Turns out a rifle designed for military use fucks people up a lot more than a handgun.
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Statistically speaking, the physical and emotional stress of being hyper-vigilant 24/7 while waiting for a boogieman to come for them is much more likely to punch their tickets than an actual boogieman is.
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The NRA will amend the following platitude, “All it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” to read as follows: “All it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is two guys, no wait… three guys. What? OK, four guys. No? OK, wait a sec.”
The NRA will amend the aforementioned platitude to read, “All it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is five good guys each with his own gun.”
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“Our chief weapon is surprise. And fear. Our TWO chief weapons …”
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Fine, I’ll stop selling guns. I wasn’t selling any in the first place.
No, I know what you mean. But here’s the point - to the hairy guy in the video, I am a pussy because I don’t walk around with my piece with one in the chamber (see - I am trying to manage the language). You have to change how they think. And it has been done before, once. In about 1840, both the UK and the US managed to stop duelling. This was seen as an aristocratic thing: if you were a gentleman, and you called out another gentleman, then you could settle any disagreement. This was costing us too many valuable people. There was some legal action, but the main change was in the perception: if you won a duel, you weren’t seen as bring ‘right’, but just an entitled git who could afford to spend his days at an expensive school for the duelling arts, where his opponent (who lost) had hitherto had better uses for his time. So, if you lost, you lost; but if you won, you still lost your reputation.
I don’t think I can rid the USA of all ts guns, even if I stopped selling them (see above). But the main thing is to stop the mindset that leads to this. If someone wants to harm people with guns, we cannot watch them every second of their day, but we can take away the glamour. If they lose, they lose; if they win then the robot dog shoots them in the kneecaps and they also loose.
Okay, it may not be a great idea, but I think it does the right thing in the mind games; where, taking on the robo-macho “You Have Five Seconds To Comply” droid (not your post, I know) manifestly does not. If you have a better plan, let’s hear it.
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I thought we all understood that the most important thing about cops is that they fear for their life.
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The gun nuts are using the argument “if someone was shooting at your classroom, would you rather be the teacher who can shoot back or the teacher who can’t?”
But that’s not the right question to ask, because 99.999999% of the time (give or take a decimal point) nobody is actively shooting at your classroom. So for the vast, vast, VAST majority of the time the presence of a gun serves only to provide potential harm with zero potential to provide benefit.
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OMG, that’s awesome.
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This is a good illustration of the problem with the “just put armed guards in the schools” approach. Advocates focus on what they think SHOULD happen in a “good guy with a gun” scenario instead of what ACTUALLY happens when there’s a “good guy with a gun” scenario.
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What the NRA are really upset about is that Peterson didn’t become a martyr for their ‘good guy with a gun’ dead cult.
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The last time I returned to the USA, there were all these new signs on the road about a new law making it totally illegal to just keep driving like normal when there was a cop on the side of the road, such as when said cop had pulled another driver over.
This was because a couple of cops had been killed by car accidents while on the side of the road.
So now everyone had lost the right to drive the speed limit, and were expected to pitch in for the cops’ safety, and drive super slowly and only pass when able to give a very wide berth to the cop on the side of the road.
I heard no one exhort that in Stalinist Russia and nazi Germany, new road safety measures we legislated immediately preceding genocide.
Turns out that Americans are happy to accept inconveniences and impositions to their rights if safety is involved.
Unless the risk is guns.
I know this comment is sort of a sideline to your very well documented point about relative risk on the job, but it got me thinking about how society solves problems expediently when there’s no gun lobby in the middle.
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To me, that law just codified what was already a best practice for driving. Where I live it applies to all emergency vehicles; police, fire, ambulance, etc. You definitely have a point that it’s an example of how risk reduction should work, and doesn’t in the case of guns.
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They had also eliminated parallel parking; these common sense best practices of which you speak surely come from some other state, right?
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My wife’s cousin’s husband–let’s just call him a cousin–used to be a “school resource officer” until recently, which is what Peterson was. It was sort of a lateral promotion from regular police duties: he was still sworn, but he didn’t carry a gun on his person and he mostly worked out of an office. They really liked him for the job–have been begging him to come back–because he’s just good with kids in general and seemed to have a knack for the whole “at-risk youth” thing. (I sort of hope he’ll take the job, because I can absolutely believe he’d set a few wayward youths on a better path, but he’s also sort of a fuckup otherwise.)
Anyway, there are three theories about how that job came to exist. There’s the official story (keep our kids safe), the more likely story (school-to-prison pipeline), and the generally positive way it worked out in my cousin’s case. I don’t think his situation is the most common, though.
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There’s parallel parking all over.
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Anyone who joins the police force, swears an oath, trains, is given a weapon to defend themselves and others, yet stands idly by while a psycopath kills children, should at the very least quit his job and do something else.
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good god.
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Don’t assume I think the others are not underpaid as well or are working in conditions which should be illegal.
Perhaps the definition of ‘potential’ is avoiding you. However, as noted in another post, the fact that there are other more dangerous jobs, doesn’t negate the point.
As it happens, I think the pay and working conditions for fishermen needs to attention, too.
