5 ms·

Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns. Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status

• jrflowers 3mo ago
  > Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids They already sell Kevlar backpacks
  • Joker_vD 3mo ago
    A top seller in Libya, Somali, Iraq, and that one particular first-world country which our lawyers from that country advise us to refrain from naming! Buy one today!
    • bestouff 3mo ago
      Are you sure it still deserves the "first world" label ?
      • Joker_vD 3mo ago
        Well, until it has a glorious socialist revolution — yes, it is a first world country.
        • Tadpole9181 3mo ago
          Beyond the obvious fact nobody really uses the cold war definition anymore, are you really insinuating those countries are socialist?
• gmueckl 3mo ago
  "Thoughts and prayers". It's always "thoughts and prayers" and invoking an inaginary "good guy with a gun". Can it get much more magical/mystical/performative than that?
  • nonethewiser 3mo ago
    Given an active shooter threats, what is the solution if not a good guy with a gun?
    • VertanaNinjai 3mo ago
      Why are you assuming active shooter threats need to exist to begin with? There’s only one country it regularly happens in.
    • NopIdoN 3mo ago
      Ever see Takeshi's Castle?
      • blooalien 3mo ago
        "American Ninja Warrior" gameshow looks a lot like it to me; It looks like a pretty direct copy of "Takeshi's Castle" in many ways in fact.
        • ageitgey 3mo ago
          This is not super on topic, but ANW is the US version of the Japanese TV show Sasuke, which is itself inspired by the Adventure Zone segment on Takeshi's Castle. So, yes, it is connected.
    • conception 3mo ago
      More gun homicides per capita happen in states with looser gun laws by and large. The good guy with a gun is largely a myth as compared to “i have a gun and I’m going to use it to kill you”.
    • gmueckl 3mo ago
      The existence of active shooter threats and especially their prevalence shows that the best protection - prevention - isn't working. And in the US, the best possible protection (strict gun ownership laws) is prevented based on an ideology that arguably misreads the Constitution on purpose to keep a whole industry alive. And should it come to an actual active shooter, the response needs to be a properly equipped and trained police force acting against it rather than sitting it out outside the building. That is not the proverbial "good guy with a gun" because that's implied to be a random untrained civilian on the scene.
• refulgentis 3mo ago
  We have a corrupt Supreme Court that transmutated the Constitution’s “well-organized militia” into “any individual”, combined with that and the Paranoid Style (Richard Hofstadter) of our politics, there’s absolutely 0 that can happen.
• vlod 3mo ago
  It's not something that you can just wave a magic wand. The steps to change the constitution is really really hard (deliberately).
  • Arodex 3mo ago
    The Supreme Court likes to play games with words and disregards precedent. Expand the court and shove "well-regulated militia" down their throats. Problem solved.
    • vlod 3mo ago
      [dead]
  • conception 3mo ago
    They don’t seem to mind on the other amendments.
• nonethewiser 3mo ago
  You could ban guns completely and you’d still have to deal with active shooters. There are 500M guns in the USA. Those dont just disappear. Its idiotic not to harden targets. The best way to do that’s debatable, but schools should be hardened.
  • GaggiX 3mo ago
    They should give every student a gun at this point (/s because I feel like someone would agree with me). Edit: everyone should also wear a bulletproof vest at minimum. Desks should be equipped with reactive armor to defend against anti-tank warheads. A Phalanx C-RAM will be installed on the roof next to the AC units.
    • blooalien 3mo ago
      All fantastic ideas! I bet you we could get our illustrious U.S. "Department of War" right on that without too much effort spent tryin' to convince 'em.
    • theGeatZhopa 3mo ago
      I proposed to equip the drones with explosive load instead of pepper spray. Much more effective and faster on stopping the shooting. And have at least 3 drones pursuing the active shooter (3 per shooter).
  • ofjcihen 3mo ago
    Having to think of schools as “soft targets” in a first world country is absolutely wild.
