[QUOTE=Wolfian]
At the risk of sounding callous, how do you define “so many.” I remember maybe a dozen kids shooting up their schools in the mid to late 90s and these three recent whackjobs. I’m pretty sure your more likely to die from slipping in the shower than in an American school. There are things a school can do (programs to reduce bullying, for example), but at the end of the day, a lot of it is just shitty luck. A program like the one the Congresscritter is proposing will do a lot more harm than good.
Do you know one of the common threads of the school shootings? The majority of these shooters killed themselves or wanted to die during their seige. They were suicidial. What’s the worst thing to do with a suicide? Publicize it. In a bizarre way publicization suicides honors the person who killed themself making the act look attractive to others in those shoes. So what I’m saying is, “STFU, MEDIA! Stop rubbernecking!”
[/QUOTE]
For you, and glee I’ll clarify that I mean “so many” as a comparison to other rather congested public places such as shopping malls, casinos, expos, etc… I suppose I could include gun shows as a reductio ad absurdum, I haven’t heard of a shooting spree at one of those, but that’s quite a loaded (pardon the pun) argument to make.
I believe you and I are addressing the same aspect of the issue - the psychology of the shooter. Hard to plumb the mind of a madman, but there seems to be a trend to try to inflict the maximum possible havoc before “going out”.
My point is that the effective guarantee that the shooter will be unopposed is a consideration in the mind of the madman. In the US it’s common to have signs posted near schools that say “Gun Free Zone” or more commonly “Drug Free Zone”, as there’s a law against posessing a gun within 1000 feet of a school.
Cite (wikipedia)
The passing of a law to the contrary establishing that the school may not, in fact, be gun free is in my mind sufficient - no other action needs to be taken. As I mentioned in the other post, most schools would have 0 guns, same as now… It’s a mental game, same as the publicized airmarshal program for flights or publicized states that allow CCW for citizens. Most folks don’t carry guns, but some do and no one knows who they are.
Folks with evil intent are quite odd, but not completely irrational; they’ll try to optimize their results per unit of effort like anyone else.
The point you make Wolfian is an extremely good one, the notion that “no one would care” I expect would be a good deterrent as well if the media agreed to stop publicizing such events. No future threat of punishment is sufficient since in these cases the laws are being broken quite readily already and in many cases the shooter offs themselves anyway.
Glee, the differences between the US and England were noted in the other thread already. One of them is a matter of scale, the other is culture (especially organized crime thanks to our prohibition days and War on Drugs).
I think this is self-evident, a rare event is more frequent in a larger population. Laying aside the cultural differences, the population difference between the two countries is a factor of 6 (50 mil / 300 mil). If a school shooting such as Columbine or this latest Amish debacle happens every two years here, we would expect it to occur every 12 there; all other things being equal and pretending people are like dice with regard to “snapping” on any particular day. (Yes, I know about the gambler’s fallacy; I’m illustrating a point here about normalizing statistics for population size).
There are, of course, many other factors - one of them under consideration in this thread being that in the US; the government has in my mind given a madman a reason to consider public schools as good places to go on a spree vs other public places equally full of people.
