I feel bad for the Dad if it’s his gun. His responsibly. Parents need to spend a year in jail. If you have a teenager with mental issues who has their own computer and phone and you don’t use a firewall to limit their internet access then it’s your fault.
There is some debate over the legal grounds for this sort of prosecution, and it will be interesting to see how the prosecution of the shooter's father in Georgia proceeds.
One would hope that putting fear of consequences into the minds of those who should be more in control of their bad impulses could help reduce this sort of carnage. But when you hear the way some adults manage their own lives, one wonders how often that would make a difference.
I had my local Police tell me that they can’t do anything unless the crime has been committed. So they went to talk to the parents and the kid about threats. He had a legit made before, but then left without the kid getting the help needed.
Nicely done, as usual. Irish anthropologist Mark Maguire and I have written about counterterrorism more broadly (since I live in Colorado a lot, home of school shootings as cultural phenomenon, we touch on that, too). Perhaps of interest: Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
We need to acknowledge the role culture plays in so many self-defeating peoples, including the Palestinians in the levant - and black gang members in Chicago's South Side. But acknowledging the profound role culture plays in the quality of people's lives is derogated as victim blaming, so suffering people are just patted on the head and told there is nothing they can do to save themselves.
The Palestinians are not "self-defeating". They are the victims of a people with a culture that encourages hatred of "the other" and justifies mass slaughter because, as the world's greatest ever victim, they have a right to defend themselves.
Thanks for mentioning regional differences. I agree they help explain events that might seem strange to outsiders. I had my hands on a paper not too long ago that went into this subject in some detail. Sure wish I could find it again.
The Apalachee shooter, despite being only 14 years old, will be charged with felony murder. Meanwhile, here in "enlightened" San Francisco, the DA wants wants adult law to apply to a 17 year murder suspect.
California and Georgia might have cultural differences but in both states the law, presumably a result of bipartisan agreement, seems equally cruel to juveniles.
“The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.”
If my eyes rolled any harder at this, I would have twisted the optic nerve. What an absurd comparison. There is a major difference between the choice to put one’s kid around a pool (and the associated protective decisions such as lifeguards, supervision, life-jackets, pool covers, etc) versus simply sending them to school and hoping that some lunatic with an gun doesn’t shred an entire class.
Your article strikes me as contrarian bullshit, whose intention is to paint both parties as equally useless on the matter. Your message is basically that we need to accept this violent reality where kids are gunned down mercilessly and not give just matters the media attention that you claim emboldens others to replicate such attacks. In other words, turn a little more of a blind eye. A defeatist and twisted take.
“The reality is that tweaking background checks or banning the sale of boutique weapons (what the Democrats call assault weapons) is unlikely to make a big difference.”
“Boutique weapons”!? There’s a euphemism to remember. Maybe I’ll go pick one up at the flea market on the way home. But seriously, that you dismissed this point in a single sentence.
“The nonpartisan RAND Corporation did a review of all the big research and found that laws like safe storage laws that require parents to lock up their weapons properly to keep them away from children.”
Biden literally included this in the statement that you quoted above. Lazy.
This article is useless, just another collective shrug, trotting out “it’s just too hard!!” And throwing in the towel.
I don't know that I necessarily say nothing is possible so much as it's difficult to achieve. Has anything in recent American history suggested that it is easy to achieve a reduction in gun deaths? If so, you're much more optimistic in reading that history than me.
Nobody with a functioning brain is saying it is an “easy” solution, or even that there is a single option. That’s probably why Biden mentioned like 4 things in that single quote (yet you glommed onto just one, seemingly ignoring the rest). Meanwhile in GOP-land, there’s not even a single gun-related reform taken seriously. Thoughts and prayers, they’re true monsters, et al. And yet you put them on a level playing field. Classic both sides-ism
When half the population fetishizes gun ownership and politicians proudly take family photos with their precious AR15-style “boutiques,” even the most minor suggestions are treated as an affront to their identity and liberty.
“Has anything in recent American history suggested that it’s easy to achieve a reduction in gun deaths?”
Another loaded question, as I cannot think of a single person who thinks it is easy. But to quote The Simpsons, you’re kind of like Ned Flanders’ dad: “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas!!”
My question to you is this, how many gun deaths do you think occur as a consequence of AR-15s? How many occur as a consequence of handguns? How many occur as a consequence of illegally obtained weapons? The vast majority of gun violence in places like Chicago is happening due to the presence of unlawful weapons, the people carrying them have criminal histories. It's a huge black market. Addressing that black market is largely a matter of policing, not necessarily banning guns. Thomas Massie poses with an AR-15, that's why Chicago has more gun murders than the entire nation of Japan? Let's be serious here.
Now you’re just trying to muddy the waters, mixing school shootings with gang violence and general violent crime in Chicago. Again, the intent is not to construct some panacea, one obviously doesn’t exist. It’s to have the intention to reduce such school and mass shootings. So let’s not step out of this lane. From the very RAND report you cite, there is a reason that their analysis is broken into categories of Violent Crime, Suicide, Mass Shootings, Police Shootings, etc. Because potential options have to be considered in different contexts. One solution may reduce death in a single category but not others.
