Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

They’re really going with the “there should only be one door in schools” huh? Okay.

They’re either reinventing every old timely firetrap disaster or reinventing the prison.

Old-timey

Schools should be like bank vaults. You lock the kids in at the beginning of the day, provide them with knowledge (but just about math and stuff - nothing about history, especially not American history, 'cause it makes the white kids' parents feel bad), and unlock the vault at the end of the day and let 'em all out again. Give 'em catheters so nobody ever has to leave their seats.

they're not going to get rid of doors i assume? all but one will set off the fire alarm. so you'll need a man inside?

The other big idea in the news is ratting to the authorities about peoples mental states to have them put on a list. .ya....

Is it too cynical to assume that support for gun freedom (or whatever you wanna call it) is to some extent contingent on lawmakers’ need to ensure their/their families’ continued safety?

We're beyond cynicism

i think it is ultimately the same instinct that led to massive opposition to seatbelt laws. and masks. land of the free. if i want to be a total fucking lunatic that’s my business. yes there might be some collateral damage but the principle is sacred. it’s incredibly juvenile but probably more psychically powerful for being so.

stupidly looked at fb for the first time in months, and the all the conservatives (mostly replying to normal friends’ posts) solemnly concern-trolling in unison about Mental Health I’m asking you to pls have a very nice dip in a vat of acid

otm

They have spent years cutting programs and ignoring mental health, but are all too happy to talk about it now that the only other alternative is to seriously discuss gun control.

^^^

they want to deal with it by creating fucking Arkham Asylum to dispose of undesirables

Oh, I'm under no delusions they will do anything at all to help, I'm just sickened by their "motivations" for suddenly pretending to give a shit about mental health.

yep, it's them concern trolling and little else. whatever will take the heat off of them.

All the talk about mental health services is just a stalling tactic by gun advocates until the heat dies down.

well it would be nice at least for dems to call their bluff and ask them to sign, like, a bipartisan £20B public safety and mental health recovery act of 2023 with provisions for opioid treatment

Sure, but they would mumble excuses about how you can't rush these things and in a month no one would care when the whole issue sinks from view again.

well i would!

there should be better controlled entrances and exits to schools. but this school already had that!

don't worry, now they're all blaming a teacher that propped a door open

oh and also the School Resource Officer that had the confrontation with the shooter and failed to stop him....actually failed to stop him because he was never there to begin with. fuckin' liars.

the 'arm teachers' movement is going to gain steam because conservatives know the average teacher will resign rather than do that, and be replaced with a Christ-fearing, kneejerk conservative loony who will teach the agenda they want.

they know it wouldn't stop the fucking shootings.

I've been wondering about the details of that. It says that he was able to enter an unlocked back door. Did they have security entrances (i.e. doorbells, cameras, intercoms) on the other doors?

xp

even if we turn these schools into impregnable fortresses with a single entrance and Vietnam Vets hiding inside every other locker it still wouldn't change much, since these violent psychos will just decide to shoot up a shopping mall, or a parade, or a grocery store, or a day care instead. it's like the "sell your home and move" solution to climate change. of course there's no purpose in pointing this out, cuz it's not like they really care about fixing this in the first place. just another thing to be mad about.

we can either

make guns more difficult to acquire

or

turn schools into prisons where kids actually have anxiety attacks attending it

Behind the firewall, but Goldberg is worth reading if you like doom posting before a holiday weekend.

The horrifying irony, the hideous ratchet, is that the more America is besieged by senseless violence, the more the paramilitary wing of the American right is strengthened. Gun sales tend to rise after mass shootings. Republicans responded to the massacre in Uvalde by doubling down on calls to arm teachers and “harden” schools. An article in The Federalist argued that parents must home-school so that kids can learn “in a controlled environment where guns can be safely carried for self-defense or locked away when not in use.” It’s a vision of a society — if you can call it that — where every family is a fortress.

Guns are now the leading cause of death for American children. Many conservatives consider this a price worth paying for their version of freedom. Our institutions give these conservatives disproportionate power whether or not they win elections. The filibuster renders the Senate largely impotent. Trump, a president who lost the popular vote, was able to appoint Supreme Court justices who are poised to help overturn a New York state law restricting the carrying of concealed weapons. It’s increasingly hard to see a path to small-d democratic reform.

And so among liberals, there’s an overwhelming feeling of despair. Even as people learn the names of all those murdered children, the most common sentiment is not “never again,” but a bitter acknowledgment that nothing is going to change. America is too sick, too broken. It is perhaps beyond repair.

Two years ago, David French, an anti-Trump conservative, published a book, “Divided We Fall,” warning of the possible crackup of the United States. It included two chapters imagining scenarios for how the dissolution of the country might happen. One involved a mass shooting at a school in California, to which the state’s people reacted “with white-hot rage.” French envisioned furious state politicians defying the Second Amendment, leading to a nullification crisis and blue-state secession.

He meant it as a cautionary tale, but rereading the chapter after Uvalde, it feels less bleak than our reality.

the conservative media war on doors is hilarious. too many doors. pls can someone tell them doors don’t kill people

Student calls to 911:
12:03—whispered she's in room 112
12:10—said multiple dead
12:13—called again
12:16—says 8-9 students alive
12:19—student calls from room 111
12:21—3 shots heard on call
12:36—another call
12:43—asks for police
12:47—asks for policehttps://t.co/CzkuF1llq1

— Mike Baker (@ByMikeBaker) May 27, 2022

what the fuck

I know shit never changes but it might be nice for news orgs to highlight the fact that the most overfunded and trigger-happy police force on the planet would rather let children die than engage an active shooter

xpost

Alfred looks like an interesting counterpoint between the French book and the one by Barbara Walter that I just posted the review of in the civil war thread. Actually there may be considerable overlap if the other main scenario French envisions is a more successful rerun of 1/6.

the cops also said they didn't go in because they thought everyone in the classroom was dead. Those phone calls must have been coming from some jokers. Some real punks.

i shouldn't be surprised because it's an expected consequence of these assholes being used getting away with lies but (1) why would they assume that and (2) even if they did wouldn't it be a good idea to see if they were wrong and someone in there is in urgent need of medical attention? it just blows my mind that they thought this was a good explanation. so they don't have to admit they were scared.

Here's a handy flow chart for future reference

"Did a cop say it?" ----------> "It was a lie."

Speaking of lies, one of the most infuriating things to me about the last few days (or the last few mass shootings, take your pick) is conservative conspiracy peddling that these events somehow *must* be false flag operations designed to ultimately take their guns away, because they can't possibly conceive that their religion of more guns all the time could possibly lead to the horrible consequences we're seeing.

In this most recent case, I think they're having a hard time deciding between a false flag with crisis actors (phony), or the shooter being a trans illegal immigrant (real).. tough call for conspiracy wackos

So many are dropping out of the NRA conference, looks like Lyin' Ted might have the whole stage to himself.. I hope he has enough material

Same logic that leads them to declare that Covid numbers are being vastly inflated and all precautionary measures are useless BUT we need a border wall because Mexicans are bringing it into the country in droves

Police arrested a 16 year old for making online terror threats to the high school next door to me.

So many are dropping out of the NRA conference, looks like Lyin' Ted might have the whole stage to himself.. I hope he has enough material

Trump will be there, but he'll just be riffing on low-flo shower heads, Hunter's laptop, hamburgers, etc... a greatest hits vamp

There's only one way I want to read anything about Trump on a thread about shooting sprees and that ain't it.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Is there any tangible reason as to why Biden has not issued an executive order in response to Uvalde? Obv an outright ban on automatic weapons would be great, but more realistically, a year-long wait on their purchase to allow for background checks? or a temporary year-long ban? or a ban on military-style armour? or a ban on large magazines? Any thoughts as to why he hasn't done this?

I assume the ban on machine guns is federal - otherwise, a bunch of these states would definitely allow them

Reagan signed a federal ban on new production machine guns for civilians in 1986.

It’s no more likely to come to pass than striking the second amendment completely but putting all semi-auto firearms under the auspices of the NFA (part of the above ban) would be absolutely constitutional*.

*if we didn’t have the Court such as it is.

i remember feeling hopeful last year when he nominated a pretty strident gun control advocate to head the ATF - stonewalled by GOP & eventually withdrawn after like 6 months

An executive order? Basically, he'd need to declare some kind of state of national emergency. He could do it, but the most tangible reason he won't do that is the idea that he'd squander a large amount of 'political capital' while stirring up a hornet's nest of opposition and probably getting swatted down in court, possibly within hours.

i'm not sure 'political capital' is a useful metric at this point. the republicans have shown that if you have the power, you can do whatever you want, no matter how generally unpopular

swatted down in court is certainly relevant tho. also i think we may be getting to the point where the enforcement arm of the executive branch cannot necessarily be counted on to carry out certain executive orders. and if *that* happens, things very rapidly fall apart

I just heard the reporter on the PBS New Hour talking about how many of the surviving children followed their active shooter training and went looking for hiding places: "The children did what they were trained to do... even if the adults did not," she said in a shaky voice.

Pretty damning stuff

i'm not sure 'political capital' is a useful metric at this point.

I tend to agree, but this kind of thinking is still influential among dem leadership, who do not feel like they can safely win power without careful triangulation, unlike the GOP whose power rests firmly on controlling the Senate via the states with small, mostly rural populations.

The dem leadership doesn’t want to do anything to spook the pro-gun and pro-cop republican swing voters they are courting, who might cut the Dem loss of the House from 35 seats to 34.