But you turned out OK…
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Prisons are what we do best[1]! Why not go with what we know?
- worst.
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Holy crap! 
Uh, I think you have some Stockholm syndrome going on there. That’s all extremely horrible. At around the same time you describe, I was in high school in a conservative part of Canada, and all of that would have been unimaginable. We had no “security”, no dress code, no rules about backpacks. Bringing a knife to school would get you a talkin’-to by the principal and you’d be asked to leave it at home. That’s about it.
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Back in the mid 90s1999 high schools were banning trenchcoats after Columbine. There were also bag restrictions like you had to lock your bag in the locker and only carry the book you needed to each class.
After September 11, police and bomb squads were regularly called for backpacks left lying around. Someone at our local university called the police for a backpack left by the side of a bike path, probably 200 meters from any building or any place where crowds would gather. Dumbest place ever for a bomb. Obviously someone on a bike stopped to talk to a friend or something and set their backpack down then forgot it when the rode off, but “you can’t be too safe”
So yeah, the war on backpacks has been going on for decades.
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The only thing that can stop a bad student with a backpack is…a good administration that bans backpacks?
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The horses wouldn’t keep getting out of the barn if there WASN’T a barn. Talk about creative problem solving… 
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That would have to be the early 2000s, as Columbine was in 1999. I was well out of school by the time they started cracking down on goths, as I graduated in the middle of the 90s.
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Ok, so instead of addressing the root cause of this issue, they put a feel good band-aid that doesn’t actually address any problems - and may create new ones. Sounds about right.
I did a google search, but didn’t really find any more details on the incident.
an emotionally struggling 13-year-old girl
So what does that mean? Someone suicidal? Someone who is being bullied relentlessly? Was this something completely out of the blue - or has there been a history of problems/complaints that the school has largely ignored for years?
Where did she get the gun? Probably unsecured family member. That warrants possibly child endangerment charges.
I think the solution is better school counseling and an actual proactive approach to the problems leading up to this. Identify the issue and make sure other kids aren’t in the same boat being ignored. And then follow up with a send home on safe firearm storage, including information on suicide prevention and resources if someone is struggling (even if that wasn’t the issue, that certainly is AN issue nationwide.)
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I wouldn’t call it Stockholm syndrome so much as just acceptance of just how normalized this is here. It’s “well this is what you get when you desegregate” combined with intentional desensitization of cop/prison culture. And… now the only changes I’ve seen locally being made are that it’s becoming illegal to connect any of it to racism because… it’s connected to racism.
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I went to HS in the mid-90s in a conservative area in the US. Students could dress up like cowboys if they wanted to, but if your skin was brown and you wore anything that might possibly be construed as gang colors (i.e. clothes) then the principal and/or school cop would give you a hard time. No gun precautions, but they would bring the dogs through to sniff for drugs periodically, including MJ. Something something in loco parentis = no civil rights or some shit.
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Maybe banning backpacks isn’t a bad idea, I mean, reducing their weight at least is a relief for children’s backs.
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/weighing-school-backpacks/
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Less guns has yet to be tried.
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Damn, I could have sworn it was when I was a senior in high school, but I guess not. Thanks.
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Yeah, events like that can sometimes run together as you move away from them in time… welcome to aging… population, all of us!
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Yah, I lived in the US for 25 years, and my one big takeaway from that was that it’s always about racism. Some of the patterns take longer (for an ignorant person like me) to see, but every bizarre thing that happens in America always goes back to racism, it seems.
I hope for every Americans’ sake that it doesn’t continue to be normalized. What you guys are describing as a public school sounds like madness to me.
I recently had a conversation with an American friend and the incredible creepiness of the Pledge Of Allegiance came up. She was shocked that I was shocked that America forces kids to say this stupid and creepy thing every day. That’s page one of the fascism playbook, but she was shocked that most countries don’t do shit like that, or even that I thought it was weird.
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Next up; the War on Fanny Packs.
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