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Panzeh posted:Yeah, the problem with that is, as has been said, trying not to disclose information tends to lead to social media making poo poo up, which is much worse than publicizing the shooter, which is why, by the way, you can't keep a lid on these things. There is no reason to declare it futile for the press to not platform someone, that’s absurd. People on social media, including the alt-right, make up conspiracies and lies about things regardless of the rate of mass media coverage. The spread of those lies is not in fact usually equal to that of mass media promulgation, which is itself more heavily re-mediated in social media. Liquid Communism posted:CNN, Fox, etc all run uncritically with social media leads. No, they don’t. All of these outlets are covering motives and manifestos less than they were before.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:23
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It would have been very interesting to see a media blackout on, say, uvalde. The police exacerbating the situation would have probably been deemed a conspiracy theory. I honestly can't think of a better way for the media to lose legitimacy than to refuse to report on children being murdered.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:26
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I know Sam Hyde perpetrating every mass shooting is a meme but it does make me wonder if they used a john doe style convention so they could report things they knew about the shooter where relevant without giving them any prestige. The media came together (though I don't know if they were forced to by legislation) about suicide reporting so it's not the wildest idea.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:26
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I think the most harmful thing about the media coverage is not that it reports the events but how it covers the solution. The media likes to both-sides the conversation, talking about the debate between gun control and mental health as though there can only be one of the two solutions. As though the public must hash out a single route to ending these tragedies and therefore nothing can be attempted. The reality is that both solutions are necessary to address the cause and means of these horrors. Meanwhile, this controversy only serves to divide the country and allow it to continue. The reality is that both better mental health services and more coherent gun control are very popular policies. Yet, neither ever seems to pass. That's where the media should focus, and yet it doesn't. So what function does this failure fulfill? It absolves the politicians from blame. By creating the illusion that there is some massive public disagreement over mass shootings it distracts from the fact that there really isn't any political effort to stop them. Instead, we get milquetoast bills about magazine capacities and bump stocks. And, of course, more funding for the police. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 4, 2023 14:41
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Panzeh posted:Yeah, the problem with that is, as has been said, trying not to disclose information tends to lead to social media making poo poo up, which is much worse than publicizing the shooter, which is why, by the way, you can't keep a lid on these things. People on social media are going to make things up regardless, and any information that is provided is going to be twisted to fit narratives and used for harassment. I don't agree with the folks who say that there ought to be a complete media blackout on mass attacks. I think these events are something that people, for better or worse, want to be informed of. However, there is absolutely room to cover an event without the identity of the shooter, their background, their crazed rantings, and their exact position at every moment analyzed and breathlessly reported on by every major news outlet. And, to be fair, coverage does seem to have shifted significantly in that direction over the past few decades, but I don't know if that was driven primarily by decisions over public safety or whether it's just that running days of wall-to-wall coverage is no longer drawing the ratings and pageviews it once did.
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Apr 4, 2023 14:53
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Discendo Vox posted:I'm not sure the "93% experienced a stressor in last 5 years" percentage is as telling as it seems- how does it compare to either the population at large, or the white young-ish male demographic that dominates the stats? Additionally, many of these stressors may actually be cocausal, with the behavioral or mental elements that presage the attack being the cause of, in particular, the family/relationship prior events. This is something that jumps out at me about a lot of the data I've seen. A lot of research seems to look at what shooters have in common rather than what separates them from peers. Literally everyone should have significant stressors coming out of the pandemic, at the very least. Some people just respond to stress in a way that creates tons of new problems, like Cho. Then they blame everyone but themselves. I wonder how much help it would be to literally teach stress coping skills in school. As a side note, I hadn't heard this detail: quote:Cho appeared at her dorm room wearing sunglasses and a hat and introduced himself as “Question Mark,” his imaginary twin brother 
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Apr 4, 2023 16:01
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I think the most harmful thing about the media coverage is not that it reports the events but how it covers the solution. In gun control's case, I'm fully convinced it's because a lot of the prominent voices in the anti-gun crusade absolutely, positively cannot resist acting in bad faith. Every bill put forward is a tired rehash of an AWB that even per Congressional studies had no effect discernable from the overall decline in violent crime and shootings. As noted from the numbers I posted above, even a full confiscation of semi-automatic rifles could only possibly reduce gun crime by a few percent, as the vast, vast majority of gun crimes and especially homicides are committed with handguns. So Brady Campaign and Everytown lobby up the liberal moderates that make up the Democratic Party to keep writing bills that are Doing Something but not anything effective while openly talking about their goals of incrementalism, then being surprised when all they do is serve to harden resistance from conservatives and leftists to anything that could be considered gun control. As always, of course, with exceptions carved out for police. When these laws do get passed, they are so focused on culture-war gotchas that they lead to cases like NY vs Bruen, which declared NYC's defacto handgun ban via refusing to issue licenses to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's protections on privileges and immunities. California's long-standing defacto ban on modern handguns under the Unsafe Handgun Act is presently being challenged in court as well, with a federal judge issuing an injunction on enforcement based on Bruen. To quote the judgement: quote:California’s Unsafe Handgun Act (the “UHA”) seeks to prevent accidental This has spawned additional legal challenges that are looking likely to kill much of California's current gun control scheme, such as challenges to the Unsafe Handgun Act on the basis that the exemption of police and allowance for them to sell off-roster handguns to the public indicates no actual compelling governmental interest exists to prevent those handguns from being purchased by the general public. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 5, 2023 02:11
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Let's take it as consensus that gun control would be a good policy solution and focus on other subtopics. Please.
