Another analogy might be airplane hijackings. While perhaps not as prevalent as airplane accidents, there were double-digit hijackings almost every year from 1968 through 2002, with a high of 86 hijackings in 1969. But the security measures taken after 9/11 have almost eliminated airplane hijackings, as there have been only 8 such incidents in the last 5 years.
Is there any sense of why it is always males doing these shootings?
Was it the security measures, or that the 9/11 hijackings changed the equation? Most hijackers are not suicidal, and depended on the passengers assuming they’ll survive if they cooperate. The 9/11 hijackers demonstrated that to be an unsafe assumption. So now, passengers will fight back since they assume that even a small chance of success is better than certain death. Non-suicidal hijackers recognize this change and so they are much less likely to undertake a hijacking in the first place.
Well, both. Because the security measures were put in place to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 hijackings. But your point is a good one. Regardless, we have shown that we can almost eliminate what was once a common threat.
It isn’t literally always, but it’s about 98% of the time.
In general, researchers seem to find that men are much more likely than women to be violent, much more likely to blame others for their problems, and much more likely to own and use guns. This applies not just to mass shootings but to all kinds of violent crime.
We can as a community, but I can’t as an individual. So that makes it 1) more terrifying and 2) more important to deal with it as a community. School shootings are a small subset of gun violence even against children, but they are the subset where my parenting makes no difference. So stories about school shootings hit differently because there’s no reason that couldn’t have been my child, my family. No reason at all. A story about a child getting killed by a gun in the home feels different. I’m sympathetic, but it doesn’t scare me.
Again, this is laregely illusionary. Driving, even with all the precautions I can take, is still more dangerous than flying. But being able to take active steps to mitigate the personal risk makes a big difference in how it feels.
I’m not sure what threats they are aiming to protect children from at that school (and that’s assuming the reason is threat prevention).
But I doubt it is about protection from school shooters because, well, Japan has strict gun regulations and these kinds of things don’t happen. In most years there are fewer than 10 deaths attributable to firearms in all of Japan, for any cause excluding suicide (and the number remains comfortably within double figures even with suicides included).
But also, importantly, because it wouldn’t work. Kids lining up to go into school would be sitting ducks, to a much larger degree than they would be within separate rooms with lockable doors in a building.
It’s just a silly talking point to deflect from talking about guns.
We have a fair share of knife attacks against schoolkids. It does work because knife killers are not very rational and are more opportunistic. They don’t learn the school schedule and then go on a rampage. In any case, all the kids are outside the school with their parents to pick them up and drop them off.
Yes, and any attacks on schoolkids is a bad thing but still not seeing how that’s relevant here.
You’re almost literally talking about a knife brought to a gunfight. Knife attacks are different from attacks with assault rifles.
And that’s assuming the school procedure you see in Japan is due to safety concerns over knife attacks - which I’d like to see some cites for because it seems unlikely this is the reason for it vs something more mundane like efficiency
I don’t know that you could make that inference. Let’s look at the data on knife attacks against schoolkids.
The big one was in 2001 when a guy went into an elementary school and killed 8 children.
Then in 2019 a man attacked students waiting to board a school bus killing 2.
Finally in 2022, 2 students waiting to enter the University of Tokyo and a passer-by were stabbed, all survived.
I guess from this it implies that, for knife attacks at least, the body count tends to be lower outdoors than indoors. I would not assume that the same would be true for rapid firing guns.
But it doesn’t imply that knife attackers won’t target people queuing to enter the building, quite the contrary. Whether planned or not, that seems to be their opportunity.
OK, look I don’t want to deflect from the gun debate. If you knew my posting history you would know my anti gun position.
I just want to explain that when my kid is in school I feel safe against gun or knife attacks because they have a great set-up and firm rules. (Although if that school were situated in the US I would prefer a metal detector too at the entrance)
If some locality or state banned gun sales to men, would it even be constitutional? It’s not like we have an equal rights amendment or anything.
(Please note I’m not proposing anything of the sort, and furthermore I know that such a ban would be ineffective unless it was nationwide.)
That’s called security theater.
It’s specious reasoning and not any safer. Just as the schools in my area aren’t any safer from tigers because of my magic anti-tiger rock. It has nothing to do with a magic rock or design of the schools and more to do with the lack of the threat in the first place.
