The mass shooting today.

drummerboy said:

today's shooting. 4 dead in Tulsa

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/01/us/tulsa-shooting-oklahoma-news

Are we supposed to follow the Republican plan of hardening? A heavily armed single entrance at schools, hospitals, libraries, supermarkets, movie and concert venues, so on? What about trains and subways? Have checkpoints as we have at airports? What a rotten dystopian society we'll end having.

But doesn't that conflict with their 2nd Amendment belief in being allowed to have and to carry? They can't even be consistent in their bs.

I saw that the police "general" in charge of that six man school police department wears four stars on his uniform. Talk about self-aggrandizement. Its a reflection of his character and likely his competence when he needs to advertise himself as a four star.

What's next? The head of security at your local Walmart, Sam's Club or  Costco wearing four star outfits?


RTrent said:

I saw that the police "general" in charge of that six man school police department wears four stars on his uniform. Talk about self-aggrandizement. Its a reflection of his character and likely his competence when he needs to advertise himself as a four star.

What's next? The head of security at your local Walmart, Sam's Club or  Costco wearing four star outfits?

Well there is ex sheriff David Clark who wears 4 stars as well as many fake pins and ribbons.


RTrent said:

drummerboy said:

today's shooting. 4 dead in Tulsa

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/01/us/tulsa-shooting-oklahoma-news

Are we supposed to follow the Republican plan of hardening? A heavily armed single entrance at schools, hospitals, libraries, supermarkets, movie and concert venues, so on? What about trains and subways? Have checkpoints as we have at airports? What a rotten dystopian society we'll end having.

But doesn't that conflict with their 2nd Amendment belief in being allowed to have and to carry? They can't even be consistent in their bs.

I saw that the police "general" in charge of that six man school police department wears four stars on his uniform. Talk about self-aggrandizement. Its a reflection of his character and likely his competence when he needs to advertise himself as a four star.

What's next? The head of security at your local Walmart, Sam's Club or  Costco wearing four star outfits?

this isn't just a GOP plan. Several years back a CHS student was found to have a weapon (IIRC, a knife) in a locker. Several people on MOL went ballistic and suggested a single entrance, metal detectors, armed security, etc.

It's easy for people to freak out when these incidents happen. And even the most rational among us know that nothing will be done about the number of guns in circulation. So some folks default to brainstorming how to harden the potential targets in the absence of meaningful gun restrictions.


We’ve Known How To Prevent A School Shooting for More Than 20 Years (fivethirtyeight)

Summarizing excerpts:

Some of the best data on the mental state of school shooters has come from interviews with those shooters (and would-be shooters) who survived the attack. Randazzo described one such living school shooter, currently serving multiple life sentences, who told her that before the attack he spent weeks vacillating between suicide and homicide. Only after he tried and failed to kill himself did he settle on killing others in hopes that someone would kill him. Garbarino, who has interviewed dozens of people who went to prison for life as teenagers, both for school shootings and other violent crimes, heard many similar stories.

“The reason I emphasize this is that we know so much about how to help someone who is suicidal, and those same resources can be used very effectively with someone who is planning to engage in school violence,” Randazzo said. So how do we spot the ones who are planning an attack at a school? The studies she and O’Toole published years ago showed that, like people planning to attack the president, would-be school shooters don’t keep their plans to themselves. They tell friends or even teachers that they want to kill. They talk about their anger and their suicidality. They lash out violently against family and friends. And as more teens have attacked their schoolmates, that pattern has proved to hold true over time.

...

You can’t predict violent events or who will go from threatening behavior to murder, O’Toole said. But it is possible for us to look around and see the people who are having problems and need intervention. Interventions can prevent violence, even if we can’t predict it, she told me. For example, at least four potential school shootings that were averted in the weeks after Parkland all stopped because the would-be killers spoke or wrote about their plans and someone told law enforcement.

And there’s usually time to spot these things coming. While homicides in general are almost never premeditated, mass shootings — including school shootings — almost always are, said Adam Lankford, a professor of criminology at the University of Alabama

...

