No shit. We had plenty of guns when I was a kid (52 now), even AR-15s and the like, and this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.
I’d hold off on my manifesto, :), but mental health has taken a nosedive in this country. It’s far, far worse than kids can imagine. Fox News, Facebook, the internet, etc. has poisoned our collective brains and discourse.
I’m 38, and yeah it’s seriously fucked. I keep saying this and people still want to plug their ears and scream “it’s the guns!”.
I’m a prime example, I have ADHD and hardcore insomnia, and I got laid off a few months ago, my health insurance just ended. In order to see a psychiatrist it’s gonna cost me $300 out of pocket for the visit, and then generic Ambien is like $120 for 60 pills. I got letters that say I could get health insurance via the COBRA Act of 1985, but it’s SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS A MONTH. Healthcare.gov keeps playing commercials that say “enroll now and you can get health insurance for as low as $10/month!”. I went on there to look and it’s only available for 2024 right now and they want to know your income for 2024. I put in 80k and they said I wasn’t eligible, I put in 40k and it said it was gonna cost $350/month.
My dad is 73 and he constantly has to fight with insurance and the pharmacy to get his Ambien as well.
It’s absolutely ridiculous.
Losing your insurance/job is one of those situations that they’ll enroll you early
That’s what I’m thinking, but the question is “how much will you be making in 2024?” not “How much are you currently making?”
That’s brutal, and I’m very sorry to hear that. No one should have to struggle to find help, especially for stuff like that.
I think this whole system is stupid, even from a business sense. If you want quality labour, “happy employees” are the way to go. If you prevent people from getting much wanted/needed help, you’ll have a lot less of those “happy employees”. You’ll also have fewer taxes being paid, less money being spent, fewer people attending events and buying non-essential things, etc. The current set-up makes no sense to me. Instead of imporving anything, let’s just keep continuing to make things worse and then complain that society is getting worse. That will totally fix things. It hasn’t worked for the past couple of decades, but it will totally magically change tomorrow. Assholes.
I hope things get much better for you and your father soon. Y’all deserve MUCH better than this.
Thanks 😊 The problem is that they have no souls and conscience, and only care about money, so I don’t think anything will change this unless we go with public/socialized healthcare but that will never happen because “socialism” is “the worst thing that could happen” according to some people… my dad is against it because he “doesn’t want to help pay for some low-life’s healthcare which he has worked his ass off to pay into” 🤦♂️
almost 10% of your income!? fuck the “hyper socialist” Germany has 6% from my taxes
If it puts your mind at ease at all, crime (violent and otherwise) had been on a decline from 1993 until 2016 and while it has risen since 2016, it still hasn’t hit pre-'93 levels last I saw. Furthermore despite what you’d expect, those AR-15s are responsible for less than 500 (all rifles) of our 60,000 gun deaths, which is 0.833333333333% of our gun deaths. In fact, mass shootings account for less than 0.2% of our gun deaths per year. So, I mean “any is too much” yes, but it isn’t near as bad as it seems. source
Yeah and I get that for sure, that’s part of what makes Aneurysms so scary too, can randomly happen at any moment. Tbh I’ve realized best thing I can do is just try to keep myself and those around me safe as best I can and carry one of my own, it’s the only thing that is actually within my power, unlike “fix the entire country” lol.
this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.
Things that are relatively new, circa Columbine
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the 24-hour news cycle
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rage-farming as a genre of syndicated media (think: Limbaugh, Hannity, InfoWars)
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selling fear becomes huge moneymaker for opinion programmers (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, etc)
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politics as a staple on social media comment threads
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offshore groups (like troll farms, etc) posing as domestic political actors, targeting particular demographics
Ready access to guns is of course a problem, but it’s probably made worse when all those folks with ready access to guns are bathed in fear and loathing 24/7 by millionaires making lots of money telling them things to make them or their families afraid or angry. Just a thought
The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. The idea that mental illness is largely responsible for the prevalence of mass shooters contributes to the stigma already attached to mental illness.
Know what did happen shortly before Columbine? Reagan dissembled our mental health infrastructure.
I was a teen in the late 80’s. Hell, I thought homelessness was a normal thing I simply hadn’t heard of until MTv started flogging it.
And if the mass shooting didn’t start post-Columbine…? LOL, we didn’t have that word in our lexicon.
FFS, we used to able to buy shotguns in the auto parts store. But suddenly, guns and “easy access” are the problem?
Why don’t you folks start a fight you have a chance of actually winning? Shut down the right-wing propaganda, hard, yesterday.
And while we’re at it, I’d kill for a solid study on how many killers, including suicides, are left/right politically. We both know how that’s gonna play out.
I am saying that something else started it. Mental health care has been terrible for way longer than Columbine. And youre going to have to explain why there was a decade and a half gap between Reagan and this mass shooting. Dont get me wrong, Reagan was a real piece of shit but I don’t think mental health or the lack of it is the major cause. Easy access to guns OTOH…
Mass shootings pre columbine were more rare but weren’t unheard of. Mostly they were belltower or highway sniper style incidents or postal related as they were severely overworked at the time.
Also, while mass shootings were more rare, not only could you get one at the hardware store you could order a full auto directly to your door with no background check or even ID for a while.
Just to add.
Up until 2000, the NRA was actually a big supporter of gun control. At that point they switched to being pretty much zero tolerance for any gun control, and even trying to dismantle gun control.
One could apply the same logic you just did to blame mental health regulations to blame this instead.
Its the guns. It was ALWAYS the guns. There was a significant increase in the number and severity of mass shootings after the federal assault weapons ban sunsetted. There is significant amounts of evidence that easy access to guns results in much higher homicide and mass shooting rates.
