A- none of the shootings used an automatic weapon, and at close range like in a classroom setting

 

I was under the impression that the parkland shooter used a bump stock which makes it close to automatic.

 

 

 

B- 34 victims are more than 20, but look at response times.  At parkland, the officers ran away from the shooter.  at Santa Fe, the school officers engaged.  In a classroom, at short range, a shotgun could have easily caused just as much and if not more carnage than an AR-15.  

 

 

yeah I didn't take that into account. Maybe the biggest thing is having school officers that actually protect the children like they did in Santa Fe.

I think the Vegas shooting was the bump stocks.

If my kids were still young enough to still be in school, they would be pulled out a couple years ago, and I would be teaching them myself. The entire way our children are educated, must be changed. The days of the large open campus, and freedom to walk in and out as we please, are over. Localize the schools to neighborhood level. Smaller schools. Less staff. Harden the facilities. Create education buildings. Eliminate all social aspects in school. It's education... not fun, games, and lunch. Minimize government influence and responsibility. It's not a day care center for babysitting. Open more options... night school, online classes... we must change.

you really think that's the solution?

All these shootings are so very sad, and they do need to stop.

 

 

I can say with almost 100% certainty though that even if Lys' idea for a school was implemented, it wouldn't stop them.

 

Banning every gun that exists won't stop them either.

 

 

This is a people issue!

Not a gun or school set up issue. We, as humans, should all pay closer attention and search for the signs of the issues that cause most of these shootings. We know that bullies are a huge factor in them, so all of us parents and parents to be need to really focus on teaching our kids that we are all equals. Just because this kid or that kid has more or less than you doesn't make them less of a human. The biggest problem I have seen with the bullies is that part of the tactic is to threaten harm should the victim "snitch". These kids need to know that telling adults what is happening is the the correct thing to do. But, more importantly, the kids need to be made to feel safe in telling whats going on, and to have the confidence that the adult will protect them and will also address whatever issue there is.

 

 

Almost every single shooting has the basic same story.. Person was bullied, no one stepped in to help. They showed all the red flags for the mental illnesses, and that they were making plans (most of which now days was posted on social media), and nobody did anything to help them. The parents couldn't be bothered with paying attention and listening to the kids issues. I feel that had the parents in almost every case payed the proper attention and stepped in to help the kiddos, a lot of these shootings wouldn't have happened. Parents really need to spend way more time talking with and listening to their kids concerns.

 

I just had a situation, not even a month ago, where an adult made a very out of line comment to my child. What did I do? Well, this person was told if they contact me, or try to come to my home, I will contact the authorities and they will be handled accordingly. My child, while she is upset to have "caused problems", she has been reassured many times that she did the right thing in telling myself and my husband, so that we could cut ties with that adult. I do not want my child becoming a statistic, so she knows she can talk to me about any issues she has, and I will do everything I can to help her in any way.

 

 

I honestly feel though, that had the "shooters" had more attentive & caring parents, the signs would have been caught, and help could have been provided. And I realize it isn't all on the parents, every single human that saw the alarming posts, and the warning signs should have definitely stepped up and said something!

All these shootings are so very sad, and they do need to stop.

 

 

I can say with almost 100% certainty though that even if Lys' idea for a school was implemented, it wouldn't stop them.

 

Banning every gun that exists won't stop them either.

 

 

This is a people issue!

Not a gun or school set up issue. We, as humans, should all pay closer attention and search for the signs of the issues that cause most of these shootings. We know that bullies are a huge factor in them, so all of us parents and parents to be need to really focus on teaching our kids that we are all equals. Just because this kid or that kid has more or less than you doesn't make them less of a human. The biggest problem I have seen with the bullies is that part of the tactic is to threaten harm should the victim "snitch". These kids need to know that telling adults what is happening is the the correct thing to do. But, more importantly, the kids need to be made to feel safe in telling whats going on, and to have the confidence that the adult will protect them and will also address whatever issue there is.

