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It's come to this, even in Boston
By adamg on Thu, 05/26/2022 - 9:04am
Mom Hustle reports:
My 5 year old BPS student does "quiet drills" where the children sit in their cubbies silently. My daughter said she just snuggles her stuffies. They aren't told what it's for.
Part of a longer discussion on crazed-killer drills in Boston schools.
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Comments
Shot spotter
The new Attleboro high school will have a version of shot spotter.
Instead of eliminating the threat of school shooters and protecting children, we are putting the burden on schools and ultimately children themselves to manage active shooter crisises.
“Let’s remember the children who sacrificed their lives to protect our Second Amendment rights.”
That’s not what shot spotter does
It eliminates the duration of time it take to make an emergency call, some times which then needs to be routed to the correct responding department.
Guns were invented for better or worse. No amount of laws will completely eliminate them from society.
It’s naive to think guns will just vanish if we pass some greater form of restriction. It might decrease their availability, but it will never eliminate their existence.
Every other country...
in the world is a good example of how much restricting guns reduces mass killings.
In other words, you're a liar or a fool. Which is it?
absolutely infuriating
Just how worthless the cops were in TX. Could it be any more obvious that more guns & more cops isn't the answer? We should follow the Australian model -- we need a pretty broad ban on semiautomatic weapons at the very least.
We have our own model in the
We have our own model in the machine gun ban of the 1930s, updated in the 80s. Manufacturer and sale were banned and the only people allowed to own them are those who owned legally prior to the 1930s ban (basically no one alive today) and those issued incredibly strict and rare licenses. The constitutionality of this ban was affirmed in the DC v. Heller decision.
Our national psychosis
This is not an insoluble problem. Great Britain solved it. New Zealand solved it. Australia solved it. Why are we so lame that we can't solve it? Since it seems that we have to choose between "2nd Amendment rights" and the lives of our children, why do we keep sacrificing our children? What is wrong with us?
Because people continue to
Because people continue to vote for politicians that would rather focus on controlling women and a clump of cells than to actual living, breathing human beings.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cnn-alisyn-camerota-james-white-texas_n_6...
Where you can be arrested for speech
And put into camps for covid.
Yes, I know you are probably one that supports those actions by the Gov't (as are most of Uhub posters) but those who actually value their freedom aren't cool with that.
Freedom to not be executed in a grade school classroom
…is not freedom valued in the US. Spare me the “muh freedom” bullshit.
You do know that vast majority of shootings
are gangbangers with pistols?
That school classroom shootings are not what you think they are.
Long gun shootings are not what you think they are. Less than 3% of all shootings are with long guns.
The Evil racist white guy shooter theory you people push so hard is not accurate
https://mass-shootings.info/index.php?year=2021
One canard after another
The only reason for a creep like you to own a gun is because you’re an antisocial dirtbag.
AR-15=devastating injuries. Private equity markets them2minors.
The AR was originally designed for US military to be devastatingly lethal and yet not penetrate through walls so as to risk friendly fire fatalities when clearing a house. The injuries it inflicts are devastating compared to many other firearms. Surgeons don't have much to work with when they try to save AR-15 gun shot victims.
None of the kids in Sandy Hook had open coffin funerals. One of the Sandy Hook moms insisted that the governor of CT look at photos of their kids bodies so he knew what she knew about the violence perpetrated against the children in their final moments alive. CT enacted an assault weapons ban.
Many of the victims in Texas this week were identified with DNA.
After El Paso massacre, Texas lowered the age to 18 to buy an AR-15. Their plan was to 'harden schools' a counterterrorism tactic. It didn't work.
At the same time private equity is marketing AR guns to minors, We know this because of evidence presented at trial by lawyers for Sandy Hook parents. They won a judgment. They'd rather have their kids.
@13:54 Chief Justice Warren Berger: "this [Second Amendment] has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud on the American public by special interest groups that I ever seen.."
Fuck all the guns
Full stop. Both the 3% and the rest.
“Long guns”
Assault rifles.
I dont think you understand what an assault rife is.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 bans machine guns (assault rifles), suppressors, sawed offs and explosive devises.
Assault rifles vs rifles are categorized by their rate of fire. You cant buy an assault rifle and an AR-15 is no different than say a Mark 12 or a Barret Rec 7. Its just happens to be the most popular, which if banned would just be replaced by the second most popular, the Ruger AR-556.
