http://gawker.com/its-really-hard-to-be-a-good-guy-with-a-gun-1588660306 I liked the candor of this article.
Strictly regulate it how? I still have yet to see a realistic idea for firearm regulations that would actually lower school shootings.
I'm watching the live press conference from the Police Chief on KGW. It was an AR-15. He had a handgun as well. He brought the guitar case and a duffel bag on the bus. They said the guns were secure at home, but the shooter defeated the locks. Sounds like the lockdown procedure worked very well. One student died, but the response of the police was incredible. They actually traded fire with the shooter before he shot himself.
Let's look at the latest shooting. 15 year old shooter. (legally can't purchase a firearm) Gun was legally purchased by parents. Guns were secured (per the police) but the shooter defeated the locks. So how would background checks have stopped this? How would locks have stopped this from happening? They didn't. What am I missing?
You said lower school shootings. You have no way of knowing if a law put into place to, say, prevent people from having guns in their house if they live with someone with mental illness would stop them, though. You want to treat the people, I've yet to see someone say HOW, instead of just shifting the debate, so how do you treat the people? And if you find someone that needs to be treated, do you think it'd be a reasonable idea to keep them away from guns if at all possible. Yes, yes, I know, how do you stop him from breaking other laws to get them. But you take away the easiest options for them. Kid from Sandy Hook, with a hsitory of mental illness, there's no reason for his mom to have the guns around him. He can't get hi own, takes hers, bunch of people are dead. If there was a law in place where she couldn't have them because of him, you prevented that one, with it's specific details, from happening.
What you are missing is that there are dozens of a school shootings a year and even if in this case the shooting still would have happened doesn't mean that any laws wouldn't have affected a different shooting. You keep taking specific incidents and applying the results to all possible school shootings when that's not how it works. Perhaps a different kid was unable to defeat the lock, or perhaps locks need to pass certain tamper-proof benchmarks in order to qualify as a gun lock. I know I have two gun safes, one is more a strong box that could be defeated in a couple minutes while the actual safe would take an expert to defeat. There is no absolute answer, and no response is foolproof. But common sense gun laws, better mental healthcare, smaller class sizes and other components could all work together to lessen what is becoming a tragic reality of modern society that must be curbed.
But that's so frustrating, because once again you have to lay the blame on the parents. If you have a child with mental illness, why the fuck WOULD you have guns around them? It makes no sense to me. I guess it boils down to people not wanting to believe that their kid is capable of this kind of thing, but it's common sense. If your child is dangerous, don't put them around dangerous things. I already listed a few pages back what I think we should be doing. We need to do a better job of identifying these types of children. Determine behavior "tells" that might lead to this kind of event. I think a lot of that has to do with shrinking classes to a more manageable size. Give the teachers a chance to spend more time with the kids so they can hopefully see when a child is nearing some kind of mental break. We need to dump more money into schools, and not just because of shootings, but because it's the right thing to do regardless. Honestly, I don't know if you can ever truly stop these kinds of things. As you said, if someone wants a gun they can break into someone's home to steal one. We can try all these preventative measures, and they might stop one or two kids, but the problem is that most of these shootings are premeditated. Most of the gun laws that are in place are meant to stop the impetuous killer. The person who, in a fit of rage, goes out and buys a gun to kill someone. They aren't effective at stopping someone who plans his shooting over a matter of weeks or months. Most preventative measures can be defeated if someone is planning for that long. They will figure out how to cut the locks. They will figure out how to get around things like metal detectors. So honestly, I think the only real answer is trying to identify the type of person that does this, and then attack the problem at the source. It is the only real way that you stop these shootings. Why did they do it? What caused them to break? Did the parents notice a change in behavior? If they did, why didn't they do anything about it? Dude, I'm not trying to be argumentative. I'm as frustrated as anyone. I'm tired of having this debate. I'm looking at this and I'm trying to figure out what I think is the best way to put a stop to shootings.
Identifying the kids with signs? Like Pres has mentioned with aspergers, what if every school shooter has aspergers. That doesn't make all aspergers individuals into killers. So if you recognize something that is similar...what?
Well, obviously you send them off to a concentration camp. Possibly an island where they can just kill each other.
I actually worry about this, and about a persecution coming of kids who already are outside the norm. Some experts suggest as many as 1 in 88 children has some level of aspergers. So there are about 55 million k - 12 students in America. That means right now in our school systems there are over 625,000 kids with aspergers. If you say every single school shooting since sandy hook (74 shootings) was done by an asperger kid, that still means that any particular asperger kid only has a 0.0001% chance of having been one of those shooters. So although it's easy to point our fingers at people on the spectrum, let's make sure to realize that these kids are individuals and that any one of them has almost no chance of being a school shooter. And of course, I don't know if all 74 were on the spectrum, I was taking the worst case scenario in order to do the math.
I don't think blanket accusations, like pointing the finger at aspergers kids, would accomplish anything. I think we need to shrink class sizes so teachers can better recognize when a kid becomes despondent, or apathetic. Talk to students more about how things are going in their lives. Communicate with parents more. Obviously this can't really happen unless the burden is lowered on the teachers. I'm not saying that they should start a witch hunt. Just pay more attention to how kids are acting and then talk to a student that seems distressed. Hell, maybe just talking to them and letting them know that someone cares would be enough to prevent something like this from happening.
So your answer to gun violence is smaller classes, so teachers can talk to students better. That wouldn't have stopped a single one of these school shootings. I'm not just trying to be argumentitive, but I think it's easy to just say "treat the problem" as if that means anything, or as if there's an actual way to go about doing that.
On this point, we agree. I actually don't worry about the witch hunt from the law or from school district, I worry mainly about the general idea of kids with aspergers getting labeled as dangerous in casual settings and having their peers, other kids, treat them as the enemy. This could likely have the opposite effect and cause more feelings of being bullied, abused, laughed at, and separated from the heard, potentially leading to more violent outbursts.
How do you know it wouldn't have stopped one of the shootings? The kid looked like a completely normal guy. Nobody cares why he decided to load up a bunch of mags, put on a protech helmet and a plate carrier and go down to the school? These aren't usually impetuous decisions. They don't go home, grab some shit laying around the house, and then come back and kill people. They usually plan it in advance. He obviously had a plan. He had a bunch of loaded mags. He had the vest and the helmet. He hid it in a guitar case. So obviously this wasn't something that happened spur of the moment. Why do you think that there wouldn't have been warning signs? We can usually link people who have sexual perversions to some kind of history of abuse. Why is it that we blame other crimes on their upbringing, but not school shootings?
