Gun Violence Part 2: Thoughts and Prayers STILL Don't Work

[Howl]

This article lays it all out and it exactly parallels my own thinking on the subject: 

Opinion: What America’s gun fanatics won’t tell you   The Second Amendment doesn’t give you the right to own a gun

[fraurosena]

6 hours ago, Howl said:

This article lays it all out and it exactly parallels my own thinking on the subject: 

Opinion: What America’s gun fanatics won’t tell you   The Second Amendment doesn’t give you the right to own a gun

That’s NOT an opinion. That is what the second amendment factually states.

What gun-nuts are proclaiming is an opinion.

 

[Ozlsn]

12 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Poor kid. Poor, poor kid.

 

This makes me so bloody angry. The first rule of firing a weapon is always "have a clear view of your target". You don't just fire into bushes or whatever because - and this is key - bullets fired from guns kill and seriously injure people. Firing at the thing you 'think' is a deer before you are certain is a really bad idea. Firing into areas you can't see clearly is a really bad idea.

How is it that I - who have never fired anything more powerful than a paintball gun - know this and this absolute idiot doesn't?? I hope he is charged with manslaughter (or local equivalent). Absolutely bloody ridiculous.

Calming thoughts. Calming thoughts.

Maybe a state or two could follow Punjab and and require applicants who want to own weapons to plant ten trees. Or spend six months picking up litter or something similar. Community service.

Or just require third party personal insurance for each weapon owned. If an uninsured weapon causes injury or death the owner is liable for all medical costs. I suspect that would do a lot to reduce the number of high powered weapons in the community...

[GreyhoundFan]

Good grief:

 

[fraurosena]

Massacre averted...

[fraurosena]

 

[RosyDaisy]

https://www.cnn.com/webview/us/live-news/philadelphia-shooting-08-14-19/h_c19721d48fed6835e112c09a7ba956a9

Mass shooting in Philadelphia. 6 officers shot but and some other injuries. No deaths or life-threatening injuries. Still an active shooter situation.

[candygirl200413]

Philly is right in my neighborhood. All officers have been released but the gunman is still in the house. 

[WiseGirl]

Suspect surrendered and his lawyer played a big part in getting him to surrender. So frightening that he had enough ammunition in the house to hold police at bay for so long. There is a daycare down the street and they had to shelter in place until they could be evacuated. As a teacher, a shelter in place is just as scary as a lockdown. (Although to be fair we had a shelter in place for bears once).

[precious blessing]

disregard, sorry.

Edited August 15, 2019 by precious blessing
tmi

[fraurosena]

 

 

[WiseGirl]

Just some updates form Newtown Action Alliance.

First one is House Democrats to call to cosponsor the bill (see their Twitter to retweet and the list).

 

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

Edited August 16, 2019 by WiseGirl
alignment

[fraurosena]

What?!

 

[fraurosena]

As predicted. Scary stuff though.

 

[fraurosena]

 

 

[thoughtful]

Here's a little warning about children and guns, from 1961.

It made me tense as hell, despite knowing there wouldn't be gore in a TV show from this era,  distracting racism and sexism, and some cheesy acting (Bill Mumy, Juanita Moore and a few others are good, though).

Hitchcock's entire shtick was to be casual and droll about murder, as if it was all a joke, especially for his TV show. His ending monologue was always flip and sarcastic. So the audience at the time would have found his final thoughts here very unusual.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0508131/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast

[Flossie]

On 8/17/2019 at 2:28 AM, fraurosena said:

As predicted. Scary stuff though.

 

Because the above mentioned site requires one to register to read up to five articles per month or pay for unlimited access, and I didn't want to do either, I found the story elsewhere:

********************

Ohio first graders find gun meant to prevent school violence in unlocked case

Two first graders managed to remove a gun that was part of an Ohio school’s concealed carry program after the weapon was left unlocked in a plastic case.

The mishap occurred in March, but news of the security lapse just recently came to light, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The incident happened in an administrative office beside Highland Elementary School in South Bloomfield Township.

The elementary school is nearby the school district’s transportation office, where transportation director Vicky Nelson had left her pistol in an unlocked plastic case near her desk. Her grandson and another first grader, the daughter of assistant transportation director Christine Scaffidi, were left alone in the office while Nelson used the restroom.

When Scaffidi walked into the office, she found the gun out of its case and on the desk, with the children nearby.

“I’m assuming that the child picked up the gun from behind the desk and had been holding it,” Superintendent Dan Freund explained. Freund said that Nelson and Scaffidi notified him of the incident, although he didn’t speak to the children about it.

