161–170 of 560 posts
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How do other countries get along so well without the right to bear arms, and have they paid any less blood than the US for the society they formed?
Ask Venezuela or Iraq or Iran or Hong Kong or basically any of the countries in the Arab spring how it’s going for them right now.
Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying
My Aunt has a child in early middle school - years 6 through 9 or so, for people outside the US. Not only does the poor kid have a school-issued laptop with heavy monitoring tools installed on it, but they are also required to bring a smartphone to school! My Aunt had made them tape over the laptop's webcam and explained that everything the kid typed could probably be seen by the school, but she was still concerned a…
The constant use of smartphones has become a pretty central part of US culture. Shouldn't school reflect the environment the student is being taught to live in?
Smartphone applications are designed to be addictive and have demonstrably negative effects upon the mental health of adolescents. Their usage should be vigorously discouraged by anyone who cares about the mental health of school students.
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How do other countries get along so well without the right to bear arms, and have they paid any less blood than the US for the society they formed?
With repression and fewer liberties, mostly?
> This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it. Of course they think that, they’re still kids. Who’s going to protect them from surveillance? IMO this is way over the top - and it’s conditioning future generations to accept this level of surveillance as adults.
Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying
First of all, making something illegal does not make it disappear, and you're also grossly overestimating the occurrence (as are the people calling for clear backpacks) of school shootings. The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens. Consider that the news cycle and FUD have created a terrible availability bias in our…
The bodycount might not be "spectacular" but the rate of school shootings in the U.S. dwarfs other developed countries. Fatalities 200+ so far. At any rate, you don't know what they were 'estimating' exactly.
> The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens.
Criminals retrieve their weapons through underground networks. School shooters do not. They're just students. They've either grabbed what was lying around at home or bought them. Such that, accessibility to school shooters is hampered were it the case that legal distribution were more restricted.
Add to the fact, circulation of guns in the underground is only possible and bloated because of the sheet number of legal guns.
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The constant use of smartphones has become a pretty central part of US culture. Shouldn't school reflect the environment the student is being taught to live in?
Not to be flippant, but so is alcohol usage, should we encourage students to drink at school? Smartphone applications are designed to be addictive and have demonstrably negative effects upon the mental health of adolescents. Their usage should be vigorously discouraged by anyone who cares about the mental health of school students.
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> Of course, you know that guns are more effective at killing people - especially large numbers of people. A knife is quiet, you could probably kill more people with knives, a gun is loud and everyone nearby will hear it, probably what a crazy shooter would want is to strike fear into victims. > You're more likely to use the gun to kill yourself or a family member than you are to use it to kill an intruder. Since nei…
> You could probably kill more people with knives So why are you worried about gun bans? You can just use a knife instead. I think you must know, really, that guns are more dangerous and effective than knives. That's why you want the right to own one. It's also why the US has frequent mass shootings in schools, whereas there are no instances of mass stabbings in UK schools. Just look at the recent terrorist incident…
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Can you explain who is teaching nihilism to whom and where? In school, while I did not have a clear backpack and quite obviously had internet monitoring on someone else’s network, I was never, not once, taught nihilism. In fact, in my education through grade 12, most everything was filtered through a compassionate lens. It’s not like I was taught that the Holocaust will happen again because humans are inherently bad…
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You probably also define religion pretty broadly I suspect.
I could tell you that there is joy in life, beauty in the planet, happiness in relationships with our fellow humans and this is reason to live — spread love. Is that philosophy, religion (optimism?)?
The best "teachers" in my life have taught me, if nothing else, the joy of learning itself. There's no nihilism in that.
This looks like an XY problem[0] on a massive scale. Because the grown-ups can't figure out how to solve the top-level problems, they are instead dealing with the low-level symptoms and applying band-aids. It also reeks of political pork to me. I admit that enumerating the top-level problems is politically fraught, but I think they can be neatly condensed into: * that mass shootings occur, ever * that we cannot contr…
