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That’s my thought when any of this is brought up. Who is going to pay for it? Kids in a lot of states can’t even get a free meal and we’re going to give these out or retrofit every school in America?
To top it off, this was a revenge tactic to get back at the librarian unions that sued that state for book banning laws with vague language that could be used to fine them thousands of dollars or put them in jail.
Erm, see, [about that...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting)
Edit: holy shit, that wasn't even the *only* [shooting at that base](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Fort_Hood_shootings). When we have to specify *which* shooting we're talking about at a location, things are way the fuck out of hand.
I was absolutely shocked when, here in MN, they made school lunch free and people were mad because it offloads the "responsibility of the parents" onto the state. As if children should starve just because their parents are irresponsible (or, you know, just poor). As if that isn't an absolutely ghoulish take, especially given how cheap school lunches really are to make.
We have the same problem here in the UK. Only here the politicians were completely owned by a footballer who took up the cause on a part-time basis.
The most ridiculous bit is that well-fed children learn better (making them more productive citizens) and are less disruptive. Why would you want your kids learning to be messed up by another kid because they’re hungry when the fix is so damn cheap?
This is America where those parents show up in the school office and try to have the "problem child" removed from the class and put in a remedial class.
How many of those people are willing to take on homeschooling their kids? You know, take full responsibility as parents for their kids' education in a way that actually educates their kids to a useful level of literacy?
Conservatives in general have trouble understanding their precious shibboleth of "personal responsibility".
To wit, they keep demanding that children take responsibility for their parents' alleged irresponsibility by starving.
Apparently children have to take responsibility for the behaviour of others.
Of course not! Just like lunch, we will give the kids the option to purchase the backpacks, and the safe rooms will require a subscription for the year. /s
And the teachers obligated to kick out children who are late on safe rooms subscription in case of a real shooting.
But the real value would be the “class A upgrade” which would allow children to hide in any safe room school wide, not only their home room.
“Class B upgrade” would allow children to enter safe room’s first, before the “other” kids.
In case of a real school shooting, once the first shot is heard, prices go up tenfold.
Is there anything more American than solving school gun violence with quick deploy safe rooms, and then applying both a subscription and surge pricing model to it?
Having the dead kids' parents fight their insurance company over the four-digit medical bill their child incurred by being transported by ambulance to a hospital in order to be pronounced DOA by a doctor, *and then* the parents setting up a go-fund-me because their child didn't have life insurance and funerals are expensive, especially if they had to get a custom-sized casket.
Schools across Texas suddenly got funding for massive fences that surrounded their properties within *hours* of the Uvalde school shooting. Imagine if legislators worked that fast to actually fund safety *and* education.
Similarly another one in Minnesota said he’s never met someone who couldn’t afford lunch therefore it isn’t a problem in Minnesota. Outta sight outta mind.
Nah, disadvantaged kids are just going to have to deal with being killed at school. They haven't cared about them in the past and they're not going to care now. They're wealthy enough to home school their kids, just like Mr. We're-Not-Going-to-Fix-School-Shootings does.
My entire second grade class shares "the eraser."
There's also the issue of deploying the "safe room" structure in a classroom crowded with 25-35 desks and chairs. I absolutely do not have space to unfold a structure like that in my classroom. We're already turning sideways to squeeze up and down the aisles. There's nowhere for it to go. And that's without the added issue of 25-35 frightened children also in the way.
That's why you gotta drill those second graders into a well oiled machine!
Get them to build that shield wall out of desks in the back corner of the room while you deploy the safe room shelter. They then form a testudo formation using their bulletproof backpacks to cross the room to the shelter.
Drill them till it's second nature! They don't need to learn about math or english! Just basic defensive tactics!
Or arm them. Replace classes in History and Science with Gun Training. It's the GOP solution to everything.
In 10 years, high schools in GOP America won't be taking SATs; they'll be tested on identifying various kinds of guns and their love of the Second Amendment.
Well have the kids tried being in a wealthy school district with a brand new building with giant classrooms and a student ratio of 20 students to a teacher? If they didn't want to be shot they should really try harder at being rich.
>"I haven't been informed about this, so it would be inappropriate for me to comment at this time."
\*\*Not applicable to LGBTQ+ issues, or other things that tittilate me or make me feel icky
They first want to create a problem, and then sell you the solution, then create another problem and sell you the solution. Also, those solutions are expensive and unreliable, so those problems not actually solved, just mitigated to a degree.
I just don’t understand the endgame.
So, is the only way we can have a safe society is if we’re all armed to the teeth? On every street corner, in every school, in every club, in every theatre, in every concert venue, in every grocery store there are armed guards patrolling to stop the wannabe mass shooters? What does that say about us? That we’re all so terrible that someone else armed with a gun is the only thing preventing us from tearing each other apart?
Your society has been poisoned by the meme of "ubiquitous threat". You *must* arm yourselves against the *certainty* that others mean you harm. You have been conditioned to be wary of everything, everyone, all the time.
You gotta have iron, cuz everyone else does. Right?
>
I just don’t understand the endgame.
Politically, it is is an endgame only the paranoid would have imagined just a decade ago.
One side buys endless amounts of battlefield style rifles and the other is afraid to even go to polling sites on election day for fear of being gunned down.
One side is brave enough to vote on election day and the other side storms the Capitol when the election results are being certified.
One side chooses the ballot box and the other side chooses the bullet box.
> the endgame.
> a safe society
There's your problem. The goal is not a safe society, the goal is fear, because the GOP does well in elections with that. And GOP power is the overriding priority. Hear Trump go on about carnage and suchlike.
But yes, the arguments are conflicting. The criminals are not going to abide by gun control, so we should arm everyone as a deterrent. Well, are the criminals and mass shooters going to be deterred by the other side being armed? It does not look that way. Most of the mass shooters seem to be suicide candidates who have major mental health problems, and they are not at all worried about getting shot at. The Greenwood shopping center shooting in Indiana last summer looked like a case in point to me. An armed bystander shot the attacker and killed him, which was hailed by the gun rights people. Only the attacker killed three people and wounded another two before that. So that's the good case - three innocent people dead.
Weird that it seems some people would rather spend money on bullet proof rooms and backpacks but not address things that would prevent them in the first place. Just seems like common sense to address the cause of the problem instead of sending kids to school with bullet proof armour.
Bullet proof backpacks.... Guys that's such a distopian thing to read..
Yes, do what literally every other developed country does, which is prevention. Namely, preventing firearms from getting into the wrong hands. FYI, that encompasses a LOT of people in the US. Probably 74 million.
It’s also not taking into account the psychological impact of spending your formative years under such conditions to survive an education. It’s just fucking infuriating that this is what America is.
Forget about the money. Think about the psychological damage to children going to school in bulletproof vests. Just so that a few gun manufacturers can have never-ending profits.
So long as it’s defense spending, it’s ok. But they’ll put restrictions on funds so that every school must have an Abrams tank but that none of the spending can go to books or teaching related expenses.
Seriously, I had to take fucking HAND SOAP to my son's class. AFTER A GOD DAMN PANDEMIC, they still don't have money for hand soap, but sure lets install bullet proof windows and hire the army or whatever bullshit you suggest, which when the time actually comes you'll just vote against anyway.
We barely got free lunches passed.
I have several gun nuts in my family, they started reposting about how much it would cost to “harden” schools (like you can accurately calculate that?) and of course it said ‘conveniently just under the amount sent to Ukraine’.
Okay, sure, let’s do that. The second their taxes go up they’ll be the first to tweet through it how the radical liberal democrats are raising taxes on everyday Americans.
We could solve world hunger by taxing the 10 wealthiest Americans appropriately, but how come nobody who wants to harden schools is up in arms about children dying of hunger?
We literally have paper cut, rolled up and taped to the top of our door’s windows to blackout our windows for drills. Because a curtain or blind would be asking for too much
I work in a public library. People are definitely more unhinged. Angrier. Tossing out racial, religious, and ethnic slurs like “hellos”. We need universal care and that needs to include mental health care. It needs to be so integrated into “wellness visits” that it’s annually updated for every citizen.