If you want to ban semi-auto firearms, that would include ALL handguns. Meaning people could only own bolt action & autoload rifles, pump action shotguns, revolvers and muskets.
Shut up, you murdering asshole.
N/t
Thank you for the self-own
You are no doubt correct. You are also being a ghoul, and completely inappropriate. Thank you for the self-own and for completely deflating the "it's too soon/now's not the time" argument. It is never the time to do what you did here.
Go on...
...and?
So?
Have you ever been a kid and been told that if you can't use your toy properly that you're going to have it taken away? Ever tell a kid you're going to take something away from them if they can't use it properly?
At what level of depravity do we have to go to in order to have these toys taken away?
overplayed your hand, troll
there are no comments here about white people and guns.
3%?
And how many lives does that 3 % equal? Judging by your rant, I get that you’ll probably find a way to compare that “low” number into the “low” percentages of covid deaths. But in that case, the percentage still equaled a million deaths. I don’t know why you’re ok wotr dismissing 3% of gun deaths. You seem nice.
#1 leading cause of death for American children
#1 leading cause of death for American children and teens is firearms. It used to be auto accidents. We should focus on the kids, how did we get here.
There are laws against being
There are laws against being executed in a grade school classroom. Murdering is not one of your freedoms.
“those who actually value freedom”
absolutely insufferable
How many
child massacres will it take for you to change this idea of yours that your misinterpretation of “rights” is not worth anyone’s lives?
What about your children? Which ones of them do you want yo sacrifice for this “right” of yours? Serious question, name me a name.
"What about your children?"
Are you joking? That person doesn't have children.
When people tell that person "fuck you" it's rhetorical, not an invitation.
spare us this bullshit. you
spare us this bullshit. you have no idea what freedom is.
Just curious
But can you actually quote the 2nd Amendment? Without leaving out the first bit that you like to pretend doesn't actually exist?
Not all countries...
I completely agree some type of action needs to be taken.
However, I lived in China during the time period when a rash of machete/cleaver attacks on elementary schoolers during dismissal was a serious problem. There were increased guards, some of them armed, but it still happened. I remember picking up some kids from school and seeing the security in place to try and prevent a deranged person from killing them - all in a country where absolutely no citizen will ever own a gun.
The images of the gore from the aftermath of one such attack in my then-city are stuck in my head forever. Hearing what some of those kids suffered is soul-scarring. As is anything related to the kids who have suffered and are suffering today.
Something needs to be done - but I feel helpless to state what that something is. I do not think it is as simple as I wish it was.
Curious as to what the
Curious as to what the average amount of deaths from all these machete massacres came to, compared to the average amount of recoverable injuries. I would imagine it would be much harder to kill 19 kids with a machete in under a couple of minutes before one is stopped.
Another common canard from gun-lovers is that anything can kill - steak knives, cars, drops from tall buildings - and if we ban guns we need to ban those as well. However, they conveniently leave out the fact that these high-powered weapons are specifically designed to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible, where those other objects, necessary by millions to perform the tasks for which they are designed, are not.
Very fair
Usually less than 10 killed and upwards of 30 injured in some places, depends on which attack. Lower numbers than what a gun would kill, certainly. Your point is good.
I do not like to go down the "ban cars" route of thinking but if we enter the realm of absolute quantity of children killed determining the importance of any given problem, there is a pretty obvious spiral where no one wins, with "ban cars" being one of the signposts. Or is the intention of a tool the determinant of importance?
I hear your point and primarily agree. I do not oppose the suggestions above, not at all. But I find it hard to say what should be done, based on my own experience. It is not fair to say I think stabbings are a huge problem because I saw a first-grader who lost an arm, when it is just sheer chance I saw that and not a shooting victim. But I can't help but be biased by what I myself have seen.
Hopefully I am being clear. This is an extremely fraught topic that I want to understand more fully, outside my own siloed thinking.
