Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters(washingtonpost.com) |
Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters(washingtonpost.com) |
Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids
They already sell Kevlar backpacks
Its idiotic not to harden targets. The best way to do that’s debatable, but schools should be hardened.
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.
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.
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.
It has certainly always been painted that way, particularly in US media driven by NRA framings.
An alternative description might be that Australia simply (almost but not quite) made gun regulation uniform across all states and territories.
At the time of the Port Arthur massacre all the states with larger populations had gun regulation, much like they had car and truck regulations - paperwork on ownership, licencing, etc.
Two relatively low population states, Queensland and Tasmania, had no regulation and territories had zero to mixed regulation.
Following a then world record lone shooter event in Tasmania the public pretty much overwhelmingly supported uniform regulation across the country- which meant imposing much the same laws as were then current in Western Australia on the alternative reality of Queensland.
Much of the buy back went towards buying back old guns and unused extra just in case guns that owners decided weren't actually worth formally licencing and paying annual fees (like a car rego) for.
The result of near uniform gun regulation across the country, all sales tracked, etc. was a decrease in gun incidents and two decades of near zero mass shooting events.
Quite an assertion.
What Australia is doing works by one measure that matters: number of people killed by a gun. In 2024 the gun murder rates were:
US: 4.5 per 100,000
AU: 0.09 per 100,000
Ratio: 50
Source: https://www.ussc.edu.au/by-the-numbers-stark-contrast-in-aus...
Australia didn't confiscate vast numbers of guns by violence. It introduced a buyback scheme, which a lot of gun owners took up. The buyback was "an offer they couldn't refuse" for classes of firearms that were banned, but once it was done it meant it was more tractable to keep firearms in check. The big thing is did was reduce the number of households that contained a firearm even if some of the remaining (paranoid?) license holders increased their number of guns.
Source: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/04/28/new-g...
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...)
However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.
And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.
I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.
This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.
Fwiw guns should have never been allowed to spread to this extent but undoing this is nigh impossible
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...
Per your linked article:
> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.
> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.
Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.
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.
The real question is ... who is stoking the irrational fear in the first place, and how do they benefit by doing so?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/
Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.
If you're going to accept not being able to take guns away from the perpetrators, the only thing that will "work" is their targets being likewise armed, as well as trained in firearm combat in close quarters and outside, as well as psychologically trained to handle the real situation and not freeze, tremble or hesitate.
No passive gimmicks will stop an armed perpetrator, unless he doesn't know about their existence and is not prepared for their deployment, which is a foolish assumption to rely on.
Hasn't that been a problem with active shooter drills? That future shooters also get drilled.
I'm saying that's what stems from accepting that there are going to be shooters with easy access to guns, such that we're not gonna do anything about that.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/28/school-sho...
Schools in the U.S.; this is what the U.S. are getting into.
Meanwhile, the majority of the civilized world solves this with gun control. Americans can't do gun control just because of fetishism for their obsolete Constitution.
Try to explain to Americans that their Constitution was written before the Industrial Revolution and cheap ubiquitous guns, during a war, when the overwhelming majority of the population was rural. Try to explain that when Americans try to do nation building (Japan, Iraq, Afghanistan) they choose political frameworks completely different from the American Constitution.
They won't accept it. They venerate their Constitution just as blindly as the Bible, another obsolete document.
Well, thank you twice:
* first for confirming my criticism that Americans venerate their constitution blindly
* second for staying in your country and not coming to mine
It also mentions that the effort is "spearheaded" (whatever that means) by the state legislature in Florida.
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.
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...
See: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
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.
You must have misunderstood the assertion, then. I will attempt to clarify.
- Australia tried to get rid of guns, still has millions. Several hundred thousand of them illegal.
- Australia has a much lower firearms homicide rate, despite still having quite a lot of guns. Not the same ratio as the US, sure, but 4.5M guns for 28M people is still fairly prevalent and available.
- So the rate 1:50 ratio is not easily explained by simply reducing the number of guns in circulation. Something else is going on. Something harder to solve, even, than the second amendment.
I think reducing the "saturation" of guns is important, as it is a big driver of people's mindset, whereby they see a gun as an answer. By "saturation, I mean the number owned, their availability, their visibility, their promotion and so on. The US is a standout in ownership, in that it has almost twice as many civilian firearms per person than the next closest country [1]. I suspect the US is also a standout in the other areas: availability (Walmart, but less than before), visibility (open carry), promotion (NRA).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
False. - Gun regulation was made considerably more uniform.
Here is my actual IRL Australian neighbour legally shooting here in Australia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE