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I sincerely hope this does not descend into a flamewar. We can't have discussion about this in an intellectually stimulating way in congress, we can't have thi

I sincerely hope this does not descend into a flamewar. We can't have discussion about this in an intellectually stimulating way in congress, we can't have this discussion in the media, we obviously can't have this discussion on social media so HN is the last bastion of hope. It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity. The fact stands that USA has a school shooting problem [1] unlike any other country in the world. My main question is how did we get here? There must be an inflection point in the past - any historians out there who can tell us when did this began to be a thing and what was the root cause? Also any argument like "mental illness" or "ease of access to firearms" needs to explain why the same does not apply to the rest of the world. There are mentally ill people everywhere and many countries have easily accessible weapons, yet no school shootings at this scale. Can we investigate all the contributing factors? What can we do as individuals and as a society to move forward on this issue? (parent of three elementary school kids here) [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-shootings-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh... edit: I see many comments already default to "guns are the problem". I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion. Let's look at data. While US has most guns per capita, other countries are close, in the same order of magnitude [2]. For example Serbia has 40 civilian firearms per 100 people (!) and zero school shootings in its entire history. United States had 288 just this year. Why is that? Where does the urge to kill innocent children come from? [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

smt88 4y ago
Only a very small number of Americans can't have this discussion. Most Americans (and people living elsewhere) can have it easily and think the solutions are obvious.
- bogwog 4y ago
  The problem is that the people who can't have this discussion also own a bunch of guns...
  - smt88 4y ago
    I can't tell if you're joking, but the problem is not their guns. They're mostly peaceful people who have not demonstrated a willingness to commit mass murder to defend their interpretation of the Second Amendment. I know we see some violent pro-gun extremism online, but it doesn't represent the vast majority of gun owners.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  > "Only a very small number of Americans can't have this discussion." It's unclear why people keep claiming this. According to https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own... , in 2020 while rural firearms ownership was ~48%, urban and suburban firearms ownership was 23% and 25% respectively in the US. That's a minority, to be sure, but it's not by any means a "very small" minority.
  - smt88 4y ago
    I disagree with the premise that "people who can't have a discussion about gun rights" == "people who own guns". In fact, gun owners (like the general population) are heavily in favor of increasing gun control, especially things like closing loopholes in background check laws[1]. The people who won't entertain a discussion about increasing gun control are a minority of extremists who just happen to be a large enough voting bloc to dictate the GOP's position on guns. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-a...
    - Acrobatic_Road 4y ago
      These polls assume that the public knows what our gun laws actually are. They have been fed lies about non-existent "loopholes" in gun laws, among other fantasies. I suspect most people would be satsified with the gun laws we actually have.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - qball 4y ago
      >In fact, gun owners (like the general population) are heavily in favor of increasing gun control, especially things like closing loopholes in background check laws[1]. The reason that gun owners are in practice against this, of course, is that implementation of these has consequences like "you have to waive HIPAA rights to pass your background check" (WA). I'm unconvinced that being in favor of an idea, but against the bad-faith compromises that always seem to come with it, qualifies as "extreme".
- sneak 4y ago
  The solutions are not obvious. Disarming the civilian population gives rise to a different and much larger problem than school shootings, if that is what you were implying.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Weird. What problems do, say, European countries or Japan, or pick any modern democratic state, have that are larger than school shootings?
    - sneak 4y ago
      The holocaust is a good example. It is difficult for governments to commit large scale atrocities without the consent of the governed unless those so governed are first disarmed. A more modern example was the prohibition of the free movement of the Australian population during covid. Australians were held prisoner by the state and were not permitted to leave.
      - smt88 4y ago
        The Holocaust was a result of populism in Germany. The oppressed people wouldn't have been able to protect themselves from the majority of Germans and the German military, even if they were armed.
      - xvector 4y ago
        I really doubt we are in for another Holocaust. Government restricting movement during a pandemic is not a valid reason to literally shoot someone dead, that is literally pure insanity. What is happening right now isn't the Holocaust. What is happening right now - and has been happening for years - are weekly mass shootings. This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. It only happens in the US. Guns are clearly the problem.
      - asxc11 4y ago
        Something tells me that even an armed militia of the people wouldn't be much of an obstacle for a military power such as Germany or America.
bifrost 4y ago
It likely will for a variety of reasons. People will make up all kinds of reasons why "this doesn't happen anywhere else", they'll completely ignore the actual cause of the violence (a person), they'll make excuses, bring up solutions that are illegal, entirely ignore cultural issues, ignore that psychopaths are looking to be famous, point at more laws which won't do anything because the existing ones didn't work/etc.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  I mean, I overheard my coworkers discussing pretty awful talking points. Ex: saying that gun control won't work because we'll just be killing each other with swords. Which ignores the fact that its a lot harder to kill 18-children + 1 teacher with a sword, than it is to kill the same number with a gun. -------- There's also the discussion point where "background checks won't have any effect", except we know that this person legally purchased a gun just days before deciding to shoot his grandma (and continued the shooting-spree into this school). Just giving that person maybe 2-weeks of break between buying the gun, and having the gun, could have been the time needed for that person to calm down internally and find himself. As long as people can walk into a gunstore, pickup a gun the same day, they can execute these power-fantasy moves. I'm not sure if a background check would work in this case. But any kind of "innate delay" to the gun buying process, to give any would-be mass shooter some time to think it over, would almost certainly reduce the amount of gun violence. Almost all major mass shootings in the USA for the past decade seemed to be with a very, very, very recently bought gun (within a week or two). ------- The "background-check" argument seems to point out the issues of spouse-abuse as a high correlation to mass gun shootings. It'd probably work in other cases, but not this most recent shooting. The "background check" against racism might work, since just a few days ago there was a racially motivated mass shooting. ------ In any case, there's a lot of bad talking points on this subject, pretty much espoused by everybody? I'm not entirely sure how to move forward with discussion.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    There is already a federal background check process on every purchase from a store or gun dealer; both the Texas and Buffalo shooters passed their background check. To stop these guys you have to get working process to get them into the "can't purchase" list.
deltree7 4y ago
In a country of 330,000,000, people who have shot up schools may be around 330 or 0.0001%. It is impossible to assign any single causality to events that have such low occurrences unless you have billions of examples. (Yes, the rest of the world data can provide counterfactual data, but it is still mathematically impossible because there are 100s of variables at play)
- freediver 4y ago
  It is possible and airliner crashes show that. They happen even less often and almost every single one had a precisely defined cause that was discovered after rigourus investigation. The reason why we do this despite the events having small chance of occurance, is because the impact is enormous and we give it as much scrutiny as we possibly can to prevent it from happening again. The same level of scrutiny is not happening with school shootings.
  - ejiblabahaba 4y ago
    I've yet to meet a human being that came with an operator's manual, a maintenance manual, schematics, engineering diagrams, a diagnostic and logging system designed to survive catastrophic system failure, or a multi-billion dollar megacorp full of thousands of people whose jobs depend on being able to perform root cause analysis after catastrophe. There's a whole dimension of failure analysis that is uniquely permitted by human-designed engineering systems, thanks to our comprehensive understanding of their construction and capabilities, which allows us to narrow down root causes for failures with great precision. We can do that to some extent with people, for their less complex and more common failure mechanisms (medicine)... but I don't think "deciding to go on a shooting spree at a school" is the kind of failure mode you can pinpoint to some specific hardware or software phenomenon (at least not today), let alone how to fix it. The level of scrutiny applied to human-designed engineering systems, when instead applied to interpreting tail-end-of-distribution human behavior, does not yield an improvement in root cause specificity, and likely wouldn't yield any actionable design improvements. Instead we can really only suggest process controls, based on inferences about which particular parts of the process have the most influence on the outcomes. There are so many inputs into the black box of human behavior, and so many functionally unverifiable assumptions about the mentality of the tail-end-of-distribution people who become mass shooters, that it's extremely challenging to identify process controls that would be both effective and feasible to implement. Harder still when many suggested process controls also contain embedded political goals that have little to do with controlling the process, but which can be speciously furthered under the guise of preventing high-impact system failures. All this to say, this is a hard problem, composed of thousands of overlapping adjacent elements, we have very little insight (or reliable insight-gathering mechanisms) applicable to the system under investigation, and so throwing money or effort at the investigation is a gamble that a feasible solution exists at all, rather than a process of concrete deduction with a deterministic endpoint. Maybe the optimal amount of scrutiny should be different.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Take social media activity into account during background checks. Increase the age to purchase to 21. 1 month waiting period. I'm a gun owner btw. I also wonder what interesting things would happen if in order to own a gun you must drill with a militia.
- bifrost 4y ago
  The age restriction is illegal, just ruled on by CA Supreme Court. Social Media activity check is a violation of the 4th amendment. You can't tax or gate a right by requiring someone to join a militia.
  - petschge 4y ago
    Just a thought: If the constitution prevents things that would work to prevent this problem form reoccuring, maybe the constitution needs fixing. After all it is rather old and contains a whole bunch of other bugs as well.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      > contains a whole bunch of other bugs as well. You might get agreement on that point. You won't get agreement on what the bugs are, though, so fixing them by changing the Constitution is rather difficult.
    - buscoquadnary 4y ago
      The constitution already has that in account however you need a constitutional amendment that would require 3/4 majority in both houses of Congress to approve that. However right now trust in the government is so low that even if the constitution was amended many gun owners would probably be unlikely to accept the result.