Experience
China is a useful data point. So is the UK. So is Australia. Canada, Norway, Germany, New Zealand, all tightened their gun laws in response to mass shootings. I know that when we look at the results, people tend to focus on the decrease in shooting deaths -- but I don't think those countries have seen a meaningful upswing in cleaver deaths. I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
kinda
maybe need to open your minds more to some of the CRT thinking.
the good: America appears founded on a notion of sovereignty/ transgression; as in, "I have sovereignty deigned by God, YOU do not." As much as I don't like Dave Matthews Band, his song "Don't Drink the Water" pretty much sums it up.
the bad: "evidence" and timeliness are white supremacist schemes designed to oppress humanity.
If you keep confusing the good and the bad, then you cannot address yourself to the actual problem.
We are a country of psychotics because we do not believe in human rights--we seem to collectively believe, (and our Supreme Court agrees) that a human being must be subservient to the Corporate City of God or some crazy-ass shit like Ginger Judge believes
Betos was totally right to
Betos was totally right to challenge the Lt Governor yesterday. It will happen again and again.
Someone pointed out
...and it should have occurred to me but didn't, is that the next round of school shooters have grown up participating in years of active-shooter drills and know how they work and maybe have figured out ways around them. Really fun stuff to think about, but as long as it's never Republican Senators, it's not like we need to do anything about it
Steve Scalise
Republican law makers were involved in a mass shooting on a softball field and basically apologized to the AR-15 for getting in the way of the bulletts. I know…we forget about this because there are so many mass shootings it’s impossible to keep track.
But the point is that even if 50 Republican senators were gunned down, the GOP would just double down on arming and tactically training members of congress.
On the one hand, a unified Congress acted swiftly when women with cardboard signs showed up to Brett Kavanaugh’s house, but even a Bernie nut shooting up a Republican softball practice could not get them to act on guns.
Texas shows us a way
Texas anti-abortion law S. B. 8, which the US Supreme Court has so far refused to block, includes an incentive for any individual to seek enforcement of that law by suing a person who provides or assists a woman seeking an abortion, by paying that individual a 10K bounty.
California is taking up the idea that Texas has pioneered, and is in the process of passing a law that allows private citizens to sue anybody trafficking in illegal firearms, for a similar 10K bounty.
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-texas-california-school-shootings-an...
"trafficking in illegal firearms"
Who the fuck cares? How is that relevant here?
The Uvalde kid turned 18 and LEGALLY bought two guns and all the ammunition. The Sandy Hook gun was LEGALLY owned.
What a useless, off-topic comment. All of these dirtbags are the proverbial "law-abiding citizens" until they pull the trigger. Mass shooters, by and large, LEGALLY purchase their assault weapons.
It's fucking relevant
Because someone is fucking doing something. It doesn't fucking matter if the specific fucking thing that someone is fucking doing will block one specific fucking case or kind of fucking gun violence or not. It matters that we try every fucking thing we can to prevent each and every fucking kind of gun violence. Each and every fucking gun death prevented is a fucking win. Is that fucking relevant enough?
yes, but
maybe empowering roving bands of private citizens motivated by capitalistic concerns to capture perceived rule breakers isn’t the greatest idea in 2022’s America.
It's just a change the subject tactic
Go after the currently-legal guns. Almost all "illegal guns," save this new generation of ghost guns, start their lives as legal guns.
Ban AR-15s and other assault weapons. Ban magazines with a capacity of +10 bullets. Limit the type of ammunition that can be manufactured and sold. Implement strict universal background checks. Require licensing and make licensing procedures much stricter. Disrupt the gun manufacturers' and gun dealers' money; make them both criminally and civilly liable for every single death or injury caused by a weapon that they manufactured, whether the gun was legally possessed or not. Don't sue the guy selling illegal guns, go after the deep-pocketed gun industry that profits from the demand created by illegal gun sales. No more flea market gun sales.
Again, it's cool to inform on illegal gun sales, but talking about it in a thread about the recent school shooting that was perpetrated with LEGALLY OWNED guns is just derailing discussion and shielding the gun industry, gun extremists, and gun money-subservient politicians from the scrutiny and accountability that they deserve.
Comments like this
Comments like this make gun sales go up up up.
Profiteering from tragedy
Yep.
Every time there is a national gun tragedy, so much “they’re going to confiscate your guns” scare-mongering is vomited by NRA types, right wing politicians, and conservative media—the folks who have lobbyist money, stocks, or other financial interests in the gun industries—in order to drive up gun sales and reap the profit.
