I have been thinking a lot since the election about what could explain the incredibly high numbers of Americans who seem incapable of critical thinking, or really any kind of high level rational thought or analysis.
Then I stumbled on this post https://old.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/16ires5/lead_exposure_from_shooting_is_a_much_more/
Which essentially explains that “Shooting lead bullets at firing ranges results in elevated BLLs at concentrations that are associated with a variety of adverse health outcome"
I looked at the pubmed abstract in that Reddit post and also this one https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5289032/
Which states, among other things, “Workers exposed to lead often show impaired performance on neurobehavioral test involving attention, processing, speed, visuospatial abilities, working memory and motor function. It has also been suggested that lead can adversely affect general intellectual performance.”
Now, given that there are well in excess of 300 million guns in the United States, is it possible lead exposure at least partially explains how brain dead many Americans seem to be?
This is a genuine question not a troll and id love to read some evidence to the contrary if any is available
This seems like reaching for the most esoteric and niche explanation to a fairly simple phenomenon.
America's school system sucks, and the anti-authoritarian nature of a culture formed by rejecting monarchy has been coopted to convince people that science and reason are authority figures you ought to fight back against.
The vast majority of Americans aren't gun owners, and the vast majority of gun owners don't shoot very often. You haven't provided evidence for Americans being incapable of critical thinking, but you want evidence for why guns aren't the source of american stupidity.
This is a very silly post. 😅
Well, I’m sure the exposure from going to the shooting range is a lot smaller than this, but lead poisoning from leaded gasoline apparently had a measurable impact on IQ levels.
I 100 percent agree that the big problem of the educational system, though! It is also interesting how self-fulfilling the adversity to government has been: it has made it so easy for men with bad intentions to tear down an at least functional democracy by promising to “fix” it.
That makes complete sense to me, that's a widespread systemic exposure; I'd kinda expect usage of leaded gasoline that to have that sort of impact
And yep, it sure is frustrating 🙃