So with that preface, your questions are mostly distraction. In the mass shooting context, a perpetrator with an AR or even semiautomatic pistol, with the usual array of bump stocks and extended magazines, can inflict more casualties in a lesser amount of time than weapons with a lower rate of fire. You can drop all the facts you want about handgun deaths, but this calculus remains. You can accept this as life in America, but I’ll continue to vote for people who strive to make a difference, even if small.
I don't know, if your point of view is that gun access is driving violence in America, then why would reducing gun access more broadly not be a solution to every type of shooting, from schools to gangs to suicides? You can't turn every context into a police state, from a theater to a school to a subway train in Chicago, right? I agree at least in theory your original point makes sense, it doesn't make as much sense to zoom in on school shootings and say how do we prevent them in particular, as if schools exist on a different planet that you have to transfer the weapons to.
“if your point of view is that gun access is driving violence in America, then why would reducing gun access more broadly not be a solution to every type of shooting, from schools to gangs to suicides?”
My view is that access is one of many contributing factors. I’m not saying it’s driving it, but it’s a significant factor. While I don’t believe that another assault weapons ban is politically possible in 2024, it happened before and I’d support it happening again. But more realistically, I support making access more difficult at the national level, including safe storage laws, raising the minimum age, greater waiting periods, come down hard restricting access to mentally ill, those convicted of violent crimes and domestic abuse, et al. What makes the mass shooting solutions so hard is that the volume of studies on what works and what doesn’t is sorely lacking. I wish you’d mentioned this dearth of reliable studies when you cited the RAND report which pointed this out. Limited and inconclusive evidence. 5 qualifying studies!!
Not all violence crimes are equal. Gang violence is most sad because of the innocent bystanders caught up in the mix. In school shootings, basically everyone is an innocent bystander and among the most vulnerable populations out there.
How is it muddying the waters to bring up the massive prevelance of gang violence when it comes to handgun homicide? Do those dealths not matter? How is the #1 cause of gun homicide in the country "a distraction"?
Nah. You’ll continue to vote for people who want a disarmed populace. Like most liberals, you play at—or are—ignorant of the global wave of gun restrictions from Canada to Australia, countries that have or had lots of guns without widespread gun violence before gun rights were stripped from citizens. Immediately afterwards their government introduced speech restrictions, mass control measures and extrajudicial interment camps. Of course this global movement accompanies an epidemic of knife violence but the narrative must be served.
You’re not going to be allowed to play the same game in the US. This isn’t a debate. I’m just helpfully informing you.
Just as we have lifeguards, pool covers, fencing, etc to protect kids from drowning, we should have metal detectors and armed security guards at schools to protect them from being murdered by a mass shooter.
A school should be the SAFEST place in our society, and children the most protected group of citizens.
Agreed. But solutions cannot only be one-sided and/or fall squarely on the school, teachers, and local community. There needs to be skin in the game at the broader levels, and that includes gun owners and manufacturers.
School shootings, for all the histrionic press they garner, are incredibly rare events. Infinitesimally rare. The odds of your kid being killed in a school shooting is statistically zero. The problem is, nobody has the courage to say this out loud, because you are accused of being callous, or not valuing the lives of children, or other such midwit nonsense.
4 people were shot and killed on a train in Chicago on the very same day as the Georgia school shooting. But you won't get wall-to-wall coverage on every news channel and a full-court press on social media publicizing these events. You didn't know that happened until this exact moment. Literally dozens of people, children even, are gunned down in urban neighborhoods every day. Nobody cares. You don't care, CNN doesn't care, nobody cares.
This idea that your kid is going to be gunned down in cold blood at random every time he/she goes to school is hyperbolic nonsense, a fantasy perpetuated by a media complex without morals or scruples.
There were 38 school shootings in the entire year of 2023, in which 21 people were killed and 42 injured. For context, 13 people died from direct lightning strikes. There are 130,000 k-12 schools, public and private, in the United States, with a total enrollment of 50 million. That's just students, that doesn't include teachers or admin staff.
The idea that schools are dangerous, or active war zones, or that school shootings are even a structural problem in America, is simply wrong, it's not true, it's hyperbolic nonsense.
But again, nobody has the balls to say this stuff, because the reaction is predictable, you are accused of hating children or some such idiocy.
"School shootings, for all the histrionic press they garner, are incredibly rare events. Infinitesimally rare. The odds of your kid being killed in a school shooting is statistically zero. The problem is, nobody has the courage to say this out loud, because you are accused of being callous, or not valuing the lives of children, or other such midwit nonsense."
Rarity depends on the context. As compared to all gun violence or as a percent of children affected, sure. But as compared to other industrialized countries, nope. There's a reason that people outside the U.S. are shocked that this keeps happening. Our gun violence is way worse, as are our school shootings.
