So here’s the messed up thing, right? Back when Unsafe at any Speed was published, auto fatalities were at a high rate and climbing. And there’s a theory that says when fatalities-per-year reach a certain level, then a significant % of people have lost someone they knew.
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There’s an essay I talk about sometimes about school shootings and it posits that the issue from the shooter’s perspective isn’t a lack of a sense of right and wrong, but an apathy to it.
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I think we need to look at that framing from a cultural perspective, too. It’s not that there’s a lack of morality here. It’s that we, as a society, care less about dead people than we do about warrior fantasies that breed violence.
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And it makes it so much easier when they take their own life. “Welp, he was just sick! No cultural problems here!” We have an entire generation coming up for whom mass violence feels like an expectation, not an anomaly. When do we figure out that this is a problem?
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I'm not sure the fatalities-per-year rate is high enough for gun violence (and might suggest that the auto-fatalities-per-year rate didn't need to be as high as the threshold was for tobacco, because fatal or not, EVERYONE knows someone who's had a car crash)
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To put some numbers on it, auto fatalities reached over 250 deaths per million people *every year* in the late '60s — one in every 4,000 people dying in a car crash, every single year. That's >80,000 deaths per year at the current US population level, out of 2.7m deaths. (Whoa.)pic.twitter.com/C5oYeOx9zL
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Jesus CHRIST, I had no idea it was that bad back then
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It was absurd
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I keep waiting for direct experience of wildfire to change people’s minds in the West... social scientists have told me on that score that sufficient partisan identification can overwhelm direct experiences
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I think that guns and climate change are specifically and deliberately polarized, I am not sure that this happened in the same way with seatbelts?
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Just before you started posting this thread I had been thinking about how the gun industry had seen what happened to big tobacco, realized that they were next and pushed for the PLCAA. This has shielded them for any accountability in regards to how their products are used.
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Is there an equivalent of the Birthday Paradox here? How many people have to get killed before there’s a good chance a person will know somebody who was?
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