Another Fucking Mass Shooting At US School

[Tigers!]

we see schools practicing lock downs in case of a shooter. At this point the lock down training feels like an updated version of ‘duck and cover’. Something to make kids feel less afraid, but not going to help that much

MY niece and her family moved to the US from Australia early last year.
Her oldest has just done a drill at school about what to do if a gunman (gun person?) is in the building. He asks 'Why are we doing this? We never did it in Australia.'
My niece does not know what to tell him. I suggested perhaps you came back when your husband's contract finishes in 2024.

 

[Ford]

Since the video of Beto interrupting the meeting and getting kicked out is going "viral," I'd like to provide some very important context. Here is video of the Texas governor and other officials speaking about their plans to address the problem of mass shootings in their state:

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

Congress member Tony Gonzales (R, Texas) believes school mass shootings are the will of God. He quotes Matthew 19:14 to support his opinion:

This is the pro-life party.

No, they’re the pro-birth party. They don’t give a fuck after that.

 

[dannyk]

Repeal your second amendment. It's that simple.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

Repeal your second amendment. It's that simple.

Of course the mechanism is simple. It’s also impossible.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Repeal your second amendment. It's that simple.

It is easier to give birth to an adult sized kangaroo through the anus, than amend the US Constitution. It'd be easier to give birth to a whale... through the urethra than to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

link

In rejecting suggestions that stronger gun control laws could have prevented the tragedy, Abbott conceded the slain 18-year-old suspect had no known mental health issues or criminal history but said, "Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge.”

Mental health. This is usually the go to for the GOP, not guns, but the mental health of those allowed to get guns.

This then leads us to an important topic, "mental health" and "mental illness". These are not equivalent. Yes, people who kill people have some level of issue. But it feels a lot like looking for a convenient excuse. What is the difference between saying the shooter has a mental health challenge than saying "well, we are fallen people, as stated in the Bible". A "what can you do"-ism followed by shoulder shrug... then pass more legislation to loosen restrictions to access dangerous guns and cut mental wellness spending (something that wasn't getting remotely enough funding to start with, and likely isn't for people suffering from high school level crisis). Mental health spending is for average people dealing with disproportionate problems. It is for people suffering from mental illness, that need comprehensive and enduring help.

The shooter appears to be a person broken by bullies. He needed help, but a different type, and the longer it went unaddressed or under-addressed, the harder to the pullout was going to be. And he ultimately ended where he did. But of course, public schools can't afford to address this. And teachers are on high alert to not mention that race could have been an impact with slavery or to be a confidant to a student having difficult problems with identity to manage the social well being of each student. My wife's aunt taught elementary in a suburb of a major Texas city, and it was hard enough to know if the kids could understand English. Yet, with dwindling support, baseless accusations of bias, and a never ending onslaught of testing requirements (which as I deal with daughter's scores, as an engineer I can't make sense of it!), we toss security and mental health experts on top of the requirements for schools.

It is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.

Bullying? It is tough enough being bullied. It is demeaning. Kids don't want to admit that they get bullied. And with schools completely overwhelmed with responsibility and hypersensitive alt-right dumbasses, (and lets not forget lawyers) we are providing no net for those who are getting bullied.

So what happened in Texas? A teen was failed by the social system, education system of the state of Texas as he failed to cope with what he had to deal with.

Oh, about that mental health.

"We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health," Abbot said during a news conference at Robb Elementary School, where a gunman shot and killed 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.

*slow clap*

Oh wait...

...yet in April he slashed $211 million from the department that oversees mental health programs.

Is this the point we start throwing rotten vegetables?

 

[Elixir]

School shootings are not a global phenomenon

Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Of course not. Nowhere else has as many guns, duh. I’m not sure there’s another Country where it’s so easy for a kid to lay hands on firearms, unless it’s somewhere they don’t have schools.
It’s not because there is a pallor of insanity hanging over the US that is absent elsewhere.

So why these claims from you that some kind of global population issue is driving the problem?

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

The growth of acceptance of violent atrocity is worldwide. What comprises an atrocity varies somewhat, but the growth of acceptance is consistent.

No, it really isn’t.

It’s neither worldwide, nor consistent.

Okay I'm open to persuasion. I only know where I've been, what I've read and the people I know/have met.
Convince me that there is no trend of acceptance of violent atrocity. Your simple statement is short of convincing, but if there's evidence I would love to see it.

My own feeling that we are past the point of optimal global human population is not something I suddenly came by, bilby. I recall being no more than six years old ca 1956, reading about human population historical trends, and realizing even then that the growth rate was unsustainable. It has apparently slowed in terms of percentage growth/year, but out numbers are still growing and at a level that, combined with our unwillingness/inability to address the effects we are having on biodiversity, is resulting in a global mass extinction event. One that, aside from meteor impacts and major volcanism events, seems unprecedented. That none of this (apparently) impinges on your own individual sense of well-being is not, IMHO, evidence that the inhabitants of this planet are not feeling the effects subconsciously, and even in some cases, consciously.
I have seen some very well thought out, credible analyses that concluded that this planet could "support" a trillion humans. I think that with sufficient tech, it could perhaps support tens or hundreds of brains-in-jars, but I'm not a fan.

 

[TomC]

Doesn't Texas have a law where someone can sue you for driving a pregnant woman to Oklahoma for an abortion?
How about someone suing the dealer that sold the murderer the weapons?

Even if the case gets tossed out of court it'll make some great infotainment.
Tom

 

[Elixir]

I’m talking about global human sanity, which at some (past) point starts holding an inverse relationship to population.