"This idea that your kid is going to be gunned down in cold blood at random every time he/she goes to school is hyperbolic nonsense, a fantasy perpetuated by a media complex without morals or scruples."
This itself is nonsense as nobody says that. But I can tell you that students do consistently practice lockdowns because the possibility is there. If you have a kid in grade school, you've received emails about lockdowns and even had to have the lockdown talk. It's pretty pathetic. You say there were 38 shootings in 2023 as if that should give some relief. That is a horrifying statistic.
Your narrative may contain a bunch of accurate facts, such as on lightning strikes and enrollment, but it is extremely dismissive of the fact that the U.S. remains a violent outlier.
Your argument is often the go-to of those who either want to calm hysterics or want to retain the status quo. If the former, good for you. Kids should have a proper perception of their safety. If the latter though, you're part of what makes any reform so difficult --- and if so, imagine your kid being a victim, perhaps you'd feel a bit differently; maybe those stats you've trotted out wouldn't be so meaningful and would be viewed, as you noted above, as callous.
I should mention, those "school shootings" include gang bangers doing drive-bys past parking lots after football games, accidental discharges from guns in backpacks, and such things. Columbine-style student-on-student mass slayings basically never happen, at best it's once or twice a year, it's not a really structural problem. But we have blown it up to be some some of "epidemic of violence" that exists nowhere but the minds of paranoid lunatics.
““The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.”
If my eyes rolled any harder at this, I would have twisted the optic nerve. What an absurd comparison. There is a major difference between the choice to put one’s kid around a pool (and the associated protective decisions such as lifeguards, supervision, life-jackets, pool covers, etc) versus simply sending them to school and hoping that some lunatic with an gun doesn’t shred an entire class.””
Never have I seen someone attempt to make a counterpoint with such surety and fuck up so catastrophically. What you described in detail as being different is -in fact- no different. In your fumbling, bumbling tirade you actually demonstrate how they are the same.
It’s obvious that you don’t have kids, so you make emotional assumptions based off of the politics that have brainwashed you. You’ve also never held or used a gun in your life, yet attempt to speak about them as an authority. The reason people don’t take you seriously is because you’re a muppet. Another NPC preprogrammed with talking points that has their jaws flap anytime their handler shoves a hand up their ass.
This is the problem with dealing with liberals in general: Low-T, low-IQ responses fueled on nothing but emotions. As if your child dying unexpectedly at a place they should be safe - with safeguards - isn’t every bit as tragic and traumatic as another because the method of their death was different.
You’re a generation of victims, as if it’s bred into you from the minute your kindergarten teacher declares your gender. Zaid says a lot of shit and a lot of that shit I disagree with him on vehemently. He also says a lot of wise things that make me and others like me think. His point here - if you can get past your idiotic “guns kill people” worldview - is well thought out and in my opinion, accurate.
It’s no coincidence that gun violence has increased massively as the “sheriffs” have hung up their hats or been defunded by idiots like you. Combine that with our youth being turned into mentally ill meme generators from social media or literal imbeciles from higher education and you have the world we live in today.
The meek inherited the earth - or so they thought - and now we’re at stage IV.
I like how nowhere in your frothing diatribe is an actual substantive rebuttal. Wouldn’t the high IQ, non-NPC type of person be expected to do better? Full of assumptions (that you struck out on, ha). Lot of pounding the table, get-of-my-lawn type energy on display.
Though the “Low-T” part definitely made me LOL. I like the absurdity of that being included in the mix.
Looks like I got the response I expected and wanted. Zero facts, zero justification, zero rebukes. Thereby admitting your ignorance.
I deal with you (you’re all clones that think they’re unique) all day long, every day. It’s not hard to hit a nerve when that’s all you are made of. Pathetic.
Next time you want to cry about guns and kids dying, make a fucking point.
“Looks like I got the response I expected and wanted.”
Way to say the quiet part out loud. Your transparency is refreshing: this and your handle show me you’re here to be angry and fight. More power to you, whatever gets you through the day. Blathering a bunch of insults isn’t exactly my type of recipe for discussion. Maybe X/Twitter would be more up your alley? All sorts of people with impulse controls issues there, you’d have a blast!!
“I deal with you (you’re all clones that think they’re unique) all day long, every day.”
I’d suggest getting a new job or hobby.
“Next time you want to cry about guns and kids dying, make a fucking point.”
My conversation with the author on his article will have to suffice. 😂
No, Nate, I am an adult not a meme. I don’t “say the quiet part out loud.” I say what I mean to say. I say the loud part loudly. You have still not made a single point to support your initial critique.
I have kids. I have guns. I am able to make the distinction between children being slaughtered at school by mental defectives and the method of their destruction. You, on the other hand, believe the method is the madness. You don’t understand what holding beliefs like yours actually means because - again - in true liberal fashion, you can’t see past lunch.
What you should be doing is arming yourself, as is your right. Learning how to use said weapon(s) to defend yourself and your eventual family and then praying to whatever God you may or may not believe in, that you never have to use such force.
