grocery store since there both a mile or two away.

You mean Connecdicud.

Where’s Nevada? And Montana?

Idk, I’m not a psychologist, but I have looked at studies on video games and there hasn’t been a causal link between violent video games and IRL violence. You’d think that with so much focus on age ratings and whatnot that we would’ve found something, yet that’s not the case. My understanding is the largest contributing factors are childhood abuse, social groups (esp. anonymous online groups), and bullying. I suppose some of that could happen in video games (i.e. in-game chat), but then it’s not the game itself causing violence, but the interaction w/ other players.

So no, I haven’t seen any evidence that violent video games contribute to anything. The best argument is that people who have violent tendencies tend to play violent video games, but the reverse has little to no evidence.

Because those are separate problems with separate solutions.

If people use guns to kill themselves, will they stop killing themselves if we take the guns away? Maybe some will, if the alternatives take so much more time, but the impact won’t be massive. Instead of making suicide harder, we should be treating the root cause of suicide, which is desperation (i.e. have a decent social safety net) and depression (make mental health resources widely available).

If people get hurt due to gun accidents, I highly doubt they’d be happy if we took their guns away, since that’s like solving traffic deaths by banning cars. The better solution is to improve safety features on guns and teach people gun safety so they can use them safely, or in the car example, we should be improving road design and driving education (and making cars less necessary, but that’s a separate point).

Suicides and gun accidents are certainly interesting statistics, but mixing them with homicides just makes it harder to see what’s going on and arrive at effective solutions.

Absolutely. There have been so many studies trying to prove a connection and failed. It’s a completely debunked argument.

To be fair, a lot of POC gun violence is gang related, not mental health related, because POC tend to be stuck in poorer areas and resort to gangs to make ends meet. There is certainly white gang violence as well, but there’s also a lot of mental health related crimes that happen to be committed by white people, probably because they have more ready access to guns that the average non-gang affiliated POC.

Games are unrelated to both cases.

It really doesn’t.

The only legitimate link between violence and video games is that violent people seem to like violent video games. I haven’t seen any compelling evidence of a video game causing someone to kill.

we have the most gun violence

If we look at “intentional homicide rate” (choice of weapon agnostic), the US is 66th and just above Greenland. I think this statistic is better than “gun deaths” since it excludes suicides and accidental deaths and looks at intentional murder.

The number is way higher than it should be, but probably way better than most assume given the news.

Hey, dude was a POS but I’ll never condone violence.

I played tons of first person shooters, GTA, etc, and I also have never thrown a punch at anyone.

I live in Utah and have a coworker that was supposed to be there for class tonight. Wild times…

We’ll get there, just give it time.

you hand picked 2 peices from that whole page. The first one when you read the example below doesn’t even fit your case, so you left that out.

Words have meaning given context, I pointed to the definition that fit the context. When talking about wealth and assets, “money” means anything that could be easily converted to cash. I didn’t copy the first because it wasn’t relevant to the context.

Then you had to do mental gymnastics to make the second one fit.

I provided two to drive home the point.

How about an example. If I said, “how much money does Elon Musk have?”, that would obviously include his stocks and whatnot because he probably only has a few million in actual cash, if that. If you ask how much money I have on the street, I’d assume you’re talking about cash in my wallet, or maybe cash in my checking, and I wouldn’t include my stocks or even savings balance.

Context matters a lot.

But when conversing with normal people, you will be hard pressed to find people who agree.

Are you saying that if I asked how much money you have in your retirement account, you’d say $0 because you only have stocks? If so, that’s really weird.

My vote is Podman with an immutable distro, like OpenSUSE MicroOS or Fedora Silverblue. Here are my reasons:

• rolling base, with very minimal footprint, so you don’t need to worry about upgrades
• podman runs proper rootless containers, so you get better security vs docker, which tends to run as root (breaking out does less damage if you manage permissions properly)
• deploying a new service (or moving a service) just means copying configs and running, no concerns about what the host has
• there’s nothing special about the host, so if MicroOS or Silverblue are abandoned, just copy the configs and data to a new host

It’s a little more work to set up, but once things are running, it’s drama free. And I think that’s the best thing to optimize for, keeping things boring is a good thing.