Plan B Forum

Sue U wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 24, 2022 2:54 am

MajGenl.Meade wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 23, 2022 9:48 pm

Oh, Sue.

And as for "mass murder," it seems to me it is somewhat less of a "norm" today than it was from 1939 to 1945, for example.

That's a bit less than I expected.

Not really sure what you mean by that.

I believe you far too sensible to equate a comment about mass murder by gun-toting citizens in the collapse of US civil society in 2022, with any facet of government-organized genocide in post-1935 Germany

MajGenl.Meade wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 24, 2022 4:42 pm

I believe you far too sensible to equate a comment about mass murder by gun-toting citizens in the collapse of US civil society in 2022, with any facet of government-organized genocide in post-1935 Germany

Industrial-scale genocide is only one example of a purportedly civilized society's tolerance (if not enthusiasm) for mass murder; in that same conflict, the U.S.A. murdered about 200,000 (mostly civilian) Japanese on two days in August 1945, in what still remains the world's only use of nuclear weapons. The war was the bloodiest in human history, directly producing some 60 million dead, IIRC, plus tens of millions more due to secondary effects of war (displacement, disease, starvation, etc.).

I think humanity as a whole has far less tolerance for that kind of killing these days. The mass murder problem engendered by gun-toting citizens in 2022 is pretty much exclusively an American phenomenon produced by gun manufacturers/sellers and Republican politicians for their own profit. It's not a sign of recent moral decay; it's a symptom of too many guns too readily available to too many people, pure and simple. You put nearly 400 million guns in a population of 330 million people and they're gonna get used, for legitimate purposes or not.

Unhappily, we now have a military composed of persons, from top to bottom, who have given very little thought to Mutual Assured Destruction or what the use of atomic weapons means for the entire planet. I cannot remember anyone publicly discussing the strategic implications of the Neutron Bomb during the last 40 years.

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