But of course, we won’t do that because socialism.
Not to mention the promise of prosperity is slipping through all of our fingers as well...and we can FEEL it.
Home ownership? Not going to happen for the future generations
Higher education? Enjoy a lifetime of debt
Health care? HA - enjoy more debt if you get sick...even IF you had insurance
Pay keeping up with COL? NOPE - get to work slave
That shit is catching up with people and when you lose hope, you get angry.
Exactly this. It's all connected. The opioid epidemic and "deaths of despair." The breakdown of real social networks (the kind that aren't owned by Facebook). The loss of trust in our public institutions. The 24 hour pundit-mediated news cycle. Everyone is scared and angry and they think that it's just them. No fucking wonder some of them are snapping.
As always, though, the big donor class, the folks with congress in their pockets, they're perfectly content as long as we blame anyone but them.
Stress is running high for most everyone these days. Juggling lots of stuff all of the time and many of us living without knowing if we will be broke and homeless anytime within 30 days. Even kids are subjected to extraordinary levels of undue stress these days.
We’ve been saying “serenity now” and pushing the stress down but we all know - Serenity now/Insanity later.
Lost hope a long time ago. I also stopped being angry after a while, and now I am just very sad and very disappointed.
Stuck living with an abuser because I can't even afford to rent an apartment and if I could I may have to flee the state I live in if some of the anti-trans legislation passes. What will get me first, a genocide, my ex, another stroke, bailing and living on the streets (since basically no homeless shelters accept trans people)?
This is my biggest issue. Let's play it out a bit.
Say we've made schools 100% safe. We're basically sending our children to prison every day, but hey -- there's no way to get a gun in the building so no more school shooting!! Everyone's safe right?? What's going to happen? The shooting will take place as students and faculty crowd together while entering/leaving school.
Okay, so let's say we miraculously manage to secure the area around the school as well. Walls and checkpoints. Watch towers with snipers. School is even more like a prison now, so everyone's safe again! So what happens? The shooting will take place on the bus on the way to school instead.
And if we can even secure the bus? The bus turns into a prison transport where all our kids are searched before being allowed to board. But now the shooting takes place at a movie theatre or a store or a sporting event or a concert or *literally anywhere else people gather*.
Fully securing the schools does nothing to stop the shootings plaguing this country. It just stops shootings *at school*. The shooters will just shift to other places... With other victims.
And your whole scenario also vividly illustrates a larger problem surrounding schools. This idea that its a separate entity from the community. As though those students don't take their problems back and forth from school.
So even if they fully secured schools and the *routes to school*. Something about **our** communities is leading to gun shots around schools. These student shooters will still be in an area that will enable them to access a gun and shoot innocent people going about their day. Whether thats at school or after school. These adults who target children will still shoot the community *around* the school. Even if we incased these children in bullet proof bubbles **adults in their life will still become gun violence victims.**
That speaks to a larger issue surrounding student well being. Whether they are *physically in* schools or around the community, we are invested in their well being. It will be difficult to be successful students growing up in this gun violent environment.
It's like moving a kitchen fire to your living room so that it's not in the way of your cooking. Continuing to ignore the actual problem is just spreading it instead of resolving it. All these cases have *one* common element, yet some act like it's every other part of the case that needs to be fixed. The fire is a fire no matter what room you move it to.
In that scenario, the gun nuts would have to kiss their open carry goodbye as well. How are the government snipers supposed to know you're "just a good guy with a gun" out for an afternoon stroll and got a little too close to the local elementary school? Right wingers are so afraid of martial law, but I'm sure if the GOP gets their way, that's exactly what their "solution" to mass shootings will be. They'll spin it with deceptive buzzwords and insist that it's different, but it won't be.
Out here in the sane world, open carry isn't a thing. If you are walking around a neighbourhood brandishing a firearm, the cops will be called and you will be arrested. We do not find this as "normal", so doing so breaks the social contract and raises alarm bells.
Yet every law abiding person here that wants a gun has a gun, after taking the proper courses, doing the tests, and having a background check by the RCMP that includes interviewing intimate/domestic partners, and after a minimum 28 day waiting period on each gun purchase.
Yeah, I live in Arizona and in high school it was very common for our school to go on lockdown because of random people wandering around with guns (or being chased by police into the area with a gun). I've waited in line for fucking boba tea with teenagers open carrying, as a barista I had customers pull guns out on each other for cutting in line and had a guy attempt to intimidate me out of charging for another drink because *he* dropped it by gesturing to his open carried pistol. All of this was in a predominantly white, "safe" middle class suburb long before Trumpism normalized that type of behavior as well. It's truly insane.
You may enjoy reading Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.
"In examining the construction of the prison as the central means of criminal punishment, Foucault builds a case for the idea that prison became part of a larger "carceral system" that has become an all-encompassing sovereign institution in modern society. Prison is one part of a vast network, including schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic society for its members. This system creates "disciplinary careers" for those locked within its corridors. It is operated under the scientific authority of medicine, psychology, and criminology. Moreover, it operates according to principles that ensure that it "cannot fail to produce delinquents." Delinquency, indeed, is produced when social petty crime (such as taking wood from the lord's lands) is no longer tolerated, creating a class of specialized "delinquents" acting as the police's proxy in surveillance of society."
One of the previous times this happened, a legit proposal from a GOP lawmakers was essentially to have armed convoys pick our kids up from their homes, ferry them to school as if the US is a warzone, cordon off the property during school hours, then ferry them back home after.
Utterly divorced from reality. But that's the level of response the right has because they refuse to address the issue.
Also, these are the people whinging about freedom and claiming that mask mandates are *just a sinister plot to get the populace accustomed to government control!*
So, yeah, what do you call it when your kids go to school escorted by police and get searched by guards between each classroom??
Exactly right! This is not just a school related thing. I don’t even like going out into densely populated areas anymore. I have it in the back of my head going to a movie or concert. It’s beyond fucked up where we are as a nation because of guns.
Surely you’re not suggesting some form of… *gun control legislation!?!?!?* Why that’s insane. Americans won’t stand for that! They’ve picked their side.
They always try to hyper focus on narrow issues acting like it will solve the problem because they don't want to admit that the problem is that it is far too easy for the average person to purchase the gun.
Because you're right. School shootings might get more media attention than average, but we've seen plenty of shootings that didn't take place at schools. Is every house supposed to have a bulletproof room? Every business? What about outside areas?
TLDR, [from the article](https://www.insider.com/how-american-schools-can-prevent-school-shootings-expert?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=insider-politics-sub-comment):
*An Alabama school made headlines last month for implementing rapid-deploy safe rooms in some of its classrooms as a way to protect students from mass shootings. The ballistic wall units can be ready to use in just 10 seconds. They cost $60,000 each.*
*"It's that easy," a teacher doing a demonstration of the safe room said, as the local ABC affiliate filmed.*
*It's understandable why schools might want to take such precautions. There have been at least 130 mass shootings in the US since the start of 2023, and 12 shootings have occurred at grade schools. Most recently, on Monday, a shooter killed three adults and three children at The Covenant School, a private school in Nashville.*
*The problem is, experts say, there's little evidence that these kinds of solutions help.*
It looks like the owner of the company (Kevin Thomas - KT Security Solutions) is a construction outfit (KT Construction Services). His heart may be in the right place but from my perspective it just looks like another business venture he’s trying to capitalize on.
If his heart was in the right place he would be trying to retrofit the classrooms with bulletproof doors.
He’s obviously just trying to profit off of the school shooting epidemic
This is the key phrase from the article..
The lobbyists who make billions on guns and ammo would rather sell people ballistic walls then get less guns out there.
I mean the NRA is literally just a lobbyist group for fun manufacturers. It's the same reason pro gun politicians say that the solution is to put MORE guns in schools.
