Schools, Shootings, Children and Adulthood

 

The OP proposed regulations on reproduction and voting age. He was trolling.

With 7.5 Billion humans cluttering up the landscape, reproductive "rights" seriously need to be curtailed before we breed ourselves extinct.  No troll there, simple math.

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

In reply to alfadriver :

Besides, we don't NEED free press and we don't NEED huge churches not run by the gov't. 

I'm not touching the AR discussion but...

Churches and Newspapers aren't the tools (at least in this country) used in mass murder.

I grew up reading a fair amount of science fiction.  The works of Heinlein really resonated with me.  In books like Starship Troopers, people earned citizenship through federal service and held themselves to a higher standard of behavior.  Not perfect by any means but recognizing that acting a certain way was good and helped advance the society while acting another was simple unacceptable.

Now I look around and see Idiocracy playing itself out daily as if people saw the movie and thought it was a viable option.

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

z31maniac said:

I have another question for the 2A happy proponents (I have my CCL and own more than 1)..............I frequently read/hear that it's for defense against tyranny of the government.............so a bunch of middle-aged folks with Glocks and an AR are going to stop the most powerful military in the world?

I then 95% of the time get the response, "Well the military would never turn its guns on the people!"

Anyone else see the contradiction here?

It's a military of citizens. There will always be those that follow orders. But it's much harder to make your citizen soldiers turn their guns on their fellow citizens. What makes this hard to compare is the general dynamic of your country. You can't compare us to Europe because guns have been part of our culture since its inception. We have a different health care system. We have a different military/police etc. We're similar, but too many differences to make real apples to apples comparisons. 

What makes us unique is the ability to have a coup without ever firing a shot every few years.

Uh, Europeans were going strong with guns and every type of weapon that came before them. Where did the American colonizers come from? All those wars, who fought in them? With what? Until not long ago military service was mandatory in many European counties. Every one of those neutral Swiss were packing.

What so different about our military or police? Tell me.

KyAllroad (Jeremy) said:

 

The OP proposed regulations on reproduction and voting age. He was trolling.

With 7.5 Billion humans cluttering up the landscape, reproductive "rights" seriously need to be curtailed before we breed ourselves extinct.  No troll there, simple math.

I'd agree. The first step would be making the methods of preventing reproduction easily accessible. The second would be to give incentives for not having kids, while not harming kids in poor families. One way we might be able to set up more after-school programs, meal programs for kids, give incentives for child care, and increase the earned income tax credit. Make working more profitable than sitting around sucking benefits because you've got 10 kids. Catholics will hate this, because it requires that Mom and Dad both go to work, and that kids spend more time in public school. 

Perhaps requiring that employers give more vacation time, so that people don't feel like their only goal in life is to work 9-5 and come home every night, driving the social pressures to have a house, have kids, have a dog, own two cars. This might relieve some stress from our lives as well. 

Society pressures us to have kids, lots of kids, but at the same time that we've gotta work work work, and actually live your life, for you? Not acceptable. 

Grizz said:

Added point, the last 20 years reinforces the lesson from vietnam. Our military is still not set up well to deal with insurgents instead of an actual army. They stomped the piss out of saddams army but a bunch of goat herders with AKs in some mountains in Afghanistan have held them up for 17 years

I've often said that the US miitary seems to be designed to single-handedly win a second, futuristic version of WW2, while in the post-WW2 world the odds of a straightforward mechanized war between countries with modern militaries is ever-decreasing (perhaps with one unneccessary spike recently, depending on how you define "modern").

KyAllroad (Jeremy) said:

Have any of you actually talked to a teenager about their thoughts on the subject?

Last night I had some father-son time with mini-me who just turned 16 and his thoughts ran along the lines of people (mostly young people) feeling hopeless in an increasingly anonymous world.  They realize that for the vast majority, they are going to live their lives, do all the things expected of them, and when they die, be forgotten withing a few days. 

 

Thank you for the reminder!!!

Shared parenting and less of the courts defaulting to sole custody arrangements following separation and divorce solves most of these problems.