      - LodeOfCode 4y ago
        >require 3/4 majority in both houses of Congress 2/3rds of each house, 3/4ths of the states
bitwize 4y ago
Australia has had three mass shootings since 1996. The USA has had 52 mass shootings in April of 2021 alone. If it's such a "complicated issue", why did the frequency of mass shootings in Australia drop to negligible levels after they took the simple step of enacting a comprehensive gun ban? Ban. The. Guns. It's that simple.
- seiferteric 4y ago
  Ah yes, get 2/3 of the states to agree to amend the constitution, so simple. I was just thinking how we could solve climate change by banning all cars and making everyone vegetarian, so simple! Edit: Okay I realize my comment was a bit flippant. It is a pet peeve of mine when solutions are proffered like this that don't take into account the many obvious difficulties in actually making it work (political, social economic etc.) as if nobody has thought of this. Sure, many people would love to ban and confiscate all the guns, but due to politics there is a 0% chance of that happening in the US, so it is not "simple".
  - Ferrotin 4y ago
    You mean 3/4 of the states.
- akomtu 4y ago
  If we give up a right every time someone commits a crime using this right, soon we'll be left without rights. The next obvious target is speech: it's often used to incite violence at scale, and strict speech control would prevent that. But I'd rather live in a free country and accept the risks.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    There are plenty of free countries without a First Amendment -- and saying something even vaguely Nazi-like in some of those countries risks criminal penalty. Furthermore, the absolutist interpretation of free speech we commonly associate with the First Amendment (virtually all speech protected, barring speech that causes immediate or imminent harm like threats, fighting words, and CSAM) has only really prevailed since 1969. I mean, immediately after the Bill of Rights was Ratified, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Anyway, I don't believe that owning a firearm without a license and strict government oversight is a right.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
There's plenty of "intellectually stimulating" conversation about this and has been for decades. For the most part we value civility and compromise so highly that we'll accept the routine murder of children rather than pay the price of pissing a bunch of people off with gun reform. The conversations aren't the problem, the guns are. There's not really a path to compromise here, I don't think. Either we stop having guns like we do now and a lot of people will be vocally upset, or we continue allowing the routine murder of children. Talk about it as carefully as you want, either way there's going to be conflict.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  What gun reform do you think needs to be in place? I'm curious?
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    No, I'm not willing to get derailed and bogged down into specifics that can be argued or refuted right now. Sorry if that's not your intention but it's hard to judge and it's a very common one with this subject. I am not an expert on public policy, violence, jurisprudence, or legislature. It's not my place or responsibility to design or implement the solution to this problem. I'm a citizen who is not willing to accept that routine events like this are an acceptable cost to pay for any freedom. There are probably a wide range of policies that could prevent this, it's up to experts to figure it out. My role is to demand that they do.
    - cyberlurker 4y ago
      So you’re mad and you want something done, and you don’t care about the details? Bad policy can be, and is often, worse than the status quo.
    - jstream67 4y ago
      thats how you end up with no freedom whatsoever - although i recognize that is a state of affairs that you may be comfortable with.
KerrAvon 4y ago
> It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity It really is not. There are too many guns available, too easily obtained, to too many citizens who have not been properly indoctrinated with a sense of civic responsibility, let alone trained in the proper ways to handle a gun. The answer isn't to throw more guns at the problem or to blame inadequate mental health facilities. It is to reduce gun availability. And we aren't willing to do that because politicians on the right find it more valuable to demagogue on the subject as a wedge issue.
- rco8786 4y ago
  Basically this. No other country comes remotely close to the US on availability and ubiquity of guns.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Indeed. The causal model is simple and two factor: motivation, and access to firearms. If we reduced access to firearms, we can still work the motivation angle in a lot of ways, but have overall reduced gun violence. Other countries show that the offset increase in violence through other means would still be lower than current death rates.
  - freediver 4y ago
    How does this explain the urge to kill innocent children? And where does it come from? It explains the means but not the motive. Uvalde shooter locked himself in a classroom than proceeded to kill 18 ten-year olds and their two teachers. Why?
    - bryans 4y ago
      Based on what previous school shooters have said over the years, the reasoning is somewhat simple and obvious. They experience trauma at a particular time in their life, and once they've mentally broke, the most personally "relevant" target for their anger is a group of people similar to those who either caused the original trauma or were present at the time but "did nothing to help." It doesn't matter that they're not the exact same people, because it's very rarely about revenge against specific individuals, but instead a way to exert control over a situation or space that they associate with their earlier trauma. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/mass-shootings-in-america-interviews https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/mass-shootings-in-amer...
jl6 4y ago
> the root cause If we can move this debate one epsilon forward it will be through recognizing that some events have many causes that combine in complex ways.
onesafari 4y ago
The root cause may be bullying and ostracization combined with the media contagion effect. This is a repeating pattern. Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-gunman/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa... The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said. Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school. “He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people”. Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school. Contagion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-are-contagious/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-ar...
- dragontamer 4y ago
  Are there no Bullies in say, the United Kingdom? The big difference between UK and USA is the number of guns we have in our country compared to theirs. We probably can't stop bullying, but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
  - jka 4y ago
    Supporting dragontamer's claim regarding number of firearms: According to a report[1] by Small Arms Survey in 2017, there were an estimated 120 civilian firmarms per 100 people in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... That's almost twice as many as the next-closest nation. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Papers/SAS-BP-Civilian-Firearms-Numbers.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smalla...
    - 4y ago
belorn 4y ago
If we look at the data we can see a significant increase in the last decade, and the mass school shootings are almost exclusively a modern concept from the last 30 years. A question one might ask is then what changed in the USA during those years to trigger this. In addition those factors should be compared to other nations. We should also look at what prevent school shootings. What in society might protect against a kid going to school with the intention to harm staff or students? A fatal event only occur if there is enough risk factors and not enough protective factors. My own thoughts go to increase stress in schools as one factor, social media/news focus, increasingly larger difference in social class among students (source for social tensions), a lack of trained psychologists at schools, a culture that focus on individualism. Out of those, tensions from social class would be my primary suspect when asking why say Serbia has less school shootings than the USA.
- mjevans 4y ago
  In the last 30 years or so, even before social media; the 'zero tolerance' issue others have spoken of started to happen. Bullies don't care, and then learn what they can to make the lives of anyone even a tiny bit different, like those who want to try hard to do well and answer questions, a living hell. The bullies become experts in the system. They trip, push, flick ears, and these days probably far worse. I believe the stories from my parents day, that the solutions for kids USED to be, as others have also said, to throw a punch, to fight back. That sort of behavior worked because it prevented the creation of something terrible. Victims. Fighting back is how you prevent the creation of victims. It works in the realm of the savage.
- brandonmenc 4y ago
  > mass school shootings are almost exclusively a modern concept from the last 30 years. A question one might ask is then what changed in the USA during those years to trigger this. The invention of the first person shooter (aka: the mass shooting simulator.) 30 years almost to the day.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    But these games are just as popular in many other countries as well.
juanani 4y ago
soneil 4y ago
I consider myself the middle. My mother is right-leaning American and my father is left-leaning European. Long story, to say the least. I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. It may even be, the issue is when someone thinks they're the good guy with a gun, and they're not. They think they're bruce willis, and they're not. They think they're righting wrongs, and they're not. Their narrative is out of sync with mine. This is a cultural issue apart from firearms. I may not be sober enough to make this statement, so salt to taste - but firearms aren't the root cause, they're the lubricant in a wider issue where you're all bruce willis in your own story. This combination of firearms and individualism is what separates you from examples such as Switzerland, Czechia, etc. The guns are only the medium through which a deeper problem is expressed.
- sneak 4y ago
  > I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. I think this is a commonly held belief, and that it is also false. Why does Japan have a swat team? Why is the US sending antitank weapons to Ukraine?
  - dendriti 4y ago
    A US Senator from Texas literally said yesterday that we should station "good guys with guns" (armed security guards) to prevent school shootings.
    - krapp 4y ago
      Also "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" has been an NRA talking point for years.
    - throw0101a 4y ago
      > A US Senator from Texas literally said yesterday that we should station "good guys with guns" (armed security guards) to prevent school shootings. Yeah, except there was a police officer right outside the building already: > The suspect was immediately engaged outside the building as he approached the school by a Uvalde Independent School District police officer, who was shot by the suspect, the sources said. * https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-elementary-school-reports-active-shooter-campus/story?id=84940951 https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-elementary-school-reports-ac... And this isn't the first time on-site individuals have been useless: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting#Officer_inactivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_s... Even if officers respond with-in a minute, you still have multiple deaths and many injuries: > Police at the scene engaged him within a minute of the first shots being fired, firing 18 rounds and hitting the gunman several times.[5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shootin...
pvg 4y ago
Serbia is smaller in population than NYC and has a fairly recent history of war. NYC hasn't had school mass shootings either. Mass shootings have happened in Serbia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDiti%C5%A1te_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDiti%C5%A1te_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velika_Ivan%C4%8Da_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velika_Ivan%C4%8Da_shooting Serbia's gun laws are much closer to those in NYC than to those in Texas. It's not really much of a comparison or illustration that the problem isn't ready access to firearms.