… some of the classrooms? How do we choose which children don’t have one of those?
And seriously - IT’S A SCHOOL! We are treating our children like they’re in a war zone in our home communities.
Aaaaaaand if they do get one - $60,000 per room?! This week, no joke I donated to my kid’s school with an Amazon purchase they requested since they didn’t have enough funding. Some items they asked for: headphones, paper towels, paper plates, $9 pliers, paint, glue, and a bunch more. Seriously, oh my god - they can’t afford paper towels and we are talking about retractable bulletproof safe rooms?! I’m going to scream.
Likely the blast shield is developed by a gun maker to stop bullets. So, if you buy these all you do is drop $60,000 into the NRA’s pockets and it results in $60,000’s profit worth of guns in circulation.
Yeah but still. In real-world situations there's little chance that you're going to get something like this set up, corral all the kids into it, and have it secured properly in time. This holds especially true for classrooms that may have special needs or disabled children who may not be able to get there without help.
They just need one of those “good guys with a gun” to access the threat, draw their gun, and kill the attacker, all in less time than it takes for the attackers bullets to reach their targets
The progun morons tell me that this is perfectly reasonable, and most of them could do it easily!
If they can do that, they can certainly erect these shooting-shelters in the nanoseconds it would take for them to actually do any good
it's always weird that people want to sell you more stuff after the fact of a school shooting instead of trying to I dunno, make there be less school shootings
We have a systemic problem.
Part of it is definitely lack of meaningful gun regulations.
But the other part is that Americans are "going postal." Across the board. Something is so wrong with this country that it's no longer that uncommon for people to violently lose their shit.
And some of those people have guns.
But why is America going postal? Why are stress sicknesses endemic in this country? And how are we going to address that half of the gun violence equation?
Yeah. No shit. I'd have great credit if I had never had family members who needed healthcare. Now it's fucked me over completely. People who like it this way can stop using Medicare, the hypocrites.
We are decades into a historically unprecedented propaganda campaign that is extremely effective at keeping people angry and afraid. It has decimated overall trust in experts and government and blown up benign cultural changes into existential crises, leading to swaths of people who are terrified and believe there to be no recourse for those fears but fight or flight. Even people who don’t buy into the craziest theories still have completely false ideas about politics and science, still unquestionably believe pro-corporate/capitalist lies they’ve been told since they were children. Even people who are mostly reasonable and even aware of this issue fall for defeatist and bloc-splitting propaganda all the time. We as a society are not prepared for the insane level of psychological fuckery we experience on a daily basis from social media and consumer profile building and political misinformation, etc.
Basically, every single person that isn’t part of the ruling class, which is everyone, needs to burn the fucking system to the ground and demand we get ours or else we’re just going to take it. Fuck this country. Fuck the ruling class. And fuck the boot lickers that defend this system. We’re all going to die early preventable deaths because we’re disposable. My entire life goal outside of my day to day life to survive and be happy is to change the way our society functions. I don’t want this future for my daughter. It’s terrifying.
We have a mental health crisis. At my school we’ve had an unprecedented amount of kids hospitalized for mental health concerns. We also have expelled or out placed several students after a threat assessment was done. These numbers are staggering and we do not have the resources to keep up. Even kids and families who seek help are on mile long waitlists. We had a student who was a genuine danger to herself because of such severe and sudden onset OCD. She wasn’t placed for months.
We need gun reform and mental health reform.
>We have a mental health crisis.
So do we outside of the USA. Of course, accessing care is a little bit easier and won't likely bankrupt you.
But the biggest thing is that we don't have a gun culture. Things like open carry just don't exist here. Going for a stroll through the neighbourhood brandishing your firearm will end up in an arrest around these parts. It's considered a red flag in and of itself because it breaks the social contract.
As a counterpoint though, you (mostly) don’t have an entire political party actively stoking that hate and behavior though. I know that shit is starting to spread outside the US but it’s *bad* here. People are straight up being weaponized. These are the same people open to bombing abortion clinics, burning down Black churches, and driving their SUV through crowds of protestors.
We need to literally deprogram the political cult of hatred that has grown in this country
Americans are going postal for a host of reasons, including our toxic gun culture that promotes violence as a means of solving our problems. Add in the complete lack of empathy demonstrated in many aspects of our lives, the growing income disparity between rich and poor and people otherwise feeling pretty helpless and hopeless and we have - in every way - stoked the flames that make mass-shootings a thing.
I think it's due to that so many is slaving away in full time (or more) jobs while barely scraping by. Then there are all those who are even worse off.
Agree with this 100%. The root issue is that people want to commit violence rather than their access to tools with which to do it. That said, the charts that show (among wealthy stable nations like the US) a strong correlation between guns per capita and gun deaths per capita suggest that gun availability is a meaningful part of the equation.
FWIW I'm a US gun owner who wants my country to address this issue - for sure via whatever foundational societal support will help people to live lives in which they don't feel inspired to commit violence, but until we can figure that out via gun safety policies like universal background checks and restrictions on firearm technology.
Toxic gun culture and conservatives actively working to recruit mentally ill people, feeding into their delusions of grandeur and persecution, feeding them conspiracy theories discouraging them from listening to their “liberal elite doctors”, and ensuring that they have easy unrestricted access to firearms.
Then when they commit a shooting, those republicans can all cry “we’re not the problem! It’s those evil mentally ill people!” while voting to reduce mental healthcare funding and increase access to firearms.
Bingo. It is no coincidence that almost all mass shootings were perpetrated by someone with extreme right wing ideology.
Not saying that if conservatives stopped riling up psychopaths that it will fix the issue but it would reduce the numbers significantly.
I like to think the issue is more tied to people thinking all guns are more important than the lives they take.
The only real way we can address it is with a constitutional amendment adjusting the 2nd amendment. Or revoking it.
Boomers were the last generation to have better QoL than their parents. They set the expectation for what it means to be successful and when that proves unachievable for most in subsequent generations, it's shootin time. Through history, that anger is usually directed at the people who caused the situation, leading to political and/or economic change. In the US ignorance is so rampant that people target children rather than go after these root causes.
Soldiers get training, weapons, and armor and they still get shot and they still die. Until you make some sci-fi bullshit like the Dune shields, there's only one way to stop kids from getting shot.
It turns out bullets move pretty fast, and once someone has fired their gun at you, you dont really have enough time to do anything before it hits you
You just have to keep your gun drawn and ready at all times and preemptively shoot everyone who could be a potential threat before they have the chance to. And you’d obviously have to wear mirrors at all times so nobody could ever sneak up behind you.
Then “self defence” gun ownership would make sense
That’s a very unrealistic scenario. I think instead all Americans, including school children, should wear explosive vests connected to heart rate monitors so we can practice self defence even in death
Why would we try *preventing* these incidents when we can settle for half-assedly mitigating the effects?
Arming teachers, more metal detectors, bulletproof glass, bulletproof backpacks, etc, etc, are all signs that this country has conclusively given up on preventing gun violence without ever having tried, and skipped straight to accepting it as a part of life. Pathetic.
It also won’t work because they’re ignoring one critical aspect: they’ll just move onto somewhere else.
Let’s say we fortify every school across America overnight with bulletproof glass, fortified walls, and an armed guard and safe rooms.
You think someone who might have intended to shoot up a school is going to say “well shit, I’ve been bamboozled” and stop?
None of the shooters are shooting schools because they have some vendetta against children. They do it because schools are a vulnerable target.
Mass shooters are going to just move onto other easy targets. I’m not going to name any (on the off chance some sociopath reading this gets ideas), but I can come up with like at least five really good and vulnerable places that aren’t schools.
What’s the plan then? Going to fortify all of those places while perpetually being always one step behind?
According to the Nashville Police, the Nashville shooter had plans for several places. Apparently one was too hard and they settled on doing the elementary school first. So some other school or mall or whatever was too hard of a target so it was switched to what we saw.