But time also erodes the systems that schools have implemented in the past to prevent violence. Randazzo told me that her team had trained numerous school districts in school shooting prevention back in the early 2000s and that, as of 2018, many of those districts no longer had prevention systems in place. Thanks to staff turnover and budget reprioritization, such institutional knowledge simply withered away.


not sure if I posted this before, but here it is.

total insanity.


One important thing all these lunatics seem to misunderstand is, a child’s right to be safe in school outweighs all their rights to own weapons of war.


Well, so much for stopping the terrorist by confronting him -

UVALDE, Texas — Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.

The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.

But there were problems from the start.

Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a decision to fall back, the official said.

Rather than confront an actively shooting gunman immediately, as officers have been trained to do since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999, the ever-growing force of increasingly armed officers arriving at Robb Elementary held back for more than an hour.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/uvalde-police-response.html


Jaytee said:

One important thing all these lunatics seem to misunderstand is, a child’s right to be safe in school outweighs all their rights to own weapons of war.

An originalist like Alito would differ.

Schools, what schools, nowhere in the constitution are schools mentioned. But guns, a right guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment.


RTrent said:

Well, so much for stopping the terrorist by confronting him -

UVALDE, Texas — Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.

The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.

But there were problems from the start.

Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a decision to fall back, the official said.

Rather than confront an actively shooting gunman immediately, as officers have been trained to do since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999, the ever-growing force of increasingly armed officers arriving at Robb Elementary held back for more than an hour.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/uvalde-police-response.html

I have to be honest and say that I'm barely paying attention to these stories anymore. It's clear there was a massive eff up by the police, but the story is changing practically  daily. I hope there's a solid independent investigation (by Texas? ha ha. cross your fingers) that will finally explain what happened.


And as an aside, I hope that the next journalist who faces a gun-nut telling us that doors are the problem asks them  "how do doors protect students when they're outside during recess"?


drummerboy said:

I have to be honest and say that I'm barely paying attention to these stories anymore. It's clear there was a massive eff up by the police, but the story is changing practically  daily. I hope there's a solid independent investigation (by Texas? ha ha. cross your fingers) that will finally explain what happened.

Like you, I don't expect any veracity from any Texas investigation. The state is irremediably corrupt. 


RTrent said:

An originalist like Alito would differ.

Schools, what schools, nowhere in the constitution are schools mentioned. But guns, a right guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment.

Originalist? How is a lone gunman a militia?


on the one hand, I can see why you would want to stop parents from running into the school, IF the cops had the situation under control and were doing something to get the shooter.

Since that was not the case, more power to her.

Apparently, this women was called by local LE and they threatened her to stop talking to the media.



we are so damaged. are we fixable?


Sometimes I think you need to hear/read how rapidly we hear and read your news developments:

On the further-developed notion of using armed drones inside school zones - today’s report, not last week’s:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-06/ethics-panel-members-resign-axon-taser-drones-mass-shootings/101129270


joanne said:

Sometimes I think you need to hear/read how rapidly we hear and read your news developments:

On the further-developed notion of using armed drones inside school zones - today’s report, not last week’s:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-06/ethics-panel-members-resign-axon-taser-drones-mass-shootings/101129270

That's gotta be the stupidest idea ever.


drummerboy said:

we are so damaged. are we fixable?

We're still fixable if we get our act together. The majority is decent. A decency that wants gun control and other progressive changes. 

The majority does not run to state houses armed with AR15's or threatening to kill legislators. The most the decent folk do is protest outside the homes of SC justices (without AR15's).

That's the difference between the decent majority and the armed rabid right wing minority.

How does the majority gets its act together? Vote. Don't tolerate politicians that compromise with bull. Call out the two senators who blocked the administration as rogues who not worthy of the seats they were elected to. If not now, then do it if the senate goes Republican because their votes for judicial nominations will no longer matter. 

Don't tolerate politicians who tell us, its the filibuster. They need to know if they can't handle it then they'll be replaced with those who can.