 

 

Almost every single shooting has the basic same story.. Person was bullied, no one stepped in to help. They showed all the red flags for the mental illnesses, and that they were making plans (most of which now days was posted on social media), and nobody did anything to help them. The parents couldn't be bothered with paying attention and listening to the kids issues. I feel that had the parents in almost every case payed the proper attention and stepped in to help the kiddos, a lot of these shootings wouldn't have happened. Parents really need to spend way more time talking with and listening to their kids concerns.

 

I just had a situation, not even a month ago, where an adult made a very out of line comment to my child. What did I do? Well, this person was told if they contact me, or try to come to my home, I will contact the authorities and they will be handled accordingly. My child, while she is upset to have "caused problems", she has been reassured many times that she did the right thing in telling myself and my husband, so that we could cut ties with that adult. I do not want my child becoming a statistic, so she knows she can talk to me about any issues she has, and I will do everything I can to help her in any way.

 

 

I honestly feel though, that had the "shooters" had more attentive & caring parents, the signs would have been caught, and help could have been provided. And I realize it isn't all on the parents, every single human that saw the alarming posts, and the warning signs should have definitely stepped up and said something!

awe look at this!!! My wife and I are in 100% agreement and have the same thoughts!  How cute! 

We spend way too much money on schools, supplies, teachers, busing, food... and it creates this insane reliance on this government institution to take responsibility for the care, safety, and upbringing of every child born. We are still dragging every kid by force to a central location... sometimes miles from where they live, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months per year, by bus, bike, feet, or car... and place them in the care of... who? We don't really know. This is the same way it's been done... since schools were invented?

 

Learning is not that hard. We have numerous ways for kids to learn now, and a series of tests can determine how much they know. This government baby sitting and brain indoctrination system we have now, should end as fast as it can be humanly restructured into a modern education system.

Someone run the numbers, can the US pay 1 parent of each family to do homeschooling from the current education budget. Cause that is what you are proposing.

Someone run the numbers, can the US pay 1 parent of each family to do homeschooling from the current education budget. Cause that is what you are proposing.

It's not the job of the US to pay parents to take care of their kids. It's the job of parents to take care of their kids. You sound pretty socialist. Anyone that said to me as a parent that it takes a village... I told them to keep their village away from my kids.

 

The parents of every child that has either been killed, wounded, or so much as put in danger during a mass shooting event should file suit against every teacher, administrator, union, union official, elected politician, school board, police department, security guard, crossing guard, bus driver... even hall monitors... for negligence and selling everyone the false promise that they can keep children safe. It's a lie, and they are responsible for that. After a few trillion dollars in judgments... maybe the government will realize that our children are not a very good business to get involved in, and they will come up with a better way to educate... and minimize their exposure and responsibility.

Not sure how this has become a discussion on education but my 2 cents...

 

The world is too interconnected so no matter how much you wish to educate your children in a bubble they will inevitably be exposed to the greater world in time. Humans are social by nature and only through external stimulus can we expand our knowledge and understanding, especially culturally. While it's agreed by everyone that public schools are not the best means of formal education they do teach social skills and provide opportunities that alone most households would be incapable of providing. While I would agree it isn't the government's job to ensure that each child gets an education it is in the best interest of society as a whole to work together to educate children as they are the necessary workforce and foundation of our future. Pooling resources, in our case that is through public schools, are the means by which we do that.

 

The parent's job is to instill in their children the ethics and morals by which to guide their life, no single individual knows all subjects nor is everyone skilled at passing along knowledge to others. Educating and growing in isolation will eventually reach a point of stagnation, history has proven that. Only through the sharing of ideas and working as part of a larger group can we, society and humanity as a whole, continue to advance, improve, and overcome the ever increasingly difficult challenges we face as we move into the future.