- engramps 4y ago
  Neither of those serbian shootings were in schools. NYC has had shootings though not that many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_in_New_York_%28state%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_in_New_York_... Also isnt there recent history of people going to different states to buy guns to shoot people in another state? Its not like there are border police checks
  - pvg 4y ago
    The argument was that Serbia - a tiny, war-traumatized country -tells you something about current or potential US gun regulation. My response is that even if you allow for that degree of cherrypicking, the comparison doesn't you get you anything that supports the GP's position, in fact, it gets you the opposite.
diob 4y ago
I think you're being disingenuous with what you surfaced from your Wikipedia link. We are literally the only country on there that has more guns than people (the 2nd highest is literally half our amount per capita!). Now look at the ratio of unregistered to registered in the US. We clearly have a problem compared to other countries. 392 times more unregistered guns than registered, good god.
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  Sorry, correlation != causation. Has never been a problem until recent times so maybe you can find another scapegoat if you need some pablum.
  - diob 4y ago
    I have no doubt we've increased the per capita, especially unregistered in recent times. Maybe we could try, I don't know, literally what Australia did after their mass shooting? Heck, if it doesn't work, feel free to have all the guns you want. But can we at least fucking try to change it?
    - artificialLimbs 4y ago
      No.
      - diob 4y ago
        Doesn't sound like you want to talk in good faith about ways to improve the country, so I guess go back to listening to whatever wacko conservative rustles your jimmies about the "radical left" and "crt".
        artificialLimbs 4y ago
artificialLimbs 4y ago
Well no one has said it yet and I don’t have a precious study to trot out, but: My >80 year old friend has suggested to me that this kind of problem didn’t exist before we started handing out pharmaceutical drugs of the variety that ‘handle’ mental illness. Sidebar semi-related story time: my wife got her Masters in childhood education and went directly to work for a public high school after. She was a.. I forget, counselor assistant or something like that at a very large school in Texas. She quit after just a few months because she could see that they were just using her position as a funnel to get kids on some kind of pharmaceutical drug. She was literally reprimanded more than once because she recommended against putting some of the students on drugs and pushed them toward professional counseling instead. The parents are often clamoring to get a diagnosis so they can get their kids on drugs to ‘fix’ their problems, so it’s not exclusively the fault of the government, but they’re damn sure doing their part. They’re drugging our children, MOST often unnecessarily. Perhaps if we used other methods to help, we would see other outcomes.
- xvector 4y ago
  Mental illness, mental healthcare and pharmaceutical treatments are a thing in Europe too. The US is not a special outlier when it comes to bullying and mental health. But you don't see children being gunned down every other week in Europe. The problem is guns.
  - ahallock 4y ago
    So guns are what caused this tragedy? The mere existing of them in the US causes people to lose their minds and go on rampages? We need to get to the root of the problem because people will find another way to enact their evil. Look at Boston Marathon incident
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      Your reply seems disingenuous. The person you are replying to did not say guns caused the tragedy. Rather the availability of guns in the U.S. is why we see school shootings every week in the U.S. and not in Europe.
maxerickson 4y ago
Can an 18 year old Serbian walk into a store and buy whatever guns they want? Can they buy a large amount of ammunition? You hand wave away ease of access, but it probably matters. It certainly matters at the margin.
- xvector 4y ago
  The problem is so obviously guns. It boggles my mind that people can ask questions like "what is the solution" and "we need a nuanced discussion" when the US is the only country in the world where schoolchildren get gunned down every other week. It is plainly obvious to any US citizen that has spent a significant amount of time outside the US, that the problem is guns.
  - Madmallard 4y ago
    easy to get guns in other countries that don’t have mass shooting problems
  - pokeymcsnatch 4y ago
    > The problem is so obviously guns The guns haven't changed in 60 years, and in fact regulations have increased across the board on both purchasing and manufacturing. But, let's say it is "so obviously" the guns- how is "what is the solution" some kind of naive or ignorant question? Do you know the solution?
    - throw0101a 4y ago
      > The guns haven't changed in 60 years, and in fact regulations have increased across the board on both purchasing and manufacturing. Carry regulations have decreased as evidenced in this animated map: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline.... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_concealed_carry_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_concealed_carry_in_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_... In 1986 there were 16 no-issue states (including Texas(!)); in 2022 there are zero. One unrestricted carry state in 1986, 21 in 2022.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yucky 4y ago
I suspect identity politics are too blame, since the rise of that correlates to the increase in shootings. A big part of identity politics is to demonize "the other" and if we're being honest, to shift the blame for all of societal ills onto males. Younger males may not be able to shrug those pressures of as easily as others. I think this also helps explain why girls never shoot up schools, despite having the same access to guns as boys. All of our safety nets are designed around helping females, and letting males sink or swim.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  You've got an axe, and you love to grind it. Shootings predate Identity politics.
  - yucky 4y ago
    "the rise of that correlates to the increase in shootings." I'm not sure where you think you read that there were no shootings prior to the rise of divisive identity politics.
    - anothernewdude 4y ago
      The rise of shootings also happened before identity politics became a thing.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  I don't see any undeserved shifting of blame to males. I think you are just playing the victim here. Women simply aren't as violent by nature.
  - yucky 4y ago
    When you look at government programs designed to help those in need, would you say there is an equitable gender distribution in those programs? Or really forget equitable, are there any programs designed specifically for helping males who find themselves suffering in any way? Because I suspect nobody could even count the number designed for females. And not just government programs, but scholarships, hiring initiatives etc. That ratio must be 100-1 at least. So how is this reality supposed to be processed by males who find themselves stuck? Many, or perhaps most, will internalize it and just push forward. Others will lash out. Females have a societal safety net designed to catch them when they fall, males do not. I don't think anybody would dispute that, the question is what effect does that have on the psyche of those who are left helpless?
nonameiguess 4y ago
This seems to indicate it's been happening in the United States since before there was a United States: https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school-shootings-united-states https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school... It certainly feels like someone alive for the last 40 odd years that Columbine was the inflection point at which media really started to cover this. Either that is just because 1999 happens to be my own graduation year and I was too young or not paying attention any earlier, or maybe media coverage really did pick up compared to prior incidents, for whatever the heck unknown and largely random reason. We were still early into the 24 hour cable news cycle and widespread availability of the world-wide web, but as we can see, this was not the first even in 1999. Assuming this is an accurate list, I don't see how we can possibly identify a root cause. This was happening before there was a 2nd amendment. Before there was heavy metal. Before video games. Presumably not before mental illness, but that is hardly a uniquely American problem. Sometimes national culture just picks up a particular character for whatever quirk of history that may not even be fully known or knowable, some forgotten confluence of events that continue to influence us today without anyone knowing it is happening or why. We were among the first countries to offer widespread public education, weren't we? This was even true in colonial times. Maybe the gathering of fairly vulnerable people just makes an enticing target. And sure, there are other public gatherings of vulnerable people, but this one has been around for a very long time, enough to have presented opportunity centuries ago and get woven into barely conscious national memes about where you go if you want to shoot a bunch of people. In other countries, churches and trains seem to fill that role.
confidantlake 4y ago
To simplify. One side thinks "guns are the main problem". Another side thinks "guns are not the main problem". Did you think that the guns are the main problem people would just not show up to the thread?
lend000 4y ago
The worst part is that even if we addressed the myriad cultural issues that lead to so many socially broken young people who may want to do such a thing, we now have a "school shooting culture," propagated by the media, inspiring copycats. The only way to break the positive feedback loop would be to significantly ban most reporting of these incidents, which violates the first amendment, while the other band-aid solution violates the second. And neither of these address the cultural problems creating a fearful culture with so many socially isolated people who may want to get attention by doing the things our culture teaches us to fear.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
I see many comments already default to "guns are the problem". I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion. As a non US resident you can't help but think that is a massive part of the problem. Many other countries have problems with bullying, mental health, radicalisation. We've also had mass shootings. But our tolerance is so much lower for that kind of BS. One shooting and it's over. The populace will support further gun control and stricter measures. This seems sensible to me since curing the underlying causes takes time. So why would you give firearms to people that aren't in the right state of mind to use them responsibly? I think the real question is, why is the tolerance of Americans as a population, so high with regards to mass shootings? Are the lobby groups really that powerful they are changing the minds of regular people?
- maxerickson 4y ago
  It's probably not really the lobbying, it's the way our government is structured (governments even). Because of the way the US population is distributed, the Senate ends up responding to viewpoints that are in the overall minority. And then lots of states have similar structures.
- deleted 4y ago
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BLKNSLVR 4y ago
There's a psychological link between "freedom" and "guns" going back to US independence. Guns = independence from the yoke of UK rule, therefore guns = freedom from tyranny, therefore guns = good. It's ingrained. A threat to gun ownership is equated to a threat to the freedoms fundamental to what makes the US 'the best country in the world'. Any argument restricting gun ownership, no matter how logical or however great the weight of evidence, is up against this "the very DNA of the country" emotional position. Gun availability has been said to be similar in the US to some other countries. Mental illness isn't limited to the US. The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. That's the differentiator. (this, my apologies, papers over the requested nuances of mental illness drugs, the cost and availability of medical care, the individual and societal effects of uber-capitalism at all costs, the equating of any level of socialism to be full-on communism, the widening ideological divide and/or the decreasing tolerance for the existence of differing ideologies to one's own). My cynical take is: Why would this incident make any difference if none of the previous incidents have? It's a harsh observation, but this is "US normal", and has been for a long time.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. A "war fought for freedom" is a long, long way from shooting innocent people at a school. Equating the two is a huge slap in the face to the vast majority of gun owners in the US who are responsible, law-abiding citizens and, while they would use their guns to defend themselves against tyranny, would never even think of using their guns to shoot an innocent person.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    That's not the point I was trying to make. There's no link between the US' foundation and the shooting school children bar the (intended point) difficulty of restricting gun ownership and access due to the psychological link between gun ownership and country-defining freedom.
