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.
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.
what the FUCK why are we doing shooting erasure
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!"
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, everyone
He'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.
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.
I was thinking about that exact example today
Covid - The risk of contracting covid is high. The consequences; the risk of death is low, the risk of injury is high. Wearing a mask is a very easy intervention that isn't burdensome for most people but drastically reduces all of these risks, to near zero if you're using a proper N95 or better mask and it fits properly.
School shootings - The risk of a school shooting is extremely low. The consequences are high; somewhere between 1-30 dead, likely a number of injuries. "Hardening" a school is extremely burdensome, causes real, provable, and serious harm to children and staff, and isn't actually effective at preventing or reducing the harm of school shootings. "School Resource Officers" are the most damning example; SROs haven't prevented a single shooting in 24 years, but they have condemned a million children to jail or prison. I have no numbers for this, but I imagine just the number of suicides resulting from having armed cops in schools vastly exceeds the number of people killed in school shootings during the entire period from the Colombine murders til today.
Yeah I just got the impression that we shouldn’t have any drills. I understand making it a once a year thing like fire or tornado drills
The way drills are conducted is outright terrorism. Sitting kids down for thirty minutes to explain what to do; Go in to your classroom, sit on the floor, be quiet, listen to your teacher, use texts instead of making phone calls, and wait for an all clear, then doing a quick, straightforward exercise to demonstrate what to do, would be acceptable.
Having cops running around the place firing guns and explosives is absolutely unacceptable terrorism. "random drills" in general aren't effective and shouldn't be done.
HUH