One of the common factors among all these shooters is "poor upbringing"

What does that mean..    most often single parent homes.    We are creating an expectation upon divorce one parent is going to have their role reduced to being a paycheck and the other is going to raise the kids.   It defines roles and creates a situation which isn't healthy, a virtual breeding ground for all forms of misbehavior and negative results.

Allow parents to be parents, make it the cultural norm instead of the usual and you curb these problems.

In reply to pheller :

Essentially that yes.

Your second part still involves the feds, since their solution recently has been to hand out military vehicles and full auto guns like candy to any police force with some extra tax money to burn.



I think the bigger issue is less ARs, since they've been around since the early 60s for civilian ownership with even less restriction than today, and more the mental aspect of things, since mass shootings have only gone crazy since what, the 90s? The first AWB didn't stop Columbine, it didn't stop VT and another wont stop anything else.

I know it gets dismissed as a gun nut talking point but the mental health system we have definitely needs reworked. And the idea of banning gun ownership for people with mental health issues is just going to make more people go undiagnosed because they don't want to lose their rights because they were depressed. I also think we're far too willing to throw too many meds that berkeley with the chemical balance of the brain at kids who are still developing.

There's stuff that can be done to make schools more secure, stuff that quite frankly should be done even if there were no mass shootings. How the hell people get mad at the idea of a building full of kids being hard as hell to get into without permission is beyond me.

Bob the REAL oil guy. said:

In reply to alfadriver :

better? sure. Versatile? no. You missed the part of me enjoying shooting sports as well. There isn't another rifle in that price range that is as good all around. Something I fought for years (always an AK over AR fan) is the ergonomics. It's, well, spot on. Everything falls right to hand, it's balance is great, accuaracy is phenomenal past 300 yards (I'm not that good, but I try) and it cost me under $500 several years ago. 

Besides, we don't NEED free press and we don't NEED huge churches not run by the gov't. 

You do realize that there are legal restrictions on the free press and what is considered a church, don't you?  For some reason, the only amendment that we can't touch, apparently, is the 2nd.  The rest- they have bounds.

So you want to make sure killers can have magazines of 30 rounds that they can empty into a crowd as fast as their finger can pull so you can have fun.  Ok... sounds reasonable.... Basically, that says we should just get used to these events happening, "pray" for the dead, and move on.  Nothing we can do.  Awesome.

Grizz said:

There's stuff that can be done to make schools more secure, stuff that quite frankly should be done even if there were no mass shootings. How the hell people get mad at the idea of a building full of kids being hard as hell to get into without permission is beyond me.

Because it requires higher taxes to pay for school buildings to be modernized with this common theme in mind. Even as long ago as 30 years this wasn't something that entered the minds of most citizens, schools or architects. No school board requested school that were designed to prevent entry. 

In reply to pheller :

I'm not talking about that specifically, that at least makes sense. I'm talking about the ones who get all huffy and say that I want to turn schools into prisons.

We call first-person shooter video games "fun", and train our kids to enjoy the dopamine rush of shooting at realistic human-like targets, then wonder why they want to shoot people to make themselves feel better. 

Its not the kids that are berkeleyed up. 

Dirtydog said:

I believe a lot has to do with proper parenting.  Albeit, this case, the kid had no parents.  But.... My observation is that young "adults" have not been taught responsibility.   ...

People keep saying this.... and it makes me wonder how many young adults they actually know.  Because most of the young adults I know are a hell of a lot more responsible than I was at their age.  And I was considered more responsible than most.

pheller said:

Grizz said:

There's stuff that can be done to make schools more secure, stuff that quite frankly should be done even if there were no mass shootings. How the hell people get mad at the idea of a building full of kids being hard as hell to get into without permission is beyond me.

Because it requires higher taxes to pay for school buildings to be modernized with this common theme in mind. Even as long ago as 30 years this wasn't something that entered the minds of most citizens, schools or architects. No school board requested school that were designed to prevent entry.

Plus, a building that is hard to get into also tends to be hard to get out of, which can become a safety issue.  You only need to look at places like concert venues to see how this is handled - with pure man-power at the entrances and egress points.  Man-power costs money -something most school districts are lacking in.