Nelson, who had been trained as part of the district’s concealed carry program, was removed from the initiative and suspended without pay for three days.

Freund said that he “became physically sick” when he learned about what happened.

“People were horrified,” he added.

Morrow County Sheriff John Hinton said he was never informed about the March incident, noting that there would have been an investigation into the matter if he had been.

*********************

It doesn't sound to me like any of the adults involved really understand the idea of gun safety.

[Ozlsn]

18 hours ago, Flossie said:

It doesn't sound to me like any of the adults involved really understand the idea of gun safety

And then some. I hate the whole idea of teachers being armed, the risks just go up so much for not a lot of benefit, and it changes the whole level of expectation of teachers to something that is unreasonable (in my opinion anyway). If one of these kids had managed to injure another, then what liability does the school carry? What liability does the individual teacher carry? I would have so many questions as a staff member or a parent.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Parkland students unveil sweeping gun-control proposal and hope for a youth voting surge in 2020"

Spoiler

The student activists who crashed the political arena after the mass shooting last year at their high school in Parkland, Fla., are throwing their weight behind a new and ambitious gun-control program that they hope will set the tone for the debate following the most recent mass shootings and headed into the 2020 elections.

The students are speaking out for the first time since 31 people were killed in one weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. They hope their plan — unveiled Wednesday morning — will be considered by President Trump as well as his Democratic presidential rivals and will serve as a catalyst for a surge of youth voters next year.

“I think similarly to a lot of the country, I’m in a lot of pain right now,” said David Hogg, 19, a co-founder of March for Our Lives and a survivor of the shooting in February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “You see these shootings on TV every day and very little happening around it. It’s painful to watch. And I think it’s been really hard for me and many of the other students and people that we work with to find hope in this time.

“But I think that this plan is something that we can truly — as a country and as Americans united against violence and fighting for peace — can get behind.”

March for Our Lives has been focused on voter registration and outreach across the country over the past year and a half, building a national infrastructure with more than 100 chapters centered on grass-roots organizing. They hope to turn that into droves of voters at the polls next year.

Called “A Peace Plan for a Safer America,” the ambitious platform, which was obtained by The Washington Post, goes much further than the current debate over universal background checks and “red flag” laws, which would apply to people who could be a danger to themselves and others.

After El Paso and Dayton, President Trump signaled that he was open to both ideas, but he told National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre on Tuesday that universal background checks are now off the table.

The Peace Plan would create a national licensing and gun registry, long a nonstarter with gun rights advocates; ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines; implement a mandatory gun buyback program; and install a “national director of gun violence prevention” who would report directly to the president and coordinate the federal response to what advocates call a national public health emergency.

[Read March for Our Lives gun “peace plan”]

It would dramatically increase restrictions around owning guns in ways sure to spark fierce blowback, including raising the age to 21 from 18 for those who want to buy guns. It calls for a “multi-step” gun licensing system, overseen by a federal agency, that would include in-person interviews and a 10-day wait before gun purchases are approved. The license would be renewed annually.

In the vein of the Green New Deal, the Peace Plan takes a holistic approach to gun violence by also calling for automatic voter registration when those eligible turn 18, along with the creation of a “Safety Corps,” which the authors compare to a Peace Corps for gun violence prevention. The plan also proposes community-based solutions like mental health services, as well as programs to address and prevent suicide, domestic violence and urban violence.

“It’s bold. It’s nothing like anyone else is proposing. We are really setting audacious goals,” said Tyah-Amoy Roberts, a Parkland survivor who is on the March for Our Lives board of directors. “And more than anything, what we are seeking to do is be intersectional. We know and acknowledge every day that gun violence prevention is not just about preventing mass shootings.”

Roberts noted that the effort is also a means of taking ownership of the conversation that has stalled legislatively in Washington — a plan “written by us, for us.”

“We are changing the conversation around gun violence itself because we don’t want the narrative to come from people who haven’t experienced it — to come from people who benefit from the sale of guns. We want the narrative to come from people who understand it from its very root,” she added.

Hogg, Roberts and Charlie Mirsky, the political director of March for Our Lives, hope the 2020 Democratic candidates embrace and campaign on their platform. The first test of its resonance will come Oct. 2 in Las Vegas, when March for Our Lives will host a forum dedicated to addressing gun violence in partnership with Giffords, the group run by former congresswoman and shooting survivor Gabrielle Giffords.

The issue of gun violence has recently become a much more dominant concern for the 2020 presidential candidates. Raw emotions have hit many of them as they have met advocates from Moms Demand Action and other groups whose members have been affected by gun violence. During one poignant moment, Andrew Yang broke down in tears at a gun forum in Des Moines this month.