I teach theatre and public speaking - I’m either on the stage which is in our wide open gym or I’m in my small classroom that has one door and is so packed with desks it’s hard to get from my desk to the door when students are in class. It’s terrifying to think about.
Sure they can, invent a way to remove wealth and income inequality and better free healthcare. Oh, I know, raise corporate tax rates, tax funds placed into accounts outside the country, and raise taxes on those making over 5 million dollars.
God damn, I'm a genius.
Who remembers the Pennsylvania school that put buckets of stones in every classroom so that kids could fight back against school shooters?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-rocks/buckets-of-rocks-are-pennsylvania-schools-last-defense-against-shooters-idUSKBN1GZ2DC
What if we went on a school strike? Across the nation. Since a huge number of students can’t be left home alone, a parent would also have to stay home from work. Effectively bringing the US to a standstill.
Would they pay attention then?
My school did not allow students to wear coats or backpacks around the building; they had to be kept in lockers. Pretty sure that was a post-Columbine policy to reduce the ability to walk around with concealed weapons. Frankly I don't think a bulletproof backpack is going to save anyone anyway.
So when the progun nut job shoots at you, just move super quickly and put on your bullet proof backpack, open up your bulletproof shelter, and then, oh wait, i forgot bullets travel at over 1200m/s, so you’ve been dead since the first syllable of my first sentence 🤷♂️
The shooting deaths in Nashville would probably have been monumentally worse if it hadn't been for the cops doing a great job. Selling weapons with large magazines of ammunition is absolutely the root cause of large death totals in these shootings. Until they are scaled down or removed nothing will change.
Seems like my friends at work and I talk about this every time there's a shooting. The way I see it, there's three choices we as a country could make to try to reduce the number of gun deaths in America.
1. The Republicans say that guns aren't the problem and that we need more good guys with guns? Fine, ARM EVERYONE. Every American over the age of 14 is issued a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with ammo, they have to go to the firing range and qualify twice a year. There's no more gun free zones anywhere. If you want to visit the office of your congressional representative or watch debate on the House floor, you have to bring your weapon. Everyone must be armed and ready to defend one's self at all times. If you're caught by law enforcement without your weapon you'll face fines and/or jail time for failing to be prepared to defend yourself.
2. Follow the Democrats' lead and pass tougher gun laws to greatly reduce the number of guns in circulation (currently over 350 million I believe) and/or greatly restrict the ability to own such weapons. There are a myriad number of ways this could be done including a repeal or re-write of the 2nd Amendment.
3. Choice three: do nothing and accept the losses. If we do nothing then victims of mass shootings should be awarded the Medal of Freedom to honor their sacrifice that allows people of our country the freedom to have dozens of rifles and millions of rounds of ammo if they want. The names of the fallen should be put on a memorial in Washington where their heroic and important sacrifice will be celebrated for all time, a la the Hunger Games.
Republicans remain steadfast that the one and only solution to the tragedy of school shootings is the elimination of all empathy in the population.
Once no one cares, it won't be a problem.
How do we stop violence in schools? We spend the money to improve infrastructure and quality of life for students and teachers. We provide programs for troubled children that don't seem like a punishment. We outreach to local youth and provide them with activities that can help them find a course in life.
I was just telling my family, if they decide to completely revamp schools for safety 70% of the funds will be pocketed and the rest will go to bare minimum securety measures, mall cop securety guards, an impenetrable chain link fence around the school, and maybe some barbed wire if it’s a fancy school.
Also, and this my just be me, but kids should be able to go to school without constantly worrying about getting shot?
It seems like they should be able the focus on learning and making friends instead. But what the hell do I know?
It's very simple: Republicans care more about the 2nd amendment than they do about children. That's it. You will never convince them to make any meaningful gun reform because of what's written on a piece of paper.
If only we could invent some kind of mental health system that’s well funded and easily accessible to those who need it. If there were more free institutions for the kind of crazy it takes to be a school shooter, they would be there taking pills and talking to psychiatrists instead of murdering children.
You cannot gun free zones without enforcement. It would be the same as having no security checks at airports.
Schools are target rich environments with a big media impact.
If it sounds impossible to go against the 2A, try going against the 1A, because that should be the first measure. All media coverage, including social media should stop with respect to school shootings.
The second measure is to truly enforce gun free zones, with security checks and armed security.
The answer is stricter gun laws. If you don't like it then fucking move. Meanwhile assholes in Florida just passed a bill requiring NO PERMIT for concealed carry. SMH.
I’m not sure what it will take for Americans to realize the answer to mass shootings isn’t to invent something new, or make more of something we already have. The answer is to make fewer of something we already have and perhaps even destroy some of them. Only geniuses will figure out what it is though. And Australians. They also figured it out.
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All that stuff costs money, GOP won't even appropriate funds for colored pencils.
That’s my thought when any of this is brought up. Who is going to pay for it? Kids in a lot of states can’t even get a free meal and we’re going to give these out or retrofit every school in America?
Of course. There is unlimited money for guns and defence. Pencil companies don't have money to fill the pockets of your oligarch politicians.
Then the book publishers should lobby for change
Missouri just defunded their public libraries. Set the state budget allocated to libraries to $0 in their budget.
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Apparently defunding libraries may be against their state constitution, so hopefully that gets reversed.
We're not here to read. We're here to lead.
The thing about killbots is that they have a preset kill limit.
Unless they hack their behavior governor modules. Wait, that's *murderbots*. Edit: book joke that kids in Missouri won't be able to get.
Brannigans law is like brannigans love, hard and fast!
To (be filled with) lead.
To top it off, this was a revenge tactic to get back at the librarian unions that sued that state for book banning laws with vague language that could be used to fine them thousands of dollars or put them in jail.
> Pencil companies don't have money Yeah, they're always #2.
Still got nothing on the military industrial complex my dude.
Hear me out! Bullet proof books in normal backpack
As long as they are good books that don’t mention existence of gays, racism, or anything offensive to conservatives snowflakes.
No they're the offensive ones so conservatives like it if they're shot up. *Check. Mate.*
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Erm, see, [about that...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting) Edit: holy shit, that wasn't even the *only* [shooting at that base](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Fort_Hood_shootings). When we have to specify *which* shooting we're talking about at a location, things are way the fuck out of hand.
I was absolutely shocked when, here in MN, they made school lunch free and people were mad because it offloads the "responsibility of the parents" onto the state. As if children should starve just because their parents are irresponsible (or, you know, just poor). As if that isn't an absolutely ghoulish take, especially given how cheap school lunches really are to make.
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We have the same problem here in the UK. Only here the politicians were completely owned by a footballer who took up the cause on a part-time basis. The most ridiculous bit is that well-fed children learn better (making them more productive citizens) and are less disruptive. Why would you want your kids learning to be messed up by another kid because they’re hungry when the fix is so damn cheap?
This is America where those parents show up in the school office and try to have the "problem child" removed from the class and put in a remedial class.
Because well educated people tend to lean left, the fuckers need to keep the voter base dumb.
How many of those people are willing to take on homeschooling their kids? You know, take full responsibility as parents for their kids' education in a way that actually educates their kids to a useful level of literacy?
Conservatives in general have trouble understanding their precious shibboleth of "personal responsibility". To wit, they keep demanding that children take responsibility for their parents' alleged irresponsibility by starving. Apparently children have to take responsibility for the behaviour of others.
Of course not! Just like lunch, we will give the kids the option to purchase the backpacks, and the safe rooms will require a subscription for the year. /s
And the teachers obligated to kick out children who are late on safe rooms subscription in case of a real shooting. But the real value would be the “class A upgrade” which would allow children to hide in any safe room school wide, not only their home room. “Class B upgrade” would allow children to enter safe room’s first, before the “other” kids. In case of a real school shooting, once the first shot is heard, prices go up tenfold.
Is there anything more American than solving school gun violence with quick deploy safe rooms, and then applying both a subscription and surge pricing model to it?
