Someone is truly in here going 
The hundreds of people gunned down daily is really a small percentage of the population so it's all just scaremongering. Several dozen people are upvoting it. I think I'm done with hexbear for a bit. Thanks for the fun posts, everyone
Being a child is criminalized. And the children are suffering. The point of childhood anymore doesn't seem to enjoy some innocence and learn life lessons and make mistakes in a loving or caring environment where you're shielded from most of the consequences. The purpose of childhood is to mold you into an ideal member of the proletariat. And to never ever misbehave, because the Eye in the Sky (whether that's your parents or the police state) is always watching and you'd better get used to it.
I've talked about the atrocious state of childrens' rights in this country, and had some really good discussion here about it. It's only getting worse. Don't walk or bike home from school, wait for your parent to come get you in an SUV. Don't go skateboarding, you hooligan. Don't hang out with friends or other kids in the neighborhood with only the admonition of being back before dark. Don't drink a beer, even as an adult- you'll go to jail. Don't host a party, you'll go to jail. Don't have awkward teenage sex. Don't go hang out downtown or explore the woods, you'll be raped and abducted and sold into slavery! Just stay home, on your phone where it's safe.
I fucking hate this. This shit honestly makes me despair more than climate change. I'm not sure why that is, obviously what we're doing to the climate could well spell the end of human civilization. I think I'm just really upset at this very clear, yet less dramatic impact of living in a fascist society. Being a child is criminalized.
Yup. I'm 100% on board with the "it's illegal for kids to be in public" and walking, being in a park, or being in a city center all carry a small (
) but real chance of police harassment. Malls barely exist. Public transit sucks.I spent one summer really in to home automation. I realized that the door locks could log, with a time stamp, when people went in and out, the cameras never saw anything but my roommates and neighbors, i could get logs of whose phones did what interactions wit the " smart" homes, when motion sensors were tripped, when lights were turned on and off, even when sensor equipped windows were opened and closed.
At the time it creeped me out bc it was a perfect toolkit for domestic abuse and rigid, to the second control of your partner's or family's movements. I didn't consider it in the context of "normal" parents monitoring their children but it's a 1:1 fit and, frankly, just as abusive to monitor your children on that level. Something I didn't see mentioned; once kids had cell phones they were expected to carry those phones at all time, and answer immediately when their parents called no matter what they were doing.
Also, the cops can see some or all of the recordings and info from Ring cameras, no warrant needed.
I turned almost all of it off except being able to unlock the door with your phone (one of the only actually useful things the system could accomplish), the camera i had aimed at my back yard to watch the opossum, and the open/closed sensor on my bedroom windows (it'd send me a push notification if it was going to rain and the window was open).
Idk much about the academics side of it. I graduated right before "No Child Left Behind" was brought on line and the destruction of the education system kicked in to high gear. As an older Millenial the mantra was "go to college go to college go to college" without any real guidance beyond that. Why? For what? Then everyone graduated in to the wreckage of 2007 (and in 2005 Biden made it illegal to discharge your debt under the pretense of someone, somewhere, might "cheat" the system somehow).
Where are kids supposed to party? They're under constant surveillance from countless cameras, cops, and concerned parents. Same with sex and dating, there's a ton of ways for parents to intrude on you at all times, even if it's just calling your cell to demand to know where you are. And all the cool places shut down in 07, the survivors crashed and burned in 19, so where do you go? The mall? Do malls even exist? And $$$$$$$$$$$$$
And "school resource officers" installed in schools to enforce submission, criminalize dissent and any attempt to push back at school as a system of control, reinforce us state race terrorism, and simplify the slave procurement system.
Also, "school shootings" given so much media attention people think they're common and widespread and kids are legit terrified they're going to be gunned down every day bc it's plastered across the news 24/7. "Active shooter drills". This is a personal peeve, I became sentient right when the 24/7 cable news cycle industry started with the First Gulf War. I've watched them go from war to PCP to salmonella on your kitchen counters to workplace shootings to "urban youth gangs"
to trrrism (Al-Qaeda is in your shitty town!) To heroin, trying everything to discover what could create maximum terror in their viewership to ensure maximum engagement. Well the fuckers found it; there's nothing more terrifying than your helpless children being murdered at school where they're outside your control and observation. And the news has just hammered and hammered and hammered on that for years to keep people afraid and eyes on advertising, never you mind how low the odds of it actually happening are (i have a separate screed about "mass shooting" being cynically refined in the public imagination from meaning situations where a person deliberately intended to kill strangers to any shooting where more than one person was hit).It's all very fucked. "Kids staring at their phones!" aren't the problem (though social media as a form of ruthless sousveillance, all kinds of gambling bullshit, attention stealing is). Phones are the last plave kids have where they can interact with the world without being hounded by parents, disciplined by school staff, harassed by cops, watched by hostile Nextdoor Gestapo, chased out by shop owners, or expected to pay to exist.
Like when was the last time you saw an eight year old or a ten year old wandering around unaccompanied catching bugs and swinging a stick? I literally cannot remember, but I used to wander all over town back in the day, walk miles to and from school, try to catch turtles in the creek all afternoon. This was not idyllic, i was maximizing my time away from an abusive home situation at some points. But not being home, and not being bothered about it, was an option to get away from that situation.
