When Columbine happened - we were shocked. Now, we're inured. It's been 25 years.
When Columbine happened - we were shocked. Now, we're inured. It's been 25 years.
I wanted to share an article but after read/scanned ~6 of them - I had nothing to share. They weren't any good. I wish blogs were still a thing. Blogs can be excellent on topics like these. Here's the Wikipedia page - Columbine High School massacre.
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I wouldn’t say inured. People seem to care a great deal and feel exasperated over the ongoing situation. There’s a political impotence and lack of analysis revealed by the situation… and I think that impotence and lack of analysis is part of a vicious feedback loop that actually inspires more violence, larger kill counts, increasingly cruel targets.
The Sandy Hook shooting happened in December, 2012. By early 2013 I had entirely given up on any hopes of gun control. If a mass of murdered little kids killed by guns didn't change anything - I knew nothing would ever change. I think that's true for a lot of Americans.
"Gun control" is a bourgeois talking point. Rifles kill less than 400 people a year in the US on average, the Bloombergs and the Bidens and the Betos are only concerned about disarming the working class. Things that would actually address mass shootings (like affordable mental healthcare) are never even discussed, because those solutions actually cost the rich money.
Rifles kill less than 400 people a year
Hilarious talking point when literally tens of thousands are killed (homicide!) per year by gun violence. This is like saying that Honda Civics only kill so many people per year, so traffic violence is no biggie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
Things that would actually address mass shootings (like affordable mental healthcare) are never even discussed,
Imagine seriously believing that rampant gun violence, an exclusively American phenomenon, is the cause of anything other than the second amendment.
THERE ARE NO MASS SHOOTINGS WITHOUT GUNS. Guns, not anything else, are the root cause of gun violence, just like how cars, not anything else, are the root cause of car crashes.
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Also love the take that anyone in power in America who proposes gun control is only concerned about disarming the working class, not maybe stopping children from getting slaughtered in schools. Like yeah mental health services would be great but also there is absolutely a connection between the number of mass shootings and the fact that America has more guns than people
Ok, what gun control measures should we put in place that would stop "children getting slaughtered in schools" while also not giving the government a total monopoly on violence?
The government already has a monopoly on violence and it's a joke to pretend otherwise. In the event of an armed revolution, private firearm ownership won't stop them rolling in tanks or bombing you with jets.
"We should just give up since it's hopeless anyway"
No. I think you should look to history to understand what happens when a professional military tries to occupy hostile territory. Asymmetric warfare is impossible to extinguish. The Palestinians are holding their own in a tiny city with AKs, tunnels, and homemade explosives. The Taliban now control all of Afghanistan. The Vietnamese pushed the US into the sea. An armed populace is impossible to repress, especially when it's as armed as US citizens are, and when the territory that needs to be held is as massive as the US. There is absolutely no way the US military could indefinitely suppress the US civilian population while still maintaining the production necessary to fuel it's war machine.
Also love the take that anyone in power in America who proposes gun control is only concerned about disarming the working class
He's not exactly wrong though, since gun control historically in the US was a lot more about taking guns out of the hands of PoC. One modern case was in California with the Mulford Act, which came about because the Black Panthers showed off the the thing whites fear the most has and still will be black people open carrying guns.
Hilarious talking point when literally tens of thousands are killed (homicide!) per year by gun violence. This is like saying that Honda Civics only kill so many people per year, so traffic violence is no biggie.
why are suicides always left out of this conversation? that's a huge portion of gun deaths that would otherwise just not exist if guns weren't so easy to get.
THERE ARE NO MASS SHOOTINGS WITHOUT GUNS. Guns, not anything else, are the root cause of gun violence,
We've had guns in this country since the beginning. You used to be able to buy machine guns out of a catalog and have them shipped to your door for 200 bucks. The mass shooting thing is a recent development. Obviously there are other factors at play.
mass shooting thing is a recent development
i think you will find this list has entries throughout most the 20th century
Do you think the Columbine shooters would've gotten anywhere as far as they did if all they had were a kitchen knife and a machete? Guns enable mentally ill individuals to commit acts of mass murder in a way that is impossible in gun-free societies.
Enforcing gun control laws also means relying on the police, whose ideologies are identical to those of school shooters. European countries manage to moderate rightwing rage with the kinds of concessions you mention here, but the USA is a settler colony and also requires its settlers to be armed more or less all the time in order to stave of their inevitable defeat for as long as possible. There is no way out of this situation for as long as the USA exists, and I say that as a parent with kids in school.
Honestly we're at the point where I'm surprised the liberals aren't calling for a mass purge of police forces. If the people upholding the "law and order" they supposedly care about so much overwhelmingly support Trump, you'd think that'd be worrying.
Liberals don’t oppose people like Trump, they require constant fear of people like Trump to legitimize their nearly identical politics.
Why would liberals want to purge the police? They love cops.
Growing up in the US, you just hear about people getting shot and killed. That's part of the 6:00 news along with sports and weather. There's no time to emotionally engage with what happened; you get maybe 5 seconds with a distraught family member and then it's back to the studio where nobody's showing any reaction, so, from a child's perspective, why should the viewer? So the jarring thing about Columbine for me wasn't that it happened, it's that people decided to keep caring about it unlike the hundreds of other shootings that we just immediately forgot.
Eh, it's anecdotal but when I saw the image in this post my first thought was "wait, only 13? That seems low for how big a deal it was back in the day".
The mass shooting meta is has advanced significantly in the last 25 years