tarhealnm claims: "An even greater tragedy would occur when a disarmed populace is unable to defend the country from a totalitarian take-over."

Dream on. Instead of musing the fantasy of a bunch of boys-with-their-toys resisting the most richly weaponized military on the planet "defending the country from a totalitarian take-over" -- Get active now, keeping the Totalitarians from gaining the reins of power by any means. It's infinitely better to recognize who The People and who the Totalitarians are -- and prevent such an extreme conflict from even getting started.

The shooting in Colorado is a tragedy. An even greater tragedy would occur when a disarmed populace is unable to defend the country from a totalitarian take-over.

Your Prozac Comments

Thom, I heard comments about Prozac on your show today, at the end of my Sirius XM listening time. There are hundreds of thousands of people who take SSRIs every day and do not have violent reactions nor suicidal tendencies. As progressive/liberal thinkers, we emphasize the importance of science and evidence to inform policy and discussion. There is no scientific evidence that these drugs increase violent behaviors. There IS scientific evidence that SOME people who have begun taking SSRIs have suicidal or violent thoughts at the beginning of their course of treatment, which is why it is critical to have proper psychiatric medication management, rather calling into question the class of drugs altogether.

Many many people have been helped by SSRIs, and while no psychoactive drug is without side effects, there are people who could not function or be productive members of families and communities without the tremendous benefits of these medications. I urge you to avoid making sweeping statements about SSRIs without the proper information. Just because some people are improperly medicated does not mean that all medications should be discontinued.

I am a gun-owner, a hunter, and an urban special education teacher in a public school. I have seen the rough side of town, and have dealt with students who come to school packing weapons of various types. I am not against gun control, and understand the 10 day waiting period is probably a good idea. The only problem is, the guns are available illegally, all over the nation, and the scofflaws who buy them are not being brought to justice. I would rather see gun trafficing get higher penalties, than to make ownership more difficult, in some places, and I also fear the reactionary backlash of the "mass murder" does nothing to diagnose the difficult question that is the elephant in the living room. Why are there so many people who are distraught in our society, and willing to take it out on random strangers?

I read a book as a child, John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar," which dealt with two phenomena: (1) Overcrowding of the planet, which he used as a way of explaining the (2)"Crowded Cage" symptoms of Amok-ers, individuals who succumbed to their rages and went on killing sprees. The idea that people "running Amok" were showing signs of stress due to overpopulation still resonates with me now, as I keep hearing about so many shootings. Sociological studies haven't related these concepts? I figure if a science fiction writer could write the book 50 years ago, and find it to be a reflection of today's chaos, then maybe it should be considered.

In any case, the underlying cause of these shootings, where people on one side blame the guns, while the others blame the criminal mind, is yet to be unclothed for what it is: treating the symptom, and not the diseases of poverty, disenfranchisement, overcrowding, and lack of mental/social services. Until we deal with these issues, we will not see a decrease in the incidents, and we will see security firms once again making a living off of our funds, due to our myopic fears of the public space.

After comments I posted on facebook

Guns don't kill people
Crazy people with guns kill people.
RIGHT?
and you have to be crazy or a terrorist to want an assault rifle.

I got this response.

I gotta ask ya, have you ever had a gun put up to your forehead & feared for your life by someone who had just committed a murder? I have, & I haven't gone anywhere without a gun since 1990, I will not be a victim of a lunatic or armed criminal ever

I have compassion for those who are stuck in the war zone of modern America who feel there only option is to arm themselves in self defence. Perhaps we are already in the midst of a civil war and we just don't understand what we are fight for. The soldier fights only for one reason, to survive against people who are trying to kill him. In this war more guns, more prisons and more austerity and poverty won't bring it to an end. Gated communities with private security guards are not the answer nor is armed militias. America has just gotten to be a much more brutal country over the last 30 years. People are becoming more desperate, violent and crazy. In the new American war zone gangs and criminals are on one side and police and swat teams are on the other and we the people are caught in the crossfire just ducking or heads alone not knowing or trusting our neighbors and not able to get out. Do you need a weapon to protect yourself that can kill 50 people in two minutes? Are you expecting the zombie holocaust? The guns that were used last night were legally purchased. The kid who bought them had no overt signs of being a mass murderer. This was his first attempt. We need a rational approch to the kind of guns people can get their hands on but we need much more than that to end this war of all against all.

As Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, states (see http://foreconomicjustice.org/3767/the-problem-isnt-outsourcing-its-that...) : "The problem isn’t outsourcing. It’s that the prosperity of big business has become disconnected from the well-being of most Americans.

What Romney and Obama both fail to address is the exponential concentration of ownership among a minority, while at the same time destroy American jobs or degrading them and outsourcing jobs in other countries. While new jobs can be created by new technology applications, by the year 2050 most products and services will be provided by digital computerized superautomated machines, and non-human intelligent-based operations. Thus far, economic growth in past decades has disguised the destruction of jobs and degradation of jobs that have occurred as a result of technological innovation and invention. As such technological advancements push forward, this will present a serious problem for the masses who remain solely dependent on a job for income.

Both Romney and Obama and their advisors fail to acknowledge that full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.

The non-human factor of production is the product of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. Human-level artificial intelligent machines and digital computerized operations are and will continue to destroy jobs or degrade job opportunities because increasingly machines are providing skills and abilities previously unique to human workers. The advent of truly intelligent systems of production is effectively increasing the size of the work force beyond that provided by human workers. Thus, the idea of job creation for humans is a dead-end proposition and calls for big jobs programs such as WPA-type projects to rebuild America's infrastructure are worthwhile but the resulting jobs, financed by borrowing or tax redistribution, are temporary and disappear once the project work has been completed. Corporations embracing technological innovation and invention in the form of the non-human factor of production understand that their profitability increases because machines work for nothing more than the cost of their manufacture and maintenance. When "cheap" labor becomes scarce, then corporations will pursue aggressively employing "machines" to replace human labor and the impact will be catastrophic for ordinary people dependent on jobs alone. As the cost of computer-controlled machines become less than the cost of human workers, and the job sills and productivity of the machines exceed those of human workers, intelligent "machines" will rapidly replace human workers. The increase will be exponential, and each generation of intelligent machines will be more powerful and less expansive than the one before.

It is the full utilization and application of technological innovation and invention in the form of intelligent machines that is the future and the economic engine that can result in growth of 15-plus percent of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product). But unless we restructure the mechanisms by which people acquire ownership in these "machines" the resulting levels of productivity growth via technology would be devastating to human workers whose income from wages and salaries would no longer exist or be limited, except for a minority of top-echelon educated individuals necessary to the design, engineering, and operation of the machines. As for the masses, the middle-class and poor, the current job-focused economic model relies on the sale of their labor as their primary source of income.

Ronney and Obama, as well as conventional wisdom thinking economists and public policy experts do not address the fact that the economic value of labor is being constrained by the rapidly increasing capabilities and falling cost of advanced digital computerized automation. Simply stated: if what labor can earn is based on supply and demand, and the supply of workers is rising due to growing world population, while the demand for workers if falling because of improved productivity, the market value of labor can only go down. Compound this with the exponential growth of job-destroying and degrading technology and the result will be the disastrous collapse of middle-class income.

What is needed is a modern-day Homestead Act, which I and others refer to as the Capital Homestead Act (see http://cesj.org/homestead/index.htm).

The policies and programs recommended (also see my article "Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy" at http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary) provide mechanisms for achieving rapid economic growth and widespread private, individual ownership of future productive capital investment in the form of intelligent machine technologies, robotics and superautomation in a manner such that everyone benefits and no one loses. Under this platform, those who are ambitious, hardworking, and successful wold continue to be rewarded for their achievements, with rapid growth providing opportunities for prosperity and affluence. Jobs, at least in the short term would be plentiful and due to rapid and sizable economic growth deficits would shrink. Financing for small businesses and opportunities for entrepreneurship would abound. And owner-consumers would have plenty of money for consumption so that market demand for the products and services produced would be strong and steady.