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Apr 5, 2023 03:45
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Elendil004 posted:Let's take it as consensus that gun control would be a good policy solution and focus on other subtopics. Yes let's leave gun control out and just do the Overton window shifting on our own by endlessly drilling down on nakedly insufficient police response tactics
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Apr 5, 2023 10:01
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I think it's better to have the thread work on a pretty forceful pre-emptive consensus that massive gun restrictions and bannings are obviously necessary and that this isn't a place to argue otherwise, and that it's just applied as a given fact so that the thread can literally be about anything other than gun control. That doesn't really make it a rightward overton shifter, imo
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Apr 5, 2023 10:20
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It’s also a mod rule that they’re just not enforcing. Again. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 5, 2023 13:41
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Someone should make a gun control thread I'm sure there's a lot to talk about but if this thread becomes the de facto gun control thread then we lose the main topic. Speaking of, I think we all agree the ALERRT Uvalde AAR was, somewhat lacking. Even though they are older events I can breakdown some of the older events like Rt 91 Harvest Festival (vegas)? Name Change posted:Yes let's leave gun control out and just do the Overton window shifting on our own by endlessly drilling down on nakedly insufficient police response tactics
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Apr 5, 2023 13:57
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Pretty sure we had a gun control thread and it went about as well as you could expect. Considering that, I think it's reasonable to take a position as a given to allow other discussion, though on the other hand anything short of "fix every problem in society" is like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. What difference do police tactics make if the shooter can empty 5 mags before they arrive on the scene 10-15 minutes later.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:15
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Elendil004 posted:Someone should make a gun control thread I'm sure there's a lot to talk about but if this thread becomes the de facto gun control thread then we lose the main topic. Yeah only six dead, wow what a success. I guess I find the entire debate of how to most effectively respond to active shooters distasteful to outright disgusting in this context, because as we've seen different police forces act differently on the same training, and discussing the efficacy of rapid response killteams deployed to schools ignores the elephant in the room and shifts the conversation to a "solution" that will never be a solution or feel like anything approaching success. Even if this were ultimately the appropriate question to ask (it's not), America as a nation does not have the resources to institute reliable killteam protocols everywhere, so analyzing every active shooter event like it's just a matter of proper training and action plans is loving useless. Nashville is essentially lucky that they won the lottery and only six people were murdered. If they were stuck with keystone cops, or a past-his-prime security guard, more dead. You really cannot meaningfully discuss this without admitting that it's fueling the continued militarization of police and explosion of police budgets (with accompanying abuses) in the name of murder mitigation, wherein it's entirely theoretical that it will even help. Eventually it just becomes ghoulish and inane to wonder how you can best deploy the strike teams to every public gathering place in America.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:28
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mobby_6kl posted:What difference do police tactics make if the shooter can empty 5 mags before they arrive on the scene 10-15 minutes later. they don't really, it's all cleanup at that point. our government is not capable of addressing gun violence because too many americans have become accustomed to firearms as a consumer product to ward off the fear of death, simple as. in a democracy this means a critical number of politicians are blocked by their constituents from doing anything useful about firearms upstream of the firearm violence problem, so we can only dabble in useless and token responses that blame various problems in our society while also not doing anything at all to address those problems either. it's all just blame passing and finger pointing because americans are unwilling on the whole to admit they're addicted to guns (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 5, 2023 15:49
