Trance on 25/2/2018 at 13:33
Most school shootings initially kick off outside the school, not inside it. Installing metal detectors at the entrance would do nothing.
Starker on 25/2/2018 at 13:46
It would just mean it will happen somewhere else, though, like a music concert or a nightclub or wherever young people gather.
Trance on 25/2/2018 at 14:38
Well, I suppose it's not entirely true that it would do nothing. It would create a gargantuan expense for school districts who already deal with painfully overstretched budgets, add more stress to students' lives having to deal with a daily security procedure, and create a new class of school security personnel akin to the TSA with all the same risk of invasion of privacy and abuse of their position that we hear about from airport security.
And on top of that, unless physical barriers are erected, it's not going to stop someone blasting their way into the school with a semiautomatic rifle, as with the Parkland shooting and countless others.
So unless I misunderstood your suggestion, it seems like a bad idea to me.
EDIT: This was in response to Medlar's reply of "Just nothing eh!" which he has deleted.
Gryzemuis on 25/2/2018 at 15:21
All this discussion on gun-control, types of guns, where guns are allowed and not allowed. It's all bullshit.
The whole question basically boils down to pick one option out of two possible approaches.
Option 1):
Citizens don't have guns. only police and the military have guns.
This kinda works. See the rest of the civilized world outside the US.
Option 2):
Everybody has guns. That means that your country will be a constant warzone.
Everybody is armed to the teeth. Everybody has to be combat-ready all the time. Everybody has to be alert all the time.
Making mistakes in daily life means someone might die.
(This is already the case for cops in the US today. That's why they shoot first and ask questions later).
More violence is supposed to be the answer to any question.
Congrats, you have changed your country into a living nightmare.
Lots of Americans seem to chose option 2.
What can you say ?
Good luck with that.
Medlar on 25/2/2018 at 15:31
There has to some course of action to prevent the constant recurrence of these shootings. To take no action as has been the policy to date and is clearly not working. It’s easy to do nothing, difficult and no doubt expensive to try and find answers.
I would tax the product that is part of the problem to pay for the solution.
I thought to say “just nothing” was flippant and insulting so removed it..
ffox on 25/2/2018 at 16:50
Quote Posted by Medlar
I believe it is an impossibility to change the gun culture of the American way of life, so the only answer is to circumvent it.
Of course change is possible, but it would have to be step by step over a period of time. Perhaps start by banning rapid-fire weapons and then work slowly and steadily towards to Gryz's Option 1.
In a different take, the bombastic Jeremy Clarkson has written (
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5656608/jeremy-clarkson-trump-give-teachers-guns-bruce-willis/) a controversial article in The Sun. Here are extracts:
Quote:
The anti-gun lobby seems to think that with tighter controls, America would suddenly become as harmless as Teletubbyland. But even if the controls made it totally impossible to buy any sort of weapon, the problem wouldn’t be solved.
Because what would happen to the 300million guns that are already in private hands? They wouldn’t simply disappear in a puff of smoke.
No. The big problem America has is that it’s home to a great many mad people. You occasionally see a lunatic on Britain’s streets, howling at the moon and shouting at lampposts, but in American cities, you see someone like that every day. And it’s mad people who open fire in a classroom or at concertgoers in Las Vegas.
What America should really be doing to halt the spread of mass murder is addressing its mental health issues.
They could start in the White House.
heywood on 25/2/2018 at 17:52
Quote Posted by Tocky
I hope this was dry humor. I was speaking of where we have come as a nation from our early days. I was speaking of our soul as a nation and not the amendment which allows the degradation of it.
No humor intended. My point was the following: The origin of our nation was a rebellion against a king, who sent a standing army here to keep the colonies under his thumb, enacted a ban on imports of firearms and gunpowder, and ordered the confiscation of guns from citizens and local governments. The revolution wouldn't have been possible without the existence of citizen militias that formed into the Continental Army and/or fought alongside it. That's the reason we have the 2nd Amendment, not to protect hunting or chase off burglars.
Quote Posted by Starker
It would just mean it will happen somewhere else, though, like a music concert or a nightclub or wherever young people gather.
I was just going through this list of school shootings:
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States
It seems that most of the shooters had a connection to the school. In the biggest massacres (Columbine, Red Lake, Newtown, Parkland) the shooters were current or former students who were targeting the school because of their history or experiences there. If they didn't have access to guns, they might go with bombs instead (like Columbine - but fortunately most of their bombs didn't work). Or maybe arson.
Tightly controlling access to the school might prevent that, but who the hell wants to raise their kids with that kind of extreme security mindset.
Starker on 25/2/2018 at 20:41
Isn't killing people with guns much easier than killing them by arson, though? People are bound to notice the smoke and take action. And I don't know how easy it is to make a bomb (in terms of both getting the materials and without blowing yourself up), but presumably it's not quite as easy as getting a gun in the US.
Tocky on 25/2/2018 at 21:13
Quote Posted by heywood
No humor intended. My point was the following: The origin of our nation was a rebellion against a king, who sent a standing army here to keep the colonies under his thumb, enacted a ban on imports of firearms and gunpowder, and ordered the confiscation of guns from citizens and local governments. The revolution wouldn't have been possible without the existence of citizen militias that formed into the Continental Army and/or fought alongside it. That's the reason we have the 2nd Amendment, not to protect hunting or chase off burglars.
Right. Guns didn't exist before the revolution. We didn't have to hunt for daily sustenance. We didn't have to fight the French or Indians. All the second amendment did was codify what already existed. It would never have occurred to them to ban hunting weapons. They had to have those to survive. The north even let the south keep those at the end of the Civil War. That lingered in our culture until the current day when it has been perverted by little boys in men's bodies going pow pow with maximum firepower and maximum ammunition.
When I was a kid there were hunters everywhere you looked and nobody locked their doors. We left that. We are now in the age of not being able to control anything about guns. Oh there were stupid folks who pointed guns at you. There are always stupid folks. But the Texas clock tower was an anomaly in the news. Lot's of things changed our culture from Schwarzenegger movies to gangsta inurement. But what stops our doing ANYTHING about it? Gun nuts and the NRA. You can't do even the most simple things because it might infringe on Bubba Shootemups right to FREEDOM!
Well a lot of these shootings are done with guns designed to kill the most and Bubba might decide he needs a grenade launcher next. Why not? I'm sure the NRA will support it and there will be some rationalization dreamed up to support it. After all, if you outlaw grenade launchers, only outlaws with have them.
Pyrian on 26/2/2018 at 00:31
Quote Posted by heywood
The revolution wouldn't have been possible without the existence of citizen militias that formed into the Continental Army and/or fought alongside it. That's the reason we have the 2nd Amendment, not to protect hunting or chase off burglars.
Yeah; the 2nd amendment was about protecting individual state-regulated militias that haven't existed in a rather long time.
We don't let private individuals have nukes. Or any number of large weapon systems.
We heavily regulate small cannons, grenades, and various "destructive devices" - you
can get them, but expect to pay a fair chunk of change and go through quite a bit of hassle. Notably, while private ownership of this class of manufactured weapons is possible, AFAIK they've never been used in a domestic mass killing despite being well suited to the job.
We lightly regulate small firearms. They're widely available, easy to get, and the background checks aren't that thorough and can be skirted legally. And if it's hard to get them where you are, well, it's easy to pick them up across state lines.
Knives, machetes, axes, and other potentially deadly tools are easily available without any checks, but still banned in a lot of venues.
All this talk about "...the right to bear arms shall not be infringed" is out of touch with reality. It...is...infringed. And nobody's proposing that J-random Koch brother should be allowed to buy himself a nice little nuclear missile. (...Right?) The only question is where you draw which line. What if we simply shift any semi-automatic firing mechanism to the destructive device category?