Your preferred setup would have made for easy pickings for a shooter. I’m thinking back 25 years now to the Bono, AR shooting - a kid pulled the fire alarm and picked off children outside who had assembled as per procedure. Adding metal detectors at entrances wouldn’t help either in that scenario. This is no different from the school design that makes you feel ‘safe’. That’s just window dressing from a safety perspective. Again, that setup is likely not about physical safety, unless you have evidence to the contrary.
One imagines that if a similar (just one) gun attack happened in Japan, rather than talking about hardening schools, they would be asking where and how the shooter got weapons in the first place and dealing with that. School design would be way down on the list of questions they would ask.
If I may continue on the airplane analogy… And bear with me…
Airline safety has become almost rock solid (in the U.S. especially) in the last 35-ish years because we adopted Crew Resource Management. One of its most important aspects is that senior captains are no longer unquestioned authorities.
In the old days if you were a first officer, you sat down, shut up and didn’t touch anything unless specifically allowed. And guess what? Lots of accidents happened because nobody wanted to speak up about the stupid action or inaction the captain was taking. We’ve changed that 180 degrees, and I can’t over stress how successful it has been.
Why is this relevant?
We changed the culture of flying.
Some people - in this case captains - had to give up some of their power. They did, and the results cannot be questioned by any rational observer. We have a much better system today.
Unfortunately, I think a culture change is what it would take to improve our gun violence problem. As much as I support gun control legislation, I think we need to change our relationship to guns. And the really hard part: some people will have to give up some of their power / rights.
Hard to do through law in the same way we changed the rules in flying. It’s a people change. Not sure how we do it.
Yes I agree with you. But you guys keep doing nothing. So I made at least a suggestion that I think has a little bit of merit. You on the other hand are just going to get angry and nothing will change.
Except it really won’t. These proposals have been made AND tried. And shootings still happen with increasing frequency.
I appreciate you want to help but these are suggestions that have already repeatedly been shown not to work. It’s not a matter of people dismissing them out of hand but of having experience. We don’t “keep doing nothing”. The problem is we keep doing things that don’t work and whenever another one of these shootings happen, the same folks keep suggesting the same things that didn’t work the last dozen times.
We know what will work. The frustration is that the effective solutions are already off the table. So, we’re left with a bunch of things that we already know (through experience) won’t work yet they keep being bandied about because that’s all we have to work with.
Has a shooting happened, inside a school in the USA, that only had one entrance, had no windows on the first floor, the entrance was a steel door with security cameras and intercom, and that door only opened for 10 minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the afternoon at drop off and pick up by the parents. Any other time you wanted to get into the school you could talk to someone on the intercom but if you weren’t on the list (with photographs) of parents or guardians, you aint getting in? If so, I’ll shut up.
Of course not, as I’m sure you know.
Not even every school in Japan fits that description. Or even more than handful of schools in Japan, so I’m not sure what your point even is.
And then it still doesn’t address the point I made about Westside in Bono, AR back in 1996 - the shooter was outside the school and picked off kids in a window of time well under 10 minutes.
I thought you were trying to provide a realistic solution, not one that requires rebuilding every school in the nation and hiring millions of security staff. At a cost of trillions at a conservative estimate. And still wouldn’t address all the known real world shootings that have already happened.
If we’re going with unrealistic, magical solutions, I’ll point that that no shootings have occurred at any school where I have been present with my magic anti-shooting rock either. Or we can try waving a wand around that will magically cause any firearms within 50 yards of a school to disappear.
I never said it was even common in Japan. Safety is way more lax typically in Japan than in the USA. But this school got things right. You can’t change overnight but it might be a new standard to set? no?
I disagree it even got things right. Again (and this happened 25 years ago), none of this stops a shooter outside the school from simply picking off kids as they’re assembled outside the building after somebody pulls a fire alarm. You can’t assume it’s always a false alarm and keep the kids inside.
It’s an expensive ‘solution’ to the wrong problem. The problem is not unhardened buildings. The problem is mass shootings. If it’s not schools, it’ll be movie theaters. Or bus stations. Or shopping malls. Or music festivals. Or marathons. Even if you somehow came up with the perfect school design that somehow guaranteed absolute safety, that just shifts the target elsewhere.