They talk about women's right to choose. But when we had forced birther congressman Henry Cuellar running against right to choose progressive Jessica Cisneros the Democratic leadership supported Cuellar. They talk but don't walk.

We're ruled by very comfortable, old people who do not want to pass the mantle. In history I've never seen a country run by a gerontocracy becoming or remaining great. Its like old Imperial China, a senescent decline into irrelevancy.


Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician in Texas, described what he saw: "I had heard from some of the nurses that there were two dead children who had been moved to the surgical area of the hospital. ... "[What I did find was something no prayer will ever relieve: Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities was blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them. Clinging for life and finding none."

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/gun-violence-mass-shooting-hearing-06-08-22/h_77ed716fa4763d081b96c072da50ccc6


drummerboy said:

we are so damaged. are we fixable?

The only way to fix the United States is to either hold a new Constitutional Convention (with delegates apportioned by population) and/or start trimming the Union.  

The oligarchical system of government set out by the Founders is obsolete.  We see this with the ever increasing power of the forced birth movement and the point is driven home with every school yard massacre. The solution to America's problems is actual Democracy.


Please pardon my reading comprehension — I haven’t yet gotten through the Root Causes chart in the other thread — but what is that map showing?


DaveSchmidt said:

Please pardon my reading comprehension — I haven’t yet gotten through the Root Causes chart in the other thread — but what is that map showing?

It shows a proposed redrawing of the US  with states determined in such a way that each voter would have the same voice in the electoral college and the US Senate.  As it stands now (and I am sure you are aware) the vote of a citizen in Wyoming for President is equal to the vote of 30+ Californians, while that same citizen of Wyoming has 80 times more clout in the US Senate than a citizen of California.  


Its just an example though.  The larger point is that the US system needs reform that is beyond the scope of the current Constitution.


GoSlugs said:

drummerboy said:

we are so damaged. are we fixable?

The only way to fix the United States is to either hold a new Constitutional Convention (with delegates apportioned by population) and/or start trimming the Union.  

The oligarchical system of government set out by the Founders is obsolete.  We see this with the ever increasing power of the forced birth movement and the point is driven home with every school yard massacre. The solution to America's problems is actual Democracy.

I'm not sure there's a fix at all. It's not as if there really are such things as "red" or "blue" states. Warren, Sussex, Monmouth, Ocean, and a host of other counties in NJ look very much like rural counties in other states -- MAGA land. Similarly, if you're in Austin, Birmingham or Boise, it's a lot more like Essex County than it's like rural America.

The divide in this country isn't red state/blue state. It's rural/urban&suburban. How is that fixable?


GoSlugs said:

It shows a proposed redrawing of the US  with states determined in such a way that each voter would have the same voice in the electoral college and the US Senate.  

Thanks.


ml1 said:

I'm not sure there's a fix at all. It's not as if there really are such things as "red" or "blue" states. Warren, Sussex, Monmouth, Ocean, and a host of other counties in NJ look very much like rural counties in other states -- MAGA land. Similarly, if you're in Austin, Birmingham or Boise, it's a lot more like Essex County than it's like rural America.

The divide in this country isn't red state/blue state. It's rural/urban&suburban. How is that fixable?

Austin metro has twice as many people as Wyoming and a much larger economy.  It should be its own state, if we insist on moving forward with a state based system.  I wonder whether the idea of treating urban areas and rural areas as if they are the same thing isn't outdated in and of itself. 


Good morning, everyone. Just made my first cuppa and haven’t read/heard any news yet but I’m coming to you for updates cheese

Last thing I heard (about 7 hours ago) was that the lower House of Congress passed a gun control law… there didn’t seem to be great hopes that Senate would also pass it, but ‘it’s a beginning’.  Reactions? Predictions? Might there finally be a bit of change?


from Dylan,  "Come Senators congressman,  please heed the call, don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall..."         The times may not have changed so much.  The excuses for not doing any kind of gun control are the lamest excuses I have ever heard.  


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