“Screaming children”? :rolleyes:
There are around 125,000 schools in the US. We’ve had, what, 3 big massacres since the start of the century? Sandy Hook, Parkland, Santa Fe. I didn’t count Virginia Tech because I don’t think university counts as what people think of as “school shootings” and protecting our kids, and I doubt colleges would have a serious proposal for this sort of security. Sure, there are others where someone brought a gun in and shot a person or two, but it’s the big ones that get months of media coverage that really drive these proposals. 28 for Newtown, 17 for Pankland, 10 for Santa Fe. Let’s go back to Columbine if you want and add another 15. 70 people (mostly kids, but some adults) killed in two decades years. Almost 3 people a year.
So we hire 3 cops per school, call it a pay, benefits, pension, all that stuff - call it $75,000 a year. And we give every school $500,000 to beef up their physical security. That’s a startup cost of $62,500,000,000 - and an ongoing cost of $9,375,000,000 per year to harden our schools.
Okay, so it’s not fair to only count massacres, even though that’s what motivate this law, because the hardening would save kids from ordinary instances of murder or small shootings. So from here, I’ll count all the gun homicides in any sort of elementary, middle, or high school since Columbine (inclusive). I tried to only include ones that would prevented by screening or other security inside those schools - so if someone else shot someone at a football game, for example, I didn’t include that. That page’s definition of a “school shooting” is extremely loose. For instance, it includes a kid shot by the Beltway sniper on his way to school, a drive by near a school that happened to hit a kid who wasn’t actually at school, a drug deal gone bad in a college dormitory, and a man firing a pellet gun at a school bus which didn’t even crack a window as “school shootings”
I got 92 people killed within a school by a gun that could’ve been prevented by perfect security. About 8 less if you don’t count the killer taking themselves out at the end, or police shooting them, as part of the death toll. Remove another 4 if someone coming to school and shooting themselves with no intention of harming anyone else doesn’t strike you as a school shooting. But let’s say I miscounted and round it up to 100.
So we have 100 deaths in 19 years, a bit over 5 deaths per year.
If I told you, that, say, vending machines falling over, or heating equipment malfunctions, or swim team meets, or slipping on a wet floor killed 5 people per year in schools out of tens of millions of students and staff, would you be shocked? Would you view it as a bloodbath that puts us on par with liberia? Or would you say “huh, that sounds about right I guess” and not really give a shit? Would you be willing to spend $92 billion up front and $10 billion a year to prevent those 5 deaths if they were from those incidents?
What if we could save hundreds of thousands of kids with that hundred billion dollars by investing it in other ways, like health care? Or improving their lives by providing free college to the whole nation? Would you still want to spend it on securing schools?
And what if we do successfully secure our schools, so people who want to go out in a blaze of glory start shooting up train stations or movie theaters or concerts or daycare centers or a thousand other places? Do we secure those, too? Do we chase whatever the last tragedy was to ensure that a shooting at that particular venue doesn’t happen again?
And I know this sounds like I’m about to say “so of course just ban the guns, that protects everywhere!” but that’s another debate. Suffice to say, I think that the same thing will happen in that case too. Oh, so we ban a certain feature from guns. Okay, so people use other guns to shoot up schools. So then someone on antidepressants shoots up a movie theater, and we restrict people on antidepressants from owning guns. And we keep chasing the last tragedy there too while it doesn’t really slow people down all that much.
The reality is that 5 people dying per year for any reason is not some horrible epidemic that threatens our existence. I know, that sounds heartless, but you feel the same way about literally hundreds or thousands of ways to die that kill a few people per year. You wouldn’t want to rearrange society or pay hundreds of billions of dollars to save people choking themselves to death while masturbatng or dying from their riding lawn mower tipping over either. It’s tragic that kids get shot in schools, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a tiny tiny slice of even gun violence, let alone all untimely deaths. Any massive changes we undertake in our society in response to them would be far disproportionate to the actual problem.
Someone I know, an Australian, was going off on how stupid Americans were because of the school shootings. I asked him what percentage of schools do you think have had a big school shooting this year. He guessed 10-15%. Many orders of magnitude too high. People don’t understand how big the world is. They can only really relate on a small scale - things they know, things they experienced. But they get bad news from all over the world. So they have this idea in their head of how big the world is, or how big the country is, and it’s far too small. But they get all the most spectacular bad news from all of it. So it gives them a false sense of scale - they think things that affect a miniscule percentage of people are commonplace and are likely to affect them and people they know. They can’t properly place risk in context.
