serviceguy
Well-Known Member
100%
Things that make you go Wow š²
- Thread starter mattybfat
- Start date
Johnny Utah
Well-Known Member
I figured those are coming. My mind was blown two years ago when I found out some of the new construction builds off Ramshorn Drive by Allaire were being assessed for over $30k in annual property taxes.
Hurts my brain. If your property taxes are 30k a year you should be in a house that requires a butler.
Captain Brainstorm
Well-Known Member
The education system is going downhill, yes, but don't give parents a pass. A lot of this is also a result of bad parenting, and just not being there for your kids.
One of the things that has happened over the last 30-40 years is the desensitization and glorification of violence. Look at video games, all of the most popular games are shooter games, starting with the youngest (Fortnight, Minecraft) to the older (GTA), complete with blood and guts. Kids play these games by the millions. Then there is "liberal" Hollywood. The egregious violence in movies and TV shows today is pretty striking, no? Stuff that would have been R or NC-17 30 years ago is on TV! I love the Walking Dead, but holy shit, Romero wouldn't have even attempted any of this in the 80's. You can't put out 4 John Wicks (and I love John Wick), on every streaming platform possible and TV, promote the shit out of it, but out of the other side of you mouth say "guns are bad, m'kay"?
So ill state again that im not anti guns....I still own 3 of them, although its such a pain, in NJ, I don't target shoot with them anymore. However, im not blind or can ignore this...... This is why I agree with you about training and background checks.
It just sinks the "gins don't kill people" statement...no they don't shoot people by themselves, but its pretty obvious what happens when you let anyone and everyone have them with no rules....as in some of our states.
I equate (in a way...we have rights to own a gun, but not to drive) to what germany does with the no speed limit portions of the autobahn. There are countless studies showing how the no speed limit sections are FAR more deadly that the sections with speed limits....I saw one stating 66% high death rates. There is 0 reason to have no speed limits outside of people in Germany like driving fast and the will of the people is prevailing over safety. That doesn't bother me at all. However, its VERY hard in Germany to get a drivers license....up to 5 months of training and $4000...so not just anyone can drive. If I was a licensed driver in Germany, using the autobahn...I would be happy about this....Not just anyone and everyone is on the road with me. This is what I don't understand about a large portion of the right wing who want zero regulations of any kind on guns....You should embrace responsible gun ownership and preventing mentally ill people from having easy access to assault rifles.....I know this isnt really an argument for New Jersey as we at least have some common sense laws....but JFC, Texas...Shocking that Uvalde taught them absolutely nothing.
I know everyone rails against government regulation, and as a govt. contractor I can site you chapter and verse many cases of how absurd it can be. But im also not going to deny since 2001...we have had ONE person die on a domestic jet liner in the US....Over 800 million passengers PER YEAR for ~23 years!!! One person has died....That is the FAA, that is NOT the good CEOs of United, Delta, Boeing, etc
Johnny Utah
Well-Known Member
I was addicted to the A-Team as a kid - there was tons of gun play in that show, but out of 98 episodes only one person was shot and killed.
The shows had a positive theme at the end.
Different times now.
The first Jon Wick was interesting - at this point (I think we are on four?) it is just hours of killing people - totally acceptable by the mainstream.
Yet movies like Revenge of the Nerds are deemed as āoffensiveā.
I don't know man, to me the most sick and twisted movie I can still recall seeing were from the 70s.....Clockwork orange, godfather, Apaclypse now, Deer hunter (omg that Russian roulette scene freaked me out as a kid....oh and I got to watch it bc hbo was just on the TV and my parents couldnt restrict movies like I can now) Deliverance, The omen, Death wish, Dirty harry, Taxi Driver.....
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mntal
Well-Known Member
What is an assault rifle? Is that like an assault knife or assault fists?
Death Wish! My dad took me to that movie in the theaters, just looked it up, 1974. I was 6! He also took me to see Jeremiah Johnson. Both of those movies are really scary. I really don't know what he was thinking. That was parenting in the 70's. Half the parents smoked, the other half were drinking Martinis. I could do anything I wanted when I was a kid. All my friends would leave the house in the am on our bikes and get home for dinner. I think that parents today are way more involved than they were when I was a kid.
iman29
Well-Known Member
yep this was me in the summer time too
somehow i saw this movie when I was probably 12-ish and it gave me nightmares for weeks.
in my early teens during BlockBuster's heyday we used to go to the store and rent the scariest movie we thought from the cover. The Evil Dead messed with my head for many months after that especially walking home at night from the park or my friends house.
Yup, my parents didn't give a shit what i did for the most part.....My mom used to drop me off at action park when I was 11 with my 8 year old sister...."watch your sister, ill be back at X time to pick you up"......Would I ever do that with my 10 year old now? NFW with all of the drunken idiots that used to roam that place....Do I take my 10 year old to the bike park and do WAY more dangerous stuff (WITH HIM) then I ever did at action park....100% We do wear better protective gear tho.
omg, who remembers "Faces of Death"???? Im sorry, I can't think of much that compares to that dudes eyes popping out of his head in the electric chair. Granted, for years, I thought that was a real execution. There was no internet to tell me otherwise. Where as now...kids know all of this stuff is fake.
This is an interesting thing. The kids now are growing up with media of people dying on video. It's a tad more than we grew up with. Never really thought about this before.
There's so much to digest with this.
The "kids" that we're talking about here tend to be far more insulated from actual, real world violence, and just death in general, than kids across a lot of the world and certainly kids for most of human history. I don't know what to make of the increased availability of videos of real people dying in wars, in accidents, in random acts of violence. In some ways at least it's a more accurate picture of the ugliness of humanity and the horrors of war as opposed to the glamorization of violence in something like the John Wick movies (not that I'm anti John Wick, I just wouldn't want my hypothetical 10 year old watching them). Maybe you could argue that there are some positives in that. That this at least gets away from some of the simplistic narratives of the "good guy with a gun" and could lead to more empathy and a better understanding of the world. Or maybe it's all just negative and further desensitizes kids to violence because it's still "other people" dying, all conveniently viewed on an iPhone. I have no idea.
"Wow".
serviceguy
Well-Known Member
I don't disagree, but in some cases that may mean perpetrating a vicious cycle of abuse and neglect. I can't speak about how education and social services work in the US, but there should be some protection in obvious cases of child abuse without delegating to the government all the aspects of children lives.
There is. I started writing more but there are so many facets, it's hard to really dig into all of them.
Well despite violent movies, etc etc......Mass shooters/killers for the most part have a common trait if you read about them on a case by case basis...From Charles Wittman to the unibomber to Thomas Matthew Crooks....Most of them are/were socially isolated. To me that is the key factor in cultivating a mass killer....Not so much the movies they watched.
I'm in Metuchen so most lots are 1/8 acres. One house on my block was recently rebuilt and they are now paying $37k. That's a huge WOW when some other homes are still paying less than $7500.
It's just so different now. I mean, I had nuclear bomb drills where we sat under the desks at school.š Kid's now have active shooter drills and then get to see the aftermath of real shootings every night on the news while eating dinner. It's just business as usual for them. When my son was in HS just a few years back he said everybody knew who their school shooter would be. Thankfully it never happened, but they knew who to watch out for.