3 ms·

> Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school. I don't like today's youth, but we're really doing them a disservice by

> Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school. I don't like today's youth, but we're really doing them a disservice by refusing to do anything about the fact that these places we force them to attend ~40 hours a week keep turning into literal warzones and nobody's doing anything about it. If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. One of the most boring places I ever worked had fucking mantraps firewalling areas. This wasn't the Pentagon, this was an insurance company. Everyone in a school is a sitting duck-- if not from gunmen, then from new forms of covert bullying that do not lead to actionable intervention. It's made all the worse when the bullies are the ones that get sympathy and support. That's all before nonsense like zero-tolerance (punishes both the victim and offender), NCLB and "intelligent design." The effect being, you go to school and sit around waiting to become someone's victim or pawn one way or another. The politics of American schools are indistinguishable from those of our minimum-security prisons; everyone is constantly anxious, frightened, and screaming there too. Risk of spontaneous murder is also high. If I were a kid these days, I would refuse to attend any [public] school in most of the US. It's a failed institution.

secabeen 3y ago
We should do many more things to stop school shootings, including getting guns out of the hands of children. It's also important to understand how rare school shootings remain in the US. The shooting rate is pretty swingy, with some years fewer than 5 school experiencing at least one death, and other years as many as 40. Assuming 20 schools a year have a shooting death and 128,000 schools, that's a 0.01% chance each year that your child will attend a school where a shooting happens, or a 0.2% chance (260 deaths) across a 13-year primary and secondary education. That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. In that same 13-year window, ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? After all, except for the teens driving at age 15.5 and up, these kids are passengers, and have no control over their safety in a car, just like they have no control of their safety at school.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. [...] ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. > If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? All valid points. I know the stats are what they are--by rights they should be terrified of being on the road--but this is about optics. The lack of any response to what they [incorrectly] perceive as a threat sends the message that nobody cares about them. If enough people feel unsafe at work, security patrols will increase to project the appearance of safety. In this case, we're dealing with scared children...it wouldn't take banning all guns to change that. Shitshows like Uvalde do the opposite-- where even the cops are seen quivering in fear. Unlike their usual nonsense ("I can't get a job, my Munchausen's is flaring up!" or "You're abusive for not buying me a car!"), the kids have no demands on this one. They're begging for help. Ignoring that is only going to foster resentment, antisocial and sociopathic behavior; we give money to the poor to keep their knives away from our throats (and alas, food stamp programs are being defunded as we speak). These kids are the same demographic we expect will take up arms (irony) to defend the country when/if we have any kind of foreign conflict; meanwhile our two adversaries have been working very hard over the last decade to groom them for defection by selling them the idea that they can have everything for free under Communism. My point was mostly that I wouldn't blame them for welcoming a change in management. We do nothing to win anybody's hearts or minds. Even the case in TFA, in Canada-- we treat kids like a pool of idiots to exploit with blinky lights, loot crates and smartphones, and signal that we'll just leave them for dead if they feel threatened. The psychologists they go cry to have peers helping companies engineer these very outcomes.
devilbunny 3y ago
> If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. I dunno; threats and occurrences of actual violence are shrugged off pretty frequently by hospitals. And my old high school? Sure, you have to have an ID card to get in, but the doors are still fully glass. You don't need a gun to get in; a brick would do the job. And it's private. The public schools are even worse. Wife worked for a couple of years in a downtown admin job at the local public school system; one of their few duties in schools was to proctor standardized tests several times a year. I took her to one in a very rough area that had metal detectors even 20+ years ago. It went off when we walked through, but no cops or security officers were present, and one of the students just told us to ignore it, because they all did. This - in a school that had bullet holes in the windows and ceilings (which, to be fair, were probably just potshots from the apartments across a ditch from the school that were fired when nobody was actually in the building).

secabeen 3y ago

We should do many more things to stop school shootings, including getting guns out of the hands of children. It's also important to understand how rare school shootings remain in the US. The shooting rate is pretty swingy, with some years fewer than 5 school experiencing at least one death, and other years as many as 40. Assuming 20 schools a year have a shooting death and 128,000 schools, that's a 0.01% chance each year that your child will attend a school where a shooting happens, or a 0.2% chance (260 deaths) across a 13-year primary and secondary education. That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. In that same 13-year window, ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? After all, except for the teens driving at age 15.5 and up, these kids are passengers, and have no control over their safety in a car, just like they have no control of their safety at school.

jstarfish 3y ago
> That's way too high, but it's not going to happen at all at 99.8% of schools over a 13-year period. [...] ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. > If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? All valid points. I know the stats are what they are--by rights they should be terrified of being on the road--but this is about optics. The lack of any response to what they [incorrectly] perceive as a threat sends the message that nobody cares about them. If enough people feel unsafe at work, security patrols will increase to project the appearance of safety. In this case, we're dealing with scared children...it wouldn't take banning all guns to change that. Shitshows like Uvalde do the opposite-- where even the cops are seen quivering in fear. Unlike their usual nonsense ("I can't get a job, my Munchausen's is flaring up!" or "You're abusive for not buying me a car!"), the kids have no demands on this one. They're begging for help. Ignoring that is only going to foster resentment, antisocial and sociopathic behavior; we give money to the poor to keep their knives away from our throats (and alas, food stamp programs are being defunded as we speak). These kids are the same demographic we expect will take up arms (irony) to defend the country when/if we have any kind of foreign conflict; meanwhile our two adversaries have been working very hard over the last decade to groom them for defection by selling them the idea that they can have everything for free under Communism. My point was mostly that I wouldn't blame them for welcoming a change in management. We do nothing to win anybody's hearts or minds. Even the case in TFA, in Canada-- we treat kids like a pool of idiots to exploit with blinky lights, loot crates and smartphones, and signal that we'll just leave them for dead if they feel threatened. The psychologists they go cry to have peers helping companies engineer these very outcomes.

devilbunny 3y ago

> If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. I dunno; threats and occurrences of actual violence are shrugged off pretty frequently by hospitals. And my old high school? Sure, you have to have an ID card to get in, but the doors are still fully glass. You don't need a gun to get in; a brick would do the job. And it's private. The public schools are even worse. Wife worked for a couple of years in a downtown admin job at the local public school system; one of their few duties in schools was to proctor standardized tests several times a year. I took her to one in a very rough area that had metal detectors even 20+ years ago. It went off when we walked through, but no cops or security officers were present, and one of the students just told us to ignore it, because they all did. This - in a school that had bullet holes in the windows and ceilings (which, to be fair, were probably just potshots from the apartments across a ditch from the school that were fired when nobody was actually in the building).