This is correct. Another possibility is that some right-wing nutjob thought that a martyr was just what the right needed.
IMO: many of those that are the head of district safety and security are not qualified for that role and add to that laziness through inertia. But ultimately it all boils down that the (ignorant) decision makers want everything in a nice little box as in “We’ve always done it that way.”
For example, if there were an emergency the hierarchy in the school stays the same … not that I’ve ever known an administrator to have taken a NIMS class. No attempt is made to figure out what people’s strengths are and put them in the spot that they will do the most good. Nurses go here, deans go there, counselors do this, teachers do that based solely on title. I know based on my past and outside-school training that I could do triage and if necessary black-tag a student. But am I in that position? No, because I’m a teacher.
Sorry all, I’m ranting but I cannot contain myself when students are at risk and when I speak out it falls on deaf ears at the district downtown office.
This is not at all the same thing, but my husband once had a very difficult time trying to convince a local school administration/sheriff that their D.A.R.E. program had been proven to actively increase the chances that children would do drugs, but the response was basically, “Oh, come see what we do, you’ll realize it’s great.” So I am not unfamiliar with bureaucratic resistance to change, even in the face of compelling evidence that they should.
Another thing I’ve noticed since my kid started school is how much more red tape there is than when I was a student, and I can see that so many policies and procedures effectively exist for the sole purpose of preventing a lawsuit.
You got to bear in mind that some powers-that-be don’t do things with the actual intention of helping people; they do it to avoid liability and lawsuits. Many school administrators don’t care if their measures actually protect students, they just want to be able to say, post-shooting, that they didn’t show negligence by having no anti-shooter program.
Great minds!
And I think they also don’t want to make any changes to the default School Shooting Drill template, whatever it is, because in the event that they didn’t follow it to the letter, boom! Lawsuit.
ETA: One thing I have seen change in the last few years is that states seem increasingly more inclined to prosecute parents for putting guns in their kids’ hands.
Exactly, I did it the way the district told me to therefore I cannot be personally sued.
And that it why it is so worrisome. No one wants to change in a way that protects students.
I feel threads like this are a bit loaded, and the only correct answer is to say “Kirk’s death doesn’t matter / is overblown”, with anything else equated to either being a fan of Kirk or not caring about school shootings.
Even though it’s the death of a jerk, it’s important politically and socially. As was Trump’s shooting…the image of him getting up and saying “fight” with blood running down his face might have influenced enough apathetic voters to swing the election.
Obviously to me the death of a child matters a heck of a lot more. But right now, with allusions to civil war and how “we can’t coexist with liberals” infecting much of right wing dialogue, yeah this appears to be having a big impact.
I think if it’s a Right Wing nutjob, the most likely motive would be that Charlie Kirk wasn’t Right Wing enough, and failed the shooters purity test.
But the question isn’t “which matters more”, it’s “which scares you more” (and is that rational).
The routine murders of lots of innocent kids and young adults in schools is surely more tragic than the death of an odious political influencer. But i am personally more frightened by the death of the influencer, and the previous deaths of Minnesota politicians and other attacks on public figures.
That’s partly because I’m not a parent of school kids. We all are more frightened of things that might have an effect on us, personally, or those we love.
But i see that political assassination are increasing exponentially, and that makes it really hard to be a free nation, in any sense. And I’m afraid the current administration will use this death in particular to impose tighter restrictions on the public, and increase federal (as distinct from local) law enforcement. I’m pretty scared, honestly.
Well, what worries you more, and it can be interpreted different ways.
I think the most straightforward reading of the OP, is that it is contrasting how concerned we should be about the whole phenomenon of school shootings, with how much we should care about Charlie Kirk’s death.
Which is a largely pointless question IMO, because even if Charlie Kirk was the world’s nicest man it remains very obvious that we should be much more concerned about school shootings. Heck, if CK’s benevolent twin was killed I would still care more about a single child killed by a mass shooter, let alone comparing the whole phenomenon of school shootings to a single death.
But why are we even asking questions like the OP? It’s because the media is talking a lot about this assassination and ISTM people who, like me, can’t stand CK, want a rationale to handwave it.
Well, I would disagree with that, because if we compare the political and social significance of this assassination to a single school shooting in the US, this likely has more weight – that’s not me wishing it were so, I’m just aware of the political environment and that’s my judgement of how it has, and will, land.
My wife and daughter visited a flea market in SE Indiana the other day. A couple of the vendors had long table covered with guns of aLL calibers and varieties.
My wife was a bit shocked ..”Who needs all these guns?” she remarked.
My daughter said:..”Well these schools aren’t going to shoot themselves up”
Comment on our current state of affairs.
One argument I’ve heard about the evils of political assasination is that it allows a single individual to nullify an election.
Now It’s true that Charlie Kirk wasn’t elected to any political office, but this is still a “political assasination” because he had such a high level of influence that he probably had more influence on our system than most Senators did. From what I’ve learned, he played a vital role in influencing Republican Congresspeople to “stay in line” and vote in lockstep with Trump, even through controversial votes.
It looks like you might correct.
My son just started kindergarten, and let me tell you, things ain’t what they used to be. I picked him up early from school today. I had to show my ID to get in the first door, and I was ushered into the space between two sets of locked doors, and made to sit while someone else fetched my kid. At no point did I set foot in the front office.
The “more violence” that we’re worried about is children getting killed, and school shootings are a sign that we’re already destabilized.
Political violence is a much greater threat and can pose a much greater threat to society as a whole than 50-100 students getting killed every year at schools for any number of reasons and in any number of circumstances. Just because one tugs at the heartstrings more doesn’t mean it poses the same systemic and existential threat to society as a whole. We know from history that a single assassination can unravel society far more than a student shooting another student or a crazy person killing a group of students. Wars (and genocides) have commonly started because of an assassination while I can’t think of an example of the same starting because of a random massacre at a school.
Should the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand have been worth worrying about at the time? Its consequences are now known to be staggering, but at the time he was a minor figure and merely one in a very long series of political assassinations in Europe. Yet with that hindsight we know that minor characters can be tipping points.
If the question is one of “rational speaking,” then morality is a separate issue. Rationally speaking, we have to worry about the possible immediate consequences of this singular event over other considerations unless and until proven otherwise.
There were no major consequences to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The problem was the powder keg, and if it hadn’t been Ferdinand, it’d have been something else, probably within a matter of months at most.
In fact, Ferdinand was a supporter of a larger degree of Serbian autonomy (making his assassination by Gavrilo Princip, a pan-Slavic Bosnian activist ironic), and was so disregarded by the rest of House of Habsburg-Lorraine that he was forced to renounce titles for his descendent and no major figure in the family attended his funeral.
Stranger
For what it’s worth, Gavrilo Princip accomplished his goal of removing Austria’s boot from Bosnia’s neck. Of course, millions of people who couldn’t have even found Bosnia on a map had to die first.