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I think media coverage is an interesting topic for discussion. We have one camp that wants North Korea-style censorship to prevent future occurrences, and I'm curious to explore how that would affect different groups of people: 1. The individuals most often targeted by these shootings: despite the most recent and public event, many of these shootings target minority populations. How would, say, the Black community respond to a media that intentionally avoids reporting on shootings at predominantly Black churches? I think the most logical question to ask would be "well, what else aren't they telling us?" Not to mention how this would effectively be just another way that corporate media neglects issues that target minority populations. Trust in the media would collapse. 2. The individuals that are less targeted by these shootings: let's be honest, it's mostly wealthy white people. While some shootings do target well-off populations (and certainly they are the more famous ones), the wealthy can better afford the protection and mental health services that help prevent these crimes. As a result, they are better insulated from these events and a media blackout would only serve to further insulate them. They could just go about their day while children die at school. Since they hold a disproportionate amount of power, this would mean even less policy focus on prevention and response. 3. The shooters themselves: there is some sort of assumption that reporting multiplies these crimes. To that I would respond that i]there have been almost 140 mass shootings so far this year alone. That's more than one a day! The national media has barely covered one 10th of them in any real front page capacity. So % wise the coverage has absolutely plummeted while the crimes are getting worse than ever! 4. The victims: the only thing sadder than dead children is dead children that nobody ever heard of. Thousands of unreported fatalities is not the sort of country I want to live in.
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Apr 5, 2023 16:58
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I think media coverage is an interesting topic for discussion. We have one camp that wants North Korea-style censorship to prevent future occurrences, and I'm curious to explore how that would affect different groups of people: Who constitutes this camp? Are any of them posting here? They don't need to be, I just would like to know who is being referenced as desiring total censorship of all mass casualty incidents. Baronash fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 17:09
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I legitimately think if news agencies were forced to preface every discussion of the shooter with "the shooter has a weird tiny punishment and one time his pants fell down and everyone saw it and laughed" it would affect shootings. these people are pathetic jokes not death angels, treat them as such. no glory for murderers.
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Apr 5, 2023 21:32
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Name Change posted:Yeah only six dead, wow what a success. I guess I find the entire debate of how to most effectively respond to active shooters distasteful to outright disgusting in this context, because as we've seen different police forces act differently on the same training, and discussing the efficacy of rapid response killteams deployed to schools ignores the elephant in the room and shifts the conversation to a "solution" that will never be a solution or feel like anything approaching success. Even if this were ultimately the appropriate question to ask (it's not), America as a nation does not have the resources to institute reliable killteam protocols everywhere, so analyzing every active shooter event like it's just a matter of proper training and action plans is loving useless. Nashville is essentially lucky that they won the lottery and only six people were murdered. If they were stuck with keystone cops, or a past-his-prime security guard, more dead. Let me be clear, there's more to the whole of active shooterdom than response. There's preparedness, mitigation, recovery, and prevention. Response is important but even the best response starts after someone is probably shot and dead or dying. Better prevention, mitigation, and preparedness would undoubtedly curb these events. But you're never going to get them to 0, so you're always going to need response, so we may as well be good at it. The "killteam protocols" are insanely simple and there is no reason every department in America can't adopt and follow them. I think there's a lot of work to do outside of response. Personally I think reducing stressors and being compassionate has a lot to do with it but there are still a lot of unknowns. But we know the response side, I don't think there's much debate there, we know what works.
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Apr 6, 2023 00:20
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Shrecknet posted:I legitimately think if news agencies were forced to preface every discussion of the shooter with "the shooter has a weird tiny punishment and one time his pants fell down and everyone saw it and laughed" it would affect shootings. Didn't that incel kill a bunch of people because he found out he had a tiny pecker? It'd be great if they said "well, the killer was concerned with the size of his johnson, and post-mortem analysis has concluded -- he was right to be concerned. Very weird, small dick. One for the textbooks."
