The same is true of “Texas Tower Sniper” Charles Whitman, who in 1966 after murdering his mother and wife perpetrated what remained the deadliest school shooting on record up till the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The mother of Columbine school shooter Eric Harris was also a full-time homemaker. ISTM that relying on this sort of “old-fashioned family values” influence to prevent mass shootings is a fairytale.
Yes, we need to do a better job of confronting social problems like toxic aggression and mental illness. But plenty of countries that aren’t doing a better job than we are in those areas nonetheless have nowhere near our number of mass murders. “Family values” and social problems are obviously not the only or biggest pieces of the puzzle here.
If, out of a million parents, 999,999 raised good kids thru old fashioned values but one produced a mass murderer nonetheless, then that’s…a Columbine right there.
If video games, modern degeneracy, etc. were causing kids to act violently, wouldn’t it be the case that kids were getting more violent and schools were getting less safe? In reality, kids are less violent and schools are safer. (There’s also a section about how flashy new school security measures are probably pointless, and possibly even harmful.)
I expect some arms manufacturers to start producing and selling versions of the WW 2 German Krummlauf with periscope and bent barrel for shooting around curves and corners.
I believe the technical term for this idea is “stupid”. You have an order of magnitude higher chance of being killed by the school bus that takes you to or from school than being killed by a school shooter. So investing money in making school architecture more “tactical” is better spent on actually teaching its occupants things like probability and statistics.
The amazing amount of media violence from television, movies, games, and the internet has given you the perception that society is becoming more violent, when the reality is that isn’t true:
No, guns themselves aren’t the problem, and neither are assholes and neither are inadequate protection of potential victims. The problem is the *combination *of guns and assholes and inadequate protection. Unless you can offer a plausible and effective approach to solving the asshole problem (and you can’t; there isn’t one), there are only two parts of the problem available to address, aren’t there? Architecture, AKA surrender, is one, as this story exemplifies. What’s the other?
It doesn’t reduce the intent, but it can reduce the ability.
You’re never going to eliminate intent without mind control, which would be somewhat more of a disturbing rights violation than gun control, to my mind.
Given the extreme rarity of shootings in schools, these features must be either extremely cheap or extremely effective to be worth the cost. So, has there been an independent showing that these new design features work at all, let alone to a degree that would justify the extra expense? Or is some grifter just padding their bills because people in the throes of a moral panic* are easy marks?
*Gun violence is a real problem, but schools are pretty much the last places in need of solutions to it. Kids at school are just about the safest people in the country from violent crime.
I’m not against the design idea. Making doors harder to breach is a cost effective idea. I just think the curving hallway misses the mark. Even if it doesn’t add any cost. It doesn’t begin to isolate anybody close to a shooter. There’s no mention in the article about testing it. We do active shooter drills all the time. Where does this fit in? We have an entire military complex that plays war games to simulate stuff like this. Take the idea and have at it with a mockup with all the ideas you can think of and lets see where the money should be spent.
Looking at the issue there is an increase in the number of shooters. We can’t make guns go away nor are guns the only avenue of mass murder. We could spend a million dollars on safety for each student in school to protect them from guns and someone will just run them over outside the building or make an IED and blow them up or an infinite number of ways to kill.
It’s the intent of the person in a mass killing that does the damage. Focusing on one possible tool or method doesn’t improve the likely outcome.
Something has changed to increase the mental instability of children in my lifetime. If you disagree with my assessment of why that happened it doesn’t change the fact that it happened. I think we’re a product of our environment and that environment has changed.