Imagine leveraging the murder of 19 children as a marketing strategy. Sick fucks.
Mythical "NRA types" don't
Mythical "NRA types" don't have to do anything. Anti-gun advocates are doing the mongering for them.
This mythical group…
…is having a very real annual meeting down the proverbial road from Uvalde starting tomorrow. And these gun extremists are hosting Abbott, Cruz, and Trump as speakers.
I have no words
for the contempt I feel for you …child massacre enthusiasts.
Am I wrong...
...or did drunk driving deaths start to go down when we started holding those providing the alcohol responsible?
For that matter, what about regulating inherently dangerous/harmful products? We regulate cigarettes and alcohol. Why can't we manage the same level of regulation of firearms and ammunition?
Or maybe cars
People still get to own them, despite them killing about as many people as guns each year. But harm reduction has been remarkably successful. We brought the death toll down from above eight deaths per 100M miles traveled to 1.33. And we're still working on reducing it further.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/06/opinion/how-to-reduce-sho...
Harm reduction. Every bit helps.
Cars also provide a societal
Cars also provide a societal benefit (transit discussion aside, I'm talking in generalities). Cars allow for people to travel from point A to point B that would otherwise be impossible to impractical, cars allow for goods to be transported across the country, etc. They have a purpose and there is a general unspoken agreement that while car deaths are bad and we should continue to harm reduce, there is a trade off here as well, and the good that cars provide makes wholescale removal impractical.
All guns are designed to do is kill things. That is their sole and only purpose. With a small carve out for people who use them for hunting for food (which isn't the style of gun being discussed here ANYWAY), what possible good do they provide to offset the death??
Motor vehicles serve many
Motor vehicles serve many purposes: ambulance, city bus, semi-tractor trailer that transports food to grocery stores… you can’t use a gun to rush someone to a hospital when they’re having a heart attack.
Guns are bad in the hands of crazy people
The school should have been locked. How about a national law on that? You practically have to show ID getting in some Boston schools through a single entrance that is locked and on camera. Why can’t a law be made forcing schools to follow proper protocol in keeping kids as safe as possible.
3D printed guns will be everywhere in the near future. Strict gun laws may help, but crazy will alway find a way, like the camp shooting in Sweden.
Meanwhile, 60 juveniles will be killed in Chicago this year to little national outrage. There will likely be zero outrage and no national discussion on what to do. The problem is systemic.
Crazy people not needed for guns to be bad
I'm not going to bore you all with another list of links to news reports of accidental shootings by policemen, gun safety instructors, gun range masters, and other "properly trained" good guys with guns. If you're interested, you can find lots and lots of those stories. Guns are intrinsically dangerous. They're designed to be, to apply lethal force with a minimum of preparation or effort. They do that really well. If only humans were designed that well to be able to control their impulses, twitches, clumsiness, substance use, anger, and general human randomness.
You're not going to increase school safety by introducing more guns to schools. Just the opposite. Introducing guns to any situation inevitably makes that a more dangerous situation. More guns, more danger. This isn't just common sense. Numerous studies bear it out.
Evidence
Here's some evidence that more guns = more danger:
A society with fewer guns is safer. Gun fetishists are going to say that I'm advocating sacrificing freedom for security, but I'm actually advocating that we prioritize the freedom from fear of being shot over the freedom of gun-cultists and their enablers to make our being shot acceptable.
Press candidates for public office to take a stand on gun control. Don't vote for any candidate who enables the gun subculture. Even Bernie Sanders should be held to this standard.
Less guns is more safe
Yes. I never said that wasn’t true or tried to imply otherwise. More criminals with guns means more gun crimes and many legal gun owners kill themselves with their own gun.
Guns in the hands of bad people are bad. One can declare all guns to be bad, fine. What about the ones we are shipping to the Ukraine? Or the guns the secret service carry to protect the President? Or dare I say, the police?
If you’ve ever been shot at and unarmed, it is an incredibly powerless and scary feeling. If you’ve ever had your kids shot at, it’s even worse. I have experienced both of these situations and it is more awful than you can imagine. The police showed up in every time very quickly (less than 90 seconds) and armed with guns. If armed police did not show up, the bullets would have kept flying and my kids could be dead.