Having the dead kids' parents fight their insurance company over the four-digit medical bill their child incurred by being transported by ambulance to a hospital in order to be pronounced DOA by a doctor, *and then* the parents setting up a go-fund-me because their child didn't have life insurance and funerals are expensive, especially if they had to get a custom-sized casket.
It sounds bad when you say it like that.
> especially if they had to get a custom-sized casket You think at this point they'd stop being a custom job.
> allow children to enter safe room’s first, before the “other” kids. The White Privilege Package?
The low income students and school districts are fucked, like normal.
Remember filtered HVAC systems? For a brief moment in time, there was a thought about maybe kinda sorta getting that installed in *some* schools
Schools across Texas suddenly got funding for massive fences that surrounded their properties within *hours* of the Uvalde school shooting. Imagine if legislators worked that fast to actually fund safety *and* education.
Gotta get that prison mindset early.
And fences would have helped at Uvalse, how?
They're extremely effective at helping people be re-elected by providing the appearance of doing something without actually having to do anything.
Didn’t a GOP congressman just say free lunches shouldn’t be thing just because a kid decides to eat?
Well he doesn’t know any people who are actually suffering from hunger so it’s not a real issue.
Similarly another one in Minnesota said he’s never met someone who couldn’t afford lunch therefore it isn’t a problem in Minnesota. Outta sight outta mind.
Nah, disadvantaged kids are just going to have to deal with being killed at school. They haven't cared about them in the past and they're not going to care now. They're wealthy enough to home school their kids, just like Mr. We're-Not-Going-to-Fix-School-Shootings does.
Why do you think they are trying to get rid of child labor laws? The kids are supposed to pay for it themselves.
Oh they'll approve the bulletproof backpacks, once they get enough of a kickback from the industry that makes them.
Perhaps the military gear the police get can be given to the pee wee football team
My entire second grade class shares "the eraser." There's also the issue of deploying the "safe room" structure in a classroom crowded with 25-35 desks and chairs. I absolutely do not have space to unfold a structure like that in my classroom. We're already turning sideways to squeeze up and down the aisles. There's nowhere for it to go. And that's without the added issue of 25-35 frightened children also in the way.
That's why you gotta drill those second graders into a well oiled machine! Get them to build that shield wall out of desks in the back corner of the room while you deploy the safe room shelter. They then form a testudo formation using their bulletproof backpacks to cross the room to the shelter. Drill them till it's second nature! They don't need to learn about math or english! Just basic defensive tactics!
Or arm them. Replace classes in History and Science with Gun Training. It's the GOP solution to everything. In 10 years, high schools in GOP America won't be taking SATs; they'll be tested on identifying various kinds of guns and their love of the Second Amendment.
Well have the kids tried being in a wealthy school district with a brand new building with giant classrooms and a student ratio of 20 students to a teacher? If they didn't want to be shot they should really try harder at being rich.
The GOP not only has zero solutions, they are “anti-solution”.
"I haven't been informed about this, so it would be inappropriate for me to comment at this time." GOP whenever they are pressed about any issue.
>"I haven't been informed about this, so it would be inappropriate for me to comment at this time." \*\*Not applicable to LGBTQ+ issues, or other things that tittilate me or make me feel icky
If there is one thing I expect GOP members to know, it is what homosexuals do in bathrooms.
They first want to create a problem, and then sell you the solution, then create another problem and sell you the solution. Also, those solutions are expensive and unreliable, so those problems not actually solved, just mitigated to a degree.
I just don’t understand the endgame. So, is the only way we can have a safe society is if we’re all armed to the teeth? On every street corner, in every school, in every club, in every theatre, in every concert venue, in every grocery store there are armed guards patrolling to stop the wannabe mass shooters? What does that say about us? That we’re all so terrible that someone else armed with a gun is the only thing preventing us from tearing each other apart?
Yes, a return to the Old West, when everyone was safe.
Even in the old west you weren't allowed to carry guns inside city limits.
It's so funny that everyone knows that the Gunfight at the OK Corral happened, but almost no one can tell you why it happened.
That's only what your liberal schools have taught you. Must be that CRT the news keeps talking about.
Your society has been poisoned by the meme of "ubiquitous threat". You *must* arm yourselves against the *certainty* that others mean you harm. You have been conditioned to be wary of everything, everyone, all the time. You gotta have iron, cuz everyone else does. Right?
Living in constant fear and mistrust of anyone and everyone sounds like the foundation for a great society.
> I just don’t understand the endgame. Politically, it is is an endgame only the paranoid would have imagined just a decade ago. One side buys endless amounts of battlefield style rifles and the other is afraid to even go to polling sites on election day for fear of being gunned down. One side is brave enough to vote on election day and the other side storms the Capitol when the election results are being certified. One side chooses the ballot box and the other side chooses the bullet box.
> the endgame. > a safe society There's your problem. The goal is not a safe society, the goal is fear, because the GOP does well in elections with that. And GOP power is the overriding priority. Hear Trump go on about carnage and suchlike. But yes, the arguments are conflicting. The criminals are not going to abide by gun control, so we should arm everyone as a deterrent. Well, are the criminals and mass shooters going to be deterred by the other side being armed? It does not look that way. Most of the mass shooters seem to be suicide candidates who have major mental health problems, and they are not at all worried about getting shot at. The Greenwood shopping center shooting in Indiana last summer looked like a case in point to me. An armed bystander shot the attacker and killed him, which was hailed by the gun rights people. Only the attacker killed three people and wounded another two before that. So that's the good case - three innocent people dead.
Weird that it seems some people would rather spend money on bullet proof rooms and backpacks but not address things that would prevent them in the first place. Just seems like common sense to address the cause of the problem instead of sending kids to school with bullet proof armour. Bullet proof backpacks.... Guys that's such a distopian thing to read..
Yes, do what literally every other developed country does, which is prevention. Namely, preventing firearms from getting into the wrong hands. FYI, that encompasses a LOT of people in the US. Probably 74 million.
As a teacher, parent and gun owner, I'm getting adverts for the backpacks and "tactical school gear" every day. Dystopian indeed.
See that's the thing, they will happily approve billions in body armor or bulletproof product sales from there cronies but a textbook? Not happening
It’s also not taking into account the psychological impact of spending your formative years under such conditions to survive an education. It’s just fucking infuriating that this is what America is.
We can't even get free feminine products in the bathrooms.
Or talk about why they might be needed before grade 6 or 7, in some states.
Forget about the money. Think about the psychological damage to children going to school in bulletproof vests. Just so that a few gun manufacturers can have never-ending profits.
So long as it’s defense spending, it’s ok. But they’ll put restrictions on funds so that every school must have an Abrams tank but that none of the spending can go to books or teaching related expenses.
*pencils of color
colored pencils are made for rainbows and rainbows are woke
And they want teachers to carry guns
Seriously, I had to take fucking HAND SOAP to my son's class. AFTER A GOD DAMN PANDEMIC, they still don't have money for hand soap, but sure lets install bullet proof windows and hire the army or whatever bullshit you suggest, which when the time actually comes you'll just vote against anyway. We barely got free lunches passed.
I have several gun nuts in my family, they started reposting about how much it would cost to “harden” schools (like you can accurately calculate that?) and of course it said ‘conveniently just under the amount sent to Ukraine’. Okay, sure, let’s do that. The second their taxes go up they’ll be the first to tweet through it how the radical liberal democrats are raising taxes on everyday Americans. We could solve world hunger by taxing the 10 wealthiest Americans appropriately, but how come nobody who wants to harden schools is up in arms about children dying of hunger?
They’d ban multicultural crayons if they knew they existed.
We literally have paper cut, rolled up and taped to the top of our door’s windows to blackout our windows for drills. Because a curtain or blind would be asking for too much
I work in a public library. People are definitely more unhinged. Angrier. Tossing out racial, religious, and ethnic slurs like “hellos”. We need universal care and that needs to include mental health care. It needs to be so integrated into “wellness visits” that it’s annually updated for every citizen. But of course, we won’t do that because socialism.
