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

washingtonpost.com

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

#71

Post by rootusrootus »

femto wrote: post #69
rootusrootus wrote: post #32

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…

> So clearly that isn't the answer. 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…

> Quite an assertion.

You must have misunderstood the assertion, then. I will attempt to clarify.

- Australia tried to get rid of guns, still has millions. Several hundred thousand of them illegal.

- Australia has a much lower firearms homicide rate, despite still having quite a lot of guns. Not the same ratio as the US, sure, but 4.5M guns for 28M people is still fairly prevalent and available.

- So the rate 1:50 ratio is not easily explained by simply reducing the number of guns in circulation. Something else is going on. Something harder to solve, even, than the second amendment.

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

#72

Post by defrost »

rootusrootus wrote: post #32
Havoc wrote: 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…

> Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions

It has certainly always been painted that way, particularly in US media driven by NRA framings.

An alternative description might be that Australia simply (almost but not quite) made gun regulation uniform across all states and territories.

At the time of the Port Arthur massacre all the states with larger populations had gun regulation, much like they had car and truck regulations - paperwork on ownership, licencing, etc.

Two relatively low population states, Queensland and Tasmania, had no regulation and territories had zero to mixed regulation.

Following a then world record lone shooter event in Tasmania the public pretty much overwhelmingly supported uniform regulation across the country- which meant imposing much the same laws as were then current in Western Australia on the alternative reality of Queensland.

Much of the buy back went towards buying back old guns and unused extra just in case guns that owners decided weren't actually worth formally licencing and paying annual fees (like a car rego) for.

The result of near uniform gun regulation across the country, all sales tracked, etc. was a decrease in gun incidents and two decades of near zero mass shooting events.

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

#73

Post by defrost »

rootusrootus wrote: post #71
femto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So clearly that isn't the answer. 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…

> Quite an assertion. You must have misunderstood the assertion, then. I will attempt to clarify. - Australia tried to get rid of guns, still has millions. Several hundred thousand of them illegal. - Australia has a much lower firearms homicide rate, despite still having quite a lot of guns. Not the same ratio as the US, sure, but 4.5M guns for 28M people is still fairly prevalent and available. - So the rate 1:50 ra…

> Australia tried to get rid of guns,

False. - Gun regulation was made considerably more uniform.

Here is my actual IRL Australian neighbour legally shooting here in Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE

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

#74

Post by atmavatar »

api wrote: post #54
influx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

This is a good point, so I'd like to provide some additional context.

There were 2,977 victims in the 9/11 attacks. This doesn't come close to cracking the top 10 leading causes of death, which are annual numbers.

The top 2 are Heart Disease at 683K and Cancer at 619K.

For terrorism to be an equivalent threat, 9/11 scale attacks would need to occur ~230 times a year, or just shy of 2 out of every 3 days.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11...

See: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

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

#75

Post by fhdkweig »

nonethewiser wrote: post #37
kazinator wrote: post #10

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.

The people deploying them know how to make money off people's fears and the "we have to do something" mentality.

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

#76

Post by diego_moita »

AaronAPU wrote: post #61
diego_moita wrote: post #15

> 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

> Our country is better than yours because of the constitution

Well, thank you twice:

* first for confirming my criticism that Americans venerate their constitution blindly

* second for staying in your country and not coming to mine

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

#78

Post by femto »

rootusrootus wrote: post #71
femto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So clearly that isn't the answer. 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…

> Quite an assertion. You must have misunderstood the assertion, then. I will attempt to clarify. - Australia tried to get rid of guns, still has millions. Several hundred thousand of them illegal. - Australia has a much lower firearms homicide rate, despite still having quite a lot of guns. Not the same ratio as the US, sure, but 4.5M guns for 28M people is still fairly prevalent and available. - So the rate 1:50 ra…

Okay. I should have interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't the full answer". I interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't part of the answer".

I think reducing the "saturation" of guns is important, as it is a big driver of people's mindset, whereby they see a gun as an answer. By "saturation, I mean the number owned, their availability, their visibility, their promotion and so on. The US is a standout in ownership, in that it has almost twice as many civilian firearms per person than the next closest country [1]. I suspect the US is also a standout in the other areas: availability (Walmart, but less than before), visibility (open carry), promotion (NRA).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

nonethewiser wrote: post #47
diego_moita wrote: post #15

> 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…

Idk, I think the constitution is pretty awesome.

[deleted]

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

#80

Post by xboxnolifes »

influx wrote: post #42
Havoc wrote: 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...

Is there some sort of astroturf campaign going on about this? I have never seen so many comments about this in random places as I have in the last month.
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