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Apr 6, 2023 00:44
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PT6A posted:Didn't that incel kill a bunch of people because he found out he had a tiny pecker? I don't think implicitly endorsing the direct connection between penis size and masculinity and therefore worth as a human being is going to help matters. I get that your post isn't entirely literal/serious, but I want to underscore that these people aren't, like, virtual particles spontaneously blinking into existence in a vacuum. They're products of their environment who, for whatever reasons, became walking manifestations of the lovely parts of our culture. Ultimately, I think there's gonna have to be an organized education/propaganda campaign, whatever you want to call it, to try to reduce the number of people hung up on this poo poo. I have no idea what that will look like.
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Apr 6, 2023 02:54
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Blue Footed Booby posted:I don't think implicitly endorsing the direct connection between penis size and masculinity and therefore worth as a human being is going to help matters. Well, I mean, with incels, the fact that they can blame all their failures on phrenology and dick size is a security blanket to avoid the fact that the real reason they can't have a satisfying relationship with a woman is because they have abhorrent personalities. There is no dude so ugly, no dick so small, that you can't find a partner who will love you for you. On the other hand, if you're a lovely person, you could be an Adonis with an anaconda-like whopper and women will still get sick of your bullshit really, really fast.
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Apr 6, 2023 03:48
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Elendil004 posted:Single points of entry, and those points being mantraps/vestibules are a common best practice and older schools need to be retrofitted. This is both grim and absurd. The discussion is a parody of itself when people are arguing that the problem is that public buildings aren't sufficiently fortified against attack.
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Apr 6, 2023 09:01
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Liquid Communism posted:It's not so much a 'now'. That's how it's always been. Unless the crime is big enough to be outrageous, it rarely got out of local or regional level media. A couple people getting shot in a gas station holdup isn't news past county lines, but if you're looking for a sensational mass shooting number it's getting counted. Homicide in general regardless of method in the US has decreased over the 25 years covered. (Linked data is the World Bank numbers. Note the 2003-2005 gap, though.) Likewise, the NCV Survey (the method by which the BPJ measures incidence of most types of crime besides homicide) shows a general decline in people surveyed claiming to have been victims of crime over the same period. (Right on page 1.) However, for the bulk of the period covered - 1999-2018 - we see the percentage of homicides committed with a gun consistently trend upward, going from a 1999 low of 67.2% of homicides being gun homicides to a rate of 76.5% in 2018. (2011 is an exception because of September 11.) 1999-2000 were the low point, after a downward trend since 1994. The latter data is from the BJS study you linked, page 11. Media coverage of mass shootings is reflecting a general anxiety that people's children are more in danger from guns, but it's an understandable fear. Death by firearm (including suicide and accident) is the leading cause of death for children and young adults in the US as of 2021, despite a recent upward trend in the second-most-common cause of death, car accidents. For ages 1-19, the reversal happened in 2019. The linked sources lack 2021 data, but it remains true for 2021, the last year with CDC data. (Note that the BJS study is also using CDC homicide data, owing to the difficulties involved in interviewing victims of homicide.) Mass shootings themselves are not driving these trends, though. I'm relatively certain (although I admittedly don't have a source to hand) that the vast majority of homicides are one at a time. But a lot of the (imo mostly flawed) sets of mass shootings people use to talk about mass shooting trends are reflecting this greater trend of homicide, suicide, and death by injury increasingly being with a gun rather than other means, relative to the total death numbers. Cpt_Obvious posted:3. The shooters themselves: there is some sort of assumption that reporting multiplies these crimes. To that I would respond that i]there have been almost 140 mass shootings so far this year alone. That's more than one a day! The national media has barely covered one 10th of them in any real front page capacity. So % wise the coverage has absolutely plummeted while the crimes are getting worse than ever! Like take this link for example. It's the Gun Violence Archive's list, and, for better or worse, the GVA are trying to talk about gun violence in general, so it sweeps a lot of relatively ordinary everyday crime in because multiple people were shot, rather than fitting the narrative everyone focuses on: a lone motivated mass killer in a school or place of business. If you look at the GVA's list rather than CNN's version of it, you can see how the incidents differ pretty quickly by clicking through to their news sources. It's not incels or copycats or insufficiently fortified schools causing three men to set out to kill someone in their garage or a bar fight between biker gangs to escalate to a shooting or an argument that escalates to a shooting. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Apr 6, 2023 |
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Apr 6, 2023 10:35