Not sure how this has become a discussion on education

It did not become a discussion on education. It's a discussion about securing public schools so children are not forced by law to be dragged every day into a shooting gallery. They take responsibility to keep kids safe, and they fail. It's not the fault of the Constitution. It's not the fault of legal gun owners. It's not the fault of the NRA. Hell, it's not even the fault of criminals that possess guns. They are not sneaking in a shotgun and killing kids.

 

It's the same thing as if a kid drove a car into a school, down the hall, and killed a bunch of kids. It's the schools fault for allowing a car to get into the hall. It's not the fault of everyone in the country that owns a car. This is obviously a situation that will continue to happen as long as we keep things the way they have always been done. It's open season on schools, because the schools are easy to do it to.

 

Treat this like 9/11/01. When that happened, all airports were closed and refitted against it. They opened back up 5 days later, and it's never happened again... and there isn't even a law requiring us to get on a plane.

 

Plus, I hear things about how he was bullied. I don't care if 5 jocks pulled down his pants, and the entire school laughed at him... it's not an excuse for him to kill people. It's the motive. I am 5'5" tall as an adult, and growing up I heard every short, shrimp, and midget joke in the book. I never thought about killing anyone because I was bullied and teased. I did have an older brother... they didn't like dealing with him.

9/11 and airport retrofits did nothing to stop anything. The TSA and all those additional visible "security measures" are nothing but security theater done to make people feel better through the illusion of increased security. All that happened post 9/11 was the government used the fear of the people to pass through measures that are needlessly intrusive and violate the constitutional rights of Americans. So I'm unsure how treating this like post 9/11 airports will help anything?

 

Statistically, the chances of anyone getting shot in a school is almost nothing. To devote millions to retrofit schools, whatever that even means, would frankly be an enormous waste of resources.

 

People become emotionally charged when something can pose a risk that they haven't already assimilated and accepted in their life and that becomes doubly true when kids are involved. Fear is a poor driver of policy...

 

 

9/11 and airport retrofits did nothing to stop anything.

I think you could be right about that, but the fact remains that it hasn't happened again. The government has to do something to keep murder out of schools. If someone gets killed, it should never be on government property, while they are in government care. Blaming guns is a deflection. Too much money is made off the education system, and there is high motivation to not change that.

 

 

I think you could be right about that, but the fact remains that it hasn't happened again. The government has to do something to keep murder out of schools. If someone gets killed, it should never be on government property, while they are in government care. Blaming guns is a deflection. Too much money is made off the education system, and there is high motivation to not change that.9/11 and airport retrofits did nothing to stop anything.

 

9/11 happened because very few securities factors took hijackings seriously as a threat. Something to be prevented sure, but the goal of hijackings in the past was to take hostages and try some sort of extortion. As such the response at the time was to let the hijackers have their way and then get the plane on the ground. Almost all hijackers fail at that point, and no point provoking them into killing people. 9/11 style attacks and hijackings in general are almost entirely prevented by changing that response.

 

Other attacks are pretty much uniformly prevented by soft measures. post 9/11 the FBI and the various security organizations have stepped their game way the hell up and have managed to step on something like 80% of all known planned attacks before they were close to getting off the ground.

 

Finally 9/11 triggered a monumental shift in culture, in how everyone in America views potential terrorism. Despite media prattling about America under attack or whatever, there is essentially no support amongst any group the USA, and there is a large push to bringing potential threats to light. In almost every successful attack, the threat was known, but the government had insufficient information to act.

 

The TSA has played little role in this, and what role they do play has little to do with the continual and absurd expansion of their powers. infact the TSA and it's failings are one of the better current examples of how defensive and reactive strategies don't work.

 

 

gun culture in the USA is broken. Regardless of individuals, the net culture both lacks responsibility and glorifies violence.  Until people want to confront this, one way or another, we will keep seeing this narrative play out. "Young disaffected male who probably should never have had unsupervised access to guns kills people because violence is a way to assert his identity and/or take revenge for perceived wrongs." sums up damn near every one of these cases. The attacks aren't random, the problem doesn't exist on this scale anywhere else western world and the issue is systematic. It's also relativity new

 

Festung Amerika is not an answer.  If schools aren't a target, malls will be. if those aren't libraries will be. if those aren't, gyms will be.