Well guess what, I also say the quiet part loudly, and you’re acting like a man-child. Calling you a meme would be too kind. I was thinking a coward and an asshole. If you had an ounce of courage, you’d ask questions instead of presuming to know what I stand for. Instead of imagining where I stand on the issues and vomiting out nonsense about low-T (I give you credit for that still, really was funny 😂).
The amount of things you’ve presumed to know of me that have been wrong is laughable. Like “anti-Nostradamus” levels of error. But I bet it’s easier for you to rationalize your assholish conduct when you make those with opposing opinions out to be caricatures of real people.
Your criticisms ring hollow. I made my points clear enough to engage author. Kudos to Zaid for wading into the comment section cesspool. I may not have shown him the tact he deserved and could have toned down my frustration, but I wasn’t an asshole. You sir, are an asshole. And a net-negative to this discussion. Barking bullshit from the sidelines and tossing around insults doesn’t impress anyone other than your fellow assholes. Well, I’ve been called worse by a hell of a lot better than you. You mentioned earlier that you deal with such people as me all day long. It reminded me of this quote that I’ll leave you as a parting gift: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” 👋
This same "honor culture" argument could be made for why the Palestinians have suffered for so many years under genocidal/suicidal "leadership". Honor killings are rampant in Palestinian culture, and honor culture may be at the root of why so many Palestinians' would rather die than accept the existence of a Jewish State.
"Honor culture" is a plague on humanity that needs to be wiped out - it certainly needs to be cleansed from the hearts of the Palestinians and their so called "supporters".
I think another factor in the culture of honor is the fact that the South is the only area of our country that has been invaded by another. The anger and shame of losing the Civil War is real and has been passed down.
What an insane statement. Young black men (15-34) constitute just 2% of our population and yet commit about half of the nation’s homicides. That’s a rate 49 times (I repeat 49 times) that of the average American. That is the very definition of pathological. As to mass shooters look at the Parkland school shooter and the Highland Park, Illinois shooter and ask yourself one question: Why are these two murderers still alive? In a rational world they would both have been tried, convicted and executed by now.
Since true timely justice is unlikely to ever occur in this country we need to look to practical and achievable solutions.
Given the existence of the Second Amendment and Supreme Court rulings upholding an individual right to own a firearm, every school shooting gives rise to a paradox. Democrats invariably call for more gun control none of which, if effective, could withstand judicial scrutiny or if it could, would actually reduce the risk of school violence.
The only approach which might actually help the situation is rejected outright by those on the left, that is allowing school personnel who meet the same firearm qualification standards as the local police to carry their personal weapons at work. We are surrounded by these individuals while we shop at Target with our children and never give them a thought and that is the correct response. The average armed citizen including those who work in schools poses no particular threat to society either shopping in Target or working at a school but the thought of the latter drives people up a wall. Yet the entire concept of a school as a “gun free” zone is ludicrous. Those bent on mass murder laugh at the very idea of obeying such a rule. They are fucking murderers.
Let qualified school staff protect themselves and their students where they work. It’s worth a try.
We changed a culture of smoking years ago. It took awhile but the numbers of smokers has dramatically declined. Could we use something like this as a starting point? Could we begin to at least attempt a cultural change?? Education, awareness, very high hand gun and AR type gun and ammunition taxes, immediate cessation of ARtype weapon production and sale to public, 21yr old min age, registration, requiring proof of gun safes, gun locks, etc removal of guns from homes with children displaying the obvious (as in recent case and others), gun buy backs at great prices, penalties for parents (via courts of course). The list of options is long. We could try.
Regarding regional differences, I found it amusing that there was speculation that Maine has so little gun violence due to surrounding state's laws. Really?
I was recently reading Influence and Caldini highlights the attitude you reference that when a certain behaviour gets media attention you get more of it.Effectively not talking about mass killings reduces their potential reoccurance.That is strangely well documented for over 20+ years yet we still make school shootings viral.Protecting kids should be the one thing policy makers value more than being correct,and we should see Dems/Reps just blaming the other side instead of working together to reduce these incidents
More gun laws 👮 instead of at least more security until better gun laws. The irony is that where does Americans drugs come from and where does Mexicos guns come from? More gun laws here while we supply the cartels w less security at the border. Twist that around for a second.
I feel bad for the Dad if it’s his gun. His responsibly. Parents need to spend a year in jail. If you have a teenager with mental issues who has their own computer and phone and you don’t use a firewall to limit their internet access then it’s your fault.
@Neil as you may be aware, this is being tried in Michigan -- parents going to prison for a long time for ignoring their child's mental health needs and supplying him with a gun that was used in a mass shooting. https://apnews.com/article/james-crumbley-jennifer-crumbley-oxford-school-shooting-e5888f615c76c3b26153c34dc36d5436
There is some debate over the legal grounds for this sort of prosecution, and it will be interesting to see how the prosecution of the shooter's father in Georgia proceeds.
