School shooting at Texas Elementary school, several children reported dead

[Bedinsis]

Something I found on twitter, outlining actionable policies to prevent massacres:

The linked report is only 17 pages long and formatted like a listicle.
Point 3 I found interesting, regarding the profiles of the perpetrators:
“They were people who felt severely damaged, presumably to the point of shame — not for something they had done but for who they were,” Langman observes. “They responded to their sense of personal insignificance by seeking to make themselves powerful, famous, and/or heroes.”
Also:
"While most mass shooters do fall somewhere on the spectrum of mental illness, defined broadly, that’s merely a testament to how common mental illness is."

 

[Agema]

That's not what the 2nd amendment says. It says specifically the people have the right to bear arms. Not the states or militias, but the people have that right.The militias are the reason the people need the right to bear arms. To paraphrase: "since the government is going to be armed by necessity, the people must also be allowed to arm themselves."

Uhh...

Yes, the 2nd Amendment unambiguously gives the people a right to bear arms. However, it seems to me to do so very clearly in reference to the need for citizens to defend the state: the citizenry are the armed forces of the state. To paraphrase better, "Since the people defend the state, the people must be allowed to arm themselves".

However, that then creates the context in which people should be allowed to bear arms. They want to own military grade weaponry (e.g. assault rifles), okay. But that doesn't necessarily mean they should be able to walk around them freely on an everyday basis, or that any random yahoo should be able to buy one entirely at whim.

 

[Dreiko]

Something I found on twitter, outlining actionable policies to prevent massacres:

The linked report is only 17 pages long and formatted like a listicle.
Point 3 I found interesting, regarding the profiles of the perpetrators:
“They were people who felt severely damaged, presumably to the point of shame — not for something they had done but for who they were,” Langman observes. “They responded to their sense of personal insignificance by seeking to make themselves powerful, famous, and/or heroes.”
Also:
"While most mass shooters do fall somewhere on the spectrum of mental illness, defined broadly, that’s merely a testament to how common mental illness is."

I don't see much actionable information here. Perhaps we should just have an hour every day where we make fun of mass shooters so that others won't think it's heroic or cool to be one? Share their tiny dick picks and have fujoshi write BL fanfics about them and then parade their corpses in fursuits too.

That's about all I can come up with.

 

[Bedinsis]

I don't see much actionable information here. Perhaps we should just have an hour every day where we make fun of mass shooters so that others won't think it's heroic or cool to be one? Share their tiny dick picks and have fujoshi write BL fanfics about them and then parade their corpses in fursuits too.

That's about all I can come up with.

From the thread itself:
Restricting high-capacity magazines, permit-to-purchase laws tied to universal background checks, taking guns away from demonstrably dangerous people and those prohibited from possessing guns, better early-warning systems, and closer tracking of the data that will inform other solutions.

 

[Dreiko]

From the thread itself:
Restricting high-capacity magazines, permit-to-purchase laws tied to universal background checks, taking guns away from demonstrably dangerous people and those prohibited from possessing guns, better early-warning systems, and closer tracking of the data that will inform other solutions.

Yeah that's run of the mill stuff they always talk about but not do, it's neither new nor actionable, apparently.

 

[Bedinsis]

Yeah that's run of the mill stuff they always talk about but not do, it's neither new nor actionable, apparently.

I never claimed it was new.
Enacting policies are actionable though, provided politicians are willing to do it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

These days, people who cling to their guns are among the more disempowered people in this society. The fantasy that they could be a sleeping giant is better to them than the reality.

Are they? Maybe some, but then there's people who can afford multiple assault weapons in the same calibre and the latest tacticool gear. Couch commandos have a very expensive cosplay hobby to pay for, dunno how disempowered they air.

I don't think the government can win such a hypothetical war because if it could then Vietnam would also have gone better too. The issue is that you won't really ever get a united population against an evil military but more like half the country and the evil military vs the other half, and sure, that fight is much less easy to win.

I'd point out that the Vietnam war was about dominoes falling in a country most Americans couldn't find on a map, and which the US didn't lose anything when they gave up. They had enough money to fund the moon landings during the war, it was not a great priority the way fighting for their own country would be.

 

[tstorm823]

I mean you say shaky. There was an actual court case about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
This really was decided in 2008. The 2nd Amendment really wasn't understood to mean citizens get guns until them. It was the first Supreme Court case to decide whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense or if the right was intended for state militias. This is pretty recent history.

Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886)

Presser v. Illinois: There is no Second Amendment violation when a state bans private citizens from forming personal military groups, drilling, and parading.

supreme.justia.com

Well, in Presser v. Illinois in 1886, they ruled that it was constitutional for states to ban private militias, but also said "the states cannot prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security." That's a bit backwards of what you think is accepted history.

But also, something going relatively unchallenged for over 200 years doesn't make it recent history. The challenges, the laws that would prevent a person from owning a gun without cause, are the recent history part of it.

 

[tstorm823]

However, that then creates the context in which people should be allowed to bear arms. They want to own military grade weaponry (e.g. assault rifles), okay. But that doesn't necessarily mean they should be able to walk around them freely on an everyday basis, or that any random yahoo should be able to buy one entirely at whim.

Yup, sure, I agree with these conclusions. There are plenty of perfectly reasonable and constitutional regulations on gun ownership. The point of contention with SilentPony is the suggestion that prior to 2008, the right to bear arms wasn't applied to general citizenry, but just to activities associated with state militias, which is bunk. The case I posted in response above actually claims that states can't deprive the people of guns in part because those same people make up the potential army of the federal government.