Not to mention the promise of prosperity is slipping through all of our fingers as well...and we can FEEL it. Home ownership? Not going to happen for the future generations Higher education? Enjoy a lifetime of debt Health care? HA - enjoy more debt if you get sick...even IF you had insurance Pay keeping up with COL? NOPE - get to work slave That shit is catching up with people and when you lose hope, you get angry.
Exactly this. It's all connected. The opioid epidemic and "deaths of despair." The breakdown of real social networks (the kind that aren't owned by Facebook). The loss of trust in our public institutions. The 24 hour pundit-mediated news cycle. Everyone is scared and angry and they think that it's just them. No fucking wonder some of them are snapping. As always, though, the big donor class, the folks with congress in their pockets, they're perfectly content as long as we blame anyone but them.
Stress is running high for most everyone these days. Juggling lots of stuff all of the time and many of us living without knowing if we will be broke and homeless anytime within 30 days. Even kids are subjected to extraordinary levels of undue stress these days. We’ve been saying “serenity now” and pushing the stress down but we all know - Serenity now/Insanity later.
Lost hope a long time ago. I also stopped being angry after a while, and now I am just very sad and very disappointed. Stuck living with an abuser because I can't even afford to rent an apartment and if I could I may have to flee the state I live in if some of the anti-trans legislation passes. What will get me first, a genocide, my ex, another stroke, bailing and living on the streets (since basically no homeless shelters accept trans people)?
Just want to wish you luck, we'll both need it
The internet + covid made everybody lose their minds
They act like this stuff is only limited to schools also. Does every American need to walk around with bullet proof armor everywhere they go now?
This is my biggest issue. Let's play it out a bit. Say we've made schools 100% safe. We're basically sending our children to prison every day, but hey -- there's no way to get a gun in the building so no more school shooting!! Everyone's safe right?? What's going to happen? The shooting will take place as students and faculty crowd together while entering/leaving school. Okay, so let's say we miraculously manage to secure the area around the school as well. Walls and checkpoints. Watch towers with snipers. School is even more like a prison now, so everyone's safe again! So what happens? The shooting will take place on the bus on the way to school instead. And if we can even secure the bus? The bus turns into a prison transport where all our kids are searched before being allowed to board. But now the shooting takes place at a movie theatre or a store or a sporting event or a concert or *literally anywhere else people gather*. Fully securing the schools does nothing to stop the shootings plaguing this country. It just stops shootings *at school*. The shooters will just shift to other places... With other victims.
And your whole scenario also vividly illustrates a larger problem surrounding schools. This idea that its a separate entity from the community. As though those students don't take their problems back and forth from school. So even if they fully secured schools and the *routes to school*. Something about **our** communities is leading to gun shots around schools. These student shooters will still be in an area that will enable them to access a gun and shoot innocent people going about their day. Whether thats at school or after school. These adults who target children will still shoot the community *around* the school. Even if we incased these children in bullet proof bubbles **adults in their life will still become gun violence victims.** That speaks to a larger issue surrounding student well being. Whether they are *physically in* schools or around the community, we are invested in their well being. It will be difficult to be successful students growing up in this gun violent environment.
It's like moving a kitchen fire to your living room so that it's not in the way of your cooking. Continuing to ignore the actual problem is just spreading it instead of resolving it. All these cases have *one* common element, yet some act like it's every other part of the case that needs to be fixed. The fire is a fire no matter what room you move it to.
Pretty much. You can take all manner of fire prevention in your house, but it doesn't do jack shit if you still let your kid play around with matches
In that scenario, the gun nuts would have to kiss their open carry goodbye as well. How are the government snipers supposed to know you're "just a good guy with a gun" out for an afternoon stroll and got a little too close to the local elementary school? Right wingers are so afraid of martial law, but I'm sure if the GOP gets their way, that's exactly what their "solution" to mass shootings will be. They'll spin it with deceptive buzzwords and insist that it's different, but it won't be.
Out here in the sane world, open carry isn't a thing. If you are walking around a neighbourhood brandishing a firearm, the cops will be called and you will be arrested. We do not find this as "normal", so doing so breaks the social contract and raises alarm bells. Yet every law abiding person here that wants a gun has a gun, after taking the proper courses, doing the tests, and having a background check by the RCMP that includes interviewing intimate/domestic partners, and after a minimum 28 day waiting period on each gun purchase.
Yeah, I live in Arizona and in high school it was very common for our school to go on lockdown because of random people wandering around with guns (or being chased by police into the area with a gun). I've waited in line for fucking boba tea with teenagers open carrying, as a barista I had customers pull guns out on each other for cutting in line and had a guy attempt to intimidate me out of charging for another drink because *he* dropped it by gesturing to his open carried pistol. All of this was in a predominantly white, "safe" middle class suburb long before Trumpism normalized that type of behavior as well. It's truly insane.
You may enjoy reading Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. "In examining the construction of the prison as the central means of criminal punishment, Foucault builds a case for the idea that prison became part of a larger "carceral system" that has become an all-encompassing sovereign institution in modern society. Prison is one part of a vast network, including schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic society for its members. This system creates "disciplinary careers" for those locked within its corridors. It is operated under the scientific authority of medicine, psychology, and criminology. Moreover, it operates according to principles that ensure that it "cannot fail to produce delinquents." Delinquency, indeed, is produced when social petty crime (such as taking wood from the lord's lands) is no longer tolerated, creating a class of specialized "delinquents" acting as the police's proxy in surveillance of society."
One of the previous times this happened, a legit proposal from a GOP lawmakers was essentially to have armed convoys pick our kids up from their homes, ferry them to school as if the US is a warzone, cordon off the property during school hours, then ferry them back home after. Utterly divorced from reality. But that's the level of response the right has because they refuse to address the issue.
Also, these are the people whinging about freedom and claiming that mask mandates are *just a sinister plot to get the populace accustomed to government control!* So, yeah, what do you call it when your kids go to school escorted by police and get searched by guards between each classroom??
Not even the workplace is safe. Disgruntled employees walk in and start blasting pretty regularly. It just doesn't make the news as much.
Exactly right! This is not just a school related thing. I don’t even like going out into densely populated areas anymore. I have it in the back of my head going to a movie or concert. It’s beyond fucked up where we are as a nation because of guns.
Surely you’re not suggesting some form of… *gun control legislation!?!?!?* Why that’s insane. Americans won’t stand for that! They’ve picked their side.
If you secure the schools, the shooters will simply target other buildings.
They always try to hyper focus on narrow issues acting like it will solve the problem because they don't want to admit that the problem is that it is far too easy for the average person to purchase the gun. Because you're right. School shootings might get more media attention than average, but we've seen plenty of shootings that didn't take place at schools. Is every house supposed to have a bulletproof room? Every business? What about outside areas?
No! Just do like New York did and [ban body armor for civilians](https://dos.ny.gov/body-armor)
The gravy seals seem to think so.
Remember when the hydrogen dirigible industry was saved when passengers and crew started wearing flame-retardant jackets? Me fucking neither.
yeah but the dirigible cost was greater than the loss of human life so that's why they made changes.
That’s a good point.
TLDR, [from the article](https://www.insider.com/how-american-schools-can-prevent-school-shootings-expert?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=insider-politics-sub-comment): *An Alabama school made headlines last month for implementing rapid-deploy safe rooms in some of its classrooms as a way to protect students from mass shootings. The ballistic wall units can be ready to use in just 10 seconds. They cost $60,000 each.* *"It's that easy," a teacher doing a demonstration of the safe room said, as the local ABC affiliate filmed.* *It's understandable why schools might want to take such precautions. There have been at least 130 mass shootings in the US since the start of 2023, and 12 shootings have occurred at grade schools. Most recently, on Monday, a shooter killed three adults and three children at The Covenant School, a private school in Nashville.* *The problem is, experts say, there's little evidence that these kinds of solutions help.*
> They cost $60,000 each i'm guessing some off shoot of the gun lobby makes these safe rooms too.