This is a rant i've ranted many times. Kids are no longer allowed much if any autonomy and are subject to constant, sometimes violent (physically and otherwise) surveillance and discipline wherever the go in life, supported by the digital panopticon that would have made the famed and much maligned STASI go "okay this is too intrusive y'all need to calm down"
Some ofnthat starred even earlier, with Stranger Danger and drugged halloween candy. Fearmongering was merely seen as profitable in the 80s and 90s. It became ideological after 9/11
Absolutely! Also the Satanic Panic, Reefer madness, post-war reactionary anxieties about basically anything fun.
(I have a separate screed about "mass shooting" being cynically refined in the public imagination from meaning situations where a person deliberately intended to kill strangers to any shooting where more than one person was hit
Literally the definition used when you hear "x mass shootings have happened this year", where x is usually greater than the number of days we are into the year, is 4+ people shot. For any reason, with any outcome, with any relationship between the victims and the perpetrator.
But that's not what you think of when you think of a mass shooting. You think school shootings, attacks on mosques, synagogues, and gay nightclubs, and whatever the fuck the Las Vegas shooting was about (side note: the deadliest mass shooting in history and we still have no idea what the motive was, that's always been suspicious). Public spaces, much more than 4 deaths, the victims usually don't have much of a relationship with the perpetrator or even each other (besides maybe whatever reason they were in the same public place, like classmates or fellow worshipers). i.e. someone decided they want to kill a bunch of people either for the terror, bigotry, infamy, revenge on society, or just because. What you don't think of is someone killing their partner and children in their home in a domestic dispute, but they count that for some reason.
I think TrueAnon has a pod on the Vegas shooter. I don't think they came to any definitive conclusions, but like everything in America it's weird as hell.
Yeah but it was a great episode, pretty sure they have Matt or Felix on for that one
I dont really see the use in arguing the semantics of what is or is not a mass casualty event, considring many of what you mention as mass shootings in the popular consciousness do start out with the shooter killing people they know (often women) in their home, workplace etc.
this post reads pretty conspiritorialy, they're not hiding the a mass shooting is 4 people number, it's there for anyone who cares to look. obviously there's some hyperbolic shit in the media, but by this statistic, someone like Kyle Rittenhouse is not a mass shooter, food for thought.
i'm not sure if this is the mindset where they're taking our guns, we need them, rah rah revolution is the base, but do you know what we need a whole lot more than guns? comrades we can trust. communities that are organised and ready to support each other.
I'm not from the USA, but i've seen friends argue about this, and i've especially seen the impact these semantic like points have had on friends who have lived in the USA. Talk of condemning ourselves to pointless slaughter if we're not armed, its unhelpful, it's only driving us apart and keeping us at arms length.
The individualist drive to arm every man woman and child in school, churches, and supermarkets, in their bedrooms, for their protection, does nothing but line the pockets of the arms dealers who would have us all on the frontlines sooner than you could say I will not fight my working class brothers and sisters in Vietnam
sorry that's scattered and a bit ranty, but I absolutely consider someone shooting their partner and child to be a part of the issue we're up against, the conditions we face, capitalism, imperialism, white nationalism, and oppression of the powerless.
haha dark and awful, but we're almost discussing if a shooting is more impacting, if say, it were taken out on a large, christian family, 10 kids or something, uh, #greatreplacement or something I guess.
whew i'm glad I've finally taken the time to articulate that, even for myself.
this post reads pretty conspiritorialy, they're not hiding the a mass shooting is 4 people number, it's there for anyone who cares to look. obviously there's some hyperbolic shit in the media, but by this statistic, someone like Kyle Rittenhouse is not a mass shooter, food for thought.
People don't look. They "know" what they "know" and don't think to look up the official FBI definition. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a mass shooter. He doesn't count by the "official" standard. He killed two people and injured one. That's not a mass shooting, either in public conscious or official statistics. But it does highlight the problem; The concept of a mass shooting has gotten to the point where two people being killed in a fight is a "mass shooting". Which is somehow worse than a double homicide. The notion has been used to sensationalize gun violence and create an atmosphere of terror. People think they could be gunned down at any time when, I cannot stress this enough, violent crime is at or near an all time low in the US since they began keeping records. Things have gotten worse since the pandemic started but that's a function of the economy being in free fall collapse. Poverty drives violence.
Calling it a "mass shooting" doesn't make it any less of a crime or a moral offense. It doesn't make it extra bad or wrong. but it does mislead people in to thinking masked gunmen are executing dozens of white suburban parents every day, contributing to the atmosphere of terror that has contributed to children being locked in a social and political cage as we're discussing.
Homie, are you me?
I have been thinking about the panopticon for a long time. We've slowly allowed one to be built around us ever since 9/11.
I work in schools, I know how much surveillance exists now, from near 100% camera coverage in the hallways (and sometimes, depending on the state, the classrooms as well), to total visibility of all internet activity (including emails), all the way to things like internet connected Vape sensors in the bathrooms.
I could go on and on but typing out all my thoughts via my phone would probably kill me.
God damn.
