DescentBB

It's official. More children have been killed this year by armed classmates than U.S. service members currently fighting in all the conflicts around the world. What is wrong with these teen-aged kids who resort to shooting their classmates seemingly on a whim? Do they think that life is so cheap that taking it with the twitch of a finger will solve all their problems? Do they think it'll be fun or something? What the hell?

It's not even an assault weapons issue anymore, because the guns this kid used in the Santa Fe, Texas school shooting, a shotgun and a .38 revolver taken from his father's locked gun cabinet, weren't even semiautomatics and are common as dirt all around the Western industrialized world. We don't even see this kind of carnage happening in Europe, Canada or Australia. The gun advocates were out on TV this morning desperately pushing the violent video games and movies theory, seeming to gloss over the fact that in other Western countries, those forms of entertainment are just as popular. So why here in the U.S.? Is there a virus or something turning our kids into callous, mentally ill murderers and it's spreading?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pol ... bd6bcbabb8

When the high school students grow up and go to to the polls to vote, they are going to remember growing up in a war zone and its going to be a wave that conservatives won't be able to stop. Maybe if we all ride that wave we can finally start the process of demilitarizing this country instead of doubling down on it which is clearly not working.

The thing about other western countries not having anywhere near the same volume of shootings is obvious: one can't shoot someone if one does not possess a gun.

It won't stop the violence entirely, but it will moderate it and it may even buy us the time and perspective to do something about the real underlying problems.

Krom wrote: ↑Sun May 20, 2018 5:07 pm When the high school students grow up and go to to the polls to vote, they are going to remember growing up in a war zone and its going to be a wave that conservatives won't be able to stop. Maybe if we all ride that wave we can finally start the process of demilitarizing this country instead of doubling down on it which is clearly not working.

I don't know. I was talking to my sister and she still doesn't think guns should be more regulated or controlled. There's a mindset there that's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to change. Maybe if one of her grandchildren was murdered, she'd have a different opinion. Plus, I think that about half of Americans are forever diehard gun owners and will never give up their guns or allow any type of intrusive regulation, even in the face of their children being murdered at a place they normally think is safe, school. They'll fight to the death to protect their gun rights. They also tend to be more worried about government overreach than their kids getting murdered anyway. They'll stick to their twisted reasoning that we just need more guns so that we can all protect ourselves from the other people who are the bad guys. Yeah, right.

Besides, there just won't be enough graduating high school kids in the future to make much of a difference at the polls either. The U.S. birth rate is down and I don't know if there are enough Millennials who care. What you'll probably see in the near future, from all the nutty rhetoric I'm hearing in the news right now, is that we need to harden of our schools into more secure little safety prisons, like our airports and government buildings. We'll all end up so jaded to these little secure islands, that we won't realize until it's too late that we've lost the freedom to move around safely everywhere else. Of course, the pitfall there is that in order to survive the rest of our violent society that isn't hardened, we'll all need to carry guns just to protect ourselves from each other. Our highways, sidewalks and stores will turn into something from the past where disputes and crimes were settled at the end of a gun. We'll be living a country like Yemen or Afghanistan and it will be of our own creation.

Some frightening statistics.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opin ... story.html

http://www.humanosphere.org/science/201 ... est-world/

No offense but your sister and other like minded people aren't going to be the dominant voting block forever. Simply put these school students will one day be the ones in charge regardless of the birth rate for the simple reason that nobody lives forever. I'm reminded of the line from the movie Men in Black when the one guy says "you can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers" and the bug replies "your proposal is acceptable". For better or for worse, we are in this for the long haul and simply outliving the anti-control crowd is a valid approach.

I agree that hardening schools and erecting physical barriers and checkpoints that actually prevent guns from entering would put a significant damper on school shootings, but it would be costly, inefficient, wouldn't help anywhere else and still doesn't address the underlying social issues. Just doubling down on the militarism isn't going to cut it and the more shootings that happen the more obvious it will become especially to the younger generations who will be the ones making the call one day.

The mindset the American's have will only change with time. Change the rules now, wait for it to get more accepted in decades to come. Like Krom said, the younger generation will make change at the polls.

