Originally published at: Texas will hand out free DNA kits so you can ID your child after the next school massacre | Boing Boing
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More evidence that the Texas GOP is firmly in the hands of Moloch worshipping death cultists.
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I remember our whole class getting fingerprinted at school once when I was young but it never occurred to me until many years later why the school would need to have our biometrics on file. (And that was long before school shootings became commonplace.)
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If you put this in a dark satire of current events, I suspect it would come across as too broad and unbelievable. But somehow it’s reality?!?
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They tried literally everything else to keep kids safe already and none of it worked.
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I have more confidence in the students coming up with a better plan than any elected official.
This could be the next “science fair” competition where these proposals are evaluated.
(I believe that the foreign exchange students from Israel/Palestine/Ukraine/(any war torn region) would win this hands-down as they are more accustom to this new reality.)
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How about we have Texas politicians submit their DNA and fingerprints first. Once they’re in the system, I wonder if some cold cases would be closeable?
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I remember our whole class getting fingerprinted at school once when I was young but it never occurred to me until many years later why the school would need to have our biometrics on file. (And that was long before school shootings became commonplace.)
I remember that they did this back during the kidnapping craze.
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A related topic I’ve been thinking about for a while but have been reluctant to bring up because it’s obviously a tough subject:
Clearly something major needs to change with our country’s attitude about these horrific schools shootings if we want to enact real change and reform to gun laws. Too many people seem to find the issue easy to ignore. I wonder if a grieving parent insisting on having an open-casket funeral for their murdered, mangled child would help wake people up and move the needle on this, much as Mamie Till’s brave insistence on the open casket viewing of her son Emmet (as well as her subsequent activism) helped force the country to pay attention to the horrors of lynching.
I certainly don’t like thinking about the prospect of seeing those images all over the news, but that’s the point. If we were all forced to witness just a portion of the horror and grief that these parents are being subjected to maybe something would finally change. Seems like it might be worth a try, anyway, if one of the (far, far too many) families decided to go this way.
Same. Decades ago when I was in elementary school, I remember being fingerprinted in case of abduction. I’m not even in the US.
In hindsight it was pretty morbid to think about the police focus being fingerprinting all the kids on the very unlikely chance that they would need to identify bodies.
The parent’s DNA would be sufficient to determine whether a victim was their kid. The chilling part is that is not enough; the problem this addresses is when you have two kids who were both mangled into unrecognizability and need to determine which is which.
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How did they get this past the “the government is tracking you from birth to death” nutballs?
Identify the people killed by the guns, not the idiots who shouldn’t have had them. That’s Governor Abbott for you.
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The kind of thing that dystopian fiction never comes up with because it’s both too bleak and too absurd.
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I suspect that the moment they did so, they’d be getting death threats from right-wingers screaming about how they’re part of the conspiracy and their dead child was just a dummy covered in ketchup that ANTIFA is using to take away their sacred 2nd Amendment rights. Remember Sandy Hook. It’s not that those on the right aren’t aware of the horrors of mass shootings and dead schoolchildren, it’s that they literally don’t care and have decided murdered children are an acceptable price to pay as long as they get to keep their death machines.
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That was absolutely the case for Mamie Till as well. And I’ll bet she anticipated that reaction before making her decision, but did so anyway.
I’m certainly under no illusions that a majority of nut jobs would suddenly reverse their positions on gun regulation, but I still think it could make a difference. Humans react very differently when presented with emotional images vs. facts and statistics. Boatloads of desperate Syrian migrants were routinely drowning in 2015 but it was a single viral photo of a drowned boy on the beach that helped stir the international community to dramatically increase donations to refugee support organizations and get some governments to change their migrant policies.
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Like much GOP legislation these days, this comes across to me as intentionally hurtful = attacking the victim = vicariously participating in the crime after the fact via identification with the perp = intentionally extending the original crime by means of law.
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