    - pdonis 4y ago
_gabe_ 4y ago
I'm sorry, I'm just really hesitant to believe that "the fact stands that the USA has a school shootings problem" with the statistics you linked. The website you linked to cites two sources for its data. One of the sources is CNN. The second source is something called everytownresearch. Their method for counting school shootings were: > Everytown tracks every time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds Which means they're counting individual fights, and or gang violence in with all these shootings. In addition it looks like the vast majority of their data points list no injuries or deaths. They also include things like this in their statistics: > A car entered the east parking lot at a high speed and hit one student. The CCSD police officer ordered the car to stop, and when it didn't, fired their gun at the car. Two teenagers in the car-- one a 16-year-old boy and one a juvenile-- were struck and injured by the officer's gunfire. So this is an injury sustained from an officer trying to stop two kids who injured somebody with their car, not a gun. If you want to talk about how we can combat school shootings how about we agree to use honest statistics? It doesn't help anyone to quote shoddy studies like this. In addition I found this[1] research paper that claims the original paper people quote to show the US is the leader in school shootings does not show how they got their data. In addition they refuse to show how they calculated their statistics. This paper goes on to show that the US may be significantly lower than the number one spot. The reason I even looked at this stuff is because in the link you posted it said there 288 school shootings in the US this year! That claim sounded very far fetched. I know there have been some nasty events so far this year, but if there had been 288 shootings this year alone, I feel like there would have been a lot more news about it. That averages to almost 2 shootings every day this year. And I'm expected to believe these statistics are a factual claim? Edit: And yes I know that this paper is from 2018, but I'm posting it because there is clearly weird stuff going on with the statistics that were quoted in the original posters linked "research" website. [1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736
rvr_ 4y ago
School shooting is a memetic behavior, on the classical sense disseminated by R. Dawkins, not Internet's one. Can we rephrase the problem as: how do a society gets rid of a bad meme?
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Memes are international. American cultural hegemony is global. Evidence: I'm a Canadian and can name all members of the US supreme Court from memory and zero members of the Canadian one. Memes do not stop at borders, and yet the hot zone for the school shooting plague is localized within the USA. It's the cheap plentiful, underregulated firearms.
  - qball 4y ago
    >I'm a Canadian and can name all members of the US supreme Court from memory and zero members of the Canadian one. To be fair, the Canadian Supreme Court rarely does anything of everyday relevance to Canadians, much like all aspects of the political system except for which party happens to be in power (the exact identity of the PM is similarly irrelevant, though everyone knows who that is).
pdonis 4y ago
> (parent of three elementary school kids here) Then my first question to you, regarding your "what can we do" issue, is simple: are you connected to your kids? Are you engaged in their lives? Do they feel like you care about them? When I was a kid, my answer to all three of those questions about my parents was always an unqualified yes. And the idea of committing any kind of violence, let alone a school shooting, would never have occurred to me. You could have had me at the gun range practicing every day and it would never have crossed my mind to actually try to kill someone with a gun, unless it was absolutely necessary for self-defense. When the background eventually comes out on mass shootings, one common factor I always see about the shooters is that they weren't connected to other people. So I think one obvious thing any of us can do for others to keep such things from happening is to give other people connections.
WheatM 4y ago
donsupreme 4y ago
I have always maintained that children growing in this generation with social network and influencers is way harder than any generation before. For instance, growing up I knew that we weren't rich but never fully aware how much poorer I was than my classmates. Simply I have no access to the information of my classmate life after school is over. Sure I had TV and all that but almost everyone I knew growing up are more or less like me, from what I can see. Nowaday even for grownups, you have a hard time constantly comparing yourself to others with what you see on FB or IG, your "peers" who are better or whatnot. Can't imagine for kids without the maturity and fully developed brain can process that. All that is to say, the feeling of insecurity and being "not enough" is so much more amplified for kids than ever before. Nothing makes you feel even more lonely and miserable than seeing other kids having a seemingly great lives on their vacation with their loving parents or kids having so much fun at parties that you are not invited to. So glad that I didn't grow up with social network.
mahastore 4y ago
>> Also any argument like "mental illness" or "ease of access to firearms" needs to explain why the same does not apply to the rest of the world - Well Afghanistan people have access to lot of guns , lots of it and maybe even tanks. But they don't go to school that much. And in Serbia the population is thinly spread across vast swatches of ice. Not exactly LA. Lets simply stop talking and just bring a bill to buy back all automatic guns and destroy them. This country needs it.
- bicx 4y ago
  I think you're thinking of Siberia, not Serbia (the country ravaged by the Kosovo War in the late 90's).
- ch4s3 4y ago
  There aren’t really any automatic weapons in the US, unless they were manufactured before a certain date and you have a particular hard to acquire license. You may mean semi-automatic. I assume you don’t know many gun owners. I grew on a farm in the south and Incan assure you that when people there say “come and take them,” they mean it. At this point you’re talking about a lot of very armed veterans and hunters, it just doesn’t seem practical. If you could wave a magic wand, who knows it may work but that isn’t really an option. I think there have to be other approaches here that can actually happen. The element of cultural memesis and role of the media in making anti-heros of these deranged young men is worth examining. It’s also pretty clear that the current approach to bullying in schools isn’t working at all. It also seems like it’s just too easy for some young men in their late teens to just fall through society’s cracks, I don’t know what the answer is there.
  - mahastore 4y ago
    Buyback program. Lets go.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      What I’m saying is that you very quickly need to enforce a law like that with the state’s monopoly on violence, which seems to run contrary to the problem you’re trying to solve.
dsizzle 4y ago
To the extent that school shooting are, statistically, a "tail" event, you would expect that to change more sensitively than the "average" (guns per capita). So a tripling of the average gun measure (going from Serbia to US), might correspond to a much larger change in these extreme events. I doubt it's a simple statistical consequence, but it also doesn't follow that amount of guns would be (linearly) proportional to extreme events.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  Sweet baby Jesus thank you. I've been waiting years for someone to make a reasonable argument to me on why stricter guns laws are a good idea. Every other argument I've seen has been appeals to emotion without actually framing the cost/benefit relationship in any useful way.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Lots of reasons. But I'd say the culture of glorifying gun ownership is a root cause combined with an institutionalized and deliberately flexible attitude to any form of gun control. It varies between states of course. But the net result is that people are assumed to be armed to the teeth. Which leads to shoot first and ask questions later situations. Which is actually something you can legally get away with under some circumstances and something that is glorified as well. And it's getting worse because it's getting worse. People respond to feeling insecure by getting more guns. And bigger guns. And this is big business in the US. Gun manufacturers advertise on TV, lobby the local authorities, and spend billions on marketing. There's more scrutiny on advertisements for cigarettes and alcohol in the US then there is on gun commercials. There are more rules around owning a drivers license or a car than there are on owning a gun. That's why things have gotten much worse in the US in the past decades. The rules haven't changed but the number of guns has. And given the percentage of people with guns and the percentage of people with mental issues, the Venn diagram of those two groups intersecting produces a percentage of armed homicidal maniacs at a high enough frequencies that stuff happens. Simply put: when millions of assault rifles get sold, a few of them are going to end up being used by exactly the type of people you'd never want to own such a thing. Simple math. There's nothing mysterious about that. I'd probably want to own a gun if I lived in the US. There are war zones that have less casualties per year than some cities and areas in the US. I think Kiiv probably has better statistics than Chicago in the last half year or so. That, or it's alarmingly close. Combat medics actually get trained in hospitals in in big cities in the US. If you work in the ER in Chicago, LA, etc., you are going to get plenty of practice. Every day. So, yes, I'd probably feel a need to defend myself in such a place. I'd be part of the problem. However, I don't live in the US. I live in Berlin, Germany. I feel safe here and feel no need to own a gun and tough luck if that weren't the case because it's pretty hard to get one here. It's not a perfect city and there are occasional incidents involving gun violence just like everywhere else. Generally if you see a gun you are either in an armed robbery, looking at a person in uniform, or in the country side with people responsibly handling their legal guns while hunting. The first happens but not very often. Most crime does not involve guns. And when it does, the sentences are steep, the guns are typically small (easier to conceal), and highly illegal. Anything involving illegal guns is not cool with the authorities. People in uniform discharging their arms is generally involves lots of paper work and scrutiny. More so for civilians with permits and legally owned guns. Getting permits is not super easy and keeping your permit requires sticking to the rules. So, that narrows down the situations that can escalate considerably. It still happens but not very often. Same math, different variable values.
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gitastrophie 4y ago
Maybe a hot take, but as others have identified, these violent outbreaks are at least in part due to social isolation, which may have something to do with lifestyle, city layout, and ease of access to public parks/things to do. Cities in the US have been set up to support cars, creating widely spread out and large landscapes, inconvenient for those who don't drive. Finding niche groups to fit in with on the internet has become easier, but irl in the US, much harder. This is independent of age group, but obviously impacts kids in a huge way. IMO, we need more places for people in communities to get together and just talk about things, engage in continued education, and have fun. Would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between after school programs, or proximity of public spaces and violence.

