The one factor in our current culture that’s most significantly different from previous ones, is the internet and social media and its ability to confer instant fame on people. Commit a mass casualty event and you can capture the attention of the entire country. Everyone’s brain will belong to you, even if only for a fleeting moment. Lady Gaga will be tweeting about you. LeBron will be tweeting about you. The fucking President of the United States will be tweeting about you. What sociopathic narcissist could possibly resist this opportunity?
Unfortunately, that one factor is the one that is totally impossible to mitigate. The genie is out of the bottle and will always be. So we have to focus our attention on the others.
Pretty much. It’s not that the opinions are different from mine, it’s that they are unrealistic and a total waste of time and effort, much like Chicken Little running around and screaming that the sky is falling.
In another thread, I used an example of an EMT rolling up on a car wreck. I’m not interested in putting band-aids on the glass cuts, I’m interested in stopping the bleeding from the chest injury, making sure the patient can breathe and their heart is beating, and that they will survive the trip to the hospital. First things first. Let the hospital handle the long-term stuff.
Same sort of thing here. We have a problem. Address the immediate issue: put defenses in place that will keep shooters from getting to kids without meeting massive armed resistance. THEN address the long term issues, like how to identify the mental whackjobs that want to hurt kids in the first place and figure out how to take them out of play.
How do we do that? Two very viable solutions are available to us. 1) Arm the teachers and put them through active shooter training, or 2) hire returning ex-military as armed school safety officers. One guy with a gun on a campus ain’t gonna cut it, as we have so recently seen.
The problem is a determined American resistance to learning, period. Distrust of experts and intellectuals has a long and stubborn history across large parts of the U.S.
Other countries, too, but Americans have made a political industry out of it.
Why is disarming the shooters, or at least reducing their lethality, not considered viable? By your other posts on the topic that reference “target rich environments”, you seem convinced that shooters will go where defenses are minimal, so how is it “viable” to turn all schools or even most schools into fortresses, since that’s what you’d have to do, lest the shooters just move down the road to softer targets. How many schools are there in the U.S. ? How much would it cost to “bulletproof” all or most of them?
Except for everywhere they work. Specifically, the entire rest of the world.
One isn’t enough, despite all the “good guy” blather? How many *does *it take?
We have the money to spend on arms, you tell us, but not on paper or pencils, or art and music teachers or extracurriculars. Your idea of “realistic” is … odd.
It’s been claimed that 1 in 5 Americans is mentally ill
So yeah, reducing the general availability of guns is the solution, irrespective of mental health status.
We have a tendency to label really angry violent people as mentally ill. Maybe they are just really angry violent people. For myself, I can’t see a difference between mental illness and politico-religious extremism. So again, making it harder to own guns, and especially making it harder to own many, and/or military style weapons, has worked in other countries.
I’m sorry, but that is too broad a list to be used to deny someone their right to own a firearm. Could you maybe point out some of the most critical mental illnesses on the list that you think should be used to stop people from owning firearms?
Sorry for the delay in response, I wasn’t on all weekend.
I would define this as lack of non-obligated close contact between large groups of people of different ages and natural social groupings multiple times a month with an exchange of personal though not necessarily relevant information without any implied tit for tat. I would define it the way that community is stereotypically defined. “Joe is my neighbor one block over. Joe likes raising tomatoes and knitting sweaters. I speak to Joe on a daily or at least weekly basis. Joe is not my friend, per se, but he’s someone that I communicate with face to face. Joe does not always agree with my points of view, but we are respectful of our differences. Joe does invite me for dinner from time to time and I invite him as well. I am aware when Joe is ill. I baked Joe cookies when his granddaughter was born. I am aware when Joe is away for a period of time. I see Joe in the grocery store and stop and inquire as to his week. I am concerned when something bothers him, but not to the point that I would consider him a confidante. Joe is not the only person in my life like this. I have scores of people like this whom I see daily and weekly and who come to my house and I go to theirs. We help each other when necessary, but not excessively. I may mow Joe’s lawn when he’s out of town. He may watch my dog. I help him build a retaining wall, he helps me paint the house. We participate in a shared social life.”
As to how to address the issue, I haven’t the foggiest idea. I think that at heart, people are designed for community, but the transient and disconnected nature of modern life tend to push it away. I think that community is valuable, but difficult. You have to confront and deal with ideas and personalities that you may not care for. You have to learn to be a social creature who is capable of dealing with conflict without exacerbating it. I think that requires a good deal of personal growth and if not self-denial, at least self-control and I feel that is a thing which requires effort and is sometimes quite difficult and it’s easier to retreat behind our walls. When everyone is behind a wall, you don’t know what’s happening on the other side. You essentially turn a very small family unit into the only real unit capable of dealing with a problem and we have found that family units suck at this. They have reasons to protect their own members and they frequently have blinders that don’t allow them to see what is happening or they are the victims of abuse or emotional blackmail. A family is an important part of creating stable people and seeing when someone needs help, but I don’t think it’s even close to the only part. I think that community is necessary for mental well-being and as a social watch for dangerous behavior and I feel that it is not necessarily completely dead, but it’s not well either.