Stop talking about global anything when discussing mass shootings, over half of which occur in a nation populated by 330 million people, and less than half in the rest of the planet populated by more than 7 billion.

Of course The Onion has recycled its traditional article on the topic for the umpteenth time.

I don't disagree with any of this. But I feel that it overlooks the macro-psyche that needs nothing more than added guns to assure this kind of repeated outcome.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Doesn't Texas have a law where someone can sue you for driving a pregnant woman to Oklahoma for an abortion?
How about someone suing the dealer that sold the murderer the weapons?

Even if the case gets tossed out of court it'll make some great infotainment.
Tom

Over a dozen children were massacred. "Infotainment" isn't the word I would use.

 

[Elixir]

Get rid of the guns, get rid of the Republican politicians... there are any number of things that would mitigate the effects of crazy rampagers. But there will still be crazy rampagers; they simply won't be able to kill so many others so easily.

 

[TomC]

Doesn't Texas have a law where someone can sue you for driving a pregnant woman to Oklahoma for an abortion?
How about someone suing the dealer that sold the murderer the weapons?

Even if the case gets tossed out of court it'll make some great infotainment.
Tom

Over a dozen children were massacred. "Infotainment" isn't the word I would use.

I'm talking about the lawsuit.
Juxtaposed with discussion of SB8 and 2nd amendment issues.
Tom

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What is the point of new laws if the old ones are not enforced? It’s a straw man that conservatives don’t want to get illegal guns off the streets. But if local judges and prosecutors are lenient on criminals using guns, what do you expect? ACAB! Abolish prisons! Bail reform! Okay.

While there very definitely is a problem with old ones not being enforced none of your examples are relevant.

Rather, we see things like what happened locally where IIRC domestic violence caused a gun ban--but that caused more complex court proceedings and the actual result was the prosecutors pled down most of the charges because they couldn't handle the workload. You can't say be-tough-on-crime if you won't vote to fund the courts and prisons adequately to accomplish that.

And bail reform is a very good thing--for a lot of crimes you effectively got more punishment for being found innocent than for pleading guilty. That makes a mockery of justice. Now, it does need some changes but the basic concept is a good one.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But the problem in the US isn't population density, which is much worse in many other developed countries than in the US. It is the easy availability of guns, especially military style weapons that lend themselves to mass murder, and extremely lax regulation on gun ownership. That is an American thing.

The vast majority of guns used in crime are handguns, not military style rifles. Military rifles are simply too hard to conceal, while they are common in mass shootings they are a tiny fraction of gun crime overall. And mass shootings are less than 1% of murders.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

You know the biggest problem with these massacres. The threads are always in Politics. Somehow, school mass shootings (or mass shootings in general), have become a "political issue". Things have radicalized so much for right-wingers, that any discussion regarding how to prevent school mass shootings, becomes a political one. Not personal. It is obscene!

I don't particularly worry about a mass shooting at my daughter's school. I worry that if her school doesn't have one, that means a score of other parents are doomed to suffer from one. We have reached a repugnant equilibrium where these events are just treated as fait accompli.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

the lesson is that being a bully has zero consequence and you can escalate as much as you want.
the lesson is that you have no options within the existing system to stop bullying and so your only recourse is to go outside the system.

I've lived in the US all my life and I've never found any of that to be even a little bit true.

Going to school that's exactly what I saw--no meaningful consequences for the bullies. Victims quickly learned to shut up about it as the system was powerless to do anything about it. Including the police--while they could arrest the bullies they would just be released back to their parents. If the parents didn't care nothing would happen--and of course the parents liked their kids being top dog, not understanding what would happen when they turned 18.

 

[Alcoholic Actuary]

Doesn't Texas have a law where someone can sue you for driving a pregnant woman to Oklahoma for an abortion?
How about someone suing the dealer that sold the murderer the weapons?

Even if the case gets tossed out of court it'll make some great infotainment.
Tom

Over a dozen children were massacred. "Infotainment" isn't the word I would use.

I'm talking about the lawsuit.
Juxtaposed with discussion of SB8 and 2nd amendment issues.
Tom

https://www.usnews.com/news/nationa...red-gun-bill-modeled-after-texas-abortion-law

CA is doing that.

aa

 

[TomC]

Doesn't Texas have a law where someone can sue you for driving a pregnant woman to Oklahoma for an abortion?
How about someone suing the dealer that sold the murderer the weapons?

Even if the case gets tossed out of court it'll make some great infotainment.
Tom

Over a dozen children were massacred. "Infotainment" isn't the word I would use.

I'm talking about the lawsuit.
Juxtaposed with discussion of SB8 and 2nd amendment issues.
Tom

https://www.usnews.com/news/nationa...red-gun-bill-modeled-after-texas-abortion-law

CA is doing that.

aa

The possibility of deputizing everyone in a state to push a political agenda is rather a powerful new development.
Tom

ETA ~To add yet more hilarity, I understand that the Sandyhook parents are suing Jones in a Texan court.
Wheeee!~

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Doesn't Texas have a law where someone can sue you for driving a pregnant woman to Oklahoma for an abortion?
How about someone suing the dealer that sold the murderer the weapons?

Even if the case gets tossed out of court it'll make some great infotainment.
Tom

Over a dozen children were massacred. "Infotainment" isn't the word I would use.

I'm talking about the lawsuit.
Juxtaposed with discussion of SB8 and 2nd amendment issues.
Tom

https://www.usnews.com/news/nationa...red-gun-bill-modeled-after-texas-abortion-law

CA is doing that.

aa

But Federal law offers a shield and that'd be the basis for blocking the law by SCOTUS.