I attend a branch of Central Washington University co-located on the Highline campus. I didn’t have classes today but I was watching with a horrible sick feeling as the lockdown alerts were coming into my mailbox. I was emailing with one of my former professors who said people in our building were pretty rattled. Thank goodness no one was hurt, but police from at least four cities were mobilized and one direction of I-5 was shut down for a time.
Of course, the human cost is incalculable and it by far the greatest, but these other things have high societal cost, as well. In so many ways, we pay a very high price for our gun culture.
The gun-free zone bullshit is a distraction. People who want to carry guns will carry them whether there’s a sign or not.
Republicans have been cutting education budgets for years. We don’t have enough teachers, and the one we do have are underpaid. We don’t have enough books, supplies, and non-core/elective classes are being cut out of the curriculum. We have crowded, dirty, unsafe schools.
And the Republican solution to school shootings is to spend money we don’t have on more armed security guards, training teachers to shoot, and arming teachers. Funny how they didn’t have the money for school books, but it’ll appear magically for something involving guns.
In February 2017, the SCROTUS signed a bill that rescinded an Obama-era regulation barring those with severe mental health issues from being able to purchase firearms
Trump’s “budget” also slashed money for school safety/security.
The Republicans have been calling teachers incompetent lazy union thugs for decades, and suddenly the solution is to give them guns? Cognitive dissonance rules the day with those guys.
The advantage Republicans have is that their followers are idiots. They can contradict themselves from one day to another and the idiots won’t know or care. Their current leader is a habitual chronic liar, and his base doesn’t even notice. No one should be surprised that these moronic cretins think that the reason the most gun-infested country in the civilized world has so much gun violence is that it doesn’t have enough guns.
Not to belabor the point, but the U.S. was the most gun-infested country in the civilized world in 1960 yet there weren’t mass shootings in schools then.
My first post and all but looking at your posting history it seems like you thought fucking a paper towel cardboard tube was an effective method of defending a child molester. Starving Artist, you’re clearly a fucking idiot. Your time is better spent licking a window somewhere aboard a short bus.
Why the fuck do any of you fucks take this fucking idiot seriously?
Maybe the problem is that our leaders’ thoughts and prayers are not effective enough? What if we elected people with really really powerful thoughts and prayers?
No one at all, including people off the board. Starving Artist is a useless, impotent fuckwit yelling at clouds and getting sputteringly angry at news reports he can’t understand. Laughing at a dumbass on a message board doesn’t mean that we take his 500-page manifesto about how Jane Fonda and Maynard G. Krebs ruined the perfection of 1950s America seriously.