smt88 4y ago

Only a very small number of Americans can't have this discussion. Most Americans (and people living elsewhere) can have it easily and think the solutions are obvious.

bogwog 4y ago
The problem is that the people who can't have this discussion also own a bunch of guns...
- smt88 4y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking, but the problem is not their guns. They're mostly peaceful people who have not demonstrated a willingness to commit mass murder to defend their interpretation of the Second Amendment. I know we see some violent pro-gun extremism online, but it doesn't represent the vast majority of gun owners.
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
> "Only a very small number of Americans can't have this discussion." It's unclear why people keep claiming this. According to https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own... , in 2020 while rural firearms ownership was ~48%, urban and suburban firearms ownership was 23% and 25% respectively in the US. That's a minority, to be sure, but it's not by any means a "very small" minority.
- smt88 4y ago
  I disagree with the premise that "people who can't have a discussion about gun rights" == "people who own guns". In fact, gun owners (like the general population) are heavily in favor of increasing gun control, especially things like closing loopholes in background check laws[1]. The people who won't entertain a discussion about increasing gun control are a minority of extremists who just happen to be a large enough voting bloc to dictate the GOP's position on guns. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-a...
  - Acrobatic_Road 4y ago
    These polls assume that the public knows what our gun laws actually are. They have been fed lies about non-existent "loopholes" in gun laws, among other fantasies. I suspect most people would be satsified with the gun laws we actually have.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - qball 4y ago
    >In fact, gun owners (like the general population) are heavily in favor of increasing gun control, especially things like closing loopholes in background check laws[1]. The reason that gun owners are in practice against this, of course, is that implementation of these has consequences like "you have to waive HIPAA rights to pass your background check" (WA). I'm unconvinced that being in favor of an idea, but against the bad-faith compromises that always seem to come with it, qualifies as "extreme".
sneak 4y ago
The solutions are not obvious. Disarming the civilian population gives rise to a different and much larger problem than school shootings, if that is what you were implying.
- krapp 4y ago
  Weird. What problems do, say, European countries or Japan, or pick any modern democratic state, have that are larger than school shootings?
  - sneak 4y ago
    The holocaust is a good example. It is difficult for governments to commit large scale atrocities without the consent of the governed unless those so governed are first disarmed. A more modern example was the prohibition of the free movement of the Australian population during covid. Australians were held prisoner by the state and were not permitted to leave.
    - smt88 4y ago
      The Holocaust was a result of populism in Germany. The oppressed people wouldn't have been able to protect themselves from the majority of Germans and the German military, even if they were armed.
    - xvector 4y ago
      I really doubt we are in for another Holocaust. Government restricting movement during a pandemic is not a valid reason to literally shoot someone dead, that is literally pure insanity. What is happening right now isn't the Holocaust. What is happening right now - and has been happening for years - are weekly mass shootings. This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. It only happens in the US. Guns are clearly the problem.
    - asxc11 4y ago
      Something tells me that even an armed militia of the people wouldn't be much of an obstacle for a military power such as Germany or America.

bifrost 4y ago

It likely will for a variety of reasons. People will make up all kinds of reasons why "this doesn't happen anywhere else", they'll completely ignore the actual cause of the violence (a person), they'll make excuses, bring up solutions that are illegal, entirely ignore cultural issues, ignore that psychopaths are looking to be famous, point at more laws which won't do anything because the existing ones didn't work/etc.

dragontamer 4y ago
I mean, I overheard my coworkers discussing pretty awful talking points. Ex: saying that gun control won't work because we'll just be killing each other with swords. Which ignores the fact that its a lot harder to kill 18-children + 1 teacher with a sword, than it is to kill the same number with a gun. -------- There's also the discussion point where "background checks won't have any effect", except we know that this person legally purchased a gun just days before deciding to shoot his grandma (and continued the shooting-spree into this school). Just giving that person maybe 2-weeks of break between buying the gun, and having the gun, could have been the time needed for that person to calm down internally and find himself. As long as people can walk into a gunstore, pickup a gun the same day, they can execute these power-fantasy moves. I'm not sure if a background check would work in this case. But any kind of "innate delay" to the gun buying process, to give any would-be mass shooter some time to think it over, would almost certainly reduce the amount of gun violence. Almost all major mass shootings in the USA for the past decade seemed to be with a very, very, very recently bought gun (within a week or two). ------- The "background-check" argument seems to point out the issues of spouse-abuse as a high correlation to mass gun shootings. It'd probably work in other cases, but not this most recent shooting. The "background check" against racism might work, since just a few days ago there was a racially motivated mass shooting. ------ In any case, there's a lot of bad talking points on this subject, pretty much espoused by everybody? I'm not entirely sure how to move forward with discussion.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  There is already a federal background check process on every purchase from a store or gun dealer; both the Texas and Buffalo shooters passed their background check. To stop these guys you have to get working process to get them into the "can't purchase" list.

deltree7 4y ago

In a country of 330,000,000, people who have shot up schools may be around 330 or 0.0001%. It is impossible to assign any single causality to events that have such low occurrences unless you have billions of examples. (Yes, the rest of the world data can provide counterfactual data, but it is still mathematically impossible because there are 100s of variables at play)

freediver 4y ago
It is possible and airliner crashes show that. They happen even less often and almost every single one had a precisely defined cause that was discovered after rigourus investigation. The reason why we do this despite the events having small chance of occurance, is because the impact is enormous and we give it as much scrutiny as we possibly can to prevent it from happening again. The same level of scrutiny is not happening with school shootings.
- ejiblabahaba 4y ago
  I've yet to meet a human being that came with an operator's manual, a maintenance manual, schematics, engineering diagrams, a diagnostic and logging system designed to survive catastrophic system failure, or a multi-billion dollar megacorp full of thousands of people whose jobs depend on being able to perform root cause analysis after catastrophe. There's a whole dimension of failure analysis that is uniquely permitted by human-designed engineering systems, thanks to our comprehensive understanding of their construction and capabilities, which allows us to narrow down root causes for failures with great precision. We can do that to some extent with people, for their less complex and more common failure mechanisms (medicine)... but I don't think "deciding to go on a shooting spree at a school" is the kind of failure mode you can pinpoint to some specific hardware or software phenomenon (at least not today), let alone how to fix it. The level of scrutiny applied to human-designed engineering systems, when instead applied to interpreting tail-end-of-distribution human behavior, does not yield an improvement in root cause specificity, and likely wouldn't yield any actionable design improvements. Instead we can really only suggest process controls, based on inferences about which particular parts of the process have the most influence on the outcomes. There are so many inputs into the black box of human behavior, and so many functionally unverifiable assumptions about the mentality of the tail-end-of-distribution people who become mass shooters, that it's extremely challenging to identify process controls that would be both effective and feasible to implement. Harder still when many suggested process controls also contain embedded political goals that have little to do with controlling the process, but which can be speciously furthered under the guise of preventing high-impact system failures. All this to say, this is a hard problem, composed of thousands of overlapping adjacent elements, we have very little insight (or reliable insight-gathering mechanisms) applicable to the system under investigation, and so throwing money or effort at the investigation is a gamble that a feasible solution exists at all, rather than a process of concrete deduction with a deterministic endpoint. Maybe the optimal amount of scrutiny should be different.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Take social media activity into account during background checks. Increase the age to purchase to 21. 1 month waiting period. I'm a gun owner btw. I also wonder what interesting things would happen if in order to own a gun you must drill with a militia.

bifrost 4y ago
The age restriction is illegal, just ruled on by CA Supreme Court. Social Media activity check is a violation of the 4th amendment. You can't tax or gate a right by requiring someone to join a militia.
- petschge 4y ago
  Just a thought: If the constitution prevents things that would work to prevent this problem form reoccuring, maybe the constitution needs fixing. After all it is rather old and contains a whole bunch of other bugs as well.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > contains a whole bunch of other bugs as well. You might get agreement on that point. You won't get agreement on what the bugs are, though, so fixing them by changing the Constitution is rather difficult.
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    The constitution already has that in account however you need a constitutional amendment that would require 3/4 majority in both houses of Congress to approve that. However right now trust in the government is so low that even if the constitution was amended many gun owners would probably be unlikely to accept the result.
    - LodeOfCode 4y ago
      >require 3/4 majority in both houses of Congress 2/3rds of each house, 3/4ths of the states

bitwize 4y ago

Australia has had three mass shootings since 1996. The USA has had 52 mass shootings in April of 2021 alone. If it's such a "complicated issue", why did the frequency of mass shootings in Australia drop to negligible levels after they took the simple step of enacting a comprehensive gun ban? Ban. The. Guns. It's that simple.

