When I was in school, backpacks were a favored place to hide weapons.
Big fat maybe on those. None of those would have stopped the Santa Fe shooting, Sandy Hook, or Columbine. And as we saw with Cruz, none of that helps if authorities won’t do their jobs. They went out of their way to not charge him with a crime, so background checks won’t do much. The mental illness change requires authorities to bother to register them as mentally ill. As we saw with another shooter in Texas, authorities couldn’t even put an actual criminal on the background check database!
On the other hand, clear backbacks DEFINITELY mean kids can’t put guns or knives in their backpacks. Metal detectors can prevent them from bringing them in at all.
All guns, yes. That’s not on the table. At all. As a matter of fact, 90% of gun control advocates swear up and down, on their mothers’ graves, that they don’t want to take your guns. Now Ar-15s, that would save some lives at the margins. Not all school shootings involved AR-15s(Columbine, Virginia Tech and Santa Fe did not), and it’s safe to assume that without an AR-15, Cruz and Lanza would have just armed themselves with pistols and shotguns. So maybe a 20-50% reduction in the casualty rate? Worth doing, and I actually support every mainstream proposed gun control measure. But none of them save as many lives as other proposals, or even other priorities(like raising the driving age to 21).
This is not meant to be an insult. It’s meant to be a learning experience. Blaming guns is easy. Addressing the other issues that led to the shooting, as well as the other pathologies that kill teenagers by the bucketload, actually involve limiting the liberties of teenagers. And that’s when they find out they value liberty more than anything. Which is as it should be. That’s what I WANT them to do. IT’s how they become good American citizens. They learn that security is not worth giving up your liberties for.
Serious question: if the biggest problem at schools wasn’t school kids doing mass shootings, but Al Qaeda terrorists doing mass shootings and bombings, would high school kids support a Patriot Act style response, or not?
There are other ways of hiding weapons. There’s an entire industry devoted to it in fact. Unless you are expecting students to come to school naked, wear transparent clothing, or submit to daily strip searches, clear backpacks will do no good.
Even if someone was hiding a weapon in their backpack, it is not as though the are not aware that they need to find a new place to hide it.
Can we insult the student who killed the other students? You know, the one who actually committed the crime? If the answer is yes then the next step is to blame that student and all those who let him slip through the Grand Canyon sized crack.
True. That’s where metal detectors come in. But the backpack issue is equivalent to say, age requirements to buy a gun. It just means you have to buy on on the street or steal a friends’ or parents’ gun. It’s only a mild deterrent. But it does help on the margins. One thing that does help and that the government is doing now is crack down on the black market and other illegal sales like straw purchasers and people who lie on background check forms. Prosecutions for gun crimes are up 25% under Trump.
And the reason that the local authorities were afraid to do their jobs is because if they had taken the guns away form this kid, then there would have been an uproar in the 2a community. Some of the proposed measures are specifically to make it easier to do all these things.
Sandy Hook and the Santa Fe shooting would have been less likely if people were actually required to be responsible with their guns, and not allow their children to access to them.
You are correct that it is safe to assume, in a country where nearly anyone can get nearly any gun, that restricting one or two types of guns, they will just pick another one.
No, it is meant to be an insult. The only learning experience that they could possibly receive from this is that the people in charge of their safety would rather play games than actually do anything to protect their safety. The learning experience that is intended, the message being sent, is to not dare complain about their classmates being gunned down around them.
I don’t see how that is a serious question. In your hypothetical, schools are being targeted by a foreign terrorist organization, and you are asking if a Patriot Act style response, which was a bunch of security theater that would not have prevented 9/11 or other terrorist attacks would have been supported?
The ridiculousness of the pro-gun lobby’s arguments becomes clear when they’re reduced to complaining about too many doors and windows in schools. It’s apparently preferable for students to die in a building fire for lack of exit possibilities than to try to do something to keep shooters from getting guns to bring to the school and kill people with.
That’s a patently ridiculous and sanctimonious argument. Cars are inherently useful for getting students to and from school, extracurricular activities, jobs, and so on. Cars are highly regulated, and operating one requires registration, insurance, training, and a license. If you’re concerned about the possibility of getting into a car accident, you can choose to avoid the road altogther.