Our present scenario relies on jobs ONLY for the 99 percent. No jobs equals no income and thus no consumer demand. As businesses minimize labor costs, a further shortage of consumer-customers result. And with fewer customers, businesses need fewer workers, which leads to fewer jobs. The result is a downward spiral that can only be fixed by a upward spiral reversal of economic growth simultaneously with broadened private, individual ownership in future productive capital investment. By stimulating economic growth in this manner, in the short term, increased investment would create demand for labor workers to build new machines, factories, plants, and infrastructure to facilitate commerce. Thus, jobs would be created that generate income and market demand increases, and such investment would cause business corporations to hire and invest even more. As investment spending pays for itself, once paid for it creates income for investors from dividends, interest, or rent. Thus, ordinary Americans would benefit from dividends through investments made through Capital Homesteading, which would be used to buy the new products and services that their investments produce. Dividend income to every man, woman and child leads to more customers, which creates more profits, which creates more dividends, which creates more customers. The result is an upward spiral of economic growth putting ALL Americans on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice.

We've had 30 years of trickle down economics and a belief system that the super rich are the "job creators" and everything to do with the government is bad. Now we have our elections being bought out from under us by a few billionaires and a supreme court that believe money is speech and corporations are living, breathing people. Divide and conquer, it's exactly what they've done and they're laughing all the way to their tax sheltered banks (swiss or cayman) Feels pretty hopeless for those of us struggling to make ends meet.

I live in Colorado, about 20 miles north of Denver. I have not heard anything on the news, but there is a large gun show scheduled tomorrow and sunday at the Loveland outlet malls, about 40 miles north of Denver. I called the management of that mall and was told the show wouldn't be cancelled because "I need to understand that this was scheduled months ago and the owner of the shows' lively-hood was at stake. I commented to him that obviously money was more important to him then lives. If political candidates can suspend campaign adds I don't think it is asking too much to cancel a gun show.

how often do you hear of violence like this in other industrialized world

1975 is marked by the end of the Straus-German American-Lincoln Trust Company, formed 1910.

400 billionaires, 36,300 with more than $30million, and 3,104,000 millionaires...in 2009 (according to one source..wikipedia). But more recent data (from the Spectrum Group) says that 200,000 new millionaires were added to the US just last year (2011). They said that there are 8.6 million households in the US with a total net worth (minus principle residence) of $1million or more (about 2.76% of Americans). 1,078,000 households worth $5million or more and about 107,000 people worth $25million or more. So, it is really not just the 1% we need to worry about...it is the top 2.76% in the US who are millionaires. I highly doubt that you would find many liberals or progressives (real ones anyway...not the ones that just pretend) in that group. They all likely have the same screw everyone else mentality...and love the idea of getting rid of social security, medicare, and certainly wouldn't be for taxing the rich.

Fox News....Fox Screws! And all the other regular major news media tends to suck as well...but not as much as Fox. Fox is the great evil that deranges people to useful idiots for the ruling elite that exploits them.

Sometimes I think the Roman Gladiator mentality...or the Middle Ages...Christian witch-burning mentality...never left us. The major news media knows this and has these addle brained zombies hooked on all of this trash news that they play over and over again, ad nauseam. People still want to stone or burn other people...any excuse will do.

I watch, almost exclusively, RT, FSTV, and Link TV. Occasionally glimpse at CNN, or local channels.

My spouse is from Africa. Her relatives were surprised to hear/see how bad off financially many Americans really are. I felt embarrassed, her older relatives had a look of dismay/shock on thier faces. It's humiliating to go overseas to visit them and them thinking "those poor Americans it's not what it used to be in the USA ". My great grandparents must be rolling over in their graves.