We should be pressing candidates and district attorney’s to uphold the law and do everything in their power to keep the residents of their district safe by keeping gun offenders off of the street.
I too think we should be prioritizing the freedom from fear of being shot, as do many residents in this city and others who live with and have survived gun violence.
Uvalde
Tell that to the people of Uvalde.
Those cops
Those cops that arrived on scene are sorry pieces of garbage and did not do their jobs. There will be an investigation into their unwillingness to enter the school.
The Boston police did do their jobs and were willing to go towards gunfire to save lives. I would imagine there are different levels of training in Uvalde than Boston, but I don’t have details on that.
Also
It seems that there are still mandatory sentences on the books for carrying an unlicensed firearm in MA, but these sentences are not being applied. At one time, there were even signs at the state borders, warning gun-toters of the jail time they were risking. Why are these sentences not being applied? The people illegally carrying guns are a danger to us all. Lock them up. Make room by letting some drug users out.
Let's Pretend You Care About Chicago
Agreed, in this case better door security might've helped. I'm guessing the school already had some kind of door policy that they let slip. But blaming elementary school security is just surrendering to gun nut culture instead of facing the problem head on. How are you going to do that to every church, every shopping mall, every grocery store, etc, etc...?
All that being said, lets pretend that you, a garbage troll who claims "CRT" is ruining america's youth, actually care anything about "60 juveniles" in Chicago.
You know a good way to decrease shootings in Chicago? Remove the easy access to guns people in Chicago have from neighboring states like Indiana. 60% of the guns used in crimes in Chicago were purchased out of state. https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/chicago-gun-trace...
How do we fix that "systemic" problem"? How about a national gun licensing program like we have in Massachusetts where we have some of the lowest rates of gun deaths in the country? There's no need to re-invent the wheel. https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-control-laws-l...
Or...
...let's consider the case of Dylann Roof, who also didn't have to shoot his way through a locked door. He went to a bible study meeting, was greeted with trust, and killed a bunch of people.
"Lock the doors" isn't an answer if you want a free and open society. It isn't the answer if you want a society where people can extend trust to others. But maybe you don't want those things?
You can
You can definitely lock the doors of an elementary school. They do this in Boston and many towns throughout New England, New York, and the rest of the country.
If I operated a place of religious worship, I would consider keeping only one entrance unlocked along with some kind of security check point.
Of course I want a free and open society where we can all extend trust to others, but keeping people safe takes priority over ideology. Why are you so hostile?
Pete you keep putting words in my mouth
I never said “ruining.” I said a number of things but I didn’t say that.
Nearly all guns used in crimes are purchased illegally. I am aware that lax gun laws in neighboring states can create a problem in a state with strict laws, allowing criminals more sources for illegal purchase. Guns are trafficked into the cities from neighboring states or far away states.
A national law tightening things up would help, but both republicans and democrats nationally are holding that up. We’ll see if they can compromise on anything after yet another tragedy.
I care about innocent people, especially kids, being shot anywhere. It’s nice we are having a national discussion on the issue, but the fact is kids are shot in this country all the time and there is rarely little coverage in the national media because it doesn’t sell like school shootings. A dozen kids every six weeks in Chicago apparently isn’t enough. If 20 kids in first grade and now 20 in another elementary school isn’t enough, then I honestly don’t know what will do it.
I do know a small percentage of the population has to live with gun violence at a much higher rate than the rest and this problem is systemic. Within this subset, it is an even smaller percentage of people consistently perpetrating acts of gun violence and they are often members of gangs.
Gang violence taking over neighborhoods (and cities) is never something to take lightly and is not easy to rein back in when things get out of control. More community intervention programs, gang units, tougher sentencing, and stricter gun laws can be used in combination to lower gun deaths, which would actually be much higher without the magic that doctors are performing these days.
For a lone wolf shooting, like these AR-15 military style school shootings, there are almost always enablers that allow the sociopath to commit their crime. They house and feed them knowing they have deadly weapons and growing mental health problems. There are also online enablers if the criminal is talking to anyone about their desires and it goes unreported.
In both situations, mental health intervention is needed and should be focused on. Whatever is happening in school is not moving in the right direction to improve the mental health of young people, otherwise we would have the data to prove that. The numbers are mostly trending in the wrong direction.