The last time I was in a high school, my old, very badly designed fire-trap highschool had been knocked down, and we were given a chance to tour the new one for some reason. The school was arranged thus - Central hallways. Coming off the hallways were long hallways leading to circular pods for classrooms and lockers. At the base of each secondary hallway where it left the main hallway was what was very obviously a guard room, a pill box. Even my non-gun-pilled normie friends recognized it for what it was - A bunker from which there were clear line of sight where anyone moving from the main hallways towards the classroom pods could be observed (or shot. The fucking thing screamed "Emplace a machine gun here!"). The pods were arranged just like the theoretical Panopticon. The classrooms were arrayed in a circle around the center of the pod. Lockers line the walls and were arranged in the center of the pod. there was no where to hide from observation, no where to have a quiet discussion, no where to get away from surveillance. Everyone I talked to about it was visibly creeped out, recognizing that our school had been torn down and replaced with some kind of bizarre prison. That was in 2003.
I grew up relatively near a mall, and "mall kids" were never a thing, even in the early 2000s. I would be the only kid riding my bike as all the other kids were inside playing video games or watching TV.
I had mall kids where I was, and did some mall kidding myself. Problem was that the mall was like 4-5 miles away so getting there was a time investment.
i was a mall kid in the 90s. everybody knew somebody who worked at the food court where maybe we could get free refills. or worked at the movie theater in the mall, remember those? being a mall kid was totally a thing in the 80s and 90s, until malls stopped wanting kids around (aka "unattended minors"). the arcades closed, the mall cops appeared+multiplied, and trespass orders were issued because too many young people clustering in a place was thought to frighten away "real" shoppers. by the time i was 16, i knew 3 people who were banned from the mall (mall security would phone the PD on sight, even if they were cutting across the parking lot on the way to work), not for shoplifting or anything. just for being someone who hangs out too much and drawing the ire of the security bozos... and also
coded.by early 2000s, the once-popular mall completely stopped being a destination for young people. even as i turned into a young adult, i had been passively conditioned to think of the mall as a place hostile to my presence... definitely not going to see any friends there hanging out, not a place to people-watch, so i never went there to make a purchase either because getting there was more of a hassle than whatever retail place actually specialized in what i was looking for.
dead/dying malls make me laugh. the entire concept was a climate controlled market district with casual eateries meant to attract casual milling around. and then they decided to actively drive away future customers.
they did it entirely to themselves.
Word. The sheer amount of hostility towards people casually existing in public spaces that has spread further and further over the last few decades is incredible.
Also, "school shootings" given so much media attention people think they're common and widespread and kids are legit terrified they're going to be gunned down every day bc it's plastered across the news 24/7. "Active shooter drills". This is a personal peeve, I became sentient right when the 24/7 cable news cycle industry started with the First Gulf War. I've watched them go from war to PCP to salmonella on your kitchen counters to workplace shootings to "urban youth gangs" to trrrism (Al-Qaeda is in your shitty town!) To heroin, trying everything to discover what could create maximum terror in their viewership to ensure maximum engagement. Well the fuckers found it; there's nothing more terrifying than your helpless children being murdered at school where they're outside your control and observation. And the news has just hammered and hammered and hammered on that for years to keep people afraid and eyes on advertising, never you mind how low the odds of it actually happening are (i have a separate screed about "mass shooting" being cynically refined in the public imagination from meaning situations where a person deliberately intended to kill strangers to any shooting where more than one person was hit).
School shootings aren't "rare" though, there have been roughly 57.5 school shootings annually on average since the year 2000 (I summed the lowest annual number and the highest and averaged it, if that's wrong someone please call me out on it). That's about 1 school shooting every week
"School shooting", as popularly understood, is an individual coming in to a school with the intent to kill as many kids as possible. That happens very rarely. Most of the shootings in schools are one kid shooting another kid, often over personal beefs.
Conflating the popular idea of a mass shooting - A lone gunman killing a lot of people, with every shooting in schools and every shooting where more than one or two people are injured has wildly, wildly skewed public perceptions of what gun violence looks like in the US. Mass shootings as understood by the public are a tiny fraction of all firearms violence; It is still, and always has been, overwhelmingly violence related to petty crime, and domestic violence. The focus on mass shootings, and the re-definition of what constitutes a "mass shooting", has totally replaced awareness that the vast, vast majority of all firearms violence in the US is poor kids shooting each other over petty crime shit.
To put this all in perspective; 70,000, that is seventy thousand, people are killed by firearms in the US each year. It's about half/half suicides and homocides. So out of 30-40k people murdered with guns each year in the US, about 100-150 of those killings happen in schools annually. And almost all of the killing, out of 70k dead and 30-40k murdered, is done with handguns. Long guns, especially ARs, are a tiny, tiny fraction. Like hundreds, not even thousands. Public perception of gun violence in the US is grotesquely distorted towards a media and political narrative that bears little relation to reality.
See I’m reading this and I think I’m coming to a maybe more nuanced conclusion, hopefully I don’t come across as
or 
hereWarning this enters full conspiracy theorist mode so take it very skeptically
I don’t think school shootings themselves are an overwrought phenomenon, in the sense that we have consistently had school shootings (as in, media-covered, disparate incidents) that were absolutely horrific, and as the Onion eloquently puts it, “does not happen consistently anywhere else in the world”.