Some Oregonians are trying for this initiative. The backlash and fearmongering has already begun, even before this thing gets to the voters and IF they can get enough signatures to even place it on the ballot. I'll be the first to admit, this initiative is pretty draconian and does restrict people's rights to own certain types of semiautomatic weapons, including pistols that have magazine capacities of more than ten rounds. That means I would have to register my own handgun if this thing passes since it holds 15 rounds. I'm also certain Grendel will not be a happy camper either. You'll also notice that even if this were to become law within the entire U.S., extremely unlikely in the near future, it would not have stopped that nutty kid in Texas. So we still have a problem with kids who are willing to kill their classmates by any means possible.

http://katu.com/news/local/oregon-initi ... ith-police

https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/ ... 444530002/

I genuinely think that anyone whose child accesses an unsecured firearm and kills someone with it should be charged with the same level of murder as the child. It's ★■◆●ing disgusting.

Top Gun wrote: ↑Tue May 22, 2018 5:22 pm I genuinely think that anyone whose child accesses an unsecured firearm and kills someone with it should be charged with the same level of murder as the child. It's ★■◆●ing disgusting.

I don't like that solution because it creates the possibility for moral luck. I might be in favor of making it illegal to not adequately secure firearms, but I would only think it fair to give the same punishment to the person whose child did not commit a murder as the person whose child did, since both parents committed the same crime, not adequately securing a firearm, and whether their child decides to commit a murder is outside of their control*.

* With some exceptions, but assume the general case of an otherwise well-meaning, well-intended, well-educated parent who just did not adequately secure firearms. We don't generally charge parents with the crimes of their children, and this case doesn't seem exceptional to me.

Here's the coles notes as to why you guys have shootings almost monthly.

No one gives a ★■◆● about the kids
The media spends a huge amount of time on the kill count.

So a kid who's angry, sees the last shooting and goes 'I'm going to down in a ball of flame with a bigger kill count and cement my legacy'.

Jeff250 wrote: ↑Wed May 23, 2018 6:24 pm

Top Gun wrote: ↑Tue May 22, 2018 5:22 pm I genuinely think that anyone whose child accesses an unsecured firearm and kills someone with it should be charged with the same level of murder as the child. It's ★■◆●ing disgusting.

I don't like that solution because it creates the possibility for moral luck. I might be in favor of making it illegal to not adequately secure firearms, but I would only think it fair to give the same punishment to the person whose child did not commit a murder as the person whose child did, since both parents committed the same crime, not adequately securing a firearm, and whether their child decides to commit a murder is outside of their control*.

* With some exceptions, but assume the general case of an otherwise well-meaning, well-intended, well-educated parent who just did not adequately secure firearms. We don't generally charge parents with the crimes of their children, and this case doesn't seem exceptional to me.

Texas is one of 14 states that has a gun "negligent storage law" and gun-owning parents can be charged for gun crimes committed by their children if they don't lock up their guns. But there's an inconvenient exception. Texas defines a child as 16 or younger. The shooter's parents barely squeaked out of responsibility because their son was 17 at the time he committed the gun crimes and several news outlets have since reported that the father just left his guns in an unlocked closet, easy pickings for a stupid kid with a grudge.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/us/p ... -laws.html

Jeff, there are Parental Responsibility Laws that cover who's responsible for the criminal behavior of children. It's just that a lot of the time, those laws are unevenly or rarely enforced and they usually depend on the severity of the crime and what state the child committed the crime. Technically, the laws are in place and the parents could be on the hook even in Texas with a 17 year old, if someone were to decide to prosecute.

https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/r ... al-actions

Ferno wrote: ↑Wed May 23, 2018 11:41 pm Here's the coles notes as to why you guys have shootings almost monthly.

No one gives a ★■◆● about the kids
The media spends a huge amount of time on the kill count.

So a kid who's angry, sees the last shooting and goes 'I'm going to down in a ball of flame with a bigger kill count and cement my legacy'.

What the media cares about are 3 things. Number one, ratings, so if it bleeds, it leads. Number 2, the heart wrenching sob stories and terror-filled survivor interviews, especially on-camera, swooned over by the fake sympathy of the commentators. Third, the blatant hero worship of those who charged in to stop the carnage or the vilification of those who didn't. Gotta blame somebody. The media pretty much sticks to this playbook and it's never going to solve the problem, only make more money for the media companies and news outlets.