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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Go into any of the relationship subreddits today and for the next few days and you will see countless Americans melting down into various degrees of rage and bitterness over Xmas presents.
It’s like this very goddamn year.
Can anyone explain this part of the culture to me?
I’m not saying I hate all Americans or anything ridiculous like that, the cast majority of Americans I’ve met are good hearted people but when it comes to Xmas and in what I’m given understand is the modern vernacular: “y’all cray.”
Don’t any of your families still watch the Charlie Brown Christmas? Because you really should.
Go toxic places to read toxic things. I've never heard of this. But also I can't imagine going to a relationship board and expecting to come away with anything but misanthropy regardless of time of year.
Materialism is really big with a lot of people. My in-laws kids are spoiled rotten and only accept big brand name stuff because that's all their parents give them for Christmas and Birthdays. Same people who can't afford to pay their mortgage and are likely to lose the house in a few months.
I like present-less holidays. Better to focus on just being with people I find. Also helps if there's a lot of good, homemade food.
presence > presents
For me it’s all about consumables and experience. You like sauerkraut? I just made you a jar. You like classical music? Here are two tickets to the symphony. I just avoid stuff unless it’s like plates for someone who moved into their first apartment.
Americans live in a state of constant stress that is satiated by material possessions and trying to impress or be better than others. These kids were just trying to get their dose of imbalanced brain chemicals
There are 335 million people in the United States.
One asshat shot someone.
I'm not defending guns, shitty culture, or shitty people, but this is clearly a case where this kid has some sort of mental disorder. Literally hundreds of millions of families watched Charlie Brown and went the entire holiday without murdering each other
There were 89 shootings in the united states on Christmas day. Source with incident reports for each one.
89 is 0.00002670367% of 333,287,557.
Each one of the 89 shootings was one too many.
Any idea how many shootings were on Christmas day in Australia, Canada or Switzerland where a lot of people have guns too?
By the way, if you look at shootings in Australia before and after semi-automatic rifles got banned in 1996 you know how to improve the situation in the US.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but you can also shoot people with bolt actions, lever actions; and SA, DA, and S/DA revolvers.
Someone in Prague just killed 15 people with a bolt action firearm...
We have an issue with our society, not our firearms.
No, you have an issue with your society and with firearms.
Our firearms have been around for a lot longer than we have had these recent mass shootings issue...
Firearm technology (and perhaps accessibility?) has been increasing since the earliest firearms in the US. I wonder how guns per capita has been changing (if at all), too
Where did you see that it was a bolt action rifle? I couldn't find any real details on the weapons used. I'm looking for sensible gun policies to advocate for in the US and a mass shooting with a bolt action refutes my "limit the rate of fire" idea.
There is a video out there, and it shows him cycling the action. It was basically a dressed up hunting rifle he used.
If you're actually wanting to solve our violence problem, you go to the root of our societies issues, not the tool used. All of these things below would curb our violence as a whole 1000xs more than any new gun control can.
We can start with:
Single payer healthcare
Ending the War on Drugs
Ending Qualified immunity
Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren't 30-40 kids for one teacher.
UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
End for profit prisons
Enforce the laws already on the books
Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don't turn to violence/gangs to survive.
Increase the minimum wage
Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don't turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children do not help our situation.
Banning Insider Trading for Congress
Term limits
Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
Does it not seem reasonable to take away guns while we solve our society issues ?
Lol uhh...ok...yes the videos online are just fake news right?
See, if it were 90 I could understand you being upset..., but it's just 89! are we really going to make a scene about 89 totally avoidable deaths ?? when we could just enjoy Christmas with the children we might lose tomorrow ?
(thanks for the source)
No it is not clearly a case where the kid has some sort of mental disorder. You know literally nothing about this person.
I would probably bet that this kid made a stupid split second choice in the heat of the moment about something that (partially likely due to raging teenage hormones) probably seemed very important at the time, and the guilt will haunt him until the end of his life (which, statistically speaking, just got much shorter on average).
This is exactly why guns are so dangerous. It gives people (in this case, a literal child without a fully developed brain) the capability to make a decision to end another life in a split second.
You really think any sane rational FOURTEEN year old would just shoot their sister solely because of a Christmas gift?