But almost every single time, they were done by white, often right-wing, teens or adults. It was always bigots and Nazi’s, never kids who were unstable but otherwise politically apathetic or completely ignorant, as you’d expect from a kid.
But, like you said, a majority of these incidents in these reports are one on one violence or small-scale stuff, stuff that’s probably primarily caused by communities existing that have people who need to do crime to live due to economic disparity. So, racial minorities the US has ended up corralling into segregated, poorer areas.
So the entire point of it, media-wise, is to conflate these Nazi politically motivated mass killings with struggling kids. And, because these struggling kids are being coded as the scary dangerous outside forces (black people), it’s been signal-boosted absolutely everywhere because that’s what the media already loved scaremongering about.
So there doesn’t seem to be any scaremongering about school shootings, but scaremongering using a racist construction which utilized the cultural backdrop of school shootings to build itself. The point is, in all of its utter incredulity and base malice, just to make minority’s lives worse (with the fun side effect that we’re not talking about why Nazis (or anyone) keep shooting up schools every year! Don’t worry about it, it’s just Cultural Decay caused by those damn minorities! /s)
I pretty much agree. I think a lot of the emphasis on school shoots is Democrat strategy. They spent decades fruitlessly trying to scare white people with "inner city violence", gang violence, "urban youth", "super predators", "racial jungles". Between white flight and libs becoming slightly less shitty, along with just good old fashioned burn out, that fearmongering about black kids with hand guns became less and less effective over time. Colombine was what they needed to re-invigorate gun control and violence against youth as a political whip. Their triumphant gun control bill under Clinton was a big failure - It temporarily suppressed gun violence to an extent, but when it sunset under Bush things did not return to the status quo - Gun violence drastically increased. Since then their gun control efforts have had at best mixed success - California and some East Coast states have imposed draconian arms control laws. New York City, for instance, is safer than it's ever been, but it's also a horrifying police state in the grip of a 50,000 strong fascist army. You're not even allowed to carry a fucking pocket knife, and even years after Michael Bloomberg's frighteningly oppressive "Crimestat" the police still systematically and very effectively target minorities for harassment and repression. So it's safer, sorta, but I would hesitate to assign any one cause to that. I'm sure the total ban on arms played a large role, but one must also factor in ruthless repression of poor people, minorities, ruthless gentrification, and one of the most overfunded and repressive regime security forces in the world. I think the NYPD is like the worlds 6th or 8th largest and best funded standing army.
But stepping away from Gun Control taken at face value, ie gun control for the purpose of reducing violence, their shift has been an enormous success. Along with abortion they've successfully very sharply divided their base from the GOP base, turning huge numbers of people in to defacto single issue voters who are poorly informed and largely don't have any real understanding of the issue beyond the nightly spectacle of violence on social media. They've very successfully used it to whip fundraising and votes, promising results they've never delivered and giving their base a strong thought terminating cliche to use against dissenters; Anyone who opposes arms control is an evil maniac or a republican stooge. Anyone who opposes a blanket ban on AR15s, a weapon used in a miniscule fractions of all killings, is a psychopath. It very reliably shuts down any discussion of the real, major problems - hand guns, austerity, poverty. A commonly raised argument against Democrat gun control schemes is one that probably seems obvious to most leftists; The cops will use the laws as further justification for leveling state terror against minorities and poor people, while the ideologically motivated middlish class Nazis who actually carry out these shootings will be ignored. The gun control schemes will result in an enormous expansion of police power, but since the US operates on racial terror and economic violence, it will not achieve it's stated goal.
There was one interesting example, I'm not sure if it counts, but in Kenosha a black man leading a group of armed, mostly black people in patrolling the streets saw a group of people with rifles pointed at him hiding in the dark on top of a building. He pointed his weapon light at them to identify them. They were cops, and he was arrested for assault or whatever. The white cops were allowed to aim weapons at minorities, but the minority man who aimed back, not to attack but merely to identify them, was subjected to state violence. I should point out; DO NOT USE YOUR WEAPON LIGHT LIKE THIS. One of the four basic rules of firearms is don't point your gun at anything you're not ready and willing to destroy. Weapon lights are for identifying targets, not general use. Carry a separate flashlight for general light purposes.
There are over 100,000 k-12 schools in the US. Rounding the numbers a bit, that's 1/2000 or .0005% chance of your school being hit.
Not saying that it's not worth precautions, but the odds are low imo
Precautions are actively counterproductive to the purpose of schools. Schools by their nature need free movement of students all over the place. They need lots of entrances and exits and people are constantly entering and leaving the building. Locking them down, creating an atmosphere of terror, causes a great deal of harm while not actually doing anything to prevent the incredibly rare shootings.
I never understood the lockdown thing. Why not just install an emergency exit in each classroom and have some sort of emergency worker pick kids up?
There's a couple of factors I've heard.
One is a fear that if kids were fleeing they'd be easier targets for a gunman positioned outside. A shooter would have long sightlines with many targets.
Second, that the chaos of a general evacuation would make it much harder to locate the shooter, increase the number of targets the shooter has at any given moment, and make an armed police response (lol) much more difficult and dangerous. If there's no one moving in the halls except the shooter the armed response team is less likely to accidentally shoot an innocent person, will be more likely to have a clean shot on the shooter, the shooter won't be able to hide behind people running around, the shooter will be easier to find without a crowd to look through.
