School Shooting to Promote Hysteria

I think there was a section on this in the book “The culture of fear.” they discuss it in detail. But, like everyone else, come up with no easy answers to school violence.

They do point out, just as Ed does, that the country is much safer now, and yet we are much more afraid. A strange contradiction.

I think what it really boils down to is that even statistically insignifigant events(like school shootins) affect a vanishingly small number of people, no-one wants their kids to be one of those people.

(“if we teach kids that they’re animals, they’ll act like animals”)

If only. Most animals long ago found intraspecies ways to compete that minimize injury and death.

I’ve got an idea. Let’s teach our kids that they’re related to Birds of Paradise. That way they’ll get up before dawn, meticulously clean their rooms, and then dance.

How about, ‘If they teach children that it’s OK to be Republican, they’ll soon be shooting each other over profits or religion.’?

Of course it’s too tragic to joke about, so never mind.

@4 unbound,

A few weeks ago, we got a new player to my Encounters D&D game. He was a friend of a regular player who’s quite good. He played for one or two encounters, and then he stopped showing up. When we asked why, his friend (our regular player) said that “his mom is very religious and doesn’t want him playing D&D.” So I am very sad to say that that ship has not yet sailed.

To make things worse, a friend of mine recently told me about Dragon Raid, a Christian version of D&D where you quote Bible passages to kill dragons. If all the faces in all the towns in all the world met with palms, there would still not be enough facepalm to suffice.

I’m also reasonably sure that, as Moore also pointed out, it will be a fund-raising bonanza for the NRA.

As Tom Tomorrow pointed out after the Tucson shootings last year, there is no longer a gun control debate in this country.

People are monstrously schizophrenic about safety. I really wish I could believe otherwise, but Americans voluntarily chose to introduce some danger into their daily for the sake of convenience by driving to work. They eat high-calorie foods that, statistically speaking, probably will give them heart disease and maybe even diabetes. That’s fine if that really reflects their preferences. But then the same people freak out over highly unlikely events like school shootings. They even vote for politicians who enact monstrosities like the TSA.

I’m sure there’s some fundamentalist who’s got a website worrying that Dragon Raid is actually a Satanic plot to infiltrate Christian homes with demonic D&D roleplaying. After all, there are plenty who condemn Christian Rock as a gateway to the devil (rather than opposing it for being just plain terrible music…)

No one has mentioned the standard NRA answer to problems like this: arm everyone, from the youngest preschooler to the old teacher who went around the bend 20 years ago and is still teaching. This would solve everything. Because four-year-olds know exactly what to do in a crisis.

@ Billdaniels

Actually the Wikipedia article I mention above discusses that, though not in detail. Frankly I think it is 6 of one half a dozen of the others. I think the last one where somebody stopped one of these idiots they weren’t armed. And frankly, remembering Ms. Sparks from 8’th grade, I don’t think arming teachers is a good idea.

Woman threw a desk at Wayne Rutledge once, a frickin desk!

Then on the other hand, there is the old yarn about bringing a desk to a gunfight.

Trebuchet Says:

According to Andy Schlafley…

I actually read Conservapaedia some days at lunch, when I need a laugh. I have rarely seen someone so ignorant, un-aware, hate filled and moronic as Andy. Why anyone would care what he says is beyond me.

Oh, and school shootings have actually gone down since the rise of Facebook. So, he is even dumber than he looks.

I seem to remember one of the things that indicated more fear in people was how much television they watched. There was a direct correlation between increased TV viewing, and increased terror of crime.

I usually don’t lock my house doors, and no, I don’t live in a gated community, but an ordinary one that anyone can get into. When I do lock my doors, it’s usually during the day and not because I’m worried about criminals (I’m not), but to prevent my mother from barging in whenever she pleases. Yes, she will barge into my house without knocking or even calling ahead. I’m more terrified of that than I am of burglars.

I live in an apartment building in a decent area, and I make sure to lock my apartment door because of an incident shortly after I moved in. Some woman tried to open the door and walk in unannounced (luckily it was locked). She was carrying balloons; she was trying to surprise her daughter for her bday and had the wrong floor.

“if we teach kids that they’re animals, they’ll act like animals”

That’s one thing that really irritates me. They teach that to act like an animal is to not act like a human. When we label ourselves as animals, we are not discarding the human label. We’re adding humans as a subgroup of animals, and with it, human behavior is included as a subgroup of animal behavior.

If anyone’s teaching people to stop acting like humans and start “acting like animals” it’s the people who promote the false dichotomy and try to suppress the idea that humans are still humans, even if we are animals.

