Guns Are Number 1!

[Captante]

How can anyone be dumb enough to not grasp that MORE guns inevitably leads to MORE shootings ?!?

Almost ALL the $hit-hole former Confederate Southern states in the US are also the leaders in gun-shot deaths.

Simply shocking!


UPDATED STATISTICS FOR ACCIDENTAL GUN DEATHS

• 492 people unintentionally die by gun in an average year.
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• Thus far in 2022, there have been unintentional shootings by over 21 children, resulting in 9 deaths and 13 injuries.
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• Accidental gun deaths occur mainly to those under 25 years old.
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• So far in 2022, 209 children (age 0-17) have died by gunshot and an additional 519 were injured. Adolescents are particularly susceptible to accidental shootings due to specific behavioral characteristics associated with adolescence, such as impulsivity, feelings of invincibility, and curiosity about firearms.
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• In 2021 there were at least 377 unintentional shootings by children. This resulted in 154 deaths and 242 injuries in the United States.
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• In 2021, unintentional shooting deaths accounted for over 4% (2,007) of total gun related deaths (44,912) in the United States.
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• Shelter in place orders during the coronavirus pandemic have led to major spikes in accidental shootings at home by children. Unintentional shooting deaths by children increased by nearly one-third comparing incidents in March to December of 2020 to the same months of 2019.
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• During the Covid-19 pandemic, there were 3,906 additional firearm deaths and 9,278 additional firearm injuries in 2020 compared to 2019.
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• 70% of unintentional shootings by children occur in the home.
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• From 2006-2016, almost 6,885 people in the U.S. died from unintentional shootings. In 2016 alone, there were 495 incidents of accidental firearm deaths.
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• The majority of people killed in firearm accidents are under age 24, and most of these young people are being shot by someone else, usually someone their own age. The shooter is typically a friend or family member, often an older brother. By contrast, older adults are at a far lower risk of accidental firearm death, and most often are shooting themselves. (source)
• 
  

A statistically significant association exists between gun availability and the rates of unintentional firearm deaths, homicides, and suicides.

• In the United States, over 4.6 million American children live in homes with at least 1 unloaded, unlocked gun, setting the scene for possible tragedy if firearms are not locked and stored properly.
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• As gun sales in the US spiked by 70% in March 2020 when compared to March 2019, accidental shooting deaths by minors spiked by 43%.
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• Around 31 percent of accidental deaths caused by firearms might be prevented with child-proof safety locks and loaded chamber indicators.
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• A study from 2014 showed that victims of unintentional shootings were three times more likely to live in a household with a firearm.
• A 2001 study found that regardless of age, people are nine times more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries when they live in states with more guns, relative to states with fewer guns.

 

[Moonbeam]

I'm just trying to understand what you mean not make you feel bad, however you implying that the only reason "other people don't understand" is because they're incapable of it is the very definition of pretentious.

Unlike most here I'm giving you the benefit of a doubt that you MIGHT actually have a point other then "being right".

Am I wasting my time? (stop patting yourself on the back and give me a straight answer)




I think you need to consider the very real possibility... just for a moment... that you COULD be the one who is confused.... I still have zero clue what you're getting at with "IT".

It isn't me that makes the explanation of what it is to be tipsy on wine is like to a teetotaler. You fail to distinguish between some theoretical hypothesis and knowledge only to be had by experience. In order to feel what you really feel is a profoundly difficult task, the last thing anybody wants to do. Suicides are the result of not wanting to know.

The difference between seeing what is wrong with humanity changes everything. There are no answers in ignorance. There is hope for people who are seekers and are sincere. I do not care what people think of me. It is the price I will pay for honesty. The things I know cost me all of my naive dreams about everything in reality. I have nobody to show me how to go farther.

I am perfectly willing to waste my time with you and need no pat on the back. I appreciate you giving me the benefit of the doubt but certainty and doubt is for those caught in duality. There is a different kind of knowing. For instance, the other day I heard a rumor that Moonbeam had died. Not original with me. Thank the Sufis for that one.

Speaking of Sufis, did you know that the pin ball wizard was Meher Baba? Here is something he said about his teaching:

"Meher Baba's teachings concerned the nature and purpose of life. He described the phenomenal world as illusory, and presented the idea that the Universe is imagination. He taught that God alone exists, and each soul is God passing through imagination in order to realize its own divinity.[10] He presented advice to followers wishing to attain God-realization, and thereby escape the wheel of birth and death."

He was well aware of the uselessness of words it seems to me.

