5 ms·

> The main point is that action in government is slow. And for good reason. If people want to hold onto the fantasy that when a bunch of people get angry, the g

• numbsafari 14y ago
  It's 25 dead children who were completely innocent of any crime. It's an incident in a long line of incidents over many decades in which many innocent people were killed. I think you need to calibrate your moral barometer a bit better.
  • fr0sty 14y ago
    I'm not trying to equivocate. GGP commment made an unqualified statement "action in government is slow" adding that the idea of "drastic action" was a "fantasy". I countered by noting that in the present day the government is moving very fast on at least one particular issue. We will know tomorrow whether the action is drastic. Full stop.
    • numbsafari 14y ago
      Full stop? How many mass murders has it taken to get to this point? How is that "drastic" or "very fast"? Oh, wait, there's a commission that might "recommend" we re-enact legislation that expired a few years ago? How is that "drastic"? How is that "very fast"? As the GGP said, what's gonna happen first is an investigation and a review. Why the need to jump to "vigilante justice"? The end result of "vigilante justice" is going to be more young people squandering their careers and futures, creating further justification for harsh sentencing and prosecution of "hacktivists", and probably just more work and demand for the very people they are trying to unseat. Blowing this situation out of proportion and encouraging rash behavior is not going to solve the underlying problems.
      • achompas 14y ago
        How many mass murders has it taken to get to this point? How is that "drastic" or "very fast"? The same issue was addressed by the Brady Bill 18 years ago, so it's not like the issue hasn't been addressed before. That response's effectiveness is another story, of course (hint: it wasn't).
      • jerf 14y ago
        Mass murders may be flashy, but they are not a large problem. They only feel large. Immediate fast response here is a political tool to push policies that have little to do with stopping school shootings, not a governance tool. (Evidence: almost no proposed policies show any evidence that they could have prevented this shooting, even if they were magically 100% effective; for instance, "more background checks" doesn't prevent someone from stealing a gun obtained by somebody else, as in this case, and so on.) Prosecutor overreach is a much more widespread problem, though absolute quantification is difficult. It isn't hard to rate it as a much bigger problem than mass murders, because mass murders are a very, very small problem right now. It may not rate next to our other problems we face right now, though. (If saying mass murders aren't a big problem right now bothers you, let me also make this observation, which is that non-mass murders are also a much bigger problem than mass murders. Just the murders that can be directly traced to our War on Drugs, many of which also hit school-aged children, is a much larger problem than mass murder right now. Murders in Chicago alone is a significantly larger problem than mass murders.)
        • btilly 14y ago
          Absolutely. Regulations mandating safer showers and bathtubs would save more lives, and far more hospital visits, than getting rid of all of the assault weapons in the USA. As for prosecutorial overreach, I believe that it is part of the reason why the USA has a higher portion of its population in prison than ANY other country in the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... if you don't believe me. And our "justice" system is not race neutral. South Africa under apartheid did not imprison as high a portion of its black population as the US does now. In major cities about 80% of black males have a criminal record. This contributes to their difficulty in getting jobs. Which in turn contributes to the economic circumstances that perpetuate these shocking statistics.
    • gavinlynch 14y ago
      @ fr0sty: I believe the point is that government action is almost always slow, perhaps with the Sandy Hook tragedy being one of the rare exceptions. Something has to captivate and horrify the nation as a whole to reach that level of outrage. But beyond that, in these circumstances there is generally a known policy platform that proscribes a solution in terms of legislation and execution action. Think about it. How long did it take the 9/11 Commission to come out? How long did it take us to learn the lessons of that tragedy and to attempt to implement measures to counter-act the causes and fine-tune or response. If ever there was a case for immediate action based on outrage, that was it. In the case of Sandy Hook, the gun control measures by and large have been waiting in the wings. There have been packages applied on the state level all across the nation from which to draw a federal-level response. It was basically a case of "Okay, after this tragedy a large number of people have solidified which side of this debate they come down on. Let's ratify the gun control measures we have all discussed for decades now." Is there such a wide-spread existing platform that would solve the alleged problems in the Aaron Shwartz case? Is there even a generally identified "problem" that a majority of people agree on? Do a majority of people agree that Aaron suicide was directly caused by the prosecution? I think many here have already made up their mind. However I'm not so sure the beyond the tech communities there is a broad consensus or a clear case of causation. And if causation is not clear, how can we "fix" the problem, even if we had the nations rapt attention? Finally, what is the package of changes waiting in the wings for us to ratify? Is there a commonly-held solution to the perceived proprietorial overreach? Is there something we all agree on that, assuming there is enough momentum to enact immediately, can be put into place? I'm no lawyer, but I imagine tinkering with the judicial system is not something that happens quickly. Firing this prosecutor will just bring another who works within the same parameters of this system. Beyond the psychological satisfaction of "feel our rage" for angry people, what will it accomplish?
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  • kamjam 14y ago
    So how many deaths of individuals threatened with 30 years of prison for minor crimes does it take before this becomes an issue? We supposedly live in a civilised society I would say 1 death is 1 too many.
    • sageikosa 14y ago
      We are living in a post-civilized society, insofar as civilization implies city-rooted social order. We live in the era of continent-scaled nation-states.
  • protomyth 14y ago
    It was a tragedy, but..... Violence as a cause of death has continued to drop in the US. It is no longer in the top 15 ways people die in the US[1]. The worst year for massacres in the US was 1929 and worst occurred in 1927 (45 dead by explosive). Yet suicide is in the top 10 and mental illness is under funded. Risk factors are what the President should concentrate on, not the incident of the moment. A President coming up to the podium and announcing a serious attempt at dealing with mental illness in this country would fix more problems than something that is declining without the President's attention. 1) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm
    • btilly 14y ago
      The worst year for massacres in the US was 1929 and worst occurred in 1927 (45 dead by explosive). Citation needed. 2,996 people died in the September 11 hijacking, including the 19 hijackers. That is the worst massacre that I'm aware of in US history. If you just want domestic violence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing killed 167 people in 1995. Prohibition era violence may have created more massacres, but they were much smaller. And the people killed were much less likely to be innocent bystanders.
      • protomyth 14y ago
        September 11 and Oklahoma are listed in a different category (terrorism). I guess I should have used the matching terminology better and said "mass shooting". Prohibition era violence had a whole lot of bystanders killed. 1929 had the most in number according to Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has done a lot of research in the area. He also point out that although there was a rise in mass shootings from 1960 to 1990, a decline started in 2000. I should also point out that neither incident you cited had guns involved.
        • btilly 14y ago
          The Bath School disaster, which you referred to, may have had a gun involved, but was very much not a mass shooting. There may have been a decline in mass shootings since 2000, but in the last several years there has been a cluster. Whether this is an anomaly or a trend is too early to tell. I agree that Prohibition era violence had a whole lot of bystanders killed. But compared to the number of gangsters killed, the proportion was much lower than the massacres that I pointed to. For example in 9/11, hijackers and armed military personnel were under 2.5% of the fatalities.
  • kelnos 14y ago
    Here's a likely controversial statement: I am much more worried about the effects of prosecutorial overreach on our society than I am about gun violence. We are rapidly developing a "criminalized culture" to which the easy and popular response to everything is "put them in jail". Sandy Hook was a horrible tragedy, to be sure, but in my mind, our growing population of prisoners is a much more concerning problem.
• jetti 14y ago
  But let's see if anything actually gets done. Smoke and mirrors to appear to do something is different from actually doing something.