One would hope that putting fear of consequences into the minds of those who should be more in control of their bad impulses could help reduce this sort of carnage. But when you hear the way some adults manage their own lives, one wonders how often that would make a difference.
Exactly, the kid basically told everyone he would do this a year prior.
This is a calm and reasoned response, which is a rarity in most coverage of school shootings and similar tragedies. Thank you, Zaid.
I had my local Police tell me that they can’t do anything unless the crime has been committed. So they went to talk to the parents and the kid about threats. He had a legit made before, but then left without the kid getting the help needed.
Nicely done, as usual. Irish anthropologist Mark Maguire and I have written about counterterrorism more broadly (since I live in Colorado a lot, home of school shootings as cultural phenomenon, we touch on that, too). Perhaps of interest: Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/getting-through-security.html
We need to acknowledge the role culture plays in so many self-defeating peoples, including the Palestinians in the levant - and black gang members in Chicago's South Side. But acknowledging the profound role culture plays in the quality of people's lives is derogated as victim blaming, so suffering people are just patted on the head and told there is nothing they can do to save themselves.
The Palestinians are not "self-defeating". They are the victims of a people with a culture that encourages hatred of "the other" and justifies mass slaughter because, as the world's greatest ever victim, they have a right to defend themselves.
😂
Thanks for mentioning regional differences. I agree they help explain events that might seem strange to outsiders. I had my hands on a paper not too long ago that went into this subject in some detail. Sure wish I could find it again.
The Apalachee shooter, despite being only 14 years old, will be charged with felony murder. Meanwhile, here in "enlightened" San Francisco, the DA wants wants adult law to apply to a 17 year murder suspect.
California and Georgia might have cultural differences but in both states the law, presumably a result of bipartisan agreement, seems equally cruel to juveniles.
“The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.”
If my eyes rolled any harder at this, I would have twisted the optic nerve. What an absurd comparison. There is a major difference between the choice to put one’s kid around a pool (and the associated protective decisions such as lifeguards, supervision, life-jackets, pool covers, etc) versus simply sending them to school and hoping that some lunatic with an gun doesn’t shred an entire class.
Your article strikes me as contrarian bullshit, whose intention is to paint both parties as equally useless on the matter. Your message is basically that we need to accept this violent reality where kids are gunned down mercilessly and not give just matters the media attention that you claim emboldens others to replicate such attacks. In other words, turn a little more of a blind eye. A defeatist and twisted take.
“The reality is that tweaking background checks or banning the sale of boutique weapons (what the Democrats call assault weapons) is unlikely to make a big difference.”
“Boutique weapons”!? There’s a euphemism to remember. Maybe I’ll go pick one up at the flea market on the way home. But seriously, that you dismissed this point in a single sentence.
“The nonpartisan RAND Corporation did a review of all the big research and found that laws like safe storage laws that require parents to lock up their weapons properly to keep them away from children.”
Biden literally included this in the statement that you quoted above. Lazy.
This article is useless, just another collective shrug, trotting out “it’s just too hard!!” And throwing in the towel.
Fine work Zaid.
I don't know that I necessarily say nothing is possible so much as it's difficult to achieve. Has anything in recent American history suggested that it is easy to achieve a reduction in gun deaths? If so, you're much more optimistic in reading that history than me.
Nobody with a functioning brain is saying it is an “easy” solution, or even that there is a single option. That’s probably why Biden mentioned like 4 things in that single quote (yet you glommed onto just one, seemingly ignoring the rest). Meanwhile in GOP-land, there’s not even a single gun-related reform taken seriously. Thoughts and prayers, they’re true monsters, et al. And yet you put them on a level playing field. Classic both sides-ism
When half the population fetishizes gun ownership and politicians proudly take family photos with their precious AR15-style “boutiques,” even the most minor suggestions are treated as an affront to their identity and liberty.
“Has anything in recent American history suggested that it’s easy to achieve a reduction in gun deaths?”
Another loaded question, as I cannot think of a single person who thinks it is easy. But to quote The Simpsons, you’re kind of like Ned Flanders’ dad: “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas!!”
My question to you is this, how many gun deaths do you think occur as a consequence of AR-15s? How many occur as a consequence of handguns? How many occur as a consequence of illegally obtained weapons? The vast majority of gun violence in places like Chicago is happening due to the presence of unlawful weapons, the people carrying them have criminal histories. It's a huge black market. Addressing that black market is largely a matter of policing, not necessarily banning guns. Thomas Massie poses with an AR-15, that's why Chicago has more gun murders than the entire nation of Japan? Let's be serious here.
Now you’re just trying to muddy the waters, mixing school shootings with gang violence and general violent crime in Chicago. Again, the intent is not to construct some panacea, one obviously doesn’t exist. It’s to have the intention to reduce such school and mass shootings. So let’s not step out of this lane. From the very RAND report you cite, there is a reason that their analysis is broken into categories of Violent Crime, Suicide, Mass Shootings, Police Shootings, etc. Because potential options have to be considered in different contexts. One solution may reduce death in a single category but not others.
