According to Ms DeVoss…bears. Lots of bears.
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Pfft! Even if Cadet Bone Spurs started moving by the third or fourth shot, heard over the sound of the fire alarm, by the time he got in the building past all the panicked students fleeing the building, got to the right part of the building, got to the right floor, past all the bloody dead and wounded, it would have been longer than two minutes and the killer would have already ditched the weapon and be making his way out.
Of course, if he’s claiming to have omniscience and perfect precog abilities, why can’t we blame him for not stopping it?
Trump deploying bullet-deflecting babies and charging in:
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The .223 is not an unusually lethal rifle round. I don’t know exactly what ammo the shooter or cops used. But on average, the .223 delivers about half the energy of the .30-06 rounds used by the US in WW1 through Korea, and in common use by most hunters.
Pistol rounds are slower, but they are also several times heavier. There are trade offs.
But the talk of the AR-15 round as some sort of magic killing round is inaccurate. Besides which, rifles can be made for a huge variety of different types of ammo. So can pistols. The ranges we are talking about in an indoor confrontation make most of this irrelevant. At ranges of less than 50 meters, all firearms are essentially lethal.
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I’m not sure I completely agree with you, but your response brilliant, and may well be absolutely right. I prefer to believe that in any decent society, we will not have a shortage of people like these.
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regular people doing ‘the right thing’ would solve this by revoking the second amendment. We’re americans first, and regular people second from Portland to Portland.
Let’s not go looking to say how good any of would be just yet.
We can make this about good character, but that’s just another dodge. We have to be prepared for the enormous amount of bad character out there. Patting our own backs helps how? Counting on superheroes has worked how well, so far?
I’d rather see restrictions on guns than 700,000 new guns in schools.
How are we going to know which 700.000 have the magic character gene? They themselves will know? Not hardly!!
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I’ve been called a fence-sitter on gun issues, quite accurately I think.
I don’t accept the idea that the problem of kids being so alienated and disaffected and hopeless that they want to shoot up schools is best addressed by more or fewer guns.
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Do you at least accept that these alienated, disaffected, and hopeless kids would be less likely to lash out with a gun if we made it even marginally more difficult to obtain them than a bottle of Sudafed?
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Sure, if nothing can be done about adolescents wanting to commit mass murder, if dealing with root causes is not permitted to be on the agenda, then restricting harm seems quite sensible. I totally agree.
Personally, I don’t seem to be able to forget that the response to Columbine has harmed far more children than Columbine did. We sentence 13 and 14 year olds to die in prison; over 2,000 juveniles (age 17 or younger) in the United States have been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
Mad shoutz to the SPLC, the ACLU and Sandy Hook Promise.
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I think it’s disingenuous to say that those arguing for gun control aren’t interested in solving existing underlying problems. School-to-prison pipeline aside, this is a problem that expresses frequently through white men, who are also often abusive toward others - especially partners. Tackling the problems that create angry men who lash out violently at others is not a simple matter, and requires cultural change to de-toxify masculinity, rather than legislative action.
However, when a patient is exhibiting a fever of 106°, you put them in an ice bath to address the immediate symptom while doctors work to identify and address the underlying disease. Gun control is the ice bath. The long road of teaching men (and women, but mostly men) in this country that shooting people is not an acceptable first response to everything from a fender bender to getting your drink order wrong is treating the disease itself.
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This is not a problem that has been solved anywhere in the world. It’s not even clear if it is possible. If you can’t treat the disease, then your only option is to treat the symptoms and try to limit the collateral damage.
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Surely you understand that I have to be very careful what I say, or my speech will be censored.
Since I am not a gun fetishist of either pro- or anti- gun persuasion, the one thing both sides can vigorously agree on is that I am the worst sort of person imaginable.
Well, it’s a little more complex than just gender or skin color, but you’re not wrong. And when you start talking about cultural change, we’re on the same wavelength!
Mentoring an alienated, disaffected teen is hard.
Raising your kids so that they won’t ostracize the “creepy kid” when everyone else in their school does is hard.
I’m interested in supporting the people doing the hard stuff. The easy solutions, right or wrong, already have enough support.
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I see what you did there.
Of course that’s sort of a point in favour of making it about guns. Setting up a school to prison pipeline was part of saying, “It’s not the guns, it’s the kids!”
I actually have to wonder if these school shooting drills aren’t contributing to school shootings. The people who are shooting up schools in 2018 grew up going through school shooting drills, having the idea that sometimes people walk into a school with a gun drilled into them. That’s just a normal part of life.