They can only follow narratives - and “omg, a bunch of kids got murdered!” is one of the most horrifying narratives we can throw in front of people. And so we think the problem of school shootings is far, far bigger than it actually is, and so proposals to fix this problem perceived to be an existential threat to our country are far too costly and far reaching by any sort of logical, dispassionate utilitarian analysis.
That’s my point.
I think endorsing a narrative that repealing the 2nd Amendment is “impossible” is a mistake. I think after every school shooting we should be driving home the point that the majority of Americans have chosen to value their own right to own weapons over the safety of society as a whole. School shootings are one of the direct consequences of that choice, and there is only one robust solution - to make a different choice.
Perhaps in the U.S. the majority will never make that different choice. But a first step is to hold people accountable for the consequences of the choices they have made.
I think it’s counterproductive to engage with the bullshit distractions about mental health, school security, violent video games, or the preposterous notion that it’s just as easy to kill people with a knife or a car as a gun. Shortcomings in mental health care might contribute a few percent to the severity of the problem. But it’s not the central issue, and never will be. No human societies lack a significant proportion of unbalanced or disillusioned people, some of whom are potentially violent. The U.S. is no exception, and never will be. But virtually all other civilized societies have chosen an approach that is much more robust to failure. Since many of the future potential murderers are always a subset of current law-abiding citizens, the only reliable way to reduce violent carnage is to ensure that no citizen can obtain the tools to kill a lot of people quickly and easily.
Repeal the 2nd Amendment, or own the consequences.
Why do you say I there’s nothing that can be done? I’m saying, for one, look into hardened schools, see if they work. Or do you mean change that you’re in favor of? Can we agree that there is no solution to the school shooting problem that is going to make some people upset?
And, since we’re looking at “common sense laws” that might push up against the second amendment, I would also propose placing one on the first: Ban posting the names and faces of all school shooters by media outlets. This should help curb copycats. If it saves one life, it’s worth it?
Also, we need to hold parents, schools and law enforcement responsible when obvious red flags are missed. The amount of things that just plain got ignored with the Parkland Shooter, for example, is disgraceful.
Good, if the second amendment gets repealed, I’d at least like it to happen legally, and somehow avoid a civil war.
Good, me too.
I’ve seen bipartisan support for things like bump stock bans, raising age to 21, more thorough background checks, and red restraining orders. These are all common sense to me.
Honestly, repealing the 2A wouldn’t have any effect on me. I still don’t own a gun. 
That’s a good article, though the only “new risk” I found is that schools might rely on metal detectors alone. The prohibitive factor seems to be cost. That’s certainly the reason the school I taught at didn’t get them.
Adam Lanza did not “walk through” security: he shot his way through a glass panel next to the locked school door. A locked school door is fine, but it’s not “security.” I agree that metal detectors alone won’t be 100% effective at keeping adult shooters out of schools, but that’s not their sole purpose. 95% of school shootings are done by students. It’s very easy for a kid to hide a handgun in a backpack. I had a student who did this. The sad reality is that metal detectors are used mainly to protect kids from other kids.
The question we face now is whether our horror at the relatively few school shootings outweighs our seeming reluctance to spend the money necessary to use a variety of means to better secure schools.
There may have been multiple deputies at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. Deputy Peterson is the one who has been excoriated, but there may have been others. I don’t know if that has been confirmed though.
Coral Springs cops who responded to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School say several Broward sheriff’s deputies waited outside rather than rush in as the killer was gunning down students, according to reports.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/02/24/several-broward-deputies-waited-outside-during-florida-school-shooting-report-says.html
That is silly and dangerously ill conceived. There would be a civil war, will you fight in it?
Naw, mostly just a lot of pants-pissing when the cops show up.
There’d be a handful of True Believers, sure, like the ones who took over that bird sanctuary. Do you advocate that we allow ourselves to (continue to) be their hostages?
I kind of doubt that. People just wouldn’t comply, and then only outlaws would have guns!
Massachusetts passed a bump stock ban. Owning a bump stock is now a felony, and has been since February. Do you know how many people have turned in their bump stocks? Three. Three people.