So with that preface, your questions are mostly distraction. In the mass shooting context, a perpetrator with an AR or even semiautomatic pistol, with the usual array of bump stocks and extended magazines, can inflict more casualties in a lesser amount of time than weapons with a lower rate of fire. You can drop all the facts you want about handgun deaths, but this calculus remains. You can accept this as life in America, but I’ll continue to vote for people who strive to make a difference, even if small.
I don't know, if your point of view is that gun access is driving violence in America, then why would reducing gun access more broadly not be a solution to every type of shooting, from schools to gangs to suicides? You can't turn every context into a police state, from a theater to a school to a subway train in Chicago, right? I agree at least in theory your original point makes sense, it doesn't make as much sense to zoom in on school shootings and say how do we prevent them in particular, as if schools exist on a different planet that you have to transfer the weapons to.
“if your point of view is that gun access is driving violence in America, then why would reducing gun access more broadly not be a solution to every type of shooting, from schools to gangs to suicides?”
My view is that access is one of many contributing factors. I’m not saying it’s driving it, but it’s a significant factor. While I don’t believe that another assault weapons ban is politically possible in 2024, it happened before and I’d support it happening again. But more realistically, I support making access more difficult at the national level, including safe storage laws, raising the minimum age, greater waiting periods, come down hard restricting access to mentally ill, those convicted of violent crimes and domestic abuse, et al. What makes the mass shooting solutions so hard is that the volume of studies on what works and what doesn’t is sorely lacking. I wish you’d mentioned this dearth of reliable studies when you cited the RAND report which pointed this out. Limited and inconclusive evidence. 5 qualifying studies!!
Not all violence crimes are equal. Gang violence is most sad because of the innocent bystanders caught up in the mix. In school shootings, basically everyone is an innocent bystander and among the most vulnerable populations out there.
How is it muddying the waters to bring up the massive prevelance of gang violence when it comes to handgun homicide? Do those dealths not matter? How is the #1 cause of gun homicide in the country "a distraction"?
I already explained why, read it again
Nah. You’ll continue to vote for people who want a disarmed populace. Like most liberals, you play at—or are—ignorant of the global wave of gun restrictions from Canada to Australia, countries that have or had lots of guns without widespread gun violence before gun rights were stripped from citizens. Immediately afterwards their government introduced speech restrictions, mass control measures and extrajudicial interment camps. Of course this global movement accompanies an epidemic of knife violence but the narrative must be served.
You’re not going to be allowed to play the same game in the US. This isn’t a debate. I’m just helpfully informing you.
"Nah. You’ll continue to vote for people who want a disarmed populace"
LOL. Swing and a miss!!! I own guns, you imbecile. Is there anyone in this forum who asks instead of assuming??
Better security at schools or more gun legislation. Which is it? Both? Idk both sides can't see the the safety of either side
Nice and simple. How is a 14 year old getting a gun. Then how does he walk into a school with it after so many school shootings. That school sucks.
Just as we have lifeguards, pool covers, fencing, etc to protect kids from drowning, we should have metal detectors and armed security guards at schools to protect them from being murdered by a mass shooter.
A school should be the SAFEST place in our society, and children the most protected group of citizens.
Agreed. But solutions cannot only be one-sided and/or fall squarely on the school, teachers, and local community. There needs to be skin in the game at the broader levels, and that includes gun owners and manufacturers.
School shootings, for all the histrionic press they garner, are incredibly rare events. Infinitesimally rare. The odds of your kid being killed in a school shooting is statistically zero. The problem is, nobody has the courage to say this out loud, because you are accused of being callous, or not valuing the lives of children, or other such midwit nonsense.
4 people were shot and killed on a train in Chicago on the very same day as the Georgia school shooting. But you won't get wall-to-wall coverage on every news channel and a full-court press on social media publicizing these events. You didn't know that happened until this exact moment. Literally dozens of people, children even, are gunned down in urban neighborhoods every day. Nobody cares. You don't care, CNN doesn't care, nobody cares.
This idea that your kid is going to be gunned down in cold blood at random every time he/she goes to school is hyperbolic nonsense, a fantasy perpetuated by a media complex without morals or scruples.
There were 38 school shootings in the entire year of 2023, in which 21 people were killed and 42 injured. For context, 13 people died from direct lightning strikes. There are 130,000 k-12 schools, public and private, in the United States, with a total enrollment of 50 million. That's just students, that doesn't include teachers or admin staff.
The idea that schools are dangerous, or active war zones, or that school shootings are even a structural problem in America, is simply wrong, it's not true, it's hyperbolic nonsense.
But again, nobody has the balls to say this stuff, because the reaction is predictable, you are accused of hating children or some such idiocy.
"School shootings, for all the histrionic press they garner, are incredibly rare events. Infinitesimally rare. The odds of your kid being killed in a school shooting is statistically zero. The problem is, nobody has the courage to say this out loud, because you are accused of being callous, or not valuing the lives of children, or other such midwit nonsense."