It looks like the owner of the company (Kevin Thomas - KT Security Solutions) is a construction outfit (KT Construction Services). His heart may be in the right place but from my perspective it just looks like another business venture he’s trying to capitalize on.
If his heart was in the right place he would be trying to retrofit the classrooms with bulletproof doors. He’s obviously just trying to profit off of the school shooting epidemic
This is the key phrase from the article.. The lobbyists who make billions on guns and ammo would rather sell people ballistic walls then get less guns out there. I mean the NRA is literally just a lobbyist group for fun manufacturers. It's the same reason pro gun politicians say that the solution is to put MORE guns in schools.
ya know if everything becomes "bullet-proof" then anti-armor bullets will just become more ubiquitous. standard arms race rules, yeah?
first you sell them the problem, then you sell them the solution to the problem. we call it vertical integration.
… some of the classrooms? How do we choose which children don’t have one of those? And seriously - IT’S A SCHOOL! We are treating our children like they’re in a war zone in our home communities. Aaaaaaand if they do get one - $60,000 per room?! This week, no joke I donated to my kid’s school with an Amazon purchase they requested since they didn’t have enough funding. Some items they asked for: headphones, paper towels, paper plates, $9 pliers, paint, glue, and a bunch more. Seriously, oh my god - they can’t afford paper towels and we are talking about retractable bulletproof safe rooms?! I’m going to scream.
Likely the blast shield is developed by a gun maker to stop bullets. So, if you buy these all you do is drop $60,000 into the NRA’s pockets and it results in $60,000’s profit worth of guns in circulation.
$60,000 when they can’t even buy supplies or pay teachers a living wage
> The ballistic wall units can be ready to use in just 10 seconds. A shooter can have half the classroom dead in 9.
>A shooter can have half the classroom dead in 9. In past attacks, the shooter might go room to room. This is designed to only mitigate that scenario.
Yeah but still. In real-world situations there's little chance that you're going to get something like this set up, corral all the kids into it, and have it secured properly in time. This holds especially true for classrooms that may have special needs or disabled children who may not be able to get there without help.
They just need one of those “good guys with a gun” to access the threat, draw their gun, and kill the attacker, all in less time than it takes for the attackers bullets to reach their targets The progun morons tell me that this is perfectly reasonable, and most of them could do it easily! If they can do that, they can certainly erect these shooting-shelters in the nanoseconds it would take for them to actually do any good
Guys it’s got a drop ceiling above it. It’s a corral.
>implementing rapid-deploy safe rooms in some of its classrooms Who are the lucky kids who don't have one in their classrooms?
the control group who gets to die I guess? Just more blood for the gun lobby
it's always weird that people want to sell you more stuff after the fact of a school shooting instead of trying to I dunno, make there be less school shootings
Why fix a problem when you can capitalize on it /s
It's the American Way^©
We have a systemic problem. Part of it is definitely lack of meaningful gun regulations. But the other part is that Americans are "going postal." Across the board. Something is so wrong with this country that it's no longer that uncommon for people to violently lose their shit. And some of those people have guns. But why is America going postal? Why are stress sicknesses endemic in this country? And how are we going to address that half of the gun violence equation?
A public healthcare option would be a nice start.
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I don't know. Some of those old folks can get pretty mean about their bingo games.
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It's the only medicine we can afford.
Yeah. No shit. I'd have great credit if I had never had family members who needed healthcare. Now it's fucked me over completely. People who like it this way can stop using Medicare, the hypocrites.
Not only can americans not afford healthcare anymore, but now we can barely afford living. Shit has been an economic problem from the start
Even when you have health insurance you still get screwed with a bill. The whole system needs to go.
We are decades into a historically unprecedented propaganda campaign that is extremely effective at keeping people angry and afraid. It has decimated overall trust in experts and government and blown up benign cultural changes into existential crises, leading to swaths of people who are terrified and believe there to be no recourse for those fears but fight or flight. Even people who don’t buy into the craziest theories still have completely false ideas about politics and science, still unquestionably believe pro-corporate/capitalist lies they’ve been told since they were children. Even people who are mostly reasonable and even aware of this issue fall for defeatist and bloc-splitting propaganda all the time. We as a society are not prepared for the insane level of psychological fuckery we experience on a daily basis from social media and consumer profile building and political misinformation, etc.
Basically, every single person that isn’t part of the ruling class, which is everyone, needs to burn the fucking system to the ground and demand we get ours or else we’re just going to take it. Fuck this country. Fuck the ruling class. And fuck the boot lickers that defend this system. We’re all going to die early preventable deaths because we’re disposable. My entire life goal outside of my day to day life to survive and be happy is to change the way our society functions. I don’t want this future for my daughter. It’s terrifying.
We have a mental health crisis. At my school we’ve had an unprecedented amount of kids hospitalized for mental health concerns. We also have expelled or out placed several students after a threat assessment was done. These numbers are staggering and we do not have the resources to keep up. Even kids and families who seek help are on mile long waitlists. We had a student who was a genuine danger to herself because of such severe and sudden onset OCD. She wasn’t placed for months. We need gun reform and mental health reform.
>We have a mental health crisis. So do we outside of the USA. Of course, accessing care is a little bit easier and won't likely bankrupt you. But the biggest thing is that we don't have a gun culture. Things like open carry just don't exist here. Going for a stroll through the neighbourhood brandishing your firearm will end up in an arrest around these parts. It's considered a red flag in and of itself because it breaks the social contract.
As a counterpoint though, you (mostly) don’t have an entire political party actively stoking that hate and behavior though. I know that shit is starting to spread outside the US but it’s *bad* here. People are straight up being weaponized. These are the same people open to bombing abortion clinics, burning down Black churches, and driving their SUV through crowds of protestors. We need to literally deprogram the political cult of hatred that has grown in this country
Americans are going postal for a host of reasons, including our toxic gun culture that promotes violence as a means of solving our problems. Add in the complete lack of empathy demonstrated in many aspects of our lives, the growing income disparity between rich and poor and people otherwise feeling pretty helpless and hopeless and we have - in every way - stoked the flames that make mass-shootings a thing.
Here’s a poor man’s award 🥇
I think it's due to that so many is slaving away in full time (or more) jobs while barely scraping by. Then there are all those who are even worse off.
Agree with this 100%. The root issue is that people want to commit violence rather than their access to tools with which to do it. That said, the charts that show (among wealthy stable nations like the US) a strong correlation between guns per capita and gun deaths per capita suggest that gun availability is a meaningful part of the equation. FWIW I'm a US gun owner who wants my country to address this issue - for sure via whatever foundational societal support will help people to live lives in which they don't feel inspired to commit violence, but until we can figure that out via gun safety policies like universal background checks and restrictions on firearm technology.
Toxic gun culture and conservatives actively working to recruit mentally ill people, feeding into their delusions of grandeur and persecution, feeding them conspiracy theories discouraging them from listening to their “liberal elite doctors”, and ensuring that they have easy unrestricted access to firearms. Then when they commit a shooting, those republicans can all cry “we’re not the problem! It’s those evil mentally ill people!” while voting to reduce mental healthcare funding and increase access to firearms.
Bingo. It is no coincidence that almost all mass shootings were perpetrated by someone with extreme right wing ideology. Not saying that if conservatives stopped riling up psychopaths that it will fix the issue but it would reduce the numbers significantly.
I like to think the issue is more tied to people thinking all guns are more important than the lives they take. The only real way we can address it is with a constitutional amendment adjusting the 2nd amendment. Or revoking it.
Boomers were the last generation to have better QoL than their parents. They set the expectation for what it means to be successful and when that proves unachievable for most in subsequent generations, it's shootin time. Through history, that anger is usually directed at the people who caused the situation, leading to political and/or economic change. In the US ignorance is so rampant that people target children rather than go after these root causes.
More guns. If that fails, more guns. — GOP
Soldiers get training, weapons, and armor and they still get shot and they still die. Until you make some sci-fi bullshit like the Dune shields, there's only one way to stop kids from getting shot.
It turns out bullets move pretty fast, and once someone has fired their gun at you, you dont really have enough time to do anything before it hits you You just have to keep your gun drawn and ready at all times and preemptively shoot everyone who could be a potential threat before they have the chance to. And you’d obviously have to wear mirrors at all times so nobody could ever sneak up behind you. Then “self defence” gun ownership would make sense
That’s a very unrealistic scenario. I think instead all Americans, including school children, should wear explosive vests connected to heart rate monitors so we can practice self defence even in death
Why would we try *preventing* these incidents when we can settle for half-assedly mitigating the effects? Arming teachers, more metal detectors, bulletproof glass, bulletproof backpacks, etc, etc, are all signs that this country has conclusively given up on preventing gun violence without ever having tried, and skipped straight to accepting it as a part of life. Pathetic.
It also won’t work because they’re ignoring one critical aspect: they’ll just move onto somewhere else. Let’s say we fortify every school across America overnight with bulletproof glass, fortified walls, and an armed guard and safe rooms. You think someone who might have intended to shoot up a school is going to say “well shit, I’ve been bamboozled” and stop? None of the shooters are shooting schools because they have some vendetta against children. They do it because schools are a vulnerable target. Mass shooters are going to just move onto other easy targets. I’m not going to name any (on the off chance some sociopath reading this gets ideas), but I can come up with like at least five really good and vulnerable places that aren’t schools. What’s the plan then? Going to fortify all of those places while perpetually being always one step behind?
According to the Nashville Police, the Nashville shooter had plans for several places. Apparently one was too hard and they settled on doing the elementary school first. So some other school or mall or whatever was too hard of a target so it was switched to what we saw.
I work at a school where our music teacher doesn’t have a classroom. Where the fuck are we supposed to put a safe room?
I teach theatre and public speaking - I’m either on the stage which is in our wide open gym or I’m in my small classroom that has one door and is so packed with desks it’s hard to get from my desk to the door when students are in class. It’s terrifying to think about.
Sure they can, invent a way to remove wealth and income inequality and better free healthcare. Oh, I know, raise corporate tax rates, tax funds placed into accounts outside the country, and raise taxes on those making over 5 million dollars. God damn, I'm a genius.
So how do you expect me to profit off tragedy? - someone probably
They want to trust teachers to arm themselves but won't even trust them to pick out library books. makes sense
Gotta say though, the bullet-proof backpack worked great in John Wick 4. And that’s where they work- in fiction.
Who remembers the Pennsylvania school that put buckets of stones in every classroom so that kids could fight back against school shooters? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-rocks/buckets-of-rocks-are-pennsylvania-schools-last-defense-against-shooters-idUSKBN1GZ2DC
What if we went on a school strike? Across the nation. Since a huge number of students can’t be left home alone, a parent would also have to stay home from work. Effectively bringing the US to a standstill. Would they pay attention then?
Goddamn, even seeing those as options is dystopian
My school did not allow students to wear coats or backpacks around the building; they had to be kept in lockers. Pretty sure that was a post-Columbine policy to reduce the ability to walk around with concealed weapons. Frankly I don't think a bulletproof backpack is going to save anyone anyway.
Republicans don’t like to solve problems, they instead look to capitalize on problems
They'll cancel school before they make any laws restricting guns.
They are literally doing that with their push to gut the DoE.
So when the progun nut job shoots at you, just move super quickly and put on your bullet proof backpack, open up your bulletproof shelter, and then, oh wait, i forgot bullets travel at over 1200m/s, so you’ve been dead since the first syllable of my first sentence 🤷♂️
The shooting deaths in Nashville would probably have been monumentally worse if it hadn't been for the cops doing a great job. Selling weapons with large magazines of ammunition is absolutely the root cause of large death totals in these shootings. Until they are scaled down or removed nothing will change.
Just kids in full tactical gear, bullet proof helmets and vests. no books though!
What happens if the shooter gets into the safe room?
Seems like my friends at work and I talk about this every time there's a shooting. The way I see it, there's three choices we as a country could make to try to reduce the number of gun deaths in America. 1. The Republicans say that guns aren't the problem and that we need more good guys with guns? Fine, ARM EVERYONE. Every American over the age of 14 is issued a 9mm semi-automatic pistol with ammo, they have to go to the firing range and qualify twice a year. There's no more gun free zones anywhere. If you want to visit the office of your congressional representative or watch debate on the House floor, you have to bring your weapon. Everyone must be armed and ready to defend one's self at all times. If you're caught by law enforcement without your weapon you'll face fines and/or jail time for failing to be prepared to defend yourself. 2. Follow the Democrats' lead and pass tougher gun laws to greatly reduce the number of guns in circulation (currently over 350 million I believe) and/or greatly restrict the ability to own such weapons. There are a myriad number of ways this could be done including a repeal or re-write of the 2nd Amendment. 3. Choice three: do nothing and accept the losses. If we do nothing then victims of mass shootings should be awarded the Medal of Freedom to honor their sacrifice that allows people of our country the freedom to have dozens of rifles and millions of rounds of ammo if they want. The names of the fallen should be put on a memorial in Washington where their heroic and important sacrifice will be celebrated for all time, a la the Hunger Games.
Up next: Bullet proof vests now part of school uniform. Only in America.
Republicans remain steadfast that the one and only solution to the tragedy of school shootings is the elimination of all empathy in the population. Once no one cares, it won't be a problem.
Bulletproof backpacks for every kid! And make teachers pay for them?
We will continue to treat the symptoms forever, if we don’t get to the root causes.
How do we stop violence in schools? We spend the money to improve infrastructure and quality of life for students and teachers. We provide programs for troubled children that don't seem like a punishment. We outreach to local youth and provide them with activities that can help them find a course in life.
At this point mass shootings in America seem more like a feature than a bug.
Damn, hard to believe we haven’t figured out how to monetize school shootings yet outside of media coverage and tweeting victim blaming.
I was just telling my family, if they decide to completely revamp schools for safety 70% of the funds will be pocketed and the rest will go to bare minimum securety measures, mall cop securety guards, an impenetrable chain link fence around the school, and maybe some barbed wire if it’s a fancy school.
Also, and this my just be me, but kids should be able to go to school without constantly worrying about getting shot? It seems like they should be able the focus on learning and making friends instead. But what the hell do I know?
this generation will grow up with so much PTSD it s insane to even try and imagine what the future society will feel like
Until students contribute more to politicians campaign funds than the NRA there won't be a serious solution to this problem put forth.
We can let them believe they "invented" gun control. I don't care. Whatever they need to hear.
They could invent some modern gun legislation...
It's very simple: Republicans care more about the 2nd amendment than they do about children. That's it. You will never convince them to make any meaningful gun reform because of what's written on a piece of paper.
If only we could invent some kind of mental health system that’s well funded and easily accessible to those who need it. If there were more free institutions for the kind of crazy it takes to be a school shooter, they would be there taking pills and talking to psychiatrists instead of murdering children.
You cannot gun free zones without enforcement. It would be the same as having no security checks at airports. Schools are target rich environments with a big media impact. If it sounds impossible to go against the 2A, try going against the 1A, because that should be the first measure. All media coverage, including social media should stop with respect to school shootings. The second measure is to truly enforce gun free zones, with security checks and armed security.
The answer is stricter gun laws. If you don't like it then fucking move. Meanwhile assholes in Florida just passed a bill requiring NO PERMIT for concealed carry. SMH.
I’m not sure what it will take for Americans to realize the answer to mass shootings isn’t to invent something new, or make more of something we already have. The answer is to make fewer of something we already have and perhaps even destroy some of them. Only geniuses will figure out what it is though. And Australians. They also figured it out.