 

And lys, yes you've made this into a discussion of education. You're blithely suggesting something that would result in the utter demolition of the American education system. It is what American excellence is built on, and for all it's numerous faults remains one of the best such systems in the world. It is, quite literally what the American golden age was built on. What your proposing is sacrificing something that has had close to 2 centuries of continual success  to "solve" a problem that only exists in the last 30 years. LBJ, both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, along with a whole history of some of the greatest people in America going back to the 13 colonies who established the foundation of what exists today have all supported public education for a reason.

 

lets take a personal example from you. You've mentioned your experience in a military school and how it benefited you. Do you think you'd have gotten that if you'd been stuffed into a room and gotten math lessons or whatever of a screen? I guarantee one of the first thing they emphasized to you was the importance of being part of something larger than yourself. There's no room for that in what your proposing, and that's the least of what you want to do away with.

Education really started to be a money sink when the economy made single working parent family's into both parents working just to survive.

 

Schools are about pooling resources and knowledge to educate the kids going to it, it is a pillar of our western society. And yes schools are a social policy, cause it is about society. Could you stop being scared of the things that are actually older the you?

 

 

And lys, yes you've made this into a discussion of education. You're blithely suggesting something that would result in the utter demolition of the American education system. It is what American excellence is built on, and for all it's numerous faults remains one of the best such systems in the world. It is, quite literally what the American golden age was built on. What your proposing is sacrificing something that has had close to 2 centuries of continual success to "solve" a problem that only exists in the last 30 years.

I agree with most everything you have said. The TSA is just another waste of taxpayer money. The responsibility of passenger safety is on the airlines, and the cost of that should be absorbed by the people that buy tickets to fly on planes. I don't believe our education system is anywhere near efficient. Since the Department of Education came to be, we continuously throw more and more money at the problem, and receive less and less positive results. What I have seen coming out of our public schools the past 20 years frightens me. Perfect example... 30 year old that has to be evicted from his parents house.

 

We will not solve the problems on the IRON forum, but I believe we live in a time where kids are growing up in a culture of no responsibility, low discipline, lack of respect for others, brutal social media, glorified violence, and an unfettered desire for instant gratification. We are failing the future, and I'm not saying all of them... it's just the small percentage that will sink the ship.

I think something I said earlier may have caused confusion. I believe a small school with one entrance, and much less staff, can teach 100 students, dedicating less time, and get remarkably better results, than busing 1,500 kids across town to a large school that has too much staff, for 8 hours every day. Schools are not day care centers, nannies, restaurants, or political activists.

USA spending on education has been pretty much flat relative to the US's GDP since the 60s, and almost none of it is federal or even state expenses. Infact if we ignore the effects of the GI bill and the states increasing spending on tertiary education in the 60s and the collapse on spending during ww2, it's been close to flat as a percentage of GDP since some time around the late 30s.

 

 

federal expenses at their peak were something like 1% of the GDP, and that was at the height of the GI bill, money beyond well spent. It currently accounts for about 5% of all government expenses on education. Almost all of that small fraction of spending is dedicated towards providing funding for poor areas of the USA that wouldn't be able to adequately funding schooling. Think places like bug fuck nowhere kentucky.

 

State governments account for something a bit over a quarter, however almost all of that is on tertiary education.The remaining spending is funded and directed at the local level. And yes I'm aware that the US actually spending on 7% of it's GDP, however that extra funding is private money, not public and mostly a product of the shit show that is student loans in the USA. As well, part of the extra spending is because the education system in the US is so very decentralized. While we could get into a debate about that, the decentralization means there's a lot of duplicate spending and other issues that economies of scale would solve.