Rarity depends on the context. As compared to all gun violence or as a percent of children affected, sure. But as compared to other industrialized countries, nope. There's a reason that people outside the U.S. are shocked that this keeps happening. Our gun violence is way worse, as are our school shootings.
"This idea that your kid is going to be gunned down in cold blood at random every time he/she goes to school is hyperbolic nonsense, a fantasy perpetuated by a media complex without morals or scruples."
This itself is nonsense as nobody says that. But I can tell you that students do consistently practice lockdowns because the possibility is there. If you have a kid in grade school, you've received emails about lockdowns and even had to have the lockdown talk. It's pretty pathetic. You say there were 38 shootings in 2023 as if that should give some relief. That is a horrifying statistic.
Your narrative may contain a bunch of accurate facts, such as on lightning strikes and enrollment, but it is extremely dismissive of the fact that the U.S. remains a violent outlier.
Your argument is often the go-to of those who either want to calm hysterics or want to retain the status quo. If the former, good for you. Kids should have a proper perception of their safety. If the latter though, you're part of what makes any reform so difficult --- and if so, imagine your kid being a victim, perhaps you'd feel a bit differently; maybe those stats you've trotted out wouldn't be so meaningful and would be viewed, as you noted above, as callous.
I should mention, those "school shootings" include gang bangers doing drive-bys past parking lots after football games, accidental discharges from guns in backpacks, and such things. Columbine-style student-on-student mass slayings basically never happen, at best it's once or twice a year, it's not a really structural problem. But we have blown it up to be some some of "epidemic of violence" that exists nowhere but the minds of paranoid lunatics.
““The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.”
If my eyes rolled any harder at this, I would have twisted the optic nerve. What an absurd comparison. There is a major difference between the choice to put one’s kid around a pool (and the associated protective decisions such as lifeguards, supervision, life-jackets, pool covers, etc) versus simply sending them to school and hoping that some lunatic with an gun doesn’t shred an entire class.””
Never have I seen someone attempt to make a counterpoint with such surety and fuck up so catastrophically. What you described in detail as being different is -in fact- no different. In your fumbling, bumbling tirade you actually demonstrate how they are the same.
It’s obvious that you don’t have kids, so you make emotional assumptions based off of the politics that have brainwashed you. You’ve also never held or used a gun in your life, yet attempt to speak about them as an authority. The reason people don’t take you seriously is because you’re a muppet. Another NPC preprogrammed with talking points that has their jaws flap anytime their handler shoves a hand up their ass.
This is the problem with dealing with liberals in general: Low-T, low-IQ responses fueled on nothing but emotions. As if your child dying unexpectedly at a place they should be safe - with safeguards - isn’t every bit as tragic and traumatic as another because the method of their death was different.
You’re a generation of victims, as if it’s bred into you from the minute your kindergarten teacher declares your gender. Zaid says a lot of shit and a lot of that shit I disagree with him on vehemently. He also says a lot of wise things that make me and others like me think. His point here - if you can get past your idiotic “guns kill people” worldview - is well thought out and in my opinion, accurate.
It’s no coincidence that gun violence has increased massively as the “sheriffs” have hung up their hats or been defunded by idiots like you. Combine that with our youth being turned into mentally ill meme generators from social media or literal imbeciles from higher education and you have the world we live in today.
The meek inherited the earth - or so they thought - and now we’re at stage IV.
I like how nowhere in your frothing diatribe is an actual substantive rebuttal. Wouldn’t the high IQ, non-NPC type of person be expected to do better? Full of assumptions (that you struck out on, ha). Lot of pounding the table, get-of-my-lawn type energy on display.
Though the “Low-T” part definitely made me LOL. I like the absurdity of that being included in the mix.
Looks like I got the response I expected and wanted. Zero facts, zero justification, zero rebukes. Thereby admitting your ignorance.
I deal with you (you’re all clones that think they’re unique) all day long, every day. It’s not hard to hit a nerve when that’s all you are made of. Pathetic.
Next time you want to cry about guns and kids dying, make a fucking point.
“Looks like I got the response I expected and wanted.”
Way to say the quiet part out loud. Your transparency is refreshing: this and your handle show me you’re here to be angry and fight. More power to you, whatever gets you through the day. Blathering a bunch of insults isn’t exactly my type of recipe for discussion. Maybe X/Twitter would be more up your alley? All sorts of people with impulse controls issues there, you’d have a blast!!
“I deal with you (you’re all clones that think they’re unique) all day long, every day.”
I’d suggest getting a new job or hobby.
“Next time you want to cry about guns and kids dying, make a fucking point.”
My conversation with the author on his article will have to suffice. 😂
No, Nate, I am an adult not a meme. I don’t “say the quiet part out loud.” I say what I mean to say. I say the loud part loudly. You have still not made a single point to support your initial critique.