As we've seen; Emergency response is slow and often ineffective. Cops, who would probably be the people our society would insist on sending to rescue victims, are cowards with contempt for human life and everyone around them and often refuse to risk their life to help others.
If there were emergency exits kids would be going in and out of them a lot.
Every emergency exit would need to be maintained and kept in good repair. A couple of school shootings have happened at schools where external doors were locked and the door was either propped open for failed to lock correctly, allowing ingress for the shooter.
One is that, with some basic equipment, a classroom can be made very difficult to break in to. There are some systems that put a square hole a few inches deep in a recess near the bottom of the door. If you drop a metal post in that recess the door becomes effectively impossible to open without a fire axe or breaching gear. Since all commercial and residential doors are required to open inwards to facilitate escaping from fires or disasters it's a fairly reliable, reasonably inexpensive way to fortify a room.
To some extent the problems with fortifying a school can be related to the problems of fortifying airports post 9/11 - Nothing the TSA does has made air travel safer or prevented airline terrorism. The only change made post 9/11 that has actually improved airline safety and resistance to hijackings is putting locks on the cockpit door so there is no practical way for an attacker to get in to the cockpit and seize control of the plane.
For schools, I'm not clear if any of the interventions taken since Columbine have done anything but cause additional harm, but if there are any useful ones it would be very simple things like door wedges and door blocks, rather than turning schools even more in to prisons
- It's a country of over 300,000,000 people
- A "mass shooting" is like 3 or more people shot.
Afaik it's 4+ people shot in one incident. That's anyone that's hit - stray bullets, bullets passing through one person and hitting another, whatever. That's what makes it so misleading and deceptive; When people here "There's a mass shooting every day in the US" they think that every single day a lone gunman with an AR and thousands of rounds of ammo is walking in to a church, school, mall, or business and killing tens of people. And that's not happening. Every gang shooting, every time two people have a dispute that escalates to violence and bystanders are hit, that's counted as a "mass shooting".
Yeah, it's bad that people are getting shot. But what's actually happening in the vast, vast, vast majority of gun violence in the US is domestic violence and violence arising from petty crime. Actual mass shootings as popularly understood; A gunman in a public place trying to kill as many people as possible, are not nearly as common as the news leads people to believe.
Yes. We are. We're doing shooting erasure. We're erasing the misleading perceptions of where, how, and why gun violence occurs in the United States so people will recognize that the "mass shooting" narrative doesn't reflect actual statistics; Who is killed, when, where, why. People are taught to obsessively fear school shootings and AR 15s when school shootings account for 50-100 murders annually out of, I cannot stress this enough, FORTY THOUSAND MURDERS in the US. They're taught to fear AR15s when the vast, vast, overwhelming majority of those murders are committed with handguns. I don't know if it's media and politicians cynically making money and stoking terror, or of they're just fools, but it's absurd. Want to reduce firearms violence? Ban hand guns. Forget ARs, they're only used in a few hundred murders a year, compared to literally tens of thousands murdered with pistols. Forget school shootings, focus on the thousands and thousands of kids murdered outside their schools in neighborhoods that have been systematically strip mined of all public resources, overpoliced, and forced in to dire poverty. That's where the violence is, and for the most part always has been. Even basic access to mental healthcare would stop probably many thousands of the 35,000 firearms suicides each year.
I'm angry about this distortion. I have been for a long, long time. The public perception of firearms violence in the US is nakedly false, a false narrative pushed by media and politicians to serve cynical goals. That narrative has caused enormous harm - School Resource Officers alone have destroyed a million lives since Columbine, putting children in cages, but they've never stopped a single mass shooting in a school. Among countless other forms of repression and violence imposed in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!"
School Resource Officers alone have destroyed a million lives since Columbine, putting children in cages, but they've never stopped a single mass shooting in a school. Among countless other forms of repression and violence imposed in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!"
I legitimately forgot those were a thing, I can see the issue now, sorry about being a lib
It's why media and politicians use school shootings as a cudgel and whip. It's so awful and so terrifying and so hideous that it blots out all other considerations. Most people will do nearly anything to protect kids. Most of the "solutions" proposed are expansion to the police state - More cops, more surveillance, more repression, more control.
We know how to reduce violence targeting kids - You build community centers and third places in impoverished neighborhoods. You give kids safe places to hang out and work on homework. You set up alternative conflict resolution methods so kids can settle beefs and fights without shooting each other. You improve wages, address food deserts, make sure everyone has good healthcare. Violence is driven strongly by neoliberal austerity and the poverty it ruthlessly enforces. Politicians and media cannot address that because they're the ones strip-mining society and pulling the copper out of the walls. A relentless focus on the most sensational and frightening acts of violence, along with sensational but ultimately meaningless gun control efforts, keeps people focused on individual problems; People who own guns, "mentally ill shooters", whatever, instead of seeing the system problems that underlie so much of this violence.
The whole gun control narrative serves to keep people mad and distracted, focusing their anger on gun owners and republicans, while the politicians they vote for are ruthlessly enforcing the very austerity that drives the violence. It's not the GOP driving youth violence in cities, its the democratic mayors and city councils cutting funding to every social project, gutting schools, gutting libraries, sending legions of heavily armed police in to kidnap people and destroy families and communities. And, for that matter, the most violent places in America are overwhelmingly GOP controlled second and third ring suburbs, and the vast majority of that violence is domestic or petty crime related.