“My hope is that they focus like a laser on youth turnout,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said of March for Our Lives’s 2020 efforts, after reviewing the proposal. “The election is over the minute young people decide to turn out. The only reason that Trump would get reelected is if young people stay home. The issue of gun violence is one of the only issues that truly motivate young people to shake off their indifference and aversion to voting.”

Democrats, who in the past would at least nod toward gun owners and do photo ops while hunting, are embracing gun control with greater urgency than they have in any election in recent memory, a sign that they are sensing movement among voters. During the 2018 midterms, when Democrats recaptured the House majority, nearly 70 percent of registered voters said gun policy was “very important” to them, ranking the issue ahead of taxes and immigration, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

Former vice president Joe Biden favors renewing an assault weapons ban and implementing a federal gun buyback program. Several Democrats have said they support gun licensing, including Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), while Biden has been skeptical of such a plan.

“Gun licensing will not change whether or not people buy what weapons — what kinds of weapons they can buy, where they can use them, how they can store them,” Biden said in June.

March for Our Lives is calling for a mandatory buyback of all assault weapons and a voluntary buyback of handguns and other firearms. O’Rourke has said that he would support a mandatory buyback program, while Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have been more skeptical, pushing for voluntary programs.

“Political parties believe they have all this power, but in reality the power in the U.S. resides in the culture and what we choose to prioritize,” Hogg said. “Movements are bigger than political parties.”

Hogg, Mirsky and Roberts, who are heading to college this fall, stressed the bipartisan need for lawmakers to adopt the plan — or at least to consider parts of it. And despite their disillusionment with Trump and his inaction on gun policy, they would welcome a meeting with him at the White House.

“I don’t know if he’d be sincere about it, but I would accept any meeting I could get regardless of political party because we must make these things happen,” said Hogg.

“Donald Trump wants gun reform,” said Mirsky. “If you look at what he does when he’s unfiltered, he will tweet about universal background checks. He was saying that Republicans are owned by the NRA. These are the things he says when he’s speaking off the cuff. . . . Donald Trump’s instincts are not what the problems are here. It’s clearly and shamelessly the NRA money that is flowing in there.”

NRA spokeswoman Amy Hunter, commenting on the plan, said: “The gun-control community is finally being marginally honest about their true wish list. The simple fact remains their proposals and ideas are out of the mainstream, and most people will understand their real intent goes beyond what they publicly state.”

March for Our Lives has fiercely denounced what it says is the undue influence of the NRA in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, while the gun rights group has pushed back against the students’ calls for gun safety laws. Hogg called the NRA “the big tobacco of violence in the U.S.” and claimed that “they don’t care about gun owners, like my father.”

“The NRA cares as much about gun owners’ safety as the tobacco industry cared about smokers not getting cancer,” Hogg said.

 

[thoughtful]

Heard this on the way home tonight:

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/21/753213146/how-red-flag-laws-are-used-in-vermont

A man in Vermont is under an "extreme risk" protection order not to own a gun for six months, due to an incident in which he stood out in the woods near his house for two hours and screamed, shot the gun repeatedly, held it up to his own head several times and said "I'm done -- this is how I'm going out," and asked the police to kill him.

His girlfriend says he had a complete breakdown, and, at one point, thought he'd killed himself. She follows up with (the spoiler alert is for an actual spoiler, in case you want to listen on your own):

Spoiler

her opinion that he should not have his gun taken away, and he should not have to "relinquish his 2nd amendment for a minute because of this."

         

 

[Ozlsn]

On 8/22/2019 at 10:31 AM, thoughtful said:

Heard this on the way home tonight:

https://www.npr.org/2019/08/21/753213146/how-red-flag-laws-are-used-in-vermont

A man in Vermont is under an "extreme risk" protection order not to own a gun for six months, due to an incident in which he stood out in the woods near his house for two hours and screamed, shot the gun repeatedly, held it up to his own head several times and said "I'm done -- this is how I'm going out," and asked the police to kill him.

His girlfriend says he had a complete breakdown, and, at one point, thought he'd killed himself. She follows up with (the spoiler alert is for an actual spoiler, in case you want to listen on your own):

  Hide contents

her opinion that he should not have his gun taken away, and he should not have to "relinquish his 2nd amendment for a minute because of this."

         

 

That reminds me of the conversation I had in Arizona where the person I was talking to was absolutely disgusted that PTSD in veterans would be considered a reason to restrict their access to firearms. Apparently having guns nearby is beneficial to veteran's health - she didn't explain how.

