I doubt there’s anyone here who disagrees with you.
Spice_Weasel, there might be one or two, but I’m not naming any names.
Yeah, but as bad things are now though, there’s always the potential for it to get worse in the future. I certainly don’t see how Kirk’s death is going to make things better. The trouble with arguments like this is that it’s impossible to prove empirically one way or another; we don’t have access to the alternate universe where Kirk wasn’t shot.
I think there’s conflation of a few things in this thread.
Yes I care more about the life of an innocent school student than someone who has chosen to have odious views including on things like political violence and gun control.
But yes, in a country where mass shootings are pretty common, the latter is more consequential right now. It will likely spur further political violence, more of a police state and excuses to erode human rights.
It’s kind of like when there’s a terrorist attack and people complain saying more people died in car crashes that day, or whatever. How consequential an event is depends on many factors; it’s not just a body count or saying which lives are more “valuable”.
The fact that there have been so many school shooting should have made it consequential, and the fact that Kirk’s shooting has, in the minds of some, become more consequential is exactly what makes this whole thing political.
The problem is more with NRA money than with democracy. It would change is the NRA went away.
Things will not be better or worse due to his death. It is merely a convenient excuse to do what was already planned. I think “backlash” is a myth designed to keep the liberals at bay, a paying of the “danegeld”.
The fact that school shootings are so common that students have to be trained in ‘active shooter drills’ which aren’t done in any other developed nation that isn’t the site of an active war zone indicates the horrific effect it has had on US society, which has become highly militarized and jingoistic beyond any rational measure. However, school shootings have not precipitated political backlash as a justification for even further military encroachment into the domain of law enforcement or resulted in the restriction of civil rights that the murder of a conservative political leader may. In fact, they’ve had very limited political effects at all even though it is politicians refusing to consider even moderate measures–which again, are a feature in nearly every developed nation–to limit the potential for such shootings by placing controls and oversight on the procurement of weapons.
The real purpose of a democracy isn’t to get the ‘best’ (and certainly not the fastest) results from government; it is to ensure that everybody feels invested in the decision process and has a stake in the outcome, even if it doesn’t happen to be what they desired every time. When people feel that they no longer have a say in anything, they resort to defiance, civil disobedience, and ultimately political violence including assassination and terrorism. We still don’t know the motives or even identity of the shooter but the polarization and recent violence against both political figures and business leaders, including people openly celebrating public assassinations, is highly indicative of the collapse of democratic norms just as much as election denialism and the legislature handing over all of their authority to the executive.
Stranger
Not necessarily, according to these people: NRA Alternatives: Pro-Gun & Special Interest Groups - Pew Pew Tactical
It’s amazing to me how the murder of school children at the hands of gunmen has become so normalized. As a society, we’re comfortable with it to the point where many of us don’t even blink when it happens. We’re just not used to people like Kirk being murdered by gunmen and suddenly it’s something we need to worry about.
“Rationally speaking," I’m less worried about the occasional assassination and more worried about widespread political violence, the arrest of people for their political beliefs, the the suppression of civil rights. I’m worried about my son not having parents. Or growing up in a world where he doesn’t have civil rights. (He’s also autistic so Og knows what conservatives have in store for him. He also has a higher chance of high-conflict encounters with law enforcement/military totally unequipped to handle such a condition.)
It’s obvious they’ve just been waiting for a chance to escalate their regime of terror and this may be the thing, so yes, I’m worried about it. I was already worried about school shootings so this just adds more stuff to be worried about.
I don’t like Kirk, but he was specifically targeted because of his political viewpoints. Whereas the average kid in school is targeted just at random, for being in the school, when a gunman opens fire.
So, half of the nation is more worried about Kirk because the killing was meant to send a message of “Stop holding those views.”
A message sent by a single person, as opposed to the multitudes of people, some of them elected officials, that say the same thing about the views held by the left. Did you see what I posted about what Trump said hypocritically?
School shootings are more worrisome. Here is the dirty little secret your local school/district doesn’t want you to know … they are nowhere even close to best practices when it comes to active shooters.
- They focus almost exclusively on keeping bad strangers out when in reality most active shooters are people that are allowed on campus.
- Flee, hide, fight. But school policy is hide and wait to be executed. I teach my students that if they hear gunfire they are to:
go where there is no gunfire
get something between you and the gunfire, like get to the parking lot and get a car between you and the gunfire
when safe call 911 - Schools assume students will be in a classroom and therefore do not need to learn what to do if caught in the open. If an active shooting took place during lunch or passing period it would be a slaughterhouse. I’ve had principals tell be they don’t want to teach students because it will scare them. Hint: I have open discussions with my students because fuck the principal when student safety is at stake. Not one has been traumatized about talking about what to do in an active shooter situation.
I know what to do because I learned best practices from the FBI for active shooter situations. Schools and districts refuse to learn and implement these practices and are putting our children at needless risk.
Has that been officially reported?
Periodically we have active shooter training at the facility where I work (domestic violence shelter.) They basically said, run like hell. If you can’t run, attack. Don’t stay in one place. It’s pretty hard to shoot a moving target.
But I have to balance that with the reality that the reason people cower in place is often because of tonic immobility, a last-ditch survival tactic that completely immobilizes the victim (you thought only possums do this? Nope. Humans do it too.) The only thing that can really counter that kind of response is aggressive and frequent training like you would see with police or military populations.
I haven’t seen any data on whether this kind of training is schools is effective at preventing loss of life. Surely we have a big enough dataset by now.
The one thing I remember about the training that stood out to me is that during the Virginia Tech shooting, the room with the lowest number of causalities was engineering. Because they built a really good barricade. Because of course they did.
The difference being are you taught to run if you can and you just froze when the shooting happen? Or were you taught to hide under a desk until the shooter puts a bullet in the back of your skull?
Totally see your point. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t use the best available evidence in schools. I mean it’s emblematic of a larger problem of self-styled experts not using evidence-based methods, but the stakes are pretty high here!
I personally care less about this celebrity’s murder than I do about many kids killed at home playing with a parent’s unsecured gun, kid suicides, and kids killed on the streets.
I don’t celebrate his death; it just gets a relative meh from me. Person I don’t know was killed. Happens many times every day.
We of course don’t know that this was politically motivated or if so if was from the left or someone to the right of him on some issue … or just with a personal beef. The right has more with the gun skills than the left FWIW.
Given that moderates and points left of the middle have already been targeted I don’t think this can get blame for causing what has already been.
The reality is there is just no practical way to secure a school or other campus designed for free movement and education to be consistent with also being secure against a mass shooting; these objectives are a cross purposes with one another. The other real problem is that just talking about active shooters and doing simple drills doesn’t really instill instinctive response of what to do. We have annual ‘active shooter drills’ at work, and yet when we actually had a shooting occur outside the building a few years ago (not at our facility; just law enforcement pursing criminals who happened to stop on the road outside the building) a bunch of people went to the conference room facing the window to watch the activity while stray bullets were fired at and actually struck the building above and below the window.
Some schools did initially try to implement ‘hyperrealistic’ active shooter scenarios when the notion of training students and staff first became popular and discovered (even though it should have been obvious) that it had a very detrimental impact upon the mental health of all involved, especially students:
We do not know this to be true.
Stranger