Switzerland is a unique case. Not sure if all the men still have to go into the military, but each soldier keeps his weapon and some ammunition at home. You even see men walking around town (only occasionally) carrying their assault rifles. On Sundays you hear a lot of shooting, as the part-time soldiers do some target practice. But, Switzerland is a very homogeneous country ethnically and socially, and the immigrants don’t keep rifles at home. Also, the military weapons are seldom if ever used either in crimes or suicides.
Europe as a whole has very strict gun laws. but a general problem in the past two decades has been the sudden and widespread availability of military firearms from the former Warsaw Pact countries. Bank robbers used to have a shotgun and maybe an old pistol; these days they often have AK-47s. Obviously, it makes sense to heavily restrict private ownership of military weaponry, even though the bad guys have it. Reducing the number of guns in circulation would help, in the very long term. And exotic things such as armor-piercing bullets have no place in the civilian world.
The main issue about gun registration is that it should include a thorough character check, and a gun permit should be only given if the person is considered responsible. Some still slip through the cracks, like the guy who carried out the Dunblane massacre in Scotland. That incident provoked a great deal of restrictive legislation, ignoring the fact that the Dunblane shooter had broken the gun ownership laws beforehand. The laws themselves were not at fault.
Due to Case Law, the ONLY way someone can be denied based on due process. It is not enough that they have been diagnosed, the government would have to take them to court and prove that they are mentally unfit.
This is why 18 U.S.C. § 922(d), “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution.”
Many states have wording like this (from Washington)
[ul]
[li]After having previously been convicted or found not guilty by reason of insanity in this state or elsewhere of any serious offense.[/li][li]After having been involuntarily committed for mental health treatment, unless his or her right to possess a firearm has been restored.[/li][/ul]
Committing a mentally ill adult is very difficult, as anyone with a family member with serious problems is hard.
And a not guilty by reason of insanity plea is typically way too late even when they do happen.
But there is no constitutional way, without an amendment either revoking the 2nd or modifying the 14th that just having depression will block you from buying a firearm in this country at this point in time.
How would you go about doing that without screwing over everybody else?
Schools don’t have to be turned into fortresses. Some simple common sense, such as single point of entry, would go a long way.
The teachers are already there. No extra cost for new personnel, just the cost in training them. I would be willing to bet that a large number of teachers already have CCW licenses in states where they can get them, so firearm cost is reduced.
If we take the option of hiring returning ex-military, there is an extra cost for new personnel. That could be covered by federal grant money, and that money could come from reducing foreign aid to adversary countries.
I don’t think you can do it but for anyone who can, take a couple of steps back and see the insanity of this position.
This stuff makes having a game show host for president seen normal.
Question: why aren’t school cleaners, cooks, school bus drivers, admin staff also trained and armed? Will school maintenance crews be given armed escorts?
The assumption that it’s dysfunctional children and not the world they were brought up in that’s the problem is … fascinating.
I don’t recognize that reducing the level of gun ownership in America to the levels of, say, Canada, is screwing anybody over, because I don’t believe the myth that widescale personal gun ownership is a requirement for a free society.
Heck, I’m perfectly happy to entertain the idea of teachers who are already licensed to carry in their various states could choose to do so on the job. Thing is, it’s never been made clear that concealed- or open-carry states have lower crimes rates, has it? So far, it’s a nice fantasy that more guns will lead to more safety, satisfying people who are already prone to believe this, but it turns out fewer guns overall has that effect, for real.
Heh, or you could just do away with the Trump tax cut. What countries do you think are “adversaries” and how much money do you think they are getting?
This is silly. You can’t expect a significant number of people who want to be teachers to also be trained, armed security guards.
The obvious solution is to just have armed drone quad copters in every school that the local SWAT team can activate whenever there’s trouble. Easy-peasy.
Well, more seriously, one could equip schools with gunshot sensors which could alert local police and on-campus security, all to minimize response time (coincidental quick-response is largely considered a factor in the low body count of the 2006 Dawson College shooting, i.e. there happened to be cops at the school who recognized and reacted to the sounds of gunfire). One of the recurring elements of these shootings seems to be that regular people (i.e. not cops) seem to think the sounds are “firecrackers” and whatnot, causing them to delay evacuation or setting up defenses. There are promising technical avenues to minimize damage, though the long-term fix remains weaning Americans off guns, or at least semi-automatics.
Mental health part of it for sure, and so are a lot of things. This is NOT a “single issue” problem. In fact, there are so many variables that have changed since the pre-columbine era, that it would be extremely daunting to identify and eliminate them all.
When lithium, for example, was first widely introduced in the 50s, it cleared the institutions in droves. The subsequent anti-psychotics cleared out even more. By the time Reagan arrived on the picture, phasing out a lot of the institutions was sensible. The problem with drugs is, they have some pretty bad common side effects and people don’t like to take them.
I do think we have suffered a bit of a moral decay. I’m not going to blame it on anyone thing (though I could), but life definitely seems cheaper. That’s another one.
We definitely have become more disconnected inter-personally as well. I think technology has a big part of that.
Obviously, having twice as many guns per capita plays a big part as well.
And I think there are a bunch of other factors people haven’t even thought of.