I am in no way against the tightening of gun restrictions, mandating safe storage, and possibly even some kind of age limit. (Not in favor of anything involving the word “ban”.) All that stuff could make a dent in the school shooting problem, a sizable one.
But I do feel like I’m starting to also place more weight on the “slipping through the cracks” argument with these guys who are clearly troubled, throwing off red flags left and right, in many cases being investigated for serious crimes, and nothing being done about it. It’s really starting to piss me off. I really started feeling this way after witnessing Scott Israel’s public performance…I feel like that guy really dropped the ball in Parkland, and it seems like people also dropped the ball with this latest asshole in Santa Fe.
The cracks that these guys keep slipping through…those cracks need a good sealant, and lots of it.
The problem is is that it is really up to local law enforcment to make these calls, and local law enforemcent, by its nature, is pretty varialbe.
More than once a week these days, I hear about some student in a local school who said something either to other students or on social media that gets them charged with the felony of “inducing panic”.
My understanding on the kid that got charged with a felony was that he snapchatted “17 dead, I could do better” or some such. Kid isn’t troubled, has friends, gets good grades, his teachers like him, he’s involved in clubs and organizations. He just made a really bad joke in really bad taste, and is charged with a felony for it.
While obviously there were under reactions to some of these kids in the recent shootings, over reacting does not actually improve the situation.
Maybe I’ve missed something about the Santa Fe shooter. He was on the football team, a dance team, and had been on the honor roll. Yes, he wore a trench coat and boots, and he made a couple of weird posts recently. But if there’s a crack he fell through, I’m not seeing it.
Far as I can tell the Santa Fe shooter was far more low key and his red flags subtle. In retrospect there are signs that seem clear, but apparently despite some idiosyncrasies many folks that knew him were surprised by his rampage. He wasn’t exceptionally creepy to most - more garden variety oddball, he was a good student, he was on athletic teams, he had no criminal history. The bullying is sadly par for the course, the Nazi paraphernalia and the like flew under the radar because barring a truly massive police state it is impossible to monitor every teenager’s online presence 24/7.
“One of the frustrating things in the early status of this case is that unlike Parkland, unlike Sutherland Springs, there weren’t those kinds of warning signs,” Abbott said “Here the red flag warnings were either nonexistent or very imperceptible.”
You’re going to get some kids like him that slip through the cracks because the number of disaffected outsider teens is HUGE. Figuring out which one is likely to snap is not always going to be so easy.
Since you are hung up on cars, you should know that in California new teenage drivers are severely restricted. For instance, they cannot drive with other kids by themselves without an adult being present. I believe there are curfews. I believe this has cut down the accident rate.
Cars of course have keys so that it is more difficult for unauthorized people to use them. You’ll remember the giant snit the NRA had a while ago about guns with locks. That would have stopped the Santa Fe shooting. Are you in favor of those?
Again, how does a clear backpack stop the transport of weapons?
A kid comes to school and there’s a metal detector at the door. How does the clear backpack or the metal detector stop a kid from bringing a gun to school or stop students being shot, stabbed, run over, blown up or any other method of murder.
It cuts down on the accident rate of law abiding teenagers.
It cuts down the number of teenagers who are driving in dangerous conditions, and gives cops a reason to stop them, which they wouldn’t have otherwise.
By the way this article says that while accident rates for teen drivers covered by the laws have fallen, rates for those who have come out from under the laws have risen, possibly because cutting driving at 17 makes 18 year old drivers relatively more inexperience.
Which is what I’d suspect would happen if your raised the age to 21.
I agree that a clear backpack won’t do much good. But a metal detector? You can’t keep a kid from shooting from outside the perimeter, or from killing the guards, but it might be hard to sneak the gun or knife in. Or probably explosives.
And I was unaware that kids getting run over in the classroom has been a problem.
Are you beaming them directly into the building? If not then they’re converging on a location that is dedicated to providing soft targets.
Society is based on civil behavior. Look at how easy it is for kids to riot in a mall and vandalize the place for fun and profit. We rely on civility. The mindset behind the disregard for life is the problem.
Does this really happen all that often though? I can’t remember the last time any incident like that made national news.
It’s always easy for anyone anywhere to riot under the “right” circumstances, it has been ever thus, there’s nothing you can do if a mob of people collectively lose their shit…other than defend yourself with a weapon, which is one valid reason to own one. But I don’t really see the connection between that scenario and school shootings.