 

[Captante]

Firearm Mortality by State (CDC)

The truth hurts..... good job GOP this crap is largely ON YOU.

 

[Captante]

He was well aware of the uselessness of words it seems to me.

And now so am I .... THAT you successfully communicated.

I won't expend any further "breath".

Note "words" are especially useless when used imprecisely and in verbose fashion.

 

[IronWing]

And now so am I .... THAT you successfully communicated.

I won't expend any further "breath".

Note "words" are especially useless when used imprecisely and in verbose fashion.

I don't know, we all know who Don Quixote is; nobody knows the name of the windmill keeper.

 

[Moonbeam]

Gotta say, would not have picked you out as on this side of the issue.

Happy building

Me neither. But I was shooting with my Dad by age 4 and wore two colt 45 revolver cap guns by 6, had discovered the family 38 special hidden away by seven and had a shotgun and my Grandfathers lever action Winchester sitting just outside the garage door from the house around that time. Those I got to play with any time I wanted. There were guns in my house from the time when I was born. That was a while back. Coming for guns to me is like coming for your camera or your car. The doo gooders in California want to ban guns of various scary appearances while Republicans who want to destroy our democracy in other states arm themselves to the teeth. I'm surrounded by morons.

 

[Captante]

Me neither. But I was shooting with my Dad by age 4 and wore two colt 45 revolver cap guns by 6, had discovered the family 38 special hidden away by seven and had a shotgun and my Grandfathers lever action Winchester sitting just outside the garage door from the house around that time. Those I got to play with any time I wanted. There were guns in my house from the time when I was born. That was a while back. Coming for guns to me is like coming for your camera or your car. The doo gooders in California want to ban guns of various scary appearances while Republicans who want to destroy our democracy in other states arm themselves to the teeth. I'm surrounded by morons.

Now THAT is more like it!

See? You CAN make sense when you want to! (I knew it!)

For the record I was also taught to properly handle guns as a kid and I also enjoy target/skeet shooting. (my little bro had a job pulling skeet at a local country-club in HS)

I DO NOT favor making all guns illegal only keeping them out of the hands of folks who want to watch the world burn.

 

[TheVrolok]

Well, you can’t go around locking people up for crimes they haven’t committed.

I am not sure how to even respond to your first sentence. I guess your point is that I shouldn’t own guns because I might be depressed one day and kill myself?

I didn't say anything about whether or not you should own guns. I simply responded to your reductive simplistic point about suicide.

 

[Moonbeam]

And now so am I .... THAT you successfully communicated.

I won't expend any further "breath".

Note "words" are especially useless when used imprecisely and in verbose fashion.

Your choice of Don Quixote is especially relevant: ehttps://sirbacon.org/mdq.htm
Fairly long and you probably won't read it but I'll quote a bit here:

Everyone knows Don Quixote became mad from reading too many "novels of chivalry" and, as a consequence, believed himself a Knight Errant and set out on a series of adventures to rescue damsels in distress and to right the wrongs of the world. People tend to think this is all there is to the story. But, from another perspective, another set of meanings appears. In Don Quixote, as in the Shakespeare Plays, Bacon deals with an aspect of knowledge from the past. This time, instead of antiquity, the knowledge comes from the Middle Ages. This is the knowledge concealed in the stories of the Quest for the Holy Grail. On the surface these are adventures of knights and their ladies against a background canvas of life in the feudal courts. Underneath are hidden allegories depicting adventures through which individuals pass who apply techniques for the development of spiritual faculties and the attainment of higher levels of consciousness.

The Grail stories reprise inner adventures from more than 1500 years earlier of initiate ordeals in the state sponsored Ancient Mysteries. Many episodes in Don Quixote are modeled on the adventures of the Grail Knights, and others that are not still deal with experiences that relate to initiate trials and ordeals.

It is the old story of the cave in Plato's Republic. Socrates compares this world to a cave in which people sit fettered with their backs to a fire. They see only shadows cast on the wall of the cave before them by objects moving between them and the fire that is behind them. One of them escapes and makes his way to the outside world. When he returns and tries to describe the real world to the prisoners of the cave they think he is mad. To men of our world the real world is illusion. To men of the real world our world is illusion. The views are incompatible. They are mad from our viewpoint. We are mad from their viewpoint. Don Quixote believes in a reality he has read about in books. This reality is generally called Chivalry. A careful reading reveals the Chivalry of Don Quixote is that of the Quest for the Holy Grail. An understanding of the Grail Quest shows it dealt with the trials, ordeals, and adventures of Initiatism. Initiates are people who have escaped, or are escaping from the shadow world. Ordinary people have only heard about these people in books. Initiates undergo certain trial and ordeals that enable them to develop latent inner faculties that move their lives from the "shadow world" into the real world. Compared with their world the life of ordinary man is a life of madness in a world of illusion. But to ordinary man accounts of their world are tales of imagination by writers of fiction, and people who think they are real are mad.

