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Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

washingtonpost.com

51–60 of 118 posts

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#51
post #4

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids

Pretty easy to make glib comments like that. How do you propose the problem be addressed? The Constitution as written makes banning guns a non-starter. So amending the Constitution is step 1, and a big step it is. 3/4 states ratifying is a non-trivial threshold. And then what? There are already more guns than people in the US. Going to confiscate them all? Good luck. Even Australia, the poster child for instituting d…

The two statements are not inherently contradictory.

Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.

In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it.

(Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#52
post #42
post #4

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids

More Europeans die from lack of air conditioning than people in the US die from guns. https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...

>The European heat death figures are based on modeled "excess deaths"—a standard epidemiological approach that tries to capture everyone who died earlier than they would have in cooler conditions, including from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory failure, which casts a wide net. "But the US number," Ritchie wrote, "isn't based on this type of modeling; it's based on heat deaths recorded on death certificates." That's a far narrower count which only captures cases where a physician specifically wrote heat as the cause of death. The result is that the two figures being compared are not measuring the same thing. "If you used death certificate figures for Europe," Ritchie wrote, "they'd be far lower."

Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#53
post #42
post #4

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids

More Europeans die from lack of air conditioning than people in the US die from guns. https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...

[deleted]

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#54
post #42
post #4

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids

More Europeans die from lack of air conditioning than people in the US die from guns. https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...

People don’t evaluate risks based on stats. They do it based on vibes. We do have a disproportionate amount of gun violence for a developed nation but statistically it’s still a very low risk.

I recall pointing this out back during the post 9/11 terror panic. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack were still phenomenally low even after 9/11. It would have taken a relentless stream of constant 9/11 scale attacks to even approach automobile or drug overdose deaths.

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#55
post #42
post #4

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids

More Europeans die from lack of air conditioning than people in the US die from guns. https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...

[deleted]

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#56
post #42
post #4

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids

More Europeans die from lack of air conditioning than people in the US die from guns. https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...

I fail to understand why this should make the lack of US action on gun control any more justifiable.

Per your linked article:

> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.

> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#57
post #4

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids

Pretty easy to make glib comments like that. How do you propose the problem be addressed? The Constitution as written makes banning guns a non-starter. So amending the Constitution is step 1, and a big step it is. 3/4 states ratifying is a non-trivial threshold. And then what? There are already more guns than people in the US. Going to confiscate them all? Good luck. Even Australia, the poster child for instituting d…

Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.

However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.

And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.

I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.

This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#58

This idiotic idea that must have come from a Gemini chat session will backfire in a real incident. Of course the perpetrator will know about the drones and be prepared for them, e.g. with a face mask. Conveniently for them, the pepper spray will confuse and incapacitate their targets, leading to more casualties. If you're going to accept not being able to take guns away from the perpetrators, the only thing that will…

Whether they will be effective or not I dont know. But something tells me you dont know more about this than the people deploying them.

Right; if I were a properly humble intellectual, I would be writing things like "whether the pepper spray drones will be effective or not, I don't know", rather than calling them out as a cockamamie idea that will obviously backfire.

Re: Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters

#60
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given an active shooter threats, what is the solution if not a good guy with a gun?

Ever see Takeshi's Castle?

"American Ninja Warrior" gameshow looks a lot like it to me; It looks like a pretty direct copy of "Takeshi's Castle" in many ways in fact.
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