A Third Grader Eyeing the Classroom Door

martin said:
"...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So reads the operative clause. Simple, yet it took the Court two hundred years to decide what it means and then decide partially. Raving maniacs are people; are their rights infringed by not letting them have loaded AR-15's? Flame throwers are "Arms". Are they included?

Google "Heller on guns" and see what the state of the law is before telling the forum what it is.
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complete fabrication. there are half a dozen federal court cases that specifically denotes the 2nd Amendment as an individual right before heller.
 
SmarterthanYou said:
and how much property was destroyed?
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It's unclear if more or less would have been destroyed. For example, if it had been easier for rioters to arm themselves on short notice, would it have been harder for policy to restore order, resulting in more property being destroyed? Possibly.
 
Mina said:
It's unclear if more or less would have been destroyed. For example, if it had been easier for rioters to arm themselves on short notice, would it have been harder for policy to restore order, resulting in more property being destroyed? Possibly.
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you weren't alive at the time of those riots, were you?
 
Mina said:
I'm pro-gun-control, but I think we're probably doing more harm than good by making such a big thing about school shootings. We're terrorizing vast number of children in the context of a threat that is statistically negligible.

See here:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/a01

As you can see, the highest point on that graph, for number of homicides of kids at school, was actually 30 years ago, in the 1992-93 school year..... all the more interesting because the country has grown since then. Proportionally, that year's death toll would be like 43 this year. So, if when most of those here went to school they didn't worry about being gunned down, that's ironic, since they were probably at significantly greater risk of being gunned down at school than today's kids are.

In the decade leading up to 2018/19, according to that link, we average just under 19 kids killed at school per year. That sounds like a lot, but is it?

We have about 49.4 million k-12 students. So, that's a murder victimization rate of 0.038/100k. Even adjusting for the fact they're only in school part of the year and part of the day, it works out to a murder rate of around 0.23/100k. By comparison, the overall murder rate in the US is 6.6/100k. So, kids are being killed in school at just over one-thirtieth the background rate.

Schools are actually one of the very safest places for kids. That link above confirms it. For example, in 2018-19, when 10 kids were murdered at school, 1,498 of them were murdered overall. Say they spend 1,440 hours per year at school (counting after-school activities), and 7,320 out of school (the balance of the year). Then, that year, the out-of-school murder rate for kids was 3.63/100k/year, and the in-school rate was 0.12/100k/year (each figure adjusted for proportion of the year). In other words, KIDS WERE MORE THAN 30 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO BE KILLED, PER HOUR, OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL.

So, with schools being such an incredibly safe place for kids -- one of the safest places they could be in a nation that's as murder-happy as the US, does it really make sense to constantly freak them out about the disappearingly small threat of a school shooting? If your kids spend their day eyeing the classroom door, that's on us. We're making them neurotic, and we're doing it in the context of one of the safest places in the country for them.
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It's statistically reassuring but factually intolerable and not going to happen that school boards, parents, public officials and the public at large will live with it, though it well may be that locking down the schools is doing more harm than good...for everyone except the children, their parents, etc. who become our "next time". So, schools will be locked down and children will suffer whatever trauma follows from it unless the guns are removed from the picture.
 
martin said:
It's statistically reassuring but factually intolerable and not going to happen that school boards, parents, public officials and the public at large will live with it, though it well may be that locking down the schools is doing more harm than good...for everyone except the children, their parents, etc. who become our "next time". So, schools will be locked down and children will suffer whatever trauma follows from it unless the guns are removed from the picture.
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I'm in favor of gun control, and if that's the only way to end this hysteria about schoolhouse violence, then that's another argument in favor of it. But I remain convinced we're doing a lot more harm than good with the hype. We're going to raise a bunch of paranoid children.

