Strazdas said:
Therumancer said:
Well, they didn't have security guards when I went to regular schools either (as far as that went, I have a very unusual backround), neither did my parents, or my grandparents, however today it's extremely common. What's more many schools want to institute X-rays, metal detectors, and similar things at the entrances to schools, the "rash" of school shootings helped fuel the possibility of it happening on a large scale, but even before Columbine people wanted to do this due to the rising problems with the youth. To people who don't really "see" the problems it's hard to understand what people are so concerned about. As "funny" as it might sound, I once read an article comparing the "C" grade movie "Class of 1999" to the state of actual schools a few years ago. "Class of 1999" was a movie where the students are so out of control even with security similar to a courthouse (detectors, etc...) going in and out, that they reprogram these military androids to be teachers, since real teachers just can't deal with the school environment (... and understand IRL there are efforts by teachers nowadays to demand the right to be armed). In the movie the environment is so out of control that the androids revert to military programming and start trying to wipe out the students as an enemy force, of course the students themselves are pretty heavily armed when you get down to it and hilarity ensues. Barring the campy science fiction elements... the point is that what at one time seemed crazily far fetched is shockingly close to the truth.
Well granted i can only speak about school state in my country, but we do not have such problems here, neither we have school shootings (or shootigns of any kind).
At any rate, we've pretty much said everything that is going be said on this subject. I'm largely explaining things as opposed to trying to actually defend the other side.
Fair enough. Im not arguing with "you", im arguing with "The position of what you explained".
When it comes to "instilling proper morality" though, I have to strongly disagree with you. Kids need to be taught how to get along within society.
Taught how to get along - yes. Forced to act certain way because "omg morality" - no.
[]
I think it has more to do with the american madness for guns. The only thing they are obsessed more than sex is arming themselves thinking this solves anything.
I find some of this kind of funny actually, what country are you from? I almost lost it when your saying "America Is Obsessed with sex" to be honest we're generally considered prudes by the international community, as sexual content tends to receive very high ratings compared to other countries. We also have a lot of laws about nudity and the like, and it was a big deal a while ago when Texas finally lifted a law making sex toys (dildos, etc...) illegal if I remember.
As far as gun obsession goes, an armed society is a free society, to be honest I'm very reluctant to take people from countries where the people aren't armed seriously when they make criticisms of societies that are or talk about how free they are. Largely because the point of the right to bear arms is to ensure the people are never entirely powerless before the government or authorities. Something that works with a number of other checks and balances to curtail the government ever having too much power or control. Honestly I think the big problem with violence in the USA is simply that we as a society have become far too tolerant for the environment we've created. For all their pretensions otherwise most countries tend to be very mono-ethnic, and while they have minorities they don't have quite as diverse a population in the same numbers, combined with extremely liberal attitudes about entitlement and empowerment. Say in Japan you look around and pretty much everyone you see is Japanese, outside of the most cosmopolitan areas it's fairly unusual to see many people who aren't Japanese even if there are a decent number spread throughout the entire country, they just don't have a huge prescence. The same can be said for a lot of Europe and the like. When everyone has pretty much the same shared history, ethnicity, idealogy, etc.. it's relatively easy to keep the peace. In the US when you can see dozens of different kinds of people in most major gathering places, combined with the fact that none of them have been forced to assimilate into US culture, you can imagine where the problems come from. Two groups of people that hate each other outside of the US, continue to hate each other in the US, because they still associate primarily with wherever they are from. What's more you run into problems where say you have people coming into the US taking it's policies about tolerance to the point of doing things like complaining about the display of the US flag (the flag of the country to which they now belong) in a school that is providing them with a free education during a foreign holiday like Cinco Del Mayo, with schools being forced to comply due to threats of violence.
To be honest I don't see guns as being the big problem, though shootings are a price well worth the freedoms they help to guarantee. I think a lot of it has to do with us not keeping our house in order, and pretty much letting anyone become a citizen no matter what they think or believe, which inevitably leads to conflict with others. If two groups hate each other out in the world at large, you can pretty much they've come to America at some point and taken it out on each other in the middle of the streets pretty much. This is something a lot of the world doesn't get, no nation, no matter how cosmopolitan it might consider itself, has ever been anything quite like the USA, so it's hard to really understand the problems.... or rather I should say I think the populance at large doesn't understand the problems, the governments of some other countries do. France for example has a history of trying to maintain a draconian immigration policy and almost dropped out of the EU it helped create initially due to the way it would allow other types of Europeans into France, and it didn't want the conflict. France has also been fairly vocal a few times about it's regrets over having let so many Muslims into the country, having dealt with a number of riots due to Muslims (who consider themselves Islamics before anything else) coming into conflict with a surrounding society to which they generally set themselves apart from.
At any rate, this is all besides the point. We are going to have to agree to disagree. I do not think a 3 year old can fully determine the difference between fantasy and reality yet. 3 year olds still tend to believe in things like Santa Claus and that it's possible for him to deliver presents to every house in the world in one night. Any study which attempts to say otherwise is blowing smoke. That age is far too young to make any lasting determinations about.
As far as ethics go, the bottom line is that at the end of the day societies need to have rules and laws, and those rules and laws ultimately come down to moral judgements about right and wrong. Children need to be taught right and wrong as it applies to the society in which they will live before anything else. This is more or less a universal truth. When you start messing around with alternative morality too early, children who do not understand that and embrace it are going to wind up at odds with the rest of their own society, and that of course leads to problems. Simple things like the right to own personal property are for example not moral absolutes as communism and socialism (where everything belongs to the state to be distributed "fairly" based on contribution) are very much against the idea.
Of course this is also why at the end of the day global bloodbaths are inevitable. For humanity to survive we must unify into one global culture in order to reach the stars. This means at the end of the day humanity is going to need one set of laws and rules, to form a sort of "supernation" which means one defining morality behind those rules and laws. This is something not everyone will agree on, and will of course bring people adjusted for their own societies and way of life into inevitable conflict, and doubtlessly at some point the extermination of many people who did nothing wrong except be born into a losing civilization that taught them the wrong things by the standards of the victors. Without a global unity, humanity will die out, if nothing else due to resource depletion making it impossible to get into space to find more materials, followed by our star eventually dying while our barbaric decendants wallow in the
mud billions of years in the future. This rather dark point being irrelevant to the central point of the individual needing to fit into society. On a lot of levels the USA illustrates the problems in not doing this, more than a case study on why personal weapons ownership should be banned. At the end of the day in most shootings, the guy doing it tends to believe he was right, and of course the victim disagrees. In a surprising number of cases this comes down to people with totally divergent ideas of right and wrong being able unable to co-exist within the same society. Take all of the garbage we've encouraged in the US in our desire to "not be oppressive" and yeah, you wind up with tons of deviants blowing each other's heads off. Even if we took the guns, and every other kind of weapon away, we'd still see just as much violence in all likelihood because the people would just start killing each other with fists, feet, sticks, and stones.