It's clear that the 2nd amendment exists for purposes of war, but what I'm saying is that who is to be fought for or against is deliberately open-ended: the people can be fighting for or against any level of government. It was a compromise between federalists who wanted a substantial standing army at the federal level to repell invaders and antifederalists who wanted states to be able to defend themselves from the federal government itself, as a generally armed populace could be mobilized either way. To read the amendment as "if you're not in a militia, you don't get guns" is the truly historically ignorant position.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Cops are scum, there is literally nothing that could be done for me to respect pigs anymore. If I see a thin blue line sticker, I'd think less of the person who has it.

This whole thing is a microcosm of why we shouldn't have guns, but gun owners are pretty convinced we need them.

If cops aren't even willing to protect literal children then they aren't going to protect anyone. They chose to literally stand there and do nothing for nearly an hour while they knew that children were being slaughtered.

The only person you can rely on to protect you is you, so it's completely understandable why people want to have guns to protect themselves.

The gun problem in America isn't just a problem with guns. It's a problem of fear and distrust. Distrust of the government (for good reason), distrust of our neighbors. The proliferation of guns in the US exists because of fear, and that fear is not being addressed by our government, instead the government seems to constantly be doing everything in their power to make things worse.

 

[BrawlMan]

​

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

If cops aren't even willing to protect literal children then they aren't going to protect anyone. They chose to literally stand there and do nothing for nearly an hour while they knew that children were being slaughtered.

Let's not forget the Supreme Court ruled that police do not in fact have a constitutional duty to protect anyone.

Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone (Published 2005)

Supreme Court rules that police do not have constitutional duty to protect person from harm, even woman who obtained court-issued protective order against violent husband which made arrest mandatory for violation; decision overturns ruling by federal appeals court in Colorado; it had permitted...

www.nytimes.com

"But nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors." - Chief Justice William Rehnquist

 

[SilentPony]

This whole thing is a microcosm of why we shouldn't have guns, but gun owners are pretty convinced we need them.

If cops aren't even willing to protect literal children then they aren't going to protect anyone. They chose to literally stand there and do nothing for nearly an hour while they knew that children were being slaughtered.

The only person you can rely on to protect you is you, so it's completely understandable why people want to have guns to protect themselves.

The gun problem in America isn't just a problem with guns. It's a problem of fear and distrust. Distrust of the government (for good reason), distrust of our neighbors. The proliferation of guns in the US exists because of fear, and that fear is not being addressed by our government, instead the government seems to constantly be doing everything in their power to make things worse.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Let's not forget the Supreme Court ruled that police do not in fact have a constitutional duty to protect anyone.

Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone (Published 2005)

Supreme Court rules that police do not have constitutional duty to protect person from harm, even woman who obtained court-issued protective order against violent husband which made arrest mandatory for violation; decision overturns ruling by federal appeals court in Colorado; it had permitted...

www.nytimes.com

"But nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors." - Chief Justice William Rehnquist

Probably because there actually is nothing in the Constitution that says that the cops do have a constitutional duty to protect anyone. That's a problem with the Constitution itself. That said, cops don't have a Constutional duty to protect anyone, the duty of cops as an institution is to protect the people. Cops don't need anything in the Constitution to give them a duty to protect, it's still the reason police exist.

 

[FakeSympathy]

So I just found this post, and made the following comments in another thread, but I feel it's more appropriate here.

It seems that once again gaming is blamed for gun violence

Texas congressman blames rap music and video games for Uvalde school shooting

Ronny Jackson made his claims during an interview on Fox News.

www.revolt.tv

Oh so they're now bringing rap music into this as well. Both rap and games exist in other parts of the world, yet gun violence is significantly lower. I wonder what's the excuse/rebuttal to that?

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Worse than useless

 

[Kwak]

Worse than useless

The Filth.

 

[Dreiko]

Is it possible they feared some kind of ransom situation and didn't wanna agitate the shooter in case he started shooting hostages? Like I get the first instinct is to call em cowards but who knows what they were trained to do in this situation.

 

[Agema]

That said, cops don't have a Constutional duty to protect anyone, the duty of cops as an institution is to protect the people. Cops don't need anything in the Constitution to give them a duty to protect, it's still the reason police exist.

Yes and no.

Firemen have no absolute responsibility to run into a burning building to rescue people either: they generally assess how dangerous the situation is and if they deem it too high a likelihood that they will die in the process of attempting to rescue, they do not have to. In a lot of basic courses for emergency response, what is taught is to assess the potential danger, because getting even more people (including oneself) killed is not an improvement. In this sense, higher level police officers have to consider carefully the lives of their officers and the public, because in many circumstances for all they know, just packing in their staff mob-handed may lead to more deaths in some circumstances - for instance if the suspect still has hostages, or the lives of their officers, or any other innocents if the police haven't yet clearly identified what's going on.

I don't mean this to say the police did fine in this particular case: that's for an inquiry to determine. Nor do I know the specifics of the law in question that went to SCOTUS and what that ruling means in terms of police practice. I just mean to say that protecting society doesn't necessarily mean sending police officers straight into an assault on an armed suspect as soon as they arrive on the scene.

 

[BrawlMan]

Glad to see the youth fight for their future and something important.

Students stage walkouts across U.S. to protest Texas school massacre

"This could have been any of us," a 17-year-old in Vermont said.

www.nbcnews.com

Students walk out of schools in protest of gun violence

Days after 19 students and 2 teachers were killed in a mass shooting, students walked out of class protesting gun violence.

abcnews.go.com

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/26/virginia-students-demonstrate-texas-shooting-safety/