I have kids. I have guns. I am able to make the distinction between children being slaughtered at school by mental defectives and the method of their destruction. You, on the other hand, believe the method is the madness. You don’t understand what holding beliefs like yours actually means because - again - in true liberal fashion, you can’t see past lunch.
What you should be doing is arming yourself, as is your right. Learning how to use said weapon(s) to defend yourself and your eventual family and then praying to whatever God you may or may not believe in, that you never have to use such force.
Well guess what, I also say the quiet part loudly, and you’re acting like a man-child. Calling you a meme would be too kind. I was thinking a coward and an asshole. If you had an ounce of courage, you’d ask questions instead of presuming to know what I stand for. Instead of imagining where I stand on the issues and vomiting out nonsense about low-T (I give you credit for that still, really was funny 😂).
The amount of things you’ve presumed to know of me that have been wrong is laughable. Like “anti-Nostradamus” levels of error. But I bet it’s easier for you to rationalize your assholish conduct when you make those with opposing opinions out to be caricatures of real people.
Your criticisms ring hollow. I made my points clear enough to engage author. Kudos to Zaid for wading into the comment section cesspool. I may not have shown him the tact he deserved and could have toned down my frustration, but I wasn’t an asshole. You sir, are an asshole. And a net-negative to this discussion. Barking bullshit from the sidelines and tossing around insults doesn’t impress anyone other than your fellow assholes. Well, I’ve been called worse by a hell of a lot better than you. You mentioned earlier that you deal with such people as me all day long. It reminded me of this quote that I’ll leave you as a parting gift: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” 👋
This same "honor culture" argument could be made for why the Palestinians have suffered for so many years under genocidal/suicidal "leadership". Honor killings are rampant in Palestinian culture, and honor culture may be at the root of why so many Palestinians' would rather die than accept the existence of a Jewish State.
"Honor culture" is a plague on humanity that needs to be wiped out - it certainly needs to be cleansed from the hearts of the Palestinians and their so called "supporters".
I think another factor in the culture of honor is the fact that the South is the only area of our country that has been invaded by another. The anger and shame of losing the Civil War is real and has been passed down.
“…pathologizing black men in particular…”
What an insane statement. Young black men (15-34) constitute just 2% of our population and yet commit about half of the nation’s homicides. That’s a rate 49 times (I repeat 49 times) that of the average American. That is the very definition of pathological. As to mass shooters look at the Parkland school shooter and the Highland Park, Illinois shooter and ask yourself one question: Why are these two murderers still alive? In a rational world they would both have been tried, convicted and executed by now.
Since true timely justice is unlikely to ever occur in this country we need to look to practical and achievable solutions.
Given the existence of the Second Amendment and Supreme Court rulings upholding an individual right to own a firearm, every school shooting gives rise to a paradox. Democrats invariably call for more gun control none of which, if effective, could withstand judicial scrutiny or if it could, would actually reduce the risk of school violence.
The only approach which might actually help the situation is rejected outright by those on the left, that is allowing school personnel who meet the same firearm qualification standards as the local police to carry their personal weapons at work. We are surrounded by these individuals while we shop at Target with our children and never give them a thought and that is the correct response. The average armed citizen including those who work in schools poses no particular threat to society either shopping in Target or working at a school but the thought of the latter drives people up a wall. Yet the entire concept of a school as a “gun free” zone is ludicrous. Those bent on mass murder laugh at the very idea of obeying such a rule. They are fucking murderers.
Let qualified school staff protect themselves and their students where they work. It’s worth a try.
Welfare is responsible for most gun homicides in the US. Not remotely disputable.
We changed a culture of smoking years ago. It took awhile but the numbers of smokers has dramatically declined. Could we use something like this as a starting point? Could we begin to at least attempt a cultural change?? Education, awareness, very high hand gun and AR type gun and ammunition taxes, immediate cessation of ARtype weapon production and sale to public, 21yr old min age, registration, requiring proof of gun safes, gun locks, etc removal of guns from homes with children displaying the obvious (as in recent case and others), gun buy backs at great prices, penalties for parents (via courts of course). The list of options is long. We could try.
Regarding regional differences, I found it amusing that there was speculation that Maine has so little gun violence due to surrounding state's laws. Really?
I was recently reading Influence and Caldini highlights the attitude you reference that when a certain behaviour gets media attention you get more of it.Effectively not talking about mass killings reduces their potential reoccurance.That is strangely well documented for over 20+ years yet we still make school shootings viral.Protecting kids should be the one thing policy makers value more than being correct,and we should see Dems/Reps just blaming the other side instead of working together to reduce these incidents
More gun laws 👮 instead of at least more security until better gun laws. The irony is that where does Americans drugs come from and where does Mexicos guns come from? More gun laws here while we supply the cartels w less security at the border. Twist that around for a second.
I'm kind of a hard core 2Aer, and I see most gun "restrictions" as a way for the camel to get its nose under the tent flap.
But having said that, this is such an excellent essay. I'm so very glad that you have come back to Substack.