Idk, the whole situation is so fucked, and people's views of it are so frustratingly distorted. I was one of the "trenchcoat mafia" kids at my school, the mostly queer, mostly neurodiverse goth kids who were targeted for harassment and repression after Columbine because it couldn't be admitted that the shooters were ideologically motivated Neo-Nazis who staged a massacre on Hitler's birthday. The problem couldn't be Nazis overrunning rural and suburban Colorado. It had to be bullying in schools, it had to be kids having access to guns, it had to be goth music and rap, it had to be something else than admitting that we were up to our tits in fascists while the neoliberals were butchering society and selling off the carcass. Idk, the whole situation is just so, so fucked. Democrats have been using it to whip votes and fundraising my whole life and all they've accomplished is a steady increase the ratio of gun violence to other forms of violence (though, again, violence as a whole went down steadily right up to the start the Pandemic). Meanwhile their policies are driving a spike in youth suicides that kills more kids each year than have been shot in schools since 1999.
That's what makes me so angry. We could drastically reduce youth murders, youth suicides. But the solution isn't turning schools in to nightmarish police state prisons, it's reversing the neoliberal destruction of society. It's been achieved many times on a small scale - One community center can drastically reduce youth violence in a wide area. Building a few basketball courts, having more services at a library, food security programs, real access to medical care, all these things can provable, dramatically reduce youth violence. And Democrats systematically crush these programs when they start to show results because if word got out it would effect their bottom line. It's just fucked. I hate it so much. I've been watching it happen ever since I started really digging in to homicide and gun violence statistics 10-15 years ago. It just sucks. : (
Someone is truly in here going
The hundreds of people gunned down daily is really a small percentage of the population so it's all just scaremongering. Several dozen people are upvoting it. I think I'm done with hexbear for a bit. Thanks for the fun posts, everyoneHe's not making it in the most diplomatic way, but he has a point. Schools should not be doing active shooter drills, the actual threat much lower than the damage caused by excess fear. Cable news should not be boosting every school shooting that does happen into the stratosphere, because all it does is create more fear and inspire copycats. Nevertheless the US should have adequate gun control laws, because most of the 70K yearly victims of gun violence in our country could be saved if only we gave a damn.
Schools should not be doing active shooter drills
I disagree with this still because it smacks of “we shouldn’t be wearing masks because the fear of the pandemic is worse than the pandemic” type stuff
masks are not a miracle preventative but they are effective, minimally inconvenient, and you are very likely to get and spread COVID without them. Unlike masks, "hardening" schools, giving teachers guns, and making kids do random active shooter drills with cops pretending to be shooters does real harm, and it's not nearly as clear that it does any good. As we saw at Uvalde most of this stuff is security theater. I graduated high school in 2016 and thought that school shootings were so rare that it wasn't worth worrying about it besides very basic prep like having some sort of lockdown procedure. Same type of thing as a tornado or fire drill, do it once a year and then no reason to think about it.
As an adult I still feel this. There's nothing to do and nowhere to go, just a big ugly ass concrete jungle that barely even has any sidewalks and is a 30 minute walk just to the nearest fastfood/grocery/convenience store. The "parks" are a tiny little enclosure of grass with nothing on it, similar to what poster said. Nowhere an adult would reasonably meet random people or just hang out with their friends if they had any.
Word. The urban landscape is anti-hospitable and anti-usable in an appalling way.
Suburban psychosis. People are cooler in cities. I was out on New Year's in a major American city and saw at least a dozen high school aged kids out and about unsupervised, doubling up on rental bikes, riding the bus, etc. By comparison, I work in a white, conservative suburb of the city, and the amount of coworkers who are absolutely terrified of stepping foot in town is sizeable. A younger coworker (gen z) is mortified at the thought and is constantly repeating crime stories she heard/read.
When I was 23, I moved to North Oakland after a lifetime in white suburbs hearing the same constant racist/phobic drivel from everyone I grew up around. It was rough around the edges, and you could get in trouble if you were looking for it, but mostly it was just working class people trying to get by. Everything since feels like Disneyland by comparison
It sucks for kids now, more than before, but it sucked back then, too. The media plays a huge role. It's a symptom of suburban whiteness and fear of outsiders.
You know, I'd hoped generations after mine would get some reprieve from the bullshit of things like stranger danger, but the last few years have been anything but kind.
I mean a lot of young people spent time that they should have enjoyed in college/high school isolated at home as the people in power let the adults in their lives get sick and die for the sake of the economy. They had to go from living in fear of reactionary violence to witnessing institutional violence on screens.
It's not a comparison, but when I think about the 2008 financial crisis and Obama's presidential win giving me hope (sigh), younger generations didn't even have the luxury of a charismatic politician trying to inspire hope. It was two openly monstrous candidates talking down to Gen Z with no meaningful promises to prove life.
It's a fucking tragedy that we live in 2023, where there are enough houses for everyone, medical advancements that can sustain
, and the internet, which in better hands, would allow for genuine connection.Instead, rent costs so much that you can't take a sick day, getting sick can bankrupt you, and every bit of media and knowledge is behind a paywall or cluttered with ads.
