Vance opines on a grim 'Fact of Life' in the wake of the Georgia shootings

[Jayhawker Soule]

Well, the rape figures you quoted are nearly double the death rate of kids by guns. And no, though I am a woman, I don't walk around in fear of rape either.

Your point?

 

[Kathryn]

Your point?

I'm pointing out facts.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

I'm pointing out facts.

You're pointing out selective facts without a purpose. OK. I suspect there are stranger ways to entertain oneself.

Of course, the other possibility is that you're suggesting that gun violence is really no big deal and that, as Vance argues, it's simply one of those niggling facts of life about which some make too bid a deal.

 

[F1fan]

Who is going to pay for all that and who are going to find all the persons needed to defend from an active shooter, train them and be certain that the school are hardened in a correct manner?

Well the Agenda 47 and project 2025 both talk about cutting funding for education, and leaving standards to states. So the cost will fall on states and school districts. And of course the less federal funding means schools will suffer more budget cuts. So once again these conservatives won't help solve the problem of threats of active shooters, but will make schools struggle to fund any security they might want.

This is another bullet point (pun intended) why Trump/Vance are terrible for America, and not only don't offer solutions, but make life WORSE for the average citizen.

 

[Kathryn]

You're pointing out selective facts without a purpose. OK. I suspect there are stranger ways to entertain oneself.

Of course, the other possibility is that you're suggesting that gun violence is really no big deal and that, as Vance argues, it's simply one of those niggling facts of life about which some make too bid a deal.

First of all, Vance didn't say or imply that. Secondly, I think you're just mad at me because I laughed at you earlier, when you used the term Basket of Deplorables.

 

[metis]

“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they’re not able.”

So, how many police should each school have and who is going to pay for them? Are these police going to carry AR-15's like many of these shooters use? Maybe we should have tanks and armored personnel carriers just outside of each school, eh?

The idea that more guns somehow miraculously make us safer is totally nuts, and that's the nice word for it.

 

[Balthazzar]

And the complicit - be it out of gross ignorance or gross irresponsibility - pretend that this fact does not cry out for universal background checks, safe storage laws, red-flag laws, and reasonable constraints on the types of weapons made available to the general public.

Instead, we get inane, pathetic quips about "it has never been the guns" while we enable the slaughter of children and live in a country where ...

Gun violence is among America's most deadly and costly public health crises. But unlike other big killers — diseases like cancer and HIV or dangers like automobile crashes and cigarettes — sparse federal money goes to studying or preventing it.​

​

That's because of a one-sentence amendment tucked into the 1996 Congressional budget bill: "None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control."​

​

Its author was Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican who called himself the "point man" for the National Rifle Association on Capitol Hill. And for nearly 25 years the amendment was perceived as a threat to, and all but paralyzed, the CDC's support and study of gun violence. [source]​

Background checks are great. Gun safety courses are great. CC courses are great. Going to the range for practice is great. Safe storage is great. Reasonable constraints would be great, given they are reasonable. General public should be able bodied. The difficulty, as always, is with some types of people. It's not about the guns. National defense maybe. Home defense maybe. What we lack is adequate knowledge and training, which is available. Some simply prefer not to participate. I'm a soloist myself, but I lived my life under that knowhow from childhood. I don't have military training. I have gun safety training, hunter safety training, first aid training, CPR training, and basic citizen rights as a citizen. This know how was efforted by my parents. I grew up a hunter. Education and training would be helpful for any would be gun owner, if only for the increase in skill and ability.

 

[Twilight Hue]

So, how many police should each school have and who is going to pay for them? Are these police going to carry AR-15's like many of these shooters use? Maybe we should have tanks and armored personnel carriers just outside of each school, eh?

The idea that more guns somehow miraculously make us safer is totally nuts, and that's the nice word for it.

Maybe you should ask Ukraine if guns are a bad or a good thing.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Background checks are great. Gun safety courses are great. CC courses are great. Going to the range for practice is great. Safe storage is great. Reasonable constraints would be great, given they are reasonable.

OK

General public should be able bodied.

Huh?

Education and training would be helpful for any would be gun owner, if only for the increase in skill and ability.

... except when it "only" increases the skill of some school shooter, or when it "only" increases the skill in using a weapon which should be proscribed.

 

[Balthazzar]

OK



Huh?



... except when it "only" increases the skill of some school shooter, or when it "only" increases the skill in using a weapon which should be proscribed.

Able bodied in defense of ...

People ...

I mean some people, like school shooters, don't need guns and may require some sort of medication to keep them from acting on their impulse to violence and murder.

 

[esmith]

Who is going to pay for all that and who are going to find all the persons needed to defend from an active shooter, train them and be certain that the school are hardened in a correct manner?

So, what is your recommendation? I hear a lot of bull**** from many that have no idea what can be done, but just either complain about the problem or a solution that is improbable

 

[esmith]

So, how many police should each school have and who is going to pay for them? Are these police going to carry AR-15's like many of these shooters use? Maybe we should have tanks and armored personnel carriers just outside of each school, eh?

The idea that more guns somehow miraculously make us safer is totally nuts, and that's the nice word for it.

See Post #71 above

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

So, what is your recommendation? I hear a lot of bull**** from many that have no idea what can be done, but just either complain about the problem or a solution that is improbable

No, if you throw enough money after it, it can be done.