seiferteric 4y ago
Ah yes, get 2/3 of the states to agree to amend the constitution, so simple. I was just thinking how we could solve climate change by banning all cars and making everyone vegetarian, so simple! Edit: Okay I realize my comment was a bit flippant. It is a pet peeve of mine when solutions are proffered like this that don't take into account the many obvious difficulties in actually making it work (political, social economic etc.) as if nobody has thought of this. Sure, many people would love to ban and confiscate all the guns, but due to politics there is a 0% chance of that happening in the US, so it is not "simple".
- Ferrotin 4y ago
  You mean 3/4 of the states.
akomtu 4y ago
If we give up a right every time someone commits a crime using this right, soon we'll be left without rights. The next obvious target is speech: it's often used to incite violence at scale, and strict speech control would prevent that. But I'd rather live in a free country and accept the risks.
- bitwize 4y ago
  There are plenty of free countries without a First Amendment -- and saying something even vaguely Nazi-like in some of those countries risks criminal penalty. Furthermore, the absolutist interpretation of free speech we commonly associate with the First Amendment (virtually all speech protected, barring speech that causes immediate or imminent harm like threats, fighting words, and CSAM) has only really prevailed since 1969. I mean, immediately after the Bill of Rights was Ratified, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Anyway, I don't believe that owning a firearm without a license and strict government oversight is a right.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

There's plenty of "intellectually stimulating" conversation about this and has been for decades. For the most part we value civility and compromise so highly that we'll accept the routine murder of children rather than pay the price of pissing a bunch of people off with gun reform. The conversations aren't the problem, the guns are. There's not really a path to compromise here, I don't think. Either we stop having guns like we do now and a lot of people will be vocally upset, or we continue allowing the routine murder of children. Talk about it as carefully as you want, either way there's going to be conflict.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
What gun reform do you think needs to be in place? I'm curious?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  No, I'm not willing to get derailed and bogged down into specifics that can be argued or refuted right now. Sorry if that's not your intention but it's hard to judge and it's a very common one with this subject. I am not an expert on public policy, violence, jurisprudence, or legislature. It's not my place or responsibility to design or implement the solution to this problem. I'm a citizen who is not willing to accept that routine events like this are an acceptable cost to pay for any freedom. There are probably a wide range of policies that could prevent this, it's up to experts to figure it out. My role is to demand that they do.
  - cyberlurker 4y ago
    So you’re mad and you want something done, and you don’t care about the details? Bad policy can be, and is often, worse than the status quo.
  - jstream67 4y ago
    thats how you end up with no freedom whatsoever - although i recognize that is a state of affairs that you may be comfortable with.

KerrAvon 4y ago

> It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity It really is not. There are too many guns available, too easily obtained, to too many citizens who have not been properly indoctrinated with a sense of civic responsibility, let alone trained in the proper ways to handle a gun. The answer isn't to throw more guns at the problem or to blame inadequate mental health facilities. It is to reduce gun availability. And we aren't willing to do that because politicians on the right find it more valuable to demagogue on the subject as a wedge issue.

rco8786 4y ago
Basically this. No other country comes remotely close to the US on availability and ubiquity of guns.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Indeed. The causal model is simple and two factor: motivation, and access to firearms. If we reduced access to firearms, we can still work the motivation angle in a lot of ways, but have overall reduced gun violence. Other countries show that the offset increase in violence through other means would still be lower than current death rates.
- freediver 4y ago
  How does this explain the urge to kill innocent children? And where does it come from? It explains the means but not the motive. Uvalde shooter locked himself in a classroom than proceeded to kill 18 ten-year olds and their two teachers. Why?
  - bryans 4y ago
    Based on what previous school shooters have said over the years, the reasoning is somewhat simple and obvious. They experience trauma at a particular time in their life, and once they've mentally broke, the most personally "relevant" target for their anger is a group of people similar to those who either caused the original trauma or were present at the time but "did nothing to help." It doesn't matter that they're not the exact same people, because it's very rarely about revenge against specific individuals, but instead a way to exert control over a situation or space that they associate with their earlier trauma. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/mass-shootings-in-america-interviews https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/mass-shootings-in-amer...

jl6 4y ago

> the root cause If we can move this debate one epsilon forward it will be through recognizing that some events have many causes that combine in complex ways.

onesafari 4y ago

The root cause may be bullying and ostracization combined with the media contagion effect. This is a repeating pattern. Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-gunman/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa... The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said. Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school. “He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people”. Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school. Contagion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-are-contagious/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-ar...

dragontamer 4y ago
Are there no Bullies in say, the United Kingdom? The big difference between UK and USA is the number of guns we have in our country compared to theirs. We probably can't stop bullying, but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
- jka 4y ago
  Supporting dragontamer's claim regarding number of firearms: According to a report[1] by Small Arms Survey in 2017, there were an estimated 120 civilian firmarms per 100 people in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... That's almost twice as many as the next-closest nation. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Papers/SAS-BP-Civilian-Firearms-Numbers.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smalla...
  - 4y ago

belorn 4y ago

If we look at the data we can see a significant increase in the last decade, and the mass school shootings are almost exclusively a modern concept from the last 30 years. A question one might ask is then what changed in the USA during those years to trigger this. In addition those factors should be compared to other nations. We should also look at what prevent school shootings. What in society might protect against a kid going to school with the intention to harm staff or students? A fatal event only occur if there is enough risk factors and not enough protective factors. My own thoughts go to increase stress in schools as one factor, social media/news focus, increasingly larger difference in social class among students (source for social tensions), a lack of trained psychologists at schools, a culture that focus on individualism. Out of those, tensions from social class would be my primary suspect when asking why say Serbia has less school shootings than the USA.

mjevans 4y ago
In the last 30 years or so, even before social media; the 'zero tolerance' issue others have spoken of started to happen. Bullies don't care, and then learn what they can to make the lives of anyone even a tiny bit different, like those who want to try hard to do well and answer questions, a living hell. The bullies become experts in the system. They trip, push, flick ears, and these days probably far worse. I believe the stories from my parents day, that the solutions for kids USED to be, as others have also said, to throw a punch, to fight back. That sort of behavior worked because it prevented the creation of something terrible. Victims. Fighting back is how you prevent the creation of victims. It works in the realm of the savage.
brandonmenc 4y ago
> mass school shootings are almost exclusively a modern concept from the last 30 years. A question one might ask is then what changed in the USA during those years to trigger this. The invention of the first person shooter (aka: the mass shooting simulator.) 30 years almost to the day.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  But these games are just as popular in many other countries as well.

juanani 4y ago

soneil 4y ago

I consider myself the middle. My mother is right-leaning American and my father is left-leaning European. Long story, to say the least. I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. It may even be, the issue is when someone thinks they're the good guy with a gun, and they're not. They think they're bruce willis, and they're not. They think they're righting wrongs, and they're not. Their narrative is out of sync with mine. This is a cultural issue apart from firearms. I may not be sober enough to make this statement, so salt to taste - but firearms aren't the root cause, they're the lubricant in a wider issue where you're all bruce willis in your own story. This combination of firearms and individualism is what separates you from examples such as Switzerland, Czechia, etc. The guns are only the medium through which a deeper problem is expressed.

sneak 4y ago
> I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. I think this is a commonly held belief, and that it is also false. Why does Japan have a swat team? Why is the US sending antitank weapons to Ukraine?
- dendriti 4y ago
  A US Senator from Texas literally said yesterday that we should station "good guys with guns" (armed security guards) to prevent school shootings.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Also "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" has been an NRA talking point for years.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > A US Senator from Texas literally said yesterday that we should station "good guys with guns" (armed security guards) to prevent school shootings. Yeah, except there was a police officer right outside the building already: > The suspect was immediately engaged outside the building as he approached the school by a Uvalde Independent School District police officer, who was shot by the suspect, the sources said. * https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-elementary-school-reports-active-shooter-campus/story?id=84940951 https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-elementary-school-reports-ac... And this isn't the first time on-site individuals have been useless: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting#Officer_inactivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_s... Even if officers respond with-in a minute, you still have multiple deaths and many injuries: > Police at the scene engaged him within a minute of the first shots being fired, firing 18 rounds and hitting the gunman several times.[5] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shootin...

pvg 4y ago

Serbia is smaller in population than NYC and has a fairly recent history of war. NYC hasn't had school mass shootings either. Mass shootings have happened in Serbia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDiti%C5%A1te_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDiti%C5%A1te_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velika_Ivan%C4%8Da_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velika_Ivan%C4%8Da_shooting Serbia's gun laws are much closer to those in NYC than to those in Texas. It's not really much of a comparison or illustration that the problem isn't ready access to firearms.

engramps 4y ago
Neither of those serbian shootings were in schools. NYC has had shootings though not that many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_in_New_York_%28state%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_in_New_York_... Also isnt there recent history of people going to different states to buy guns to shoot people in another state? Its not like there are border police checks
- pvg 4y ago
  The argument was that Serbia - a tiny, war-traumatized country -tells you something about current or potential US gun regulation. My response is that even if you allow for that degree of cherrypicking, the comparison doesn't you get you anything that supports the GP's position, in fact, it gets you the opposite.