That'll wind up showing up not just in terms of neurotic kids (with substance dependence and crippling phobias). It also means we're raising a generation of kids who will be totally accustomed to heavy-handed government interference in the name of security. They'll be predisposed to favor such measures as adults, too, paving a path to tyranny. If you grow up submitting to random searches and spending much of your day in an institution that has all the trappings of a prison, and thinking that's the only alternative to a high probability of being slaughtered, you will be molded into a subject instead of a citizen.

Plus, all that time and money spent on security theater is time and money not available for actual education.... and it's not like the US is setting the international standard for educational performance to begin with.

This is a rare case where I have a "bothsiderist" critique, since both the left and the right are contributing to this problem. The left sees hyping school violence as a path to gun control, leading to a wildly exaggerated sense of the threat. Then the right see security theater (armed guards and teachers, random searches, fewer doors, and so on) as a way to make sure the fear doesn't lead to gun control. That transforms the parents' fear into vast wastes of time and money, and huge mental trauma for children.
 
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martin said:
It's statistically reassuring but factually intolerable and not going to happen that school boards, parents, public officials and the public at large will live with it, though it well may be that locking down the schools is doing more harm than good...for everyone except the children, their parents, etc. who become our "next time". So, schools will be locked down and children will suffer whatever trauma follows from it unless the guns are removed from the picture.
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gunusage.jpg
 
Mina said:
I'm in favor of gun control, and if that's the only way to end this hysteria about schoolhouse violence, then that's another argument in favor of it. But I remain convinced we're doing a lot more harm than good with the hype. We're going to raise a bunch of paranoid children.

That'll wind up showing up not just in terms of neurotic kids (with substance dependence and crippling phobias). It also means we're raising a generation of kids who will be totally accustomed to heavy-handed government interference in the name of security. They'll be predisposed to favor such measures as adults, too, paving a path to tyranny. If you grow up submitting to random searches and spending much of your day in an institution that has all the trappings of a prison, and thinking that's the only alternative to a high probability of being slaughtered, you will be molded into a subject instead of a citizen.

Plus, all that time and money spent on security theater is time and money not available for actual education.... and it's not like the US is setting the international standard for educational performance to begin with.

This is a rare case where I have a "bothsiderist" critique, since both the left and the right are contributing to this problem. The left sees hyping school violence as a path to gun control, leading to a wildly exaggerated sense of the threat. Then the right see security theater (armed guards and teachers, random searches, fewer doors, and so on) as a way to make sure the fear doesn't lead to gun control. That transforms the parents' fear into vast wastes of time and money, and huge mental trauma for children.
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We are doing two harms with guns. This was the argument I had mind starting this thread. The third grader eyeing the door is another kind of victim.
 
SmarterthanYou said:
because that would mean that you're getting your information from sanitized sources.........that you didn't see and hear what actually happened. there's a difference.
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No, it would mean that I'm getting my information from studied sources -- sources that had the benefit of hindsight and research and years of perspective to better understand what happened. It's a lot harder to get a clear view of events when you're trying to resist the urge to give your personal impressions primacy. Obviously, tricks of memory abound, and everyone's first-hand experiences are likely to be far narrower than the event they're trying to piece together... for example, just a view of what happened on their particular block, or what was reported on the particular channel they happened to be watching at a particular moment.
 
Mina said:
No, it would mean that I'm getting my information from studied sources -- sources that had the benefit of hindsight and research and years of perspective to better understand what happened. It's a lot harder to get a clear view of events when you're trying to resist the urge to give your personal impressions primacy. Obviously, tricks of memory abound, and everyone's first-hand experiences are likely to be far narrower than the event they're trying to piece together... for example, just a view of what happened on their particular block, or what was reported on the particular channel they happened to be watching at a particular moment.
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that's an awful lot of words just to repeat what I said
 
martin said:
We are doing two harms with guns. This was the argument I had mind starting this thread. The third grader eyeing the door is another kind of victim.
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I agree with you. But I think that we're inadvertently worsening that harm with the hype.
 
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