Cops going door to door and grabbing guns would require a gun registry, and we don’t even have that.
Be honest:
Any people in this country believe that their guns are more important than you. Until that changes, sorry.
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If you’re saying that their metronomic claim to be “law-abiding citizens” is selective or simply a lie, then I certainly agree. Even they ought to be tired of that one by now.
Yes, among other things we do need to register guns and license owners and require training and insurance, like we do with cars. But that’s not an adequate substitute for taking away their cherished argument about rights, by repealing the Second. Nibbling around the edges won’t save lives.
You glossed over the “or” in what I said. I’m not advocating going against the will of the American people to choose the society that they want.
What I want to see is some honesty about it. Statistically, school shootings are not really much of a problem at all, and there is no robust solution other than strict gun laws. And that’s why we haven’t done anything about it. The true position is that people believe that school shootings are not a big enough problem to warrant infringing our right to own guns. And that’s a defensible position. But own the reality of the ideology. There will always be some small number of people who are disillusioned, angry, mentally ill. So in a country awash with guns, mass shootings will keep happening. Accept that honestly, or change your ideology about gun ownership.
But consider a hypothetical world where the zeitgeist changed dramatically. Let’s say in 50 years 80% of the country were to support repealing the 2nd Amendment. Are you suggesting that we should shy away from that just because some extremists threaten violence? In a constitutional democracy, a minority of supposed “law abiding” gun owners don’t get to pick and choose which laws they respect.
FWIW, as a non-American I will never be able to read this argument as anything other than “yeah but we have niggers fucking it all up for us”. I mean, seriously. There are many, MANY multicultural & multiethnic countries out there that don’t enjoy the blessing of a weekly mass shooting. France, Spain, South Africa, South Korea to name a very few. Shit, Canada, as you yourself note.
To put this forward as an argument to explain or handwave away mass shootings/counter the argument that maybe y’all coulda shoulda control your fucking guns/otherwise go the American exceptionalism route in any debate whatsoever is either implicitly mondo racist or intellectually insulting (yeah, I know, “Por qué no los dos ?”).
EDIT : and BTW, Scandinavians aren’t a “monoculture”, either.
First of all, the idea that gun owners are collectively willing to engage in mass slaughter is an argument for confiscating guns, not against.
But second, it wouldn’t even come to that. If the Second Amendment were repealed, then the vast majority of people would cooperate. This is manifestly true, because if there weren’t already a vast majority cooperating, the repeal wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Repealing the Second Amendment isn’t the first step. The first step is convincing people to come to their senses. Once you do that, repealing the Second Amendment is easy.
Yes, the number of people killed in school shootings is really tiny.
They are law abiding citizens. But if they instituted Fahrenheit 451 rules and started burning books, would you still be a law abiding citizen?
You do know that Free speech also kills people? People do mass killings and terrorists do attacks just for the publicity. So - you are so willing to tear up the Bill or Rights, why not another amendment. It would save as many lives.
Or if they insisted everyone belong to a certain church and tithe. Are you still law abiding?
Registering guns wont do anything- all these school shootings were done with 100% legal guns, and* criminals don’t have to register their guns.
*
No, not really. Many people are willing to fight for what they think is right. Would you be law abiding if they started burning all books?
Sure, most would. But by no means all.
It is very interesting to see how many are willing to tear up the Constitution over 8000 lives a year, where Tobacco kills 500000 Americans a year, 50000 of whom dont even smoke. Most of whom are kids and the elderly.
So, every year smoking kills some 25000 kids more a year than school shootings do- but hell, let’s tear that Bill of Rights up!
Im a manner of the NRA and a gun owner. And I’m powerless to stop these events. Instead ood blaming firearms, how about out the blame where it belongs? Right at the psycho killer who carried out the attack. If the liberal utopia happens and all firearms are banned, ego are you going to blame when one of these underage killers walls into a classroom with a container of gasoline and sets it on fire?
Sorry, but getting rid of firearms will not get rid of the crazy individuals who want to do harm.
Well, I spend a lot of time in Canada, both Anglophone and Francophone, I love Canada, it is my second home, it is very multicultural, which I love; it’s very safe, which I love; I would never in a million years think the word that you used, so take that word and ram it up your ass.