jesse3638
Hooked
Crazy to read that a young female student was one of the shooters. That is definitely atypical of these tragedies. It sounds like a very brave young man put himself in harm's way (and sadly lost his life) trying to protect his fellow classmates.
Irrespective of the gun debate, I am stricken by the fundamental disregard for others that is pervasive in our society. That disregard seems to be getting worse by the day. If society doesn't figure out how to address the issue, we are screwed. The instrumentalities of death may change as laws change, but the amount of death and disregard for life likely will not.
I cannot help but think that the proliferation of social media cannot be ignored when discussing the degradation of our society, and I have recently read at least one scholarly article presenting a correlation between social media (in 2011, Twitter doubled it users, Facebook exceeded 750 million users, and Instagram had been out for one year) and the yearly number of mass shootings (demonstrably higher from 2011-2018 than in the preceding 8 year period of 2003-2010.)
Agreed, and social media has created more tribalism, not less.
In the wake of the recent shootings my coworker and I were having this exact conversation how the media and social media (gaming is now a form of social media too) seems to have made people almost numb to just how precious a human life is. To walk in and senselessly kill someone whether you feel wronged by said person or people or to do it for notoriety and infamy is crazy. I was a senior in high school the year Columbine happened. I had many discussions with classmates right after and none of us thought something like that could or would ever happen. We looked around at our classmates wondering if anyone would even try that . Even the "Goths" (students who wore black clothing, dyed their hair black, listened to metal...haha) thought it was crazy. The weapon of choice is not the issue, it's much larger than that. The stats you posted are indicative of that. George Orwell may have been onto something well before his time...
Even though guns were used in this school attack and many other attacks, we are noticing that guns are not the only way to mass kill humans (reference China knife school attacks and driving large vehicles in crowded areas, etc), this is hardly a gun issue. Guns are simply the mechanism that is utilized. We are fooling ourselves if we think that simply making all, or any type of gun illegal will solve this issue.
This is school attack/violence issue, not a school ‘shooting’ issue, by labeling it that we are not being true to ourselves of what the larger problem is.
Why aren’t our schools protected like court houses or other political buildings, shit even my water reclamation/treatment facility is more secured. We refuse to implement the needed protective measures to harden these soft targets. How easy is it to walk on school grounds and just poke around. Once we let a terrorist conduct an attack on a school then maybe we will start securing them, kind of like locking cabin doors.
Mental health is an issue as well, but again if the perpetrator is not even in the system or seeking help then that’s not a preventive measure. The best hope is to harden these targets, no we don’t have to make them look like Gitmo. Israel has some how found a way to harden their schools and not make it look like a combat outpost. Sure we could do the same.
Sent from my iPhone using WAYALIFE mobile app
This has been said many times throughout this thread. In Sharkey's last post he says this pretty clearly. It's much larger issue than guns.