  • conception 3mo ago
    “We’ve tried absolutely nothing and we’re out of ideas!” It’s also idiotic to not support mental health restrictions, gun violence research, liability but the well (russian) funded NRA isn’t a fan anymore so here we are.
• rootusrootus 3mo ago
  Pretty easy to make glib comments like that. How do you propose the problem be addressed? The Constitution as written makes banning guns a non-starter. So amending the Constitution is step 1, and a big step it is. 3/4 states ratifying is a non-trivial threshold. And then what? There are already more guns than people in the US. Going to confiscate them all? Good luck. Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions in response to tragedy, has vast numbers of illegal (and legal) weapons still in civilian hands. So clearly that isn't the answer. So I want to know what your easy solution is.
  • NikolaNovak 3mo ago
    The two statements are not inherently contradictory. Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it. In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it. (Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)
    • rootusrootus 3mo ago
      > it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it. A lot of us do, I think what happened is that a majority have decided it is a political loser. It reliably spins up republicans and gets them to the polls, probably even more so than abortion. It costs a lot of political capital with near zero hope for meaningful action. So progressives have prioritized issues with broader appeal (and still somehow fail most of the time, despite what appears to be much broader appeal). > turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards In some places. That's perhaps part of the issue. My suburban schools lock the doors, and that's about it. No metal detectors or turn stiles. They have like two security guards for a thousand students and no cops, just a liaison at the local PD if something comes up. The school does not feel like a fortress, nor a dystopia. So this gets written off as a big city problem. Which poses the question, is it predominantly a big city problem? What fraction of gun violence in school is gang violence? The AR15-wielding mass shooters get a lot of press, but if we want the violence to drop meaningfully then we are probably wasting time over-focusing on that. And then the question, will taking guns way from the gangs solve the problem? Or do we have a socioeconomic and culture problem? Talk about hard to solve.
• amazingamazing 3mo ago
  What do you want the USA to do? Keep in mind shooting kids is illegal. Feel free to share your proposal. Fwiw guns should have never been allowed to spread to this extent but undoing this is nigh impossible
• influx 3mo ago
  More Europeans die from lack of air conditioning than people in the US die from guns. https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-waves-deadlier-american-163553040.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...
  • GaggiX 3mo ago
    >The European heat death figures are based on modeled "excess deaths"—a standard epidemiological approach that tries to capture everyone who died earlier than they would have in cooler conditions, including from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory failure, which casts a wide net. "But the US number," Ritchie wrote, "isn't based on this type of modeling; it's based on heat deaths recorded on death certificates." That's a far narrower count which only captures cases where a physician specifically wrote heat as the cause of death. The result is that the two figures being compared are not measuring the same thing. "If you used death certificate figures for Europe," Ritchie wrote, "they'd be far lower." Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • api 3mo ago
    People don’t evaluate risks based on stats. They do it based on vibes. We do have a disproportionate amount of gun violence for a developed nation but statistically it’s still a very low risk. I recall pointing this out back during the post 9/11 terror panic. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack were still phenomenally low even after 9/11. It would have taken a relentless stream of constant 9/11 scale attacks to even approach automobile or drug overdose deaths.
    • atmavatar 3mo ago
      This is a good point, so I'd like to provide some additional context. There were 2,977 victims in the 9/11 attacks. This doesn't come close to cracking the top 10 leading causes of death, which are annual numbers. The top 2 are Heart Disease at 683K and Cancer at 619K. For terrorism to be an equivalent threat, 9/11 scale attacks would need to occur ~230 times a year, or just shy of 2 out of every 3 days. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11... See: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
• jimt1234 3mo ago
  "I think it's worth it. It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment..." -Charlie Kirk
  • gmueckl 3mo ago
    How can someone say they are "pro life" and at the same time believe this bizarre inhuman nonsense?
• nec4b 3mo ago
  What does e.g. Switzerland do with the guns so they don't have such incidents event though the gun ownership is high? Or do you think guns are the issue and not the culture?