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Cease to Hope posted:This is both grim and absurd. The discussion is a parody of itself when people are arguing that the problem is that public buildings aren't sufficiently fortified against attack. Nobody is arguing that that is the problem, but it's one we really should be learning by now. If you can stop an active shooter before they become an active shooter that's ideal but if you can slow them down from making entry into a building that saves lives too and it really takes a layered approach. Cease to Hope posted:Like take this link for example. It's the Gun Violence Archive's list, and, for better or worse, the GVA are trying to talk about gun violence in general, so it sweeps a lot of relatively ordinary everyday crime in because multiple people were shot, rather than fitting the narrative everyone focuses on: a lone motivated mass killer in a school or place of business. If you look at the GVA's list rather than CNN's version of it, you can see how the incidents differ pretty quickly by clicking through to their news sources. It's not incels or copycats or insufficiently fortified schools causing three men to set out to kill someone in their garage or a bar fight between biker gangs to escalate to a shooting or an argument that escalates to a shooting. I know we could go on for pages definitionally arguing what is and isn't a mass shooting, but a bar fight between biker gangs, or a planned murder are wildly different animals than the types of mass attacks in public places/ASHEs where it's a different target set, subject, motive/means/etc. a lot closer to terrorism than 'run of the mill' murder.
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Apr 7, 2023 20:01
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Elendil004 posted:Nobody is arguing that that is the problem, but it's one we really should be learning by now. If you can stop an active shooter before they become an active shooter that's ideal but if you can slow them down from making entry into a building that saves lives too and it really takes a layered approach. It's really helpful to have both of these replies in the same post because it again shows how absurd this is. The bulk of the young people dying to guns are not dying to single motivated shooters attacking schools. If this were about saving lives it would not be focused on things like blaming the victims for propping open a door because it's impractical to funnel everyone in a school through checkpoints prison-style. The effort to fortify schools is, at best, a misguided approach to a perception that schools are under constant attack by motivated shooters that cannot be stopped in any other way. At worst, and most commonly, it's a political effort to distract and diffuse political pressure to do something about gun death and police failure while also sticking public schools with either the blame or a poorly funded mandate to fortify themselves. You can't have a discussion about fortifying schools while ignoring the context. "I was asked by a colleague if our schools will have to become fortresses to keep our kids safe. And I told them yes, if that’s what it takes. I don’t care if we have to park a tank outside a school." Tennessee is already bottom five for funding public schools, and their legislature would go on to expel members who protested the lack of gun control. It's foolish to treat this nonsense as good faith argument. What's killing children is guns and crime and suicide, not public schools lacking defense in depth. Focusing only on the most outrageous cases and then disallowing any greater discussion of the context is has already lead to you treating unfunded mandates to shift the blame as if they were serious proposals. They are not. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Apr 7, 2023 |
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Apr 7, 2023 22:23
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Cease to Hope posted:It's really helpful to have both of these replies in the same post because it again shows how absurd this is. The bulk of the young people dying to guns are not dying to single motivated shooters attacking schools. If this were about saving lives it would not be focused on things like blaming the victims for propping open a door because it's impractical to funnel everyone in a school through checkpoints prison-style. Ok but this is the active shooter / hostile event thread so the other things killing children are worth talking about somewhere but aren't really germane on this discussion.
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Apr 7, 2023 23:49
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Elendil004 posted:Ok but this is the active shooter / hostile event thread so the other things killing children are worth talking about somewhere but aren't really germane on this discussion. Did you see a mention of gun law and stop reading? The anxieties about and focus on lone shooters attacking schools is driven by anxieties about widespread gun death, especially among children. It's absurd to fortify schools, especially when the argument applies equally well to pretty much any public place. Lone motivated shooters aren't limited to schools. Schools are simply the most outrageous example, and generate the most political pressure to do something, resulting in this absurdity. All of the victim-blaming examples are examples of people working around or simply neglecting the attempts to make schools more prison-like because schools and prisons have very different objectives. If your defensive strategy is defeated by foreseeable problems like people needing to enter and exit a public building easily, then the problem was with the strategy. It's also a tactic to heap another unfunded mandate on public schools, as part of a greater political program to abolish them in favor of privatization and religious schooling. It's also a tactic to argue for greater police funding or diverting school budgets to police or private security businesses. Also part of the above-mentioned political program. And, most importantly, "other things killing children are worth talking about somewhere but aren't really germane on this discussion" is exactly the framing being used to advance this political program. The argument to fortify schools only makes sense at all if you myopically focus on the examples that happen to be politically inconvenient for state Republican Parties.
