Thread by @FawkesyFox

WRT gun control, I'm reasonably sure that a large percentage of those opposed feel like they're stable, responsible, et al. The reality is that we are humans, and we are fallible. We are emotional creatures, all of who have had moments of confusion, /1

fear, sadness/depression/anxiety...we are programmed biologically as a self-defense mechanism to jump to conclusions, often the extreme conclusion and react either by fleeing or fighting. This is inside of all living creatures, and I think we forget that as we /2

sit comfortably at the top of the food chain with relatively few predators to concern ourselves with. So we get complacent in our environment with respect to threat. I'm not saying there aren't real threats here, but very few of us have ever lived with the real chance of being /3

killed and eaten while we forage for breakfast, and certainly not for EVERY breakfast. But again, we are programmed to be aware of the possibility of that threat, so in human society when faced with the potential of existential threat, we aren't accustomed to, we will tend to /4

err toward that potential being real, even when our minds may be playing tricks on us, or we saw something wrong, or we misinterpret threat based on our social programming and experiences. This happens all the time even with law enforcement and the military, who are trained /5

to asses threat and react with appropriate level of response. Far too often people are killed for looking like they might be scary (Travon Martin in a hoody at night with skittles in his pocket), or killed for playing on their own with a realistic toy in a matter of seconds /6

(12 year old Tamir Rice), or killed for shopping at Walmart (John Crawford carrying a BB gun FROM THAT STORE). Remember that these deaths are at the hands of armed humans who have had (presumably) some amount of background checks and training with their weapon, /7

and who should have at least some sense of responsibility for protecting their fellow citizens from threat of death. Ironically though in the end, these protectors were the real threat. And this is the point I'm trying to make...Even with training, (hopefully) background /8

checks, and personal responsibility, deaths like this occur far more often than they should, and that's in large part due to how humans process threat. The notion that adding yet more armed humans to places like schools makes us more safe is not a sound idea, /9

because we are drastically overestimating the capability of these armed humans to make instantaneous triage of threat and respond with appropriateness. Just today in Georgia an armed teacher fired shots while at school. Background checks or not, we are a species more /10

unstable and ill prepared for threat assessment than we realize. Ironically, some of this false sense of skill is placed upon us, especially young men, by pop culture. I myself fall into this trap; I have grown up surrounded by a bizarre super-machismo in movies,

in music, in books, in video games...We are programming our expectations that we are somehow equivalent to these characters we see, and feel like given similar situations, we'd react similarly; instantly identifying the bad guys as the ones who obviously look differently

than we do (which is a visual aid in movies so viewers can more easily follow the story, and not something that generally happens in real life), and then after whipping out our sidearm, pick off the "bad guys" with a single shot each while taking fire.

This is nonsense of course. Friendly fire takes lives in combat all the time. Friendly fire takes lives in Walmart, in our neighborhoods and homes, in our playgrounds. For fucks sake, let's not add a greater threat of friendly fire death to our schools to. /fin

#GunControlNow #ArmMeWith