 

[amorphous_constellation]

the articles are behind some kind of registration wall, or email wall, but I think that the debate about grim things in life is between figuring out why they happen on the individual level, vs. adding more layers of law of the kind that is potentially blind to the actual causes of things. Things can be grim, this reality is not all unicorns and rainbows. If it's in the human power to do so, we want to steer away from the grim potentials of life. The minds of these kids that do these things obviously seem to have been polluted, but how? They must have thought that the world was absolutely evil in order to do what they did, and what road were they on to get to that point? Do these questions call for solving the obvious mental / socialization issues involved with all of this, or do they call more-so for enacting more law?

 

[SkepticThinker]

According to Scientific American it's probably both. You have both born and made Psychopaths. Not all of them necessarily bad but clearly not good either.

Inside the Mind of a Psychopath

Neuroscientists are discovering that some of the most cold-blooded killers aren't bad. They suffer from a brain abnormality that sets them adrift in an emotionless world

www.scientificamerican.com

There are no baby psychopaths. So being "born that way" doesn't make sense.

Who we are as a people are formed from experiences during our earliest years of life. This comes from the interaction between our environmental experiences and our genetics. Basically everything about us came about as some combination of nature/nurture. You can't have one without the other. And yes, you can be genetically predisposed to psychopathy, like you can be genetically predisposed to alcoholism, but that's only if the right environmental cues happen at the "right" times that will cause it to develop.

For instance, I am most likely genetically predisposed to develop alcoholism. Almost everyone on my father's side of the family experienced it in some way or another. But, being aware of the risk for this when I was quite young, I managed to navigate around it and alter my behaviours in a different direction so that the environmental cues didn't trigger the necessary genetic changes.


"Genetic and environmental influences do not cause psychopathy directly. Instead, they influence the way certain brain structures and systems develop in a way that increases the risk a person will develop psychopathy."

What Causes Psychopathy | Psychopathy Is

What causes psychopathy? Research indicates that psychopathy results from a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors.

psychopathyis.org

But you ignored my entire point:

My point was that mass shootings are having a societal effect. You can't have a bunch of people continually experiencing such high levels of trauma without some sort of consequences. So the people you write off as mentally disturbed or whatever, got that way somehow. I'm suggesting that mass shootings are contributing to the mental health problem in your country.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Last year I believe roughly 1600 people between the ages of 1 to 17 were shot. As I have stated before, 1 is too many but still...it's not like we're living in daily fear of a school shooting. Or at least most of us aren't, though I'm sure some are. There are many graduating classes that are that big! Pretty sure my high school was that big. Anyway, I just want to point that out.

That's a lot.

" This year, there have been over 200 school shootings in the U.S, regardless of how many were shot or killed. Click or hover on a circle see more details about each incident."

Apalachee High School shooting is the latest in U.S. Here's how many happened in 2024, so far.

A 14-year-old shot and killed two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, the latest school shooting in 2024.

www.cbsnews.com

Otherwise I agree with a lot of your post. You know what's interesting to me? That my brother and I were both raised in the same house by the same parents but he's mentally ill and I'm not. And honestly, I believe I was the more "abused" of us too, but maybe I wasn't, who knows?

Same goes for my sister and I.

But I know why I'm "mentally ill." I was sexually assaulted at a young age and developed PTSD and panic disorder, though I wasn't fully aware of this until just a couple of years ago. My sister and I grew up in the same household, but I was sexually abused (in a different household) and she wasn't. So we went different ways on that.

As I've stated before, I recently hosted a friend of mine from Germany, who was very surprised that there weren't gunshots ringing in the streets (he was also really surprised at the low percentage of African Americans because based on media coverage and commercials, he thought that they made up at least 50 percent of the population, but I digress).

Anyway, I've brought this up several times, but it's never been addressed - oh well.

You guys still have waaaaay more mass shootings than most any other developed country on earth.
Something is wrong.

 

[SkepticThinker]

When you factor in the sheer number of the population , it's pretty obvious how low these figures really are.

 

[SkepticThinker]

The map already tells you that information that we are not the only country with a high rate of psychopathy within each respective borders.

Cool, so you can't blame it on mental illness then, as you were trying to do.
You've defeated your own point?

I think you would also be interested in knowing that democrat-controlled states have the most psychopaths in our nation.

Here are the U.S. states with the highest prevalence of psychopaths

A recent study used data from the Big Five personality to estimate psychopathy prevalence in the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C.

bigthink.com

LOL What a bizarre non-sequitur.

 

[SkepticThinker]

It's not the guns. It has never been about the guns. It will never be about the guns. People like to blame guns for things "some" types of people are responsible for. It's not about the people either. It's about "some" people. Not all people. "Some" people are "dangerous" with or without guns. "Some" people. Not "all" people and it's not "isolated" to Americans. Look around sport. Take a look at the middle east, Kosovo, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Russia, Palestine, Iran, Israel, S Africa, etc. It's not about the guns. It has never been about the guns.

(.)

Is this sarcasm?

 

[Twilight Hue]

Cool, so you can't blame it on mental illness then, as you were trying to do.
You've defeated your own point?

LOL What a bizarre non-sequitur.

I could care less if you don't like as those are the facts.