Public policy is hard and what the public wants is not always (maybe not usually) going to be the best option. It’s quite possible that banning certain kinds of guns, or raising age limits, or whatever other kind of reform people are calling for is a bad idea that won’t solve the problem. But it’s pointless to listen to the specific policy agenda of traumatized 17-year-olds. These kids aren’t saying, “Ban the AR-15!” they are saying, “You need to stop accepting and normalizing the deaths of your children, and you show us you are doing that by banning the AR-15.”
I think doing something about guns is definitely part of the answer for a couple of reasons.
First of all, disaffected youth are far more likely to kill themselves then to shoot up a school (it’s the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds). Reducing access to guns reduces suicide rates as well as homicide rates. People who don’t understand suicide don’t get why this is true, they think “well if you want to kill yourself, don’t you find a way?” but people who are killing themselves out of despair are ambivalent, their mood changes moment to moment. They also often aren’t very high-functioning when they are actively suicidal. Being able to grab a gun means they are more likely to try and more likely to succeed. More gun control will save lives.
Secondly, I think America is producing plenty more disaffected youth by refusing to do anything about guns. Those students at Stoneman Douglas are pretty much 100% convinced that gun control is a solution and that congress won’t do it because congress has been purchased by the gun lobby, and they have pretty good reason to think that. Children take direction from adult behaviour. Since more than half of congress, and the half of Americans who voted for them think that kids lives aren’t as important as their own interests and feelings, there are plenty of kids who likewise think that people’s lives aren’t as important as their own interests and feelings. Marco Rubio would rather win an election than save the lives of children. Nikolas Cruz is a reflection of that: putting his emotional needs above the lives of others (far more viscerally, but not more literally). At this point guns are a symbol of political corruption.
If nothing is done about guns, something else has to be done. But if that thing doesn’t involve restricting guns in some way, it had better work really well.
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[whynotboth.gif]
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Yup. Arming teachers will definitely mean less school shootings. /s
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You stay classy, Dalton!
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No. It might have been intended that way, but the penalty for bringing an unloaded gun and no ammunition to school with no intent to use that gun is usually harsher than the penalty for committing non-gun crimes that have actual victims.
And regardless of what it was intended to say, the school-to-prison pipeline ends up saying “fuck the poors, especially their children, especially the black ones”. That’s the lasting legacy of Columbine.
This is the strongest argument I know of for stricter gun control measures.
Interestingly enough I heard it from 2nd amendment supporters (specifically Mister44, right here on BB) long before I heard it from anyone else. I’ve researched it independently and I agree; restrictions on gun ownership should result in fewer suicides.
If you ever figure out why not, do be sure to let me know. I don’t understand it.
You’re the one who wrote the position as an “if/then” statement:
That phrasing kind of makes it sound like “I’m not ruling out the possibility of enacting gun legislation that would reduce harm, I’m just saying we need to try literally everything else first.”
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When I read about the school-to-prison pipeline, though, guns are almost never mentioned, and zero-tolerance policies mean that kids can be suspended and expelled for extremely minor infractions way less than bringing a gun to school. The ACLU page you link doesn’t mention guns. I don’t think overreaction against guns in schools is any significant part of that pipeline. Instead, it comes from a general sense that the real problem with violence in schools is that some kids are just violent.
That’s what we hear from legislators who talk about “evil”. Evil didn’t walk into a school with a gun, a 19-year-old did. But Americans are sold on the idea that we can get rid of the kids who are the bad ones. Who gets identified as “bad”? Of course is kids who are black, who have disabilities, who are poor.
I don’t know, maybe the whole thing has nothing to do with school shootings anyway. The Gun-Free Schools Act was 5 years before Colombine. The policy of mass incarceration of Americans really began in the 1980s, and the school-to-prison pipeline is probably just an outgrowth of that that would have happened with or without school shootings. I mean, young black men in America are funneled into prison at an incredible rate, the people in charge of these policies probably don’t want to wait until they are 18 to get started.
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I answered a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife question. Carefully. We both know perfectly well that it is harder to buy a gun than a bottle of cold medicine.
But since I’m not a pro-gun or anti-gun person, my sentences will be taken out of context and deconstructed, my words will be contorted and twisted so that I can be force-fitted into the mold of a caricature bad guy.
I get this treatment from both sides, although on bOINGbOING I generally only get it from the anti-gun people, since poorly behaved pro-gun people don’t survive on this board.
Here, I’ll do the other side for you.
“That phrasing kind of makes it sound like you support keeping any other solution off the agenda until gun prohibition is successful.”