SVreX said:

We call first-person shooter video games "fun", and train our kids to enjoy the dopamine rush of shooting at realistic human-like targets, then wonder why they want to shoot people to make themselves feel better. 

Its not the kids that are berkeleyed up. 

I doubt there's any meaningful link between mass shootings and FPS games. If there were, we should have seen mass shootings ramp up sharply along with the proliferation of FPS games since the late '80s, before which there were none. Professional psychologists have always been quick to argue against it:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/violent-video-games-and-mass-violence-a-complex-link/

In fact there is an inverse correlation between FPS gaming and violent crime in general:

(One of those is a fighting game, although one that got a lot of press attention for its violent imagery)

(It's also worth noting that Doom was the first FPS that sold in huge numbers. For a while FPSes were called "Doom clones", although Doom was not even the first commercial FPS game.)

Grizz said:

In reply to pheller :

I'm not talking about that specifically, that at least makes sense. I'm talking about the ones who get all huffy and say that I want to turn schools into prisons.

I was in a local high school a number of years ago an I commented that it really felt like a prison, especially the cafeteria area. A friend of mine that works for a large architectural firm told me that some of the firms that design schools also do prisons. That made sense.

I want my kids to be safe, but I prefer the high schools in my district. They don't look like prisons.

Another note, is high schoolers are in and out of school all day long. Delayed start, activities, sports, vo-tech. Limiting access is tough.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

Yep. Blaming FPS games is another popular gross generalization.

GameboyRMH said:

SVreX said:

We call first-person shooter video games "fun", and train our kids to enjoy the dopamine rush of shooting at realistic human-like targets, then wonder why they want to shoot people to make themselves feel better. 

Its not the kids that are berkeleyed up. 

I doubt there's any meaningful link between mass shootings and FPS games. If there were, we should have seen mass shootings ramp up as sharply along with the proliferation of FPS games since the late '80s, before which there were none. Professional psychologists have always been quick to argue against it:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/violent-video-games-and-mass-violence-a-complex-link/

In fact there is an inverse correlation between FPS gaming and violent crime in general:

(One of those is a fighting game, although one that got a lot of press attention for its violent imagery)

The link you posted says nearly the opposite of what you wrote. 

It says there here is a complex relationship, not that there is likely no meaningful link. 

Ian F said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

Yep. Blaming FPS games is another popular gross generalization.

Defending them is as well. 

Right, because the rest of the world also has access to those games. 

Also, I can't see how even a wacked out mass-shooter views any similarity between shooting "bad guys" and shooting kids, or their peers. 

If that was the case I'd think we see more young people battling it out with police officers.

Video games glorify violence, but our politics glorify hate. 

Hey Dad, aren't trains supposed to run on tracks?

Usually,  son, but that's not how things work here.

IBTL

KyAllroad (Jeremy) said:

I grew up reading a fair amount of science fiction.  The works of Heinlein really resonated with me.  In books like Starship Troopers, people earned citizenship through federal service and held themselves to a higher standard of behavior.  Not perfect by any means but recognizing that acting a certain way was good and helped advance the society while acting another was simple unacceptable.

Now I look around and see Idiocracy playing itself out daily as if people saw the movie and thought it was a viable option.

First thing I thought of too. 

In reply to SVreX :

I've personally always thought those games were boring and generally stupid, but given their popularity it doesn't seem logical they cause a wholesale numbing to violence. They are more of an additional symptom. Could say the same thing about slasher and other violent films. 

SVreX said:

The link you posted says nearly the opposite of what you wrote. 

 

It says there here is a complex relationship, not that there is likely no meaningful link. 

 

That's what the headline says, not what the article says...you know how headlines are.

Edit: Really I think the fact that in 1990, virtually nobody had been exposed to FPS gaming, and now, the average person with easy access to electricity has shot hundreds to zillions of virtual bad guys in the face, without any remotely similar trend in mass shootings, says that FPS games are not to blame.

Edit2: Here's another article on this very topic, hot off the presses:

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/25/health/video-games-and-violence/index.html