Sounds like the 60s and 70s were the formative stages that eventually resulted in all the things that are happening now. See, where I live guns were restricted then and are even more restricted now. I didn’t learn to shoot in grade school, or at any other school. Neither did anyone I know. Anyone bringing a knife to school would have been expelled or at least suspended. Schools didn’t have gun clubs. Anyone bringing a gun to school would not only have been expelled, but arrested.
And today we don’t have regular mass shootings, or in fact really all that much of any other kind of gun violence. Maybe it’s all a coincidence?
I get what you’re saying, Magiver. But it raises a question I’ve always pondered. In the days that you’re talking about, we still had some major social problems, like black people being treated like shit all the time. A black guy could come home from a war after earning decorations for valor and being entrusted with state-of-the-art technology, and literally not be allowed to sit in a certain seat, for fuck’s sake! Yet despite all this, I have never, ever, ever heard of a black person going on a shooting rampage in segretation-era America.
I am well aware of that and what I was trying to get at. Canada has less guns, more gun control and less school shootings. Canada gets the same news content. So, the point about these shootings being “sensationalized” and that is causing more shootings is a bunch of bull.
Yes but that’s not the issue. London has fewer guns and fewer shootings. But they have more deaths from stabbings.
It’s not the gun, or the knife, or the car. It’s the person. What I described was a decidedly different society than the one I live in now. The killings are being committed by school children against school children. Something has changed.
If you want this to stop you have to alter the behavior and mindset of the children intent on harming each other.
Yes, you described a different time in history that was prevalent. Much more so in the South but yes. As for a black person going on a rampage it’s a different side of the same coin. There is a much higher percentage of individual murders by black people against black people. More specifically, black males between the ages of (approximately) 16 and 30. In both cases it’s young males doing the killing. This is a social behavioral issue and it has to be addressed.
Pen knives are not the problem. Semi-automatic rifles with sizable clips are the problem.
What has the world come to is this: the USA has a gun death rate that is far worse than any other first world nation because they have far more guns per capita. Until the USA puts serious gun control in place, they will continue to have an extremely high gun death rate. In the USA a great many people care more about their ability to have guns than they care about the lives of their fellow citizens, and the USA has a constitution that enshrines this. That is toxic to effective gun control, but without effective gun control the extremely high gun death rates will continue. That is what the USA has come to, but fortunately not what the rest of the first world has come to.
Coincidentally, the RCMP’s top marksman who is an avid hunter, a common friend and I were chatting last weekend about the USA’s gun death problem. The marksman’s opinion was that only single shot firearms should be permitted for the public.
If it’s true that the shooter did this because of bullies, then a substantial amount of blame needs to be laid at the foot of the bullies.
Not right that any innocent victims should be shot - but if some of the victims were bullies, or if bullies started this, then it’s hard to feel sorry for them.
Note that this school shooter was described as a “loner” and “quiet”, as so many of these shooters seem to be. If he felt bullied, had no friends, and he was upset and pissed off at the world, then him having no access to firearms isn’t going to make him any less pissed off.
Most people could have all the guns they want and will never shoot anybody. Potential shooters have psychological issues that need to be discovered and addressed, as difficult as that may be.
You can’t claim that spelling errors are the result of the ready availability of pencils.
In the five and a bit years since Sandy Hook, more children in the States have been killed by gunfire than the number of US military deaths since 9/11.
I’m honestly surprised that I’ve never heard a classmate of a shooting victim say that the person deserved it. A few years after I graduated, a teacher at my high school was stabbed with a pencil, and at the time, I worked with a woman whose kids had him and said he did. :dubious: Even before that, in 1972, there was a shooter at the junior high I attended a few years later; I never knew about it until I saw stories about it on that school’s Facebook page. The only injuries were from kids who jumped out a first-floor window after the shooter, who had a target in mind, fired a few shots into a wall and was then tackled by a teacher. More than once, people on that Facebook page have said that the target totally had it coming, and a few of them even said that they had considered doing the same thing themselves, had a gun been readily available. :eek: This kid must have been something else.
Some years back, a boy in a nearby small town who had lettered in 4 sports committed suicide, and a TV station went to the school to do live interviews with “the grief-stricken student body” and they accosted two girls who laughed and said something like, “We’re not going to miss him. He was not a good person. We’re going out for pizza.” Other kids said things like, “We feel bad for his family, but not for him.” I sure thought of that when Emma Gonzalez said, “What do you mean, we shouldn’t have ostracized him? You didn’t know him.”
The school was also criticized for letting school out for his funeral, especially because that wasn’t done the previous time a student had died - a girl who had succumbed to cancer a few years earlier. Yes, the kids got excused absences, but school wasn’t let out which is not the same thing.
Apparently the precipitating factor in his suicide was that he started dating a girl from an adjoining town, and she had dumped him, presumably when she figured out what kind of person he really was.
In the past two weeks we’ve had two incidents of middle school students being caught with guns in school in the Memphis area. We had an elementary school student arrested for having a gun on the walk home from school in the past month. We had one child shoot another in the face at a playground last week. A high school student was arrested May sixth because of a credible threat of gun violence against black and Jewish students. There was a nineteen year old shot to death last night in Memphis. Today two people were shot to death in Memphis.
I know these school shootings are horrific but we’re living in a damned war zone here. Kids aren’t safe at school, walking home from school, or anywhere else.
The latest thing I’m hearing is that the first person he shot (and killed) was a girl who had repeated spurned his increasingly aggressive advances, which makes me think he was a junior version of an incel; in other words, “She wouldn’t go out with me, so I’ll just kill her and maybe take a bunch of other people out with her.”
Another thing I heard was that he was singing “Another One Bites The Dust” while he did this.
We had a shooting averted in my area early last week (I may have already mentioned it here) and it’s since been reported that not only did the guns belong to the 19-year-old shooter’s mother, but that she shouldn’t have had them in the first place because she’s a convicted felon. :eek: Lots of people are going to get in trouble over this, that’s for sure.
As a young lad in West Texas, we would always map out the evil destruction of the school. Make detailed plans on where to put the bombs etc. Very common but just goofing around. No one really ever did anything, although some of the more cretinous students I would not have been surprised. Man, times have changed.