[GreyhoundFan]

How sad that it's come to this: "A new high school will have sleek classrooms — and places to hide from a mass shooter"

Spoiler

Engineers in World War I dug through the earth to build serpentine trenches borne from horrifically clear logic.

If enemy soldiers ever breached it, the zigzagging pattern would prevent them from shooting in a straight line down the length of the trench — leaving only a relative few exposed to gunfire or shrapnel.

That concept has been reinvigorated a century later, in a sense, for a western Michigan high school, to dampen the killing potential of a mass shooter.

A $48 million major construction project at Fruitport High School will add curved hallways to reduce a gunman’s range, jutting barriers to provide cover and egress, and meticulously spaced classrooms that can lock on demand and hide students in the corner, out of a killer’s sight.

 

“If I go to FPH and I want to be an active shooter, I’m going in knowing I have reduced sightlines,” Fruitport Superintendent Bob Szymoniak told The Washington Post about the curved hallways. “It has reduced his ability to do harm.”

The major overhaul of an existing building was driven by the ubiquity of mass shootings in the United States, Szymoniak said, citing the El Paso killings at a Walmart this month, along with notorious school shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

In 2018, there were 24 school shootings in which there were injuries or deaths. More than 228,000 students have been exposed to gun violence during school hours since the 1999 Columbine High School slayings, an analysis by The Post concluded.

The construction in Michigan is also part of a grim reality of schools methodically preparing for massacres as if they were lesson plans and quizzes.

Jefferson County schools in Colorado have given teachers buckets and cat litter to have on hand in case children need to relieve themselves during a prolonged active-shooter lockdown. Sharpies are supplied for writing the time in which tourniquets were applied, and candy helps diabetic children with low blood sugar hiding in darkness.

And this year, bulletproof backpacks are a hot back-to-school item.

“I don’t know if this is the new normal, but it certainly gives cause of concern,” Szymoniak said. Other features allow all doors to be locked from the front office and film applied to glass to keep it from shattering.

Classrooms will be built with a “shadow zone” where a gunman peeking in could not see students cowering along a side wall, said Matt Slagle, an architect for the project and director of K-12 projects at the TowerPinkster design firm.

The front office includes an educational Panopticon — an office administrator who will have views of the main approach, the vestibule and some of the hallways from one seat, Slagle said.

School shooters are often students themselves or are familiar with the building, though Slagle said some features, such as the locks and hiding areas, would be difficult to overcome even with inside knowledge. But that doesn’t make the school invincible.

“Unfortunately, that’s the way things are now,” Slagle said, describing mass shootings. “We’ll never make it completely safe from someone who desires to cause harm.”

The overhaul, which is mostly new construction, will finish in 2021, Szymoniak said, though students will arrive for class in two weeks and gradually take advantage of new spaces once they are constructed. “When we open it, it will be the most secure high school building in the state,” he said.

Slagle said he was careful with his design. His firm also designs prisons, and he said it wanted to strike a balance between security and a welcoming presence without the pendulum swinging too far in either direction.

Szymoniak would rather be talking tests, not killers. But the latter has become a looming priority for his students and teachers.

“I don’t want to have to have these conversations,” he said. “I don’t want to have to worry about having a school designed to prevent an active shooter.”

 

[WiseGirl]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

How sad that it's come to this: "A new high school will have sleek classrooms — and places to hide from a mass shooter"

I am simultaneously sad about the new type of school construction and envious. I sure as hell wish that my school had that. Nope, the wall of windows in my room do not make me feel safe.

[Ozlsn]

4 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

I am simultaneously sad about the new type of school construction and envious. I sure as hell wish that my school had that. Nope, the wall of windows in my room do not make me feel safe.

That makes me so sad. I really hope that the root cause of the problem will be addressed, but until that happens I wish all people could feel safe in their workplace.

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

My kids have only been back in school for 1 week, and they've already had a lockdown drill and a fire drill. I found out about the lockdown drill in a sad way. I asked my 10 year old what happened to the paperclip that I put in her planner as a bookmark. She told me that when they had a lockdown drill she straightened the paperclip so that she could use it as a weapon if she needed to. A paperclip.

I hugged her and told her that I was sorry that she felt like she might need to defend herself. I told her that I thought the best thing to do in a real life lockdown was to follow the instructions from teachers and staff. (And I just hope those instructions are more effective than the old "duck and cover" drills that kids were taught in case of nuclear attack during the Cold War.)

Edited August 24, 2019 by WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?
punctuation