61–70 of 118 posts
> Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters Schools in the U.S.; this is what the U.S. are getting into. Meanwhile, the majority of the civilized world solves this with gun control. Americans can't do gun control just because of fetishism for their obsolete Constitution. Try to explain to Americans that their Constitution was written before the Industrial Revolution and cheap ubiquitous…
> Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters Schools in the U.S.; this is what the U.S. are getting into. Meanwhile, the majority of the civilized world solves this with gun control. Americans can't do gun control just because of fetishism for their obsolete Constitution. Try to explain to Americans that their Constitution was written before the Industrial Revolution and cheap ubiquitous…
Our country is better than yours because of the constitution
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (bewi…
A lot of us do, I think what happened is that a majority have decided it is a political loser. It reliably spins up republicans and gets them to the polls, probably even more so than abortion. It costs a lot of political capital with near zero hope for meaningful action. So progressives have prioritized issues with broader appeal (and still somehow fail most of the time, despite what appears to be much broader appeal).
> turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards
In some places. That's perhaps part of the issue. My suburban schools lock the doors, and that's about it. No metal detectors or turn stiles. They have like two security guards for a thousand students and no cops, just a liaison at the local PD if something comes up. The school does not feel like a fortress, nor a dystopia. So this gets written off as a big city problem.
Which poses the question, is it predominantly a big city problem? What fraction of gun violence in school is gang violence? The AR15-wielding mass shooters get a lot of press, but if we want the violence to drop meaningfully then we are probably wasting time over-focusing on that. And then the question, will taking guns way from the gangs solve the problem? Or do we have a socioeconomic and culture problem? Talk about hard to solve.
The real question here isn't "why are we sacrificing the education of the next generation to buy tools that make us feel safe but (logically, statistically) will only prevent one in a million child deaths?" ... the answer to that is a Simpsons meme ("won't someone think of the children?"). The real question is ... who is stoking the irrational fear in the first place, and how do they benefit by doing so?
What are you talking about? Schools are targets for shooters. Sad but certainly not fake.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/
Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could ban guns completely and you’d still have to deal with active shooters. There are 500M guns in the USA. Those dont just disappear. Its idiotic not to harden targets. The best way to do that’s debatable, but schools should be hardened.
They should give every student a gun at this point (/s because I feel like someone would agree with me). Edit: everyone should also wear a bulletproof vest at minimum. Desks should be equipped with reactive armor to defend against anti-tank warheads. A Phalanx C-RAM will be installed on the roof next to the AC units.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
Quite an assertion.
What Australia is doing works by one measure that matters: number of people killed by a gun. In 2024 the gun murder rates were:
US: 4.5 per 100,000
AU: 0.09 per 100,000
Ratio: 50
Source: https://www.ussc.edu.au/by-the-numbers-stark-contrast-in-aus...
Australia didn't confiscate vast numbers of guns by violence. It introduced a buyback scheme, which a lot of gun owners took up. The buyback was "an offer they couldn't refuse" for classes of firearms that were banned, but once it was done it meant it was more tractable to keep firearms in check. The big thing is did was reduce the number of households that contained a firearm even if some of the remaining (paranoid?) license holders increased their number of guns.
Source: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/04/28/new-g...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about? Schools are targets for shooters. Sad but certainly not fake.
There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news stories, then there are boring things like road safety that loom much larger in the numbers than they do in the public imagination. Here are some numbers on causes of death for chi…