At 08:00 AM 7/10/98 -0500, Scott Badger wrote:
>Trying to solve the crime problem by arming everyone is treating the
>symptom. A more transcendent approach, it seems to me, would be to do
>everything we can to eliminate Antisocial Personality Disorders (APDs) and
>help would-be criminals to become higher level humans. Get rid of this
>single personality disorder and you will have solved a huge part of the
>problem. Yes there will still be people with impulse control disorders that
>commit violent crimes (this will also hopefully be very treatable in the
>future), but the chronic and pervasive character of the APD is the driving
>force behind a large percentage of crimes of all sorts. The Truth Machine
>was a good read but it seemed to make the same mistake of not addressing the
>underlying problem of mental disorder. Being forced to tell the truth
>doesn't make the APD go away. It's going to take biomedical advances or
>genetic screening or something else to eventually address this more
>fundmental problem. Stamping out the problem means employing what's called
>a primary (preventative) intervention rather than a tertiary one (e.g. gun
>proliferation). You can arm the citizenry if you want, but the APD will
>find a way to express itself. I want society to be polite, not because it's
>armed and scared to be anything but polite, but because it really feels like
>being polite.