 

 

The ED has almost no say in educational policy. It rarely has anything to do about setting curriculum, and when it does it's mostly about establishing clear but broad guideline. For example they'll set guidelines to the rough effect of "by grade 5, your students should know how fractions work", and leave how to go about that to the local authorities. Even then it only does that as part of it's administrative role granted by congress, and that happened under bush junior.

 

the EDs job is mostly to collect statistical and other data about education in teh USA for the federal government and make that information for state and local authorities. Prior to it being implemented (and for the record, that was in 1867, it's just been combined and split with/from other parts of the cabinet over the last 150 years), education was something of a blackhole for tax payers. They might know what they were doing locally, but little information about how well they were doing  compared to others was available. The best, or at least most example of it's use in that role occurred during the space race. America found itself playing catchup and wanted to up it's game as far as STEM education went. the ED is why that could happen.

 

Past that, it's role in enforcement has to do with various federal laws around access to education and student privacy. No you can not sell students private data, yes you do need to let black kids attend your school, no you can not  have web cams and mics in school issued laptops and then use them to spy on the kids at home, no you can't cut this schools funding down to 10% of the rest of your school board, no you can't close down this school and  bus all the students there to another one four hours away, etc. America has proven time and again why it needs a federal department in that role.  They're also the organization congress has empowered to do shit like step on Corinthian Colleges.

 

Every single one of those is a real thing that happened in the last couple of years by the way, with the bonus of the web cam one resulting in the school board accidentally making child porn because of course it did.

 

The US has an extremely decentralized education system  (far more so than any other western nation). And whatever the benefits of local control, i'm certain you've seen examples of how spectacularly dumb local governments can get either out of standard stupid or basic corruption. Given the kind of damage that can do when we're talking about someones education , having a structure that can step in and clue bat people has proven invaluable to the USA. And the states have historically been quite happy to have the federal government handle that, since it means they don't need to do that work themselves (minus some of the states getting really pissy about desegregation, but nuts to that lot)
 

 

 

Everything you said in this wall of text

I'm trying to say there are cheaper and more efficient ways to teach kids in a more secure setting so they don't get killed at school... and you type out all that nonsense about how we spend the same GDP on education since the 30's. This is why nothing gets done.

no i'm pretty sure what you said was.

 

I don't believe our education system is anywhere near efficient. Since the Department of Education came to be, we continuously throw more and more money at the problem, and receive less and less positive results. What I have seen coming out of our public schools the past 20 years frightens me. Perfect example... 30 year old that has to be evicted from his parents house.

 

the role of the ED is not what you seem to think it is, control is highly local, spending is almost entirely local, the USA does not spend much more in the way of public funds than most other western nations, and spends about as much as it ever did over the last century.

 

% GDP is kinda an important metric for historical comparison. inflation and etc is a thing as i'm sure you know. America spends more total dollars than they did back in the days of 20 cent cheese burgers, but that's cause these are no longer the days of 20 cent cheese burgers.

Edited May 25, 20188 yr by Rand0m her0

 

 

no i'm pretty sure what you said was.

No, I'm pretty sure I said we pay far too much money to have stupid kids that are getting killed in school.

Edit: double post cause awful wifi

I'm quite certain you implied that the federal government and the ED were the root of that. Imying it's the governments fault, that more local control would be better, that the issue started with the ED being "created" by LBJ, and so on . I felt that was worth addressing in detail.

 

Also I'm just going to completly ignore the "stupid kids" bit because *honestly*. That's old and trite enough to be a trope when Socrates whined about kids these days.

Also I'm just going to completly ignore the "stupid kids" bit

Oh no... don't ignore that part, because it's the whole reason to send kids to school, and if fortunate enough to graduate they still don't know how to spell "work ethic", what country we fought against during the American Revolution, The difference between "Social" and "Socialist", that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, or that seasonal changes in the weather will not kill us all.

 

I think they should be able to continue to not learn anything without a deranged snowflake coming to school with a gun.

Sucks this happened. I live maybe 20 minutes from the area.

I know how you feel. I live 5 minutes from the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas.