Bad guys and guns. Its not rocket science.

[zebonaut]

http://www.bradycampaign.org

[rrneck]

1. Easy peasy.

Yep, that's what we need. Complex social and policy issues reduced to "easy peasy".

[Maraya1969]

2. I don't consider gun control laws to be complex social and policy issues.

Pretty much you either want to stop allowing people who should not have guns from having them and you stop with the uber large assault weapons, uber large amounts of ammo,

Easy Peasy

[rrneck]

3. Eighty five million years.

Last edited Wed Nov 13, 2013, 01:24 AM - Edit history (1)

That's how long evolution has taken to make us what we are. We have also been fighting and killing each other that long. There is abundant evidence that human beings are designed not only for intra species violence, but for collaborative intra species violence, and that propensity helped in the development of civilization.

If you want to deny certain human beings access to weapons, you will have to determine who those people should be and do so without violating the safety and civil rights of them and everybody else.

Please explain how you plan to do that.

[Maraya1969]

4. Where is your evidence that humans have been fighting for as long as they have been on earth?

How do you know that there were not times of tranquility and peace? I know there are tribes and religions that are essentially peaceful, that teach and live in a peace like state.

There are some ancient tribes in Africa that don't know how to not share, that live and think in a entirely communal living for hundreds, thousands or millions or years.

The Buddhist religion has never fought a war and they are one of the oldest religions that we know of.

So I don't think our right way to be is to fight. I think something happened that got most of knocked off our center. I also believe that we each can find a way to peace again and even if you don't believe it you will find your way there also someday.

[rrneck]

5. I think we evolved with the ability for violence and that ability helped us survive.

There were of course times of tranquility and peace. And sharing among hunter gatherers is ubiquitous. But the practice of sharing is confined to the tribe, or ingroup, while inter tribal conflict is common. I think the myth that ancient hunter gatherer tribes were some sort of egalitarian perfection in peaceful coexistence is wrong. Jane Goodall has documented violence and intra species conflict in chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins. Archeological evidence of violence with weapons and cannibalism have been documented, and certainly humans have been violent for at least the last ten to fifteen thousand years.

The degree of violence, its causes, and its role in early societies are influenced by many variables and research is ongoing. But it appears that the more we look, the less it looks like early societies represented a fall from Rousseauian grace but rather a continuum of the use of violence in the development of human survival and society.

It appears to me that two of the most important contributing factors in human violence are population density and resource availability. Pinker asserts that the greatest contributing factor in violence and warfare is ideology. Morris cites the five horsemen of the apocalypse. Potts/Hayden and Pinker seem to agree that we have evolved with the propensity for violence since violence has been successfully used in the survival of our species.

Of course nobody does anything for just one reason. While the intellectual mechanisms for violence developed the mechanisms for the control of violence and conflict resolution also developed. Such behaivor has been documented in chimpanzees, and of course it appears in humans as well. In fact, Pinker asserts that we are currently living in the most peaceful era in human history, even taking into consideration the twentieth century. And he makes a good case for it.

Below is a selection of stuff you might like to check out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

These are the three latest books I have seen on the subject:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
How the Mind Works
Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
The Righteous Mind

Buddhism and violence (Wiki)

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=243769

the authors present evidence to support their arguments that (1) violence is ubiquitous among all modern human societies, and (2) there is ample evidence for interpersonal violence among early hominids. Based on this, the authors argue that there is clear evidence to support at least some evolutionary biological input influencing modern patterns of violence. The authors also found tremendous variability and diversity in the patterns of violence that have been observed which implies that the occurrence of violence is a highly complex and multivariate phenomenon. The authors conclude that only multicausal models that take into account both evolutionary biological and situational or environmental influences can explain human patterns of aggression and violence.

http://www.economist.com/node/10278703

Several archaeologists and anthropologists now argue that violence was much more pervasive in hunter-gatherer society than in more recent eras. From the
!Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic and the aborigines in Australia, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers are in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and nearly 90% go to war at least once a year. War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but death rates are high—usually around 25-30% of adult males die from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0.5% of the population per year that Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois calculates as typical of hunter-gatherer societies would equate to 2 billion people dying during the 20th century.

At first, anthropologists were inclined to think this a modern pathology. But it is increasingly looking as if it is the natural state. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University says that chimpanzees and human beings are the only animals in which males engage in co-operative and systematic homicidal raids. The death rate is similar in the two species. Steven LeBlanc, also of Harvard, says Rousseauian wishful thinking has led academics to overlook evidence of constant violence.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178907000377

This paper attempts to evaluate theoretical positions concerning the causes of violence among human societies using data from small-scale, radically non-Western societies and archaeological evidence from early hominids. The paper begins by observing that the almost exclusive focus on violence in industrial societies misses a wide range of variability presented by non-industrial groups, in the present as well as the past. It is argued that this narrow focus represents a significant bias within many of the social sciences. The paper also examines evidence of an evolutionary basis for violence and aggression by looking at the early hominid archaeological record. The paper finds significant evidence for some evolutionary basis for violence given its ubiquity in both the present as well as the deep archaeological past. The paper closes by proposing a synthetic model combining evolutionary theory and interactionist perspectives on the inputs leading to aggression and violence in human social groups.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC122968/

The St. Césaire 1 Neanderthal skeleton of a young adult individual is unique in its association with Châtelperronian artifacts from a level dated to ca. 36,000 years ago. Computer-tomographic imaging and computer-assisted reconstruction of the skull revealed a healed fracture in the cranial vault. When paleopathological and forensic diagnostic standards are applied, the bony scar bears direct evidence for the impact of a sharp implement, which was presumably directed toward the individual during an act of interpersonal violence. These findings add to the evidence that Neanderthals used implements not only for hunting and food processing, but also in other behavioral contexts. It is hypothesized that the high intra-group damage potential inherent to weapons might have represented a major factor during the evolution of hominid social behavior.

[Maraya1969]

6. I think the article about Buddhist violence is not accurate

The Wikipedia article about Buddhist violence says it has problems and it has citation problems so I checked and the first link goes to a book that goes to a link to a book with no information on it.

Here is the link to the Buddhist Warfare from the Internet database http://www.ibookdb.net/isbn/9780195394849

Because it is so late I have emailed it to myself and will look at it again. I don't know how to edit a Wikipedia page and I really don't want to do it but I don't like for someone to have put bad information about Buddhism up and I will do it if I have to or I will ask for help from the Buddhist group here.

[rrneck]

7. It's true that Wiki is not the best source.

But I think it would be difficult to argue that any ideology is a panacea.