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Apr 8, 2023 01:11
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If you want to make the argument that "no, we really can't stop active shooters or do much more then we already are to defend against them, discourage them, or help them and here's why", that is obviously fine. I don't think there's a real risk of the Overton window effect causing this forum's posters to then collectively forget gun control exists as a solution. Making what seems to be an argument that this thread should not exist at all and that the thread's topic should not be seriously discussed does not seem productive to me. If you think this topic is a waste of time, you can post in a topic that does interest you.
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Apr 8, 2023 18:51
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Rigel posted:If you want to make the argument that "no, we really can't stop active shooters or do much more then we already are to defend against them, discourage them, or help them and here's why", that is obviously fine. I don't think there's a real risk of the Overton window effect causing this forum's posters to then collectively forget gun control exists as a solution. "If you find the thread offensive, you don't have to look at it" I'm actually complaining that disallowing gun control chat (and probing people for bringing it up, jfc) necessarily shifts us on to incredibly lovely and unrealistic narratives, like how to successfully fortify schools. We know this doesn't work, isn't feasible, and drives other serious consequences for our society, but the official thread response is that to bring up the actual problems = probation. You're helping this thread to rapidly become an embarrassment.
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Apr 8, 2023 22:01
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Name Change posted:We know this doesn't work, isn't feasible, and drives other serious consequences for our society, but the official thread response is that to bring up the actual problems = probation. Do we? Can you prove it? Seriously, this would be great data to post.
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Apr 9, 2023 00:41
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On that vein, I wonder if there's data on how effective metal detectors and the like are in schools where they are currently deployed. I have no idea where I'd even begin to look for this info.
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Apr 9, 2023 03:16
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I guess my question would be: if you take gun control out of the debate, why does the US still have an exceptionally high amount of spree violence compared to other countries, with or without guns? Other countries with lots of (legal or illegal) guns: not so many school shootings. Nor bombings or mass stabbings or really any of that poo poo. To me, it suggests that despite the fact gun control is a huge issue, it is by far not the only issue, and I don't think it's ridiculous to discuss how the US can deal with that given a complete and utter lack of will to implement meaningful gun control. People in the US go nuts... a lot. I won't say guns aren't a significant factor in making the problem worse than it needs to be, but I think with or without guns, there's a major problem.
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Apr 9, 2023 03:25
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What we're saying is that if you waved a magic gun control wand and guns didn't exist you'd still have mass attacks. Nobody in here (sanely, at least) is saying that the solution is do everything else except gun control. The solution is a lot of things, and if we let gun control take the thread over this just becomes a gun control thread. I'm not a subject matter expert in gun control so I didn't make a gun control effort post. I'm a SME in active shooter/hostile event related stuff so thats what I did. Why the US is a great thing to discuss and frankly should be looked at more but it's a really tough thing to pull out the single set of factors that make the US different.
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Apr 9, 2023 03:44
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Rigel posted:If you want to make the argument that "no, we really can't stop active shooters or do much more then we already are to defend against them, discourage them, or help them and here's why", that is obviously fine. I don't think there's a real risk of the Overton window effect causing this forum's posters to then collectively forget gun control exists as a solution. The thread is framed in a way that excludes all of the things we can do that would actually help and only includes absurd non-solutions, like fortifying schools. The only reason fortifying schools is even a discussion topic is because of conservatives, who ideologically oppose any of the actual solutions and see it as a lever to defund and discredit public schools, and police groups, who see it as an opportunity to divert funding to themselves. Note that "actual solutions" is not just a euphemism for gun control, although that is indeed one of the main solutions. But no. We cannot actually stop school shooters by making schools into fortresses because all of the schemes to make schools into fortresses are psychotic and run into immediate opposition. Nobody wants to fund them long-term and nobody wants to adhere to them. Additionally, it would not stop mass shootings in any other public place or workplace. Unless you're proposing that everywhere is a fortress? PT6A posted:I guess my question would be: if you take gun control out of the debate, why does the US still have an exceptionally high amount of spree violence compared to other countries, with or without guns? Elendil004 posted:What we're saying is that if you waved a magic gun control wand and guns didn't exist you'd still have mass attacks. My hypothesis: guns make it easy. Mass attacks with knives or other tools are more difficult to execute, more exhausting and traumatic to execute, significantly less deadly, require a certain amount of size and strength, and do not present a situation where the police are reluctant to shoot for fear of being shot at. Bombs are difficult to make, fail frequently, require a lot of preparation that's blatantly illegal and/or potentially noticeable, don't inherently inhibit efforts to evacuate unless they've already gone off, and don't instantly turn into violence early in an attack if something suspicious leads to a hue and cry. There's some discussion to be had about cars but the solutions are pretty obvious, less oppressive, fairly cheap (compared to high-end security), and much more generally useful because they also tend to protect pedestrians from negligence or accident. Things like bollards or Schoemehl pots are not difficult to place.