diob 4y ago

I think you're being disingenuous with what you surfaced from your Wikipedia link. We are literally the only country on there that has more guns than people (the 2nd highest is literally half our amount per capita!). Now look at the ratio of unregistered to registered in the US. We clearly have a problem compared to other countries. 392 times more unregistered guns than registered, good god.

artificialLimbs 4y ago
Sorry, correlation != causation. Has never been a problem until recent times so maybe you can find another scapegoat if you need some pablum.
- diob 4y ago
  I have no doubt we've increased the per capita, especially unregistered in recent times. Maybe we could try, I don't know, literally what Australia did after their mass shooting? Heck, if it doesn't work, feel free to have all the guns you want. But can we at least fucking try to change it?
  - artificialLimbs 4y ago
    No.
    - diob 4y ago
      Doesn't sound like you want to talk in good faith about ways to improve the country, so I guess go back to listening to whatever wacko conservative rustles your jimmies about the "radical left" and "crt".
      - artificialLimbs 4y ago

artificialLimbs 4y ago

Well no one has said it yet and I don’t have a precious study to trot out, but: My >80 year old friend has suggested to me that this kind of problem didn’t exist before we started handing out pharmaceutical drugs of the variety that ‘handle’ mental illness. Sidebar semi-related story time: my wife got her Masters in childhood education and went directly to work for a public high school after. She was a.. I forget, counselor assistant or something like that at a very large school in Texas. She quit after just a few months because she could see that they were just using her position as a funnel to get kids on some kind of pharmaceutical drug. She was literally reprimanded more than once because she recommended against putting some of the students on drugs and pushed them toward professional counseling instead. The parents are often clamoring to get a diagnosis so they can get their kids on drugs to ‘fix’ their problems, so it’s not exclusively the fault of the government, but they’re damn sure doing their part. They’re drugging our children, MOST often unnecessarily. Perhaps if we used other methods to help, we would see other outcomes.

xvector 4y ago
Mental illness, mental healthcare and pharmaceutical treatments are a thing in Europe too. The US is not a special outlier when it comes to bullying and mental health. But you don't see children being gunned down every other week in Europe. The problem is guns.
- ahallock 4y ago
  So guns are what caused this tragedy? The mere existing of them in the US causes people to lose their minds and go on rampages? We need to get to the root of the problem because people will find another way to enact their evil. Look at Boston Marathon incident
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Your reply seems disingenuous. The person you are replying to did not say guns caused the tragedy. Rather the availability of guns in the U.S. is why we see school shootings every week in the U.S. and not in Europe.

maxerickson 4y ago

Can an 18 year old Serbian walk into a store and buy whatever guns they want? Can they buy a large amount of ammunition? You hand wave away ease of access, but it probably matters. It certainly matters at the margin.

xvector 4y ago
The problem is so obviously guns. It boggles my mind that people can ask questions like "what is the solution" and "we need a nuanced discussion" when the US is the only country in the world where schoolchildren get gunned down every other week. It is plainly obvious to any US citizen that has spent a significant amount of time outside the US, that the problem is guns.
- Madmallard 4y ago
  easy to get guns in other countries that don’t have mass shooting problems
- pokeymcsnatch 4y ago
  > The problem is so obviously guns The guns haven't changed in 60 years, and in fact regulations have increased across the board on both purchasing and manufacturing. But, let's say it is "so obviously" the guns- how is "what is the solution" some kind of naive or ignorant question? Do you know the solution?
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > The guns haven't changed in 60 years, and in fact regulations have increased across the board on both purchasing and manufacturing. Carry regulations have decreased as evidenced in this animated map: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline.... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_concealed_carry_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_concealed_carry_in_... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_... In 1986 there were 16 no-issue states (including Texas(!)); in 2022 there are zero. One unrestricted carry state in 1986, 21 in 2022.

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yucky 4y ago

I suspect identity politics are too blame, since the rise of that correlates to the increase in shootings. A big part of identity politics is to demonize "the other" and if we're being honest, to shift the blame for all of societal ills onto males. Younger males may not be able to shrug those pressures of as easily as others. I think this also helps explain why girls never shoot up schools, despite having the same access to guns as boys. All of our safety nets are designed around helping females, and letting males sink or swim.

anothernewdude 4y ago
You've got an axe, and you love to grind it. Shootings predate Identity politics.
- yucky 4y ago
  "the rise of that correlates to the increase in shootings." I'm not sure where you think you read that there were no shootings prior to the rise of divisive identity politics.
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    The rise of shootings also happened before identity politics became a thing.
jjeaff 4y ago
I don't see any undeserved shifting of blame to males. I think you are just playing the victim here. Women simply aren't as violent by nature.
- yucky 4y ago
  When you look at government programs designed to help those in need, would you say there is an equitable gender distribution in those programs? Or really forget equitable, are there any programs designed specifically for helping males who find themselves suffering in any way? Because I suspect nobody could even count the number designed for females. And not just government programs, but scholarships, hiring initiatives etc. That ratio must be 100-1 at least. So how is this reality supposed to be processed by males who find themselves stuck? Many, or perhaps most, will internalize it and just push forward. Others will lash out. Females have a societal safety net designed to catch them when they fall, males do not. I don't think anybody would dispute that, the question is what effect does that have on the psyche of those who are left helpless?

nonameiguess 4y ago

This seems to indicate it's been happening in the United States since before there was a United States: https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school-shootings-united-states https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school... It certainly feels like someone alive for the last 40 odd years that Columbine was the inflection point at which media really started to cover this. Either that is just because 1999 happens to be my own graduation year and I was too young or not paying attention any earlier, or maybe media coverage really did pick up compared to prior incidents, for whatever the heck unknown and largely random reason. We were still early into the 24 hour cable news cycle and widespread availability of the world-wide web, but as we can see, this was not the first even in 1999. Assuming this is an accurate list, I don't see how we can possibly identify a root cause. This was happening before there was a 2nd amendment. Before there was heavy metal. Before video games. Presumably not before mental illness, but that is hardly a uniquely American problem. Sometimes national culture just picks up a particular character for whatever quirk of history that may not even be fully known or knowable, some forgotten confluence of events that continue to influence us today without anyone knowing it is happening or why. We were among the first countries to offer widespread public education, weren't we? This was even true in colonial times. Maybe the gathering of fairly vulnerable people just makes an enticing target. And sure, there are other public gatherings of vulnerable people, but this one has been around for a very long time, enough to have presented opportunity centuries ago and get woven into barely conscious national memes about where you go if you want to shoot a bunch of people. In other countries, churches and trains seem to fill that role.

confidantlake 4y ago

To simplify. One side thinks "guns are the main problem". Another side thinks "guns are not the main problem". Did you think that the guns are the main problem people would just not show up to the thread?

lend000 4y ago

The worst part is that even if we addressed the myriad cultural issues that lead to so many socially broken young people who may want to do such a thing, we now have a "school shooting culture," propagated by the media, inspiring copycats. The only way to break the positive feedback loop would be to significantly ban most reporting of these incidents, which violates the first amendment, while the other band-aid solution violates the second. And neither of these address the cultural problems creating a fearful culture with so many socially isolated people who may want to get attention by doing the things our culture teaches us to fear.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

I see many comments already default to "guns are the problem". I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion. As a non US resident you can't help but think that is a massive part of the problem. Many other countries have problems with bullying, mental health, radicalisation. We've also had mass shootings. But our tolerance is so much lower for that kind of BS. One shooting and it's over. The populace will support further gun control and stricter measures. This seems sensible to me since curing the underlying causes takes time. So why would you give firearms to people that aren't in the right state of mind to use them responsibly? I think the real question is, why is the tolerance of Americans as a population, so high with regards to mass shootings? Are the lobby groups really that powerful they are changing the minds of regular people?

maxerickson 4y ago
It's probably not really the lobbying, it's the way our government is structured (governments even). Because of the way the US population is distributed, the Senate ends up responding to viewpoints that are in the overall minority. And then lots of states have similar structures.
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BLKNSLVR 4y ago

There's a psychological link between "freedom" and "guns" going back to US independence. Guns = independence from the yoke of UK rule, therefore guns = freedom from tyranny, therefore guns = good. It's ingrained. A threat to gun ownership is equated to a threat to the freedoms fundamental to what makes the US 'the best country in the world'. Any argument restricting gun ownership, no matter how logical or however great the weight of evidence, is up against this "the very DNA of the country" emotional position. Gun availability has been said to be similar in the US to some other countries. Mental illness isn't limited to the US. The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. That's the differentiator. (this, my apologies, papers over the requested nuances of mental illness drugs, the cost and availability of medical care, the individual and societal effects of uber-capitalism at all costs, the equating of any level of socialism to be full-on communism, the widening ideological divide and/or the decreasing tolerance for the existence of differing ideologies to one's own). My cynical take is: Why would this incident make any difference if none of the previous incidents have? It's a harsh observation, but this is "US normal", and has been for a long time.

pdonis 4y ago
> The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. A "war fought for freedom" is a long, long way from shooting innocent people at a school. Equating the two is a huge slap in the face to the vast majority of gun owners in the US who are responsible, law-abiding citizens and, while they would use their guns to defend themselves against tyranny, would never even think of using their guns to shoot an innocent person.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  That's not the point I was trying to make. There's no link between the US' foundation and the shooting school children bar the (intended point) difficulty of restricting gun ownership and access due to the psychological link between gun ownership and country-defining freedom.
  - pdonis 4y ago