But I try to think of what a better world would look like. It's all right there with the proper application of political will.
I know the facade is crumbling as the contradictions in capitalism become more apparent. Capitalists can't help themselves - they're still wringing out profit instead of granting the smallest of concessions. I'm still holding on and speaking out where I can because I want to outlive capitalism or at least the US.
2023
Comrade, allow me to be the first one to wish you a happy new year because we're already in 2024.
There's also a significant material restriction on kids. More homework and pressure to do extracurriculars, less money, harder to get around, fewer brick and mortar places to go, less woods, parents have less time, etc. I was in school a decade ago at this point but most of us just played PlayStation together. I think as shit (specifically housing, cars, and college) gets more expensive and wages stagnate this is further exacerbated.
When all the science says that homework is actively detrimental to learning! It's awful.
The massive expansion of suburbs since I was a kid 30 years ago is also notable. The suburbs have gotten bigger and denser, eating up a ton of marginal land where you could otherwise fuck around in the woods.
And yet we are blamed for not wanting to go outside as much, like huh? We’ve been told over and over that if we step outside our parent’s sight we would be abducted and killed by people in unmarked white vans.
"Why don't you go outside!>?!!" My parent in christ the Newdoor Nazis will literally call the police.
What they failed to mention is that your kid would be hit by one of the millions of flying bricks of steel we use to get around instead of being kidnapped
For the last ten years my local supermarkets force kids to leave their schoolbags at the door. No one guarding them. Out in the open where they can be stolen from.
The message is clear. Your property doesn't matter. You are a criminal until proven otherwise. We are god. You are scum. We get all the consideration and protection, you get none.
And the result? Youth crime has only increased! Big surprise, the people you treated like shit are lashing out. And instead of getting the hint? "WE MUST PUNISH THEM HARDER!"
Forcing kids to leave their school bags unattended at the door is such a crazy reaction to youth shoplifting.
The problem is there is no good solution for an individual store. "You can't walk around with your bag" is the only thing that won't cost them money.
Really addressing this would take a government effort to provide for kids and get them to buy in to society, and of course we have no interest in doing that.
Most people think you shouldn't take things that aren't yours. There's broad support for being lenient with shoplifting, but we're departing from the masses if we go to "just take whatever you like."
For the foreseeable future (shops have existed in every AES state so far) the goal should be to address the issue through reducing poverty and social alienation.
Shoplifting is born primarily from necessity, silly! If capitalism weren't systematically starving millions, if people had their basic living needs met, people would not need to steal their bread.
The western/capitalist grocery store is a vicious establishment, which gouges the masses for money on necessary items, and has the gall to handwave in the vague direction of "inflation". Losing stock only costs them a few dollars of their multimillion-dollar coroporation profits.
Victimless crime. If you see someone shoplifting, no you didn't.
No you see, the other user called you silly and said stealing was based, so that’s as left as you could possibly be.
I've seen it become generalized here the signs at the door as say all people gotta check their bags at the cash, but they can only bully kids into doing it. Like, a grocery store clerk half my age isn't going to tell me to give them my backpack. I wouldn't comply and if they said they had to insist I'd leave and say I'm complaining to management about the policy but absolutely not blaming them and will say they did their duty well as insulting as that duty was to both of us, this did happen once at a corner store.
Also shoplifting is soooo fucking easy after 30. No one one suspects you at all as long as yknow, you don't loom homeless or like someone thst may need what they're stealing really badly. And the people hired to stop you are young enough that they can still be told off by any adult who behaves authoritatively or just isn't worth the hassle.
A roommate and friend I had, died of lung cancer two-year back, who did 17 years in prison for robbing banks said thst prison is literally the same as junior high school.
Having that sort of childhood with parents that watched my every move and were control freaks coupled with I think mental health issues that never went diagnosed or acknowledged has put me into this position at nearly 30 where I don't even know what it means to grow up anymore. I just this year experienced being high and drunk, never had sex, don't go out any, no friends I see in person. But I don't know if the voice in my head telling me I need to grow up is right or if I'm just being too hard on myself or if I just get anxious whenever I'm convinced I'm not sufficiently anxious enough already.
Pretty good stuff. I need people to do it with and not just get high alone posting though.
I think the voice in your head is being too hard on yourself because it’s not materially actionable, and any it is materially actionable is probably the root cause for why you’re thinking that.
I doubt you need to “grow up”, you probably just want to socialize or something and your brain associates that with “growing up” because we think being lonely is our fault because we live in Hell
I see this with my younger siblings. When I was 12 I was pretty much in charge of myself all day most days - not that my mom was absent, she just trusted me to get to and from school, friends' houses, the mall, the community center, etc either by bike or bus. Nowadays my siblings and their friends are about the same age and they literally can't go anywhere without someone driving them and picking them up, their only interactions with computers are locked down devices that can only do schoolwork, their group chats with their friends are read by everyone's parents, etc.