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Apr 9, 2023 06:19
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https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/09/us/wisconsin-police-officers-killed/index.html
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Apr 9, 2023 07:15
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Cease to Hope posted:Mass attacks with knives or other tools are more difficult to execute, more exhausting and traumatic to execute, significantly less deadly, require a certain amount of size and strength, and do not present a situation where the police are reluctant to shoot for fear of being shot at. Bombs are difficult to make, fail frequently, require a lot of preparation that's blatantly illegal and/or potentially noticeable, don't inherently inhibit efforts to evacuate unless they've already gone off, and don't instantly turn into violence early in an attack if something suspicious leads to a hue and cry. Not exactly a difficult thesis to write. Guns present a simple, easy, and comparatively safe way to kill others. That is what they are designed to do. The logical conclusion that this ultimately lowers the inhibitions of some to act in this way where they might otherwise not seems fairly self evident. Nonetheless, we are still left with the reality that inhibitions are just that: restraint of your true thoughts or feelings. While I can't really speculate on the true thoughts of others, I choose to believe that most individuals do not truly wish to murder others, especially not random groups of school children. Something, likely many things, in our society causes an immense amount of anger to bubble up in these individuals until it hits a blow-off point. I'd agree that if you could magically delete guns from the equation (good luck) that would shift the blow-off point but I wouldn't agree that they are in and of themselves what that is festering in individuals so they have such a desire to inflict death on strangers, they simply make it easier. Should we allow things that make it easier? Probably not, but as the op noted, that's a fairly distinct problem in this whole mess that tends to consume the whole narrative and we also appear to be unable to make much progress in. Further, I think there's a fairly ugly vicious cycle here of sticking it to the conservatives and gun control which plays out predictably, leading to greater social balkanization of which likely had second order effects of producing stressors that contributed to the Nashville shooter. That will likely remain a stretch to conclusively assert but I think it's at least a more original hypothesis than "guns make it easy to kill people."
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Apr 9, 2023 10:13
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ultrabay2000 posted:Further, I think there's a fairly ugly vicious cycle here of sticking it to the conservatives and gun control which plays out predictably, leading to greater social balkanization of which likely had second order effects of producing stressors that contributed to the Nashville shooter. It is politically useful for conservatives for public schools to feel like oppressive, dangerous places. Making schools into fortresses, drilling students, pushing SROs, pushing security services like ALERRT: all of these things allow conservatives to funnel school funding away from education and towards police and private security companies. When the security fails - as it inevitably will some portion of the time - then there's a pre-made narrative that the school failed to execute on the security plan. Even with no shooting, reallocating spending hurts the actual business of education. And all of those security tools make students' experience more unpleasant. Cameras and SROs and security checkpoints all make it easier to harass students over penny-ante nonsense. Secured doors and windows make for stuffy classrooms where a broken lock causes constant problems. Single points of entry make foot traffic a nightmare. It all makes going to class more difficult and depressing. Making public schools into police states is politically useful for the people who want more police and less public schools. Even if you set aside gun control, the negative externalities of fortifying schools are seen by conservatives as positive developments. The second order effects of stressing students out aren't even on their radar.