_gabe_ 4y ago

I'm sorry, I'm just really hesitant to believe that "the fact stands that the USA has a school shootings problem" with the statistics you linked. The website you linked to cites two sources for its data. One of the sources is CNN. The second source is something called everytownresearch. Their method for counting school shootings were: > Everytown tracks every time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds Which means they're counting individual fights, and or gang violence in with all these shootings. In addition it looks like the vast majority of their data points list no injuries or deaths. They also include things like this in their statistics: > A car entered the east parking lot at a high speed and hit one student. The CCSD police officer ordered the car to stop, and when it didn't, fired their gun at the car. Two teenagers in the car-- one a 16-year-old boy and one a juvenile-- were struck and injured by the officer's gunfire. So this is an injury sustained from an officer trying to stop two kids who injured somebody with their car, not a gun. If you want to talk about how we can combat school shootings how about we agree to use honest statistics? It doesn't help anyone to quote shoddy studies like this. In addition I found this[1] research paper that claims the original paper people quote to show the US is the leader in school shootings does not show how they got their data. In addition they refuse to show how they calculated their statistics. This paper goes on to show that the US may be significantly lower than the number one spot. The reason I even looked at this stuff is because in the link you posted it said there 288 school shootings in the US this year! That claim sounded very far fetched. I know there have been some nasty events so far this year, but if there had been 288 shootings this year alone, I feel like there would have been a lot more news about it. That averages to almost 2 shootings every day this year. And I'm expected to believe these statistics are a factual claim? Edit: And yes I know that this paper is from 2018, but I'm posting it because there is clearly weird stuff going on with the statistics that were quoted in the original posters linked "research" website. [1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736

rvr_ 4y ago

School shooting is a memetic behavior, on the classical sense disseminated by R. Dawkins, not Internet's one. Can we rephrase the problem as: how do a society gets rid of a bad meme?

Pxtl 4y ago
Memes are international. American cultural hegemony is global. Evidence: I'm a Canadian and can name all members of the US supreme Court from memory and zero members of the Canadian one. Memes do not stop at borders, and yet the hot zone for the school shooting plague is localized within the USA. It's the cheap plentiful, underregulated firearms.
- qball 4y ago
  >I'm a Canadian and can name all members of the US supreme Court from memory and zero members of the Canadian one. To be fair, the Canadian Supreme Court rarely does anything of everyday relevance to Canadians, much like all aspects of the political system except for which party happens to be in power (the exact identity of the PM is similarly irrelevant, though everyone knows who that is).

pdonis 4y ago

> (parent of three elementary school kids here) Then my first question to you, regarding your "what can we do" issue, is simple: are you connected to your kids? Are you engaged in their lives? Do they feel like you care about them? When I was a kid, my answer to all three of those questions about my parents was always an unqualified yes. And the idea of committing any kind of violence, let alone a school shooting, would never have occurred to me. You could have had me at the gun range practicing every day and it would never have crossed my mind to actually try to kill someone with a gun, unless it was absolutely necessary for self-defense. When the background eventually comes out on mass shootings, one common factor I always see about the shooters is that they weren't connected to other people. So I think one obvious thing any of us can do for others to keep such things from happening is to give other people connections.

WheatM 4y ago

donsupreme 4y ago

I have always maintained that children growing in this generation with social network and influencers is way harder than any generation before. For instance, growing up I knew that we weren't rich but never fully aware how much poorer I was than my classmates. Simply I have no access to the information of my classmate life after school is over. Sure I had TV and all that but almost everyone I knew growing up are more or less like me, from what I can see. Nowaday even for grownups, you have a hard time constantly comparing yourself to others with what you see on FB or IG, your "peers" who are better or whatnot. Can't imagine for kids without the maturity and fully developed brain can process that. All that is to say, the feeling of insecurity and being "not enough" is so much more amplified for kids than ever before. Nothing makes you feel even more lonely and miserable than seeing other kids having a seemingly great lives on their vacation with their loving parents or kids having so much fun at parties that you are not invited to. So glad that I didn't grow up with social network.

mahastore 4y ago

>> Also any argument like "mental illness" or "ease of access to firearms" needs to explain why the same does not apply to the rest of the world - Well Afghanistan people have access to lot of guns , lots of it and maybe even tanks. But they don't go to school that much. And in Serbia the population is thinly spread across vast swatches of ice. Not exactly LA. Lets simply stop talking and just bring a bill to buy back all automatic guns and destroy them. This country needs it.

bicx 4y ago
I think you're thinking of Siberia, not Serbia (the country ravaged by the Kosovo War in the late 90's).
ch4s3 4y ago
There aren’t really any automatic weapons in the US, unless they were manufactured before a certain date and you have a particular hard to acquire license. You may mean semi-automatic. I assume you don’t know many gun owners. I grew on a farm in the south and Incan assure you that when people there say “come and take them,” they mean it. At this point you’re talking about a lot of very armed veterans and hunters, it just doesn’t seem practical. If you could wave a magic wand, who knows it may work but that isn’t really an option. I think there have to be other approaches here that can actually happen. The element of cultural memesis and role of the media in making anti-heros of these deranged young men is worth examining. It’s also pretty clear that the current approach to bullying in schools isn’t working at all. It also seems like it’s just too easy for some young men in their late teens to just fall through society’s cracks, I don’t know what the answer is there.
- mahastore 4y ago
  Buyback program. Lets go.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    What I’m saying is that you very quickly need to enforce a law like that with the state’s monopoly on violence, which seems to run contrary to the problem you’re trying to solve.

dsizzle 4y ago

To the extent that school shooting are, statistically, a "tail" event, you would expect that to change more sensitively than the "average" (guns per capita). So a tripling of the average gun measure (going from Serbia to US), might correspond to a much larger change in these extreme events. I doubt it's a simple statistical consequence, but it also doesn't follow that amount of guns would be (linearly) proportional to extreme events.

BobbyJo 4y ago
Sweet baby Jesus thank you. I've been waiting years for someone to make a reasonable argument to me on why stricter guns laws are a good idea. Every other argument I've seen has been appeals to emotion without actually framing the cost/benefit relationship in any useful way.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Lots of reasons. But I'd say the culture of glorifying gun ownership is a root cause combined with an institutionalized and deliberately flexible attitude to any form of gun control. It varies between states of course. But the net result is that people are assumed to be armed to the teeth. Which leads to shoot first and ask questions later situations. Which is actually something you can legally get away with under some circumstances and something that is glorified as well. And it's getting worse because it's getting worse. People respond to feeling insecure by getting more guns. And bigger guns. And this is big business in the US. Gun manufacturers advertise on TV, lobby the local authorities, and spend billions on marketing. There's more scrutiny on advertisements for cigarettes and alcohol in the US then there is on gun commercials. There are more rules around owning a drivers license or a car than there are on owning a gun. That's why things have gotten much worse in the US in the past decades. The rules haven't changed but the number of guns has. And given the percentage of people with guns and the percentage of people with mental issues, the Venn diagram of those two groups intersecting produces a percentage of armed homicidal maniacs at a high enough frequencies that stuff happens. Simply put: when millions of assault rifles get sold, a few of them are going to end up being used by exactly the type of people you'd never want to own such a thing. Simple math. There's nothing mysterious about that. I'd probably want to own a gun if I lived in the US. There are war zones that have less casualties per year than some cities and areas in the US. I think Kiiv probably has better statistics than Chicago in the last half year or so. That, or it's alarmingly close. Combat medics actually get trained in hospitals in in big cities in the US. If you work in the ER in Chicago, LA, etc., you are going to get plenty of practice. Every day. So, yes, I'd probably feel a need to defend myself in such a place. I'd be part of the problem. However, I don't live in the US. I live in Berlin, Germany. I feel safe here and feel no need to own a gun and tough luck if that weren't the case because it's pretty hard to get one here. It's not a perfect city and there are occasional incidents involving gun violence just like everywhere else. Generally if you see a gun you are either in an armed robbery, looking at a person in uniform, or in the country side with people responsibly handling their legal guns while hunting. The first happens but not very often. Most crime does not involve guns. And when it does, the sentences are steep, the guns are typically small (easier to conceal), and highly illegal. Anything involving illegal guns is not cool with the authorities. People in uniform discharging their arms is generally involves lots of paper work and scrutiny. More so for civilians with permits and legally owned guns. Getting permits is not super easy and keeping your permit requires sticking to the rules. So, that narrows down the situations that can escalate considerably. It still happens but not very often. Same math, different variable values.

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gitastrophie 4y ago

Maybe a hot take, but as others have identified, these violent outbreaks are at least in part due to social isolation, which may have something to do with lifestyle, city layout, and ease of access to public parks/things to do. Cities in the US have been set up to support cars, creating widely spread out and large landscapes, inconvenient for those who don't drive. Finding niche groups to fit in with on the internet has become easier, but irl in the US, much harder. This is independent of age group, but obviously impacts kids in a huge way. IMO, we need more places for people in communities to get together and just talk about things, engage in continued education, and have fun. Would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between after school programs, or proximity of public spaces and violence.