Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/19/sandy-hook-promise-releases-br.html
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“But…but…what about my gun collection?”
It’s an effective ad that will probably go viral, which means the NRA and Alex Jones and every ammosexual out there is going to pull out every disingenuous and denialist argument to condemn it.
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“Breakfast is the most important meal for kids. How will I cook bacon without my machine gun?” -(Possibly Ted Cruz)
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One of the tragic outcomes of the school shootings is the terrorizing of children, too young to understand the real risks, by conducting lockdown drills etc. It’s no like the bogeyman, where adults can provide comfort. Quite opposite, authority figures are telling children that they are in mortal danger. It’s awful.
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What a fucked up world (country) we live in.
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less than a dozen people die each year due to EEE. The government takes action.
less than a dozen deaths due to vaping. The government takes action.
How many school shootings have happened? How many injured and dead? And the GOP sits on its ass and refuses to do a THING.
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The GOP has a bad history of uneven responses.
4000 dead in a terrorist attack on the US soil? Let’s send thousands of troops to their death while they kill tens of thousands of foreign civilians in the wrong country.
EDIT: I meant to say “hundreds of thousands”, not “tens of thousands”. And if you whittle that down to a % of population (where Iraq had and order of magnitude less people), it’s even more disgusting.
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My 11 y/o daughter has this as her monogram. We live in mosquito-infested NE, so maybe that wasn’t the best idea.
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It is an effective - and in the end, heartbreaking - PSA. Naturally the people who should learn from it will ignore it, mock it, and attack it. But it is literally reality for our schools now. Kids and teachers are being told to do these things, because the GOP refuses to address the real problem: guns.
EDIT: I came home to find my wife crying last night and really out of sorts. She’s a high-school English teacher and had just watched the PSA. It hit her hard because it’s real for her. This is her norm.
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“But mass shootings are rare, so gun control is disproportionate to the problem.”
You mean in trying to deal with one “minor” problem we can reduce the occurrence of all the homicides and suicides and accidents committed with firearms as well? Great!
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you can even compare it to other bigger problems as well as see that there is never going to be a 100% solution but we can do things to make it better. take driving a car for example. Look at Drunk driving laws and programs, seat belt usage, airbags, car seats, and all the other ways we make driving safer. people were dying and we did something to help try to fix that. do people still die in car accidents, of course. could it be worse if we didn’t try to fix it…absolutely.
With guns, someone literally shot a bunch of GOP congresspeople and they were just like…whelp, that was bad. back to work. nothing to see here.
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Nothing changes because every time someone proposes something simple, like enhanced background checks or maybe not selling magazines that hold dozens of rounds, gunhumpers lose their dang minds, imagining jackbooted thugs confiscating their precious firearms. Their one-track minds are permanently mounted on slippery slopes. Any change, no matter how small, dumps them right into “molon labe” mode, which is the opposite of helpful.
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I have to be honest, it’s slightly confusing to me because there is the vicious sarcasm directed at back to school advertising and then there is the message at the end reflecting the Know The Signs idea, which, unfortunately, strikes me as a good idea. I’m probably being thick but mostly it just makes me more gripped about school shootings and do I need that?
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It’s just the cost of freedom! (In this context the freedom to sell all sorts of guns all willy nilly without consequence. We can’t get in the way of business! Supply Side Baby Jesus would cry.)
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I went to one of the more violent schools in my state. We had a significant gang issue, lots of big fights, and they were talking about building a police substation on campus the year after I graduated. Yet over four years in a student body of 2,500, all our deaths were suicide or accidental; not a single gun death.
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And yet we seem to always do it. Previous generations hid under their desks to protect themselves from bombs that would wipe out all life.
Why do we want to terrorize our children?
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one of the things i like about the school district i work for (town pop. 30000+) is that lockdown drills are announced as such and the students know that this is practice. admittedly, it is practice for a depressing reason but they are not being tricked into thinking every drill is possibly the last day of their lives. i worked for a while in another district that took the other approach and it ruined the students for the rest of the day.
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Wait…there are school districts that do UNANNOUNCED or SURPRISE active shooter drills??? That is effed up.
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in my kid’s district they tell them it is another way we practice what to do when things don’t go as planned and bad stuff happens. Most days we don’t have fires at school but if we do, you need to know what to do, where to go, who to tell, etc. Same for bus evacuation drills. Bus accidents are very rare, but when they happen you need to know how to safely get off the bus. Sometimes something bad happens at school and you need to either leave the building quickly or get back into the building quickly. they say sometimes it may be that there is bad weather, or a “bad person” is trying to hurt people. and this is what we do. they have practiced both hide in place (lock down) and evacuations (get to the nearest safe building). Mind you I am talking about K-5 here. I doubt my son knows about school shooters at 7 years old, but my almost 10 4th grader probably does. Neither have seemed traumatized by it at all.
I am more traumatized by it, but the district seems to be doing the best to keep them safe without being overly aggressive (i.e. armed teachers, metal detectors, etc).
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Yes, of course, your school is safe, so problem solved! The fact that there have been more mass shootings in the US than days this year is entirely a problem that only affects other people.
Lucky you! Virtue achieved!
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