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Apr 9, 2023 11:22
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Cease to Hope posted:But no. We cannot actually stop school shooters by making schools into fortresses because all of the schemes to make schools into fortresses are psychotic and run into immediate opposition. Nobody wants to fund them long-term and nobody wants to adhere to them. Additionally, it would not stop mass shootings in any other public place or workplace. Unless you're proposing that everywhere is a fortress? Actually, fortifying schools, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars per school and billions per year, is being attempted around the country. It doesn't really work, because as you say, it's mostly a political project by fascists, not sensible policy. Elendil004 posted:Do we? Can you prove it? Seriously, this would be great data to post. There are things we can do that work--preventative/early detection, red flag gun control laws that don't involve political impossibilities like handgun prohibition, and so on. "Fortification" policy however is inhuman. We know that school lockdowns, the new national reality to replace nuke drills, cause immense trauma, especially after another school massacre hits the news, and the lockdowns are common. This trauma is because the kids don't know what's going on but have been taught that a lockdown means that a shooter has come to kill you, now shelter in place and wait for death. Incompetent and overzealous officials are also doing things like unannounced lockdown drills, and lockdowns for things that aren't even happening on campus. This lets school shooters terrify millions for years afterward with their actions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-lockdowns-in-america/?utm_term=.12750d991c13 quote:More than 4.1 million students endured at least one lockdown in the 2017-2018 school year alone, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by The Washington Post that included a review of 20,000 news stories and data from school districts in 31 of the country’s largest cities. We also have examples of "hardened" schools doing nothing to prevent or mitigate shootings. For all the money and time spent, the physical security aspect of prevention beyond having an armed officer onsite is often worthless. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/01/school-shootings-security-guns-431424 quote:Grace said he got “goosebumps” from the similarities between the shooter who killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, and the Littleton senior who stormed Arapahoe High School five years ago with a shotgun, 125 rounds of ammunition, a machete and three Molotov cocktails, killing a student and himself. Imagine putting together a bunch of Mission Impossible poo poo that's so stupid that even Donald Trump is unimpressed. quote:Hardening security was Indiana’s single-minded focus after the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. Southwestern High School was chosen by the Indiana Sheriff’s Association to test a state-of-the-art security program, put in place in 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jul/04/school-redesign-to-prevent-mass-shootings-skirts-real-issues quote:The National Rifle Association (NRA) has spoken much about its School Shield program , touting school fortification as an alternative to gun control. Pamphlets for the program push high-tech alarm systems; schools with high fences, no windows and few trees. Even relatively boring solutions like heightened surveillance generally come with a blank check and no controls for who gets to monitor the footage. https://whyy.org/articles/exclusive-cameras-counselors-and-yoga-how-pa-schools-spent-an-unprecedented-flood-of-safety-and-security-cash/ quote:A year ago, Pennsylvania earmarked $40 million in competitive grants for school districts to make safety and security upgrades in the wake of school shootings in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas. Meanwhile, we also know that drilling cops to become a paramilitary force that breaches and clears schools can lessen casualties from school shootings, but does not prevent them, especially when police do not execute the plans correctly. We see severe loss of life even in "model" responses like that in Nashville, in a world where Uvalde-level responses can still happen, decades after police procedures for active shooters should be commonplace. Altogether, you have an arsenal of half-measures and jokes that blow up local budgets with billions in spending (usually without demonstrable value), advance fascist fantasies, and traumatize millions of students and worsen their educations over the long term. ultrabay2000 posted:Not exactly a difficult thesis to write. Guns present a simple, easy, and comparatively safe way to kill others. That is what they are designed to do. The logical conclusion that this ultimately lowers the inhibitions of some to act in this way where they might otherwise not seems fairly self evident. Nonetheless, we are still left with the reality that inhibitions are just that: restraint of your true thoughts or feelings. There's nothing fundamentally different about the American psyche, it's just that when you lose your loving mind, you can just go get a gun and massacre people, because even modest gun control measures to prevent just this scenario has adamant, extremist, and well-funded opposition arrayed against it. But we have our best chance in years to do something coming up, given that the NRA is imploding under its own corruption and abortion bans are rendering the fascists unable to win elections for dog catcher across America. Name Change fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 12:16
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So just to defend the "let's take gun control as a given good" those last two posts were really interesting to me and imo would have been a lot less likely to be in a thread without it. Also since that type of security is both useless and harmful in its own right, it emphasizes the need for other options.
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Apr 9, 2023 12:41
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