I'm not saying 14 year olds have adult mental capacity and decision making ... but by that age you KNOW what a gun goes and you KNOW you can't take it back.
Either there's more to the story or this kid definitely has some kind of mental disorder or mental distress that they needed to see a therapist about.
Maybe the more to the story is that he thought he could just scare her by pointing the gun at her or her thought it was empty ... and it wasn't/the gun went off. If that's the case, then the parents really screwed up having a gun in the house, not teaching the kid anything about gun safety, and allowing the kid across to the gun (granted again by 14 you're pretty smart ... the average 14 year old could probably figure out the code or were the keys are kept on a gun safe because I know most people do not follow best practices with any passwords or keys).
And before you make any assumptions like you did with the other person, I've voted for Democrats in every election, donated some significant money to their campaigns, and I do not own a gun and do not have any restrictions that prevent me from owning a gun, I've just decided that for me ... particularly with living alone and a (granted not recent) history of depression that included suicidal thoughts ... they're not a good thing to have around. I avoid alcohol for similar reasons.
Thoughts and prayers might be a meaningless response but a huge block of the population has said "we're not giving up our guns" ... come to think of it ... just like a huge block of the population has said "we're not giving up our alcohol" (as is their right at the polls).
There is a majority that would like to see some common sense gun reform and we should do that. However, I believe the right has a point about mental health and guns. What they don't have is the willingness to fund mental health systems and instead they blame all the mental health issues on a degraded culture (🙄). We need to bring mental health back into the conversation with information from professionals. They also have a point about teaching kids about gun safety, if we're going to keep guns, then it's a public disservice to not teach kids (or at least the kids of gun owners) "this is what a gun is, don't point it at anything you don't want to kill" and "there's a difference between pretend and reality, these are never for pretend" as a baseline.
Yes. Countless stories of children murdering their parents over this stuff. It’s very common. Remember that the country is big with lots of people so you’re going to see these things from time to time-it’s statistically likely to happen.
What are you arguing here? That it happens and it's not mental illness because there are so many people that it's bound to happen?
No. That with that many people, there are enough whackos that this sort of thing will constantly be in the news even though when compared to the population size the events are still extraordinarily rare.
Murdering another human is a sign of mental disorder. Especially if it's in a case like this. I don't think it's possible to argue "this human is acting rationally, losing control of yourself to the point where you literally murder someone is, indeed, a sign of mental stability."
Also, access to guns isn't the reason people murder each other.
In Christmas Day a 36 year old stabbed 2 children, 2 girls aged 14 and 16, for no other reason than seemingly, they weren't white. A fucking racist asshole decided to attempt to murder kids. Is this person not suffering from a mental disorder? Should we stop people from owning knives too?
Again, I have never said this was about gun ownership. People who think violent crime stops if guns are gone are delusional. It's such a rhetorical trap. I bet conservative leadership in the United States love when liberals make this an issue, it's one of huge issues that motivates their base.
This is now, and always will be, a public health issue. You want less people to be victims of violent crime? Give us universal healthcare that also covers mental illness. Make it free, make education high quality, and free too. Crime will go down, violence will go down.
The political discourse about guns disguises that entire debate. And it's stupid that people fall for it.
Only stupid people say dumb shit like "guns aren't the problem, the ONLY problem is mental health". People can expect reform in two separate yet connected topics. One can absolutely impact the other.
Yeah, a crazy fucker stabbed a couple girls. He had a knife. I WISH that the crazy fucker who shot up entire classrooms at Uvalde or Sandy Hook had only had a knife.
Provide better mental health AND tighter gun control policies.
I have never said anything about gun control, for it or against it.
This is a mental health issue. Happy, well adjusted people don't murder other people.
It's interesting you mention Sandy Hook. Did you know on the same day in China a mentally ill person ran through a Chinese school and stabbed 22 kids in the fucking head?
Stabbings in Chinese schools are a huge issue. The person killed 8 of the kids by stabbing them in the head.
But sure, keep focusing on guns. Let's put all of our effort into that. That's clearly more important than free, publicly funded mental healthcare.
You're apparently saying that we shouldn't be focusing on guns because mental health is more important...