The best work of the Grail material is "Parzival" by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Among the best works on Parzival are "The Spear of Destiny" and "The Cup of Destiny" by Trevor Ravenscroft. The source of "Parzival" was said to be an Arabian historian, as was the source of Don Quixote. In the Parzival story the hero is a "divine fool" concealing great portents behind his naive and childlike simplicity. Don Quixote is a "divine madman" of the mold of those men who, in higher states of consciousness, appear "mad" from the view of ordinary consciousness. Don Quixote is very much like those tales of the comic figure of the East, Mullah Nasrudin, which are actually Sufi teaching stories.

In fact, the author of Don Quixote uses a number of the Nasrudin stories. Nasrudin often seems a madman in his stories. This is at times because he is attuned with true reality and the world is not, and at other times because his higher state of consciousness prompts him to exhibit a mirror in which we see ourselves. He says he is upside down in this world. Instead of Nasrudin it is the world that is mad. Idries Shah says:

"Nasrudin is the mirror in which one sees oneself. Unlike an ordinary mirror, the more it is gazed into, the more of the original Nasrudin is projected into it. This mirror is likened to the celebrated Cup of Jamshid, the Persian Hero; which mirrors the whole world, and into which the Sufis `gaze'."

Don Quixote is another version of this same mirror.
---------

This knight, whom Quixote battles, symbolizes the domain of the physical world, or world of form, in the sublunary sphere. And how, indeed, can Quixote conquer him as long as he is in his domain? There is only one way. This is symbolized in the Gospels by the crucifixion of Christ. This is the initiation where the lower self dies. And here the story of Quixote ends.

 

[Captante]

you probably won't read it

You're not wrong! (skimmed it though FWIW)

That one sensible and blessedly brief on-topic post of yours appears to have been an anomaly.

Damn shame too because if your writings were more concise and to the point you might be able to hold interest long enough to convey something really profound with them.

As-is however I'm certain I'm not the only one who isn't reading them. (sorry)

 

[Moonbeam]

You're not wrong! (skimmed it though FWIW)

That one sensible and blessedly brief on-topic post of yours appears to have been an anomaly.

Damn shame too because if your writings were more concise and to the point you might be able to hold interest long enough to convey something really profound with them.

As-is however I'm certain I'm not the only one who isn't reading them. (sorry)

Everything that I have been saying is to inform you that you will find some reason or another not to take seriously what I say. Why would you feel sorry about something I have told you is going to be how you will react? I just want you to see that. I have told you why it will happen. It's purely up to you if you want to make the connection. Anybody who sees will know they will be seen as fools. If the world is sane please color me mad.

 

[fskimospy]

Everything that I have been saying is to inform you that you will find some reason or another not to take seriously what I say. Why would you feel sorry about something I have told you is going to be how you will react? I just want you to see that. I have told you why it will happen. It's purely up to you if you want to make the connection. Anybody who sees will know they will be seen as fools. If the world is sane please color me mad.

Have you considered that people don’t listen to you because what you have to say is bad?

 

[Captante]

Everything that I have been saying is to inform you that you will find some reason or another not to take seriously what I say. Why would you feel sorry about something I have told you is going to be how you will react? I just want you to see that. I have told you why it will happen. It's purely up to you if you want to make the connection. Anybody who sees will know they will be seen as fools. If the world is sane please color me mad.

Au contraire my pasty friend!

Everything you've said (or at least most of it) has been self-serving and borderline nonsense interspersed with the occasional semi-lucid comment .... do you proof-read what you write at all?

And even when I'm breaking your balls and joking around I promise I'm taking you seriously. (life is such a conundrum!)


Now TRY to focus on whatever the actual topic of the thread you're posting in was intended to be by the OP AND whatever you feel like writing in terms of word-count, cut it down by two thirds on every post.

(at least if you want anyone to read them and take you seriously)

 

[dlerious]

Some of the stats I saw at CDC, there were almost as many traffic deaths and over 2x as many poisoning deaths.

FastStats

FastStats is an official application from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and puts access to topic-specific statistics at your fingertips.

www.cdc.gov

The 45,000 gun deaths don't seem like a lot when there was over 3.3 million deaths.

FastStats

FastStats is an official application from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and puts access to topic-specific statistics at your fingertips.

www.cdc.gov

 

[Captante]

Some of the stats I saw at CDC, there were almost as many traffic deaths and over 2x as many poisoning deaths.

FastStats

FastStats is an official application from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and puts access to topic-specific statistics at your fingertips.

www.cdc.gov

The 45,000 gun deaths don't seem like a lot when there was over 3.3 million deaths.

FastStats

FastStats is an official application from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and puts access to topic-specific statistics at your fingertips.

www.cdc.gov

ALMOST as many traffic death and that's somehow okay?

Traffic deaths USED to be the number one cause of death among otherwise healthy American adults and by a wide margin. Not anymore.

NOW they get shot.

And that "3 million deaths" also includes folks that die of old-age and natural causes.... and everything else! How on earth is that even relevant?

Ever seen 45,000 dead people? Sure seems like lot to me!

 

[Moonbeam]

Have you considered that people don’t listen to you because what you have to say is bad?

Actually, what I am saying is the result of experiencing a state of consciousness in which good and evil do not exist. I am suggesting the value of that conscious state and what is of value we normally call good. The issue, of course, is that not everybody has experienced a state of consciousness in which this might be understood. For most then, what is good or bad are based on relative subjective opinions. Since I am quite familiar with how people ordinarily experience reality via dualistic thinking I understand what you are asking. In that state, of course I have. As I have mentioned numerous times, however, there is certainty and doubt in a dualistically perceived world but only being where thought does not exist.

I asked you if you experience the world as a separate ego. You did not answer. I have done what I can to answer your question.

 

[Moonbeam]

Au contraire my pasty friend!

Everything you've said (or at least most of it) has been self-serving and borderline nonsense interspersed with the occasional semi-lucid post .... do you proof-read what you write at all?

And even when I'm breaking your balls and joking around I promise I'm taking you seriously. (life is such a conundrum!)


Now TRY to focus on whatever the actual topic of the thread you're posting in was intended to be by the OP AND whatever you feel like writing in terms of word-count, cut it down by two thirds on every post.

(at least if you want anyone to read them and take you seriously)

Once Mulla Nasrudin found a parrot that had been blown by a storm far far from its home. He trimmed its beak and claws and painted it brown, saying now you look like a respectable bird.

 

[Captante]

Once Mulla Nasrudin found a parrot that had been blown by a storm far far from its home. He trimmed its beak and claws and painted it brown, saying now you look like a respectable bird.

You make it SO hard to stay mad!


*(even though I wasn't actually mad @ you!)

 

[fskimospy]

Actually, what I am saying is the result of experiencing a state of consciousness in which good and evil do not exist. I am suggesting the value of that conscious state and what is of value we normally call good. The issue, of course, is that not everybody has experienced a state of consciousness in which this might be understood. For most then, what is good or bad are based on relative subjective opinions. Since I am quite familiar with how people ordinarily experience reality via dualistic thinking I understand what you are asking. In that state, of course I have. As I have mentioned numerous times, however, there is certainty and doubt in a dualistically perceived world but only being where thought does not exist.

I asked you if you experience the world as a separate ego. You did not answer. I have done what I can to answer your question.

‘I exist in a state of consciousness where good and evil do not exist’

‘anyone who wishes to live in a different type of house than me must be forced to conform to my preferred housing by the government’

I get the impression you hope that if you babble enough people will mistake it for wisdom.

 

[Moonbeam]

‘I exist in a state of consciousness where good and evil do not exist’

‘anyone who wishes to live in a different type of house than me must be forced to conform to my preferred housing by the government’

I get the impression you hope that if you babble enough people will mistake it for wisdom.

I said quite specifically that my typical conscious state is affected by having experienced a different conscious state in the past in which good and evil do not exist.

I have said that better than the government passing laws that force local governments to build multi-family dwellings on single family lots, that the locational desirability that drives that should be ameliorated by changing the system that creates this need. I have further said that the need people feel that drives them to want to live at least with some minimal contact around them with some semblance of the natural world is an organic real need, but that the need to build density has systemic unnatural roots.

Judging from the ease with which you mischaracterize what I say, and the ease that allows for putting you straight, I can understand the fear you might have that you are confronting wisdom, whether you recognize that fear or not.

The thing about people who babble is that they can never remember what they say, the source of that babble being any old thing at hand, but the telling of truth from fundamental principles internally digested will always and from any direction point to the same thing. You remind me of what I put in my signature twenty years or so ago.