(“if we teach kids that they’re animals, they’ll act like animals”).

Animals use complicated mechanical tools?

There was a direct correlation between increased TV viewing, and increased terror of crime.

That’s because countless TV shows teach that the serial killer is always the least-obvious member of the cast, and that the people who are sexually active, drug-users, or socially awkward (except the ubergeeks or Bruce Campbell) are the first to be killed. And, oh, yeah, whenever you get in your car you’d better check the back seat for a brain-eating zombie who’ll feed you Brawndo.

And then there was the Bath School bombing in 1927 but that was done by a member of the school board not a student.

Crikey, it posts it inline, sorry about that if it messes with anyone.

Violent crime has been going down steadily in America for the last couple decades, yet we are more afraid of it than ever because of overwhelming media saturation.

Steven Pinker’s new book “The Better Angels Of Our Nature” goes into this in a great deal of detail. (A great GREAT deal of detail…) I’m only a few chapters in, but I highly recommend it.

This is really crass and probably a little bit racist, but here’s your mistake….thinking the media cares about what happens in the ghetto.

I wish I could say you’re wrong. The media’s record of providing saturation coverage whenever white kids are abducted, compared to children of color, is documented beyond dispute.

I wish I could say you’re wrong. The media’s record of providing saturation coverage whenever white kids are abducted, compared to children of color, is documented beyond dispute.

A friend’s father used to be a high school teacher in one of the more rundown areas of Detroit and said that school shootings happened pretty frequently, but the media never bothered covering it.

(fixed quote this time, sorry)

It’ll be blamed on rock music, or video games, or gun control, or the lack of gun control, or even immigration and the influence of Sharia law.

One of these things is not like the others.

You wouldn’t need gun control if people weren’t colossally fucking retarded.

Kids should not have access to guns.

.. and if I’m completely honest, a significant portion of adults probably shouldn’t have have access to guns.

Oh I do so love being told that I’m right in a particularly condescending fashion.

Please, continue, if it’ll make you feel better about yourself.

Hysteria is bad and many reactions to school shootings have that 9/11 effect of calls to “increase security” in ways that ultimately ratchet us closer to that police state so many seem to adore as a concept. One tangible reaction is the whole “lock down” thing; lockdowns are pretty common in schools, and while they may be a good idea at some level, they do teach our kids certain lessons that are probably not helpful in a free society. It is the modern day “duck and cover.”

Having said that, a school shooting like this one does remind us to ask certain valid questions. An older study (I refer to it here – http://goo.gl/Wcgoi -) looked at where guns come from that are used in this sort of thing. The study is old, but I doubt this has changed much. It seems that many of these school shootings are similar in this regard to the thousands of teen and young adult suicides that happen every year: The guns are lifted from daddy’s night stand or some other insecure location, where they are not locked up.

Firearms are dangerous and they need to be unloaded and locked up, usually separately from the ammo, which should also be locked up. Not only are laws and regulations weak in this area, but recent legislation to abrogate local laws that link responsibility of gun ownership to practical sense has been proposed (i.e., in Pennsylvania, currently).

The way I see it, school shootings are the tip of a larger, lumbering ice berg which is Venn diagram of kids who are depressed or having other psychological problems X guns essentially laying around in the house. This–a school shooting–is just the more spectacular version of that.

On a different point but related to the issue you raise here, Ed, is something I saw on the news yesterday. A former FBI agent was being interviewed about the Chardon shooting, and he told the viewing audience about how his FBI unit had stopped a lot of school shootings from happening by getting reports of kids showing the signs of something like this happening. Apparently, from what he said (and it may be wrong, I don’t know) it is fairly routine for the FBI to investigate these things, which involves showing up at the child’s home and doing their FBI thing there.

Is that a good thing? When we look back at a shooting and see the signs it was going to happen, we may say “someone should have done something” and apparently they sometimes, maybe even often, do. Or is it a bad thing? Is it just one more case of the Federali’s using profiling as an excuse to push their weight around and ratchet us one step closer to that Police State? I suppose the answer to that would require a lot more information than I happen to have on my fingertips, so I’m not going to make any assumptions, but it may be worth looking into.

Whenever something like this happens, the instant response is usually “more security”. “Make schools safer”. “Lock down the schools”. Does no one ever stop to think that treating school-age young people like criminals for their entire youth, constantly controlling their schedules, rigidly monitoring their behavior, and locking them in confined spaces for most of their waking hours, never giving them any free rein or privacy, might be the cause (or a contributing cause) of school violence?

Oh no, the answer is even more Orwellian thought control and surveillance. It’s worked so well before!