We can surely do both at the same time, don't you think?
I really don't.
The whole topic, in the current political environment, is so polarizing and so toxic, I think it torpedoes any progress that could be made in reducing gun violence.
I believe gun violence will go down if people have better mental healthcare, better access to housing, and better job prospects. My personal belief is people who commit violence against others are doing so because of mental disease. If you reduce their stress, make their future prospects better, and tell them they have a future, their prospects, and mental health, will improve.
America is more polarized now than it ever has been. A conservative and a liberal will never agree on gun control. They just won't. But I do think a liberal and a conservative can agree that violence is a problem, and that conservatives would be willing to consider solutions to it that aren't simply making firearms illegal.
It obviously wouldn't reduce gun violence to 0 like a ban would, but focusing on it as a mental health issue, and addressing that, would reduce other forms of violent crime too. Less muggings, stabbing, rapes, etc. I believe, taken as a whole, there would be less crime and drastically less violent crime, doing that, than any kind of firearm ban could achieve.
Edit: the downvotes prove my point. American politics right now care more about winning whatever hot button issue someone has, rather than cooperating to make meaningful change.
How about everyone reading this does a mental exercise. Let's say liberals decided not to care about gun control, and that issue wasn't relevant in American politics for the last 20 years. Do you think the current supreme court would look the way it does? Do you think organizations like the NRA would have anywhere near the funding and power they have now? How many single issue conservative voters did simply not show up to vote if there was 0 chance a liberal majority would "take their guns"
How convenient for you: a kid shoots and kills another kid, and just by default, you can make all sorts of assumptions about their mental health, and use it as a scapegoat, before the topic of firearms can even be brought up.
Please save us all the time and energy and don't pretend like you actually give a single shit about funding mental health care. A thing conservatives have also gone out of their way to de-fund.
Interesting you'd label a guy advocating for universal healthcare and increased education spending a conservative.
You're not even listening to my arguments.
If it was the only shooting that day, it would have been a peaceful one for a change. Hint: It wasn't.
Like I said, I'm not defending guns.
What I hate is people who attack where I live, with sweeping generalizations about how shitty a place it is. It isn't. The United States is entirely neutral. There are good things about it and bad things about it. Every country has their issues, and reducing violent crimes to such a simplistic focus as "lol, guns bad, USA sucks" is catastrophically stupid.
One of the main ways I judge people is if they punch down. A good example of this is Trump's feud with Greta Thunberg. At the time he was president of the United States. And she was a 16 year old autistic girl. Think about that. For a time the president of the United States, a person with literal tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, decided that a 16 year old, foreign, autistic girl needed the focus of his ire. That's punching down. And it's classless.
So if you think the United States is shit, that's fine. But if you live in a place that you think is so much better than it, you can say that in a way that's constructive. There's no need to attack somebody or some thing you think you're better than
No. Definitely not. When it comes to violent crimes, with guns or otherwise, the US is anything but "neutral". It is a sore point sticking out of all western countries.
Well, it is a fact that shootings are an everyday occurrence in the US. Heck, even mass shootings (plural!) are a normal, everyday occurrence in the US, to the point that mass shootings with less than ten dead people rarely make the news anymore in the US. I'm not attacking you, I'm just stating the facts. But yes, I think any place in the world where things like that are not normal, everyday events is inherently a better place. Try to change my mind on that.
340M.
Entirely too many people base their self worth on what other people think of them.
So "I didn't get enough shinies" = "nobody really loves me" = "I'm a worthless human being".
Alternately "I didn't get enough shinies for my kids" = "I'm a bad parent" = "I'm a worthless human being."
Then that gets reflected outwards, poorly. :(
Breaking that cycle of seeking approval from other people is one of the hardest things you can do. At our core, we all seek validation on some level or other.
Is it all about how terrible the gf/bf is for not magically getting the super perfectist thing ever?
It’s mostly people running a mental ledger then comparing the value of presents to how much they do in the relationship as a journal for the shortfall in gift value.
Often siblings resenting one another for perceived (or even sometimes objectively clear) favouritism.
The sibling thing I get.
Anyone who does the first one isn’t ready for relationships.