Not all of it is our parents' fault, either. These kids all have scooters and bikes like I did, and if they grab one and take off during the day it's totally fine - but our neighborhood only has one outlet to a road, and that road has no bike lane, no sidewalk, a speed limit of 45 MPH and is twisty and full of blind turns. Nobody would attempt to ride a bike down that road unless they had a death wish, and even if you did these fucking burbs are so far away from anything worth riding to it's a moot point. What, you gonna ride to the gas station? Or go in the other direction - which just leads to a different gas station?
A few years ago I remember getting into a row with some homeowners about building a playground in the neighborhood - it got shot down because people were afraid that the sight and sound of children playing outside would lower their property values, so now we have a "park" that's just a big expanse of grass with nothing on it.
The American brain is poisoned, and the suburban brain especially so.
I hate property value with such a burning passion. The idea that houses are an "investment" and not a place to live is so grotesque. : (
Recommended book: KIds These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, by Malcolm Harris
http://library.lol/main/7A9F9C56ECF449348EE45C9136731C1E
“American Millennials come from somewhere—we didn’t emerge fully formed from the crack in an iPhone screen,” Harris writes. In his view, we are, down to our innermost being, the children of neoliberalism. The habits so often mocked and belittled in the press are in fact adaptations to tightening repressive and exploitative pressures, the survival strategies of a demographic “born in captivity.” https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-30/reviews/not-every-kid-bond-matures-2/
I mean it's not just Gen z. I don't really have much of a social life and when I try and tell people about how lonely I am they mostly just say "well yeah it's hard for adults to make friends." Thanks? Guess I was right the first time when I thought about how shooting myself as the best way to stop feeling lonely? Glad I can come to you with my problems and be basically told to stop whining, pretty much every person in my life (not a big number).
It's been mentioned before. The lack of "third places" where you can just exist without having to pay for it. Sadly, not only have these places been squeezed out of existence, the things that replace it are becoming increasingly expensive as people have decreasing amounts of disposable income. If a single night out at a bar costs me more than I spend on gas in a week, I'm not really going to go hang out at a bar.
Men getting any emotional support and compassion challenge level: impossible, apparently. I feel you. Trying to get anyone to understand that I have feelings and emotions and need support sometimes is very disheartening. bell hooks talks about it a bunch; Men need help to get out of the whole Toxic masculinity and even people who probably should know better either won't or can't support the men in their lives.
Hours after typing this I had dinner with my brother and sister-in-law. We grabbed some stuff from a taco truck. Being with my brother outside of work makes me feel like a human being.
I just need to find my place in the world, and my people. I've grown stronger in the past few years by leaps and bounds. There's something worth holding on to hope for. I can feel it now.
yep. 33 year old who hasn't had a single friend IRL since high-school here. I am so fucking lonely and it doesn't seem like it will ever end.
Going to xth noticing that pattern begining with the millenial generation and how gen A is still in the cage, as too many authors point out this is just a positive feedback loop for reinforcing a fascist society, you get the whole alienated AF nuclear family and then show the kids nothing but sacrificing everything for said society or else, they internalize these lessons and it makes it harder for them to question or realize anything is wrong as adults.
My conspiracy theory? A lot of this is one big tantrum from the ruling class about the civil rights act. If they can't be as naked with giving white people utopia at the expense of everyone else, then they'll make life shit for everyone.
It does a disservice to white people as well, it's the dynamic of a golden child and scapegoat. If bumper-to-bumper traffic and shitty suburbs in rural wyoming are my only options for transportation and housing alike, then the ruling class can spare me their "help".
A lot of this is one big tantrum from the ruling class about the civil rights act.
Always a firm basis for any conspiracy theory in America. A lot of this shit is 24/7 tough on crime war on drugs blowback; Decades of 24/7 "if it bleeds it leads" has people convinced we're living in the mad max movie instead of what was, up until the pandemic, the safest point in American history since they started keeping records, and all that crime reporting shit is tied in to the ruling classes "solution" to the civil rights "problem" - But everyone
in jail, justify it by convincing the :mayos: that they're about to be murdered at every second.
I grew up on the tail end of some semblance of child autonomy in the 90's. To be clear I was a white "boy" in a upper middle class family so I had way more privilege than most. The one place the totalitarian controls had really started dropping was public school, but my parents put me in private school for various reasons; the psychotic administration being one of them. Like I still got to roam the neighborhood and ride my bike into town and stuff, but I got questioned by cops a couple of times, never punished though. Looking back though I can see the strictures were really closing in around behind me, NCLB was passed when I was in HS and my sister got some of that madness before she graduated.
basically me too but more lower then upper (the upper middle class kids loved to fuck with me) and instead of private school my mom used the fact she was the superintendent's secretary to get me moved to the only high school in the county that still had a chill principal and ran things kind of old school.
the psychotic administrator from my high school life later was fired and arrested for massive embezzlement.
my senior year was pretty fun even if it sent me on a fucked up life path.
As much as I hate the small town I grew up in (with a passion, it killed my brother and my closest friend) in a way I am thankful for the freedom it granted me. My parents are fans of the "free range kid" method of parenting so I was free to roam around town on my bike. If I asked my parents to drive me they'd say "you have legs don't you?". I didn't have a cell phone till I was 16. I can't imagine growing up without that kind of freedom
Stop subposting without linking context. I want the context for this drama
It's a link post to nitter, Hexbear doesn't seem to be showing the urls right now but the title will take you there.
you deserve better my dude
