This may be the tipping point.

Would love to believe that was true, but don't, alas. Even some of the parents from MS-D they were interviewing yesterday were just saying, "metal detectors."

wb - I agree. When I said tipping point, I wasn't clear that I meant the tipping point for my daughter. She is seriously reconsidering her choice of profession as the risks are just too high. If the massacre of 20 first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School wasn't the tipping point, then we may not have one.

Oh, that is so sad, rubyclaire, but I can understand it.

I work w/ elementary school kids and we just started doing 'active shooter' drills. Imagine ushering a couple dozen little kids into a storage closet and trying to keep them absolutely silent.

I'm fairly certain that a majority of people have no idea the actual "damage" these automatic weapons actually do to human bodies.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/las-vegas-autopsies_us_5a8233cde4b01467fcf08af6

"...Over the past decade, we’ve seen Americans gunned down en masse at concerts, in churches, schools, movie theaters and nightclubs. We’re often called upon to remember the victims who’ve died in those incidents, but rarely are we asked to confront the unsettling circumstances of the deaths themselves.

In 2015, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, now a U.S. senator, argued that lawmakers should have been forced to do exactly that before voting on gun legislation after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

“Spread out the autopsy photographs of those babies and require them to look at those photographs,” Harris said. “And then vote your conscience.”

And if the human costs are not enough to move certain people to action, shall we address the economic impacts of these massacres?

Very well put, anele.

I live in an area that is probably the least ethnically diverse area in FL and crime out here is pretty much non-existent. In the 20 years I've lived here the biggest crimes in our complex have been one night when a bunch of kids went up and down the island stealing phones left on the seats of unlocked cars, and once someone left a fishing rod on their front porch for three days here and it disappeared.

Yet my gun-loving neighbor keeps a loaded shotgun in the closet and a glock in her purse, because she's always terrified that young people will come for her tv and her al-qaeda-mobile. Trying to make her understand that no young person wants either her condo or her monster SUV leads nowhere, not as long as people get their news from places like the Drudge report.

With 350 million guns in the U.S., the only gun control that would
actually make any type of difference in stopping guns from getting into
people's hands is a ban/confiscation/buy back -- which means a
constitutional amendment must be passed, then legislation, and then an
effort to collect guns from across a very large country with a very
substantial number of people who aren't giving them up.

I also don't buy the argument that the only real solution would be so drastic, so onerous and so expensive that it's not even feasible.

I am not anti-gun. I am not anti-hunting, I grew up shooting a pistol at targets and had a hunting rifle for the same although I did not hunt.

Hand guns and hunting rifles and shotguns are not weapons that we need to get back. I don't care if someone feels more personally safe carrying a concealed weapon or if people drive around their pickup with the gun rack in the back.

That's not the sort of weapon used in spree murder or mass shootings. These aren't carried out with small weapons like a purse sized handgun or slow weapons like a shotgun. Those account for millions of guns we don't need to get back. But why can't people understand that it does not need to be an all or nothing proposition?

Because they've heard so much about the slippery slope, palimpsest. A sense of proportion has become one of the rarest things you can find these days. It's the same mentality (also shared by neighbors) that because one person on EBT supposedly bought a lobster tail, nobody should have any kind of food aid, ever, which the folks around here also believe.

Charles Whitman used a hunting rifle to kill 16 people at the University of Texas in 1966.

I knew someone would bring that up eventually.

I don't know if that is a pro gun legislation or an anti gun legislation argument but it certainly plays in to the "all or nothing" "slippery slope" "it's much too complex or expensive to even countenance the true solution" arguments used by the anti gun legislators.

Ugh, something happened FIFTY TWO years ago so we should all sit around and wring our hands and say "Oh, nothing can be done!". I don't think so.

I think we should force people to use hunting rifles when they want to kill large numbers of people at once, like the good old days. Make them work to get their numbers high. Very few people have that kind of skill. And very few situations exist where sniping can get you that high of a score.

My department chair and I have discussed that if we end up with a state policy of campus carry, we are OUT.

Beagles, thank you for the New Yorker article.

I do agree if there was a complete publicity blackout for the shooter, if their name and visage were unmentionable in the media that there may be a reduction in this sort of crime at least where the motivation is self aggrandizement or wanting a place in history. The media tends to glorify these events in a twisted sort of way.

I don't see a buyback happening (although Australia did it), but I would like to see better background checks and restrictions on assault weapons. But there are so many already out there. When you have more than 1 gun per person, that's a problem.

I traveled to Beijing solo and was never afraid because I knew there were no guns, that my risk of being a crime victim was very low.

And I don't blame the media because mass shootings/school shootings happen every day and we don't hear about them. This is the 18th school shooting of 2018!

I don't have much to add that has not been said. I am sick at heart over this situation, but as has been said, if nothing changed after Sandy Hook, I wonder if it ever will. I give what I can to gun control organizations and write to my representatives. I vote with gun control, among other things, in mind. I never miss an election. If I had billions like Bloomberg, I would give huge amounts to Everytown for Gun Safety. If I hear "thoughts and prayers" one more time I will scream. I wish I knew what to do that would make a swift change. I'm at a loss,

carol - Imagine ushering a couple dozen little kids into a storage closet and trying to keep them absolutely silent.

My daughter said the same thing and since the current active threat advice is to "Run, Hide, Fight", schools can only really practice the hide part of that advice. Imagine a teacher fleeing a school building with a couple dozen little kids running for their very lives. It is unimaginable.

I do not have it in me to post all the stats about how other countries have equal mental health issues, drug abuse, violent videos and games and yet do not have this weekly mass murder problem.

I do not have the energy to remind beagles that our own rates of mass shootings dropped after the Brady bill and than increased by leaps and bounds when it expired.

I do not have the energy to argue that by law mentally ill people deserve equal rights in this country and thus should not be excluded from the even silly second amendment laws.

I do not have the energy because for the fourth time this year alone I spent the entire night crying for 17 more people, mostly children, who were killed by a gun. My community just lost a 15 year old who accidentally was shot by a grownup's gun.

I do not have the energy to yell that a child's right to a safe education and right to life should not be trumped by your precious second amendment rights.

I am ashamed to be an American.

Also the mental health thing is such a freaking red herring. Like Republicans care about mental health! Or kind of health at a systems, policy, universal level. It has just been very clever messaging to try to cast every shooter as a lone actor devoid of the policy landscape that is enabling them.

And if every mass shooter is mentally ill, does that mean every criminal is mentally ill? And deserves treatment instead of punishment, rehabilitation instead of retribution? Because if so I can start getting on board with this mental illness argument.

As most Americans, I'm a gun owner. In fact, we likely own many, many more than most. I grew up shooting. I grew up with guns in the home. I grew up in a small town where there wasn't a police presence and your personal safety was your responsibility.

This world is not that world. As a gun owner, I fully supprt controls and checks on who owns guns and how they get them. I support a ban on bump stocks which was part of the slaughter in Las Vegas. I support a ban on ARs. It's time. It's, in fact, way past time for us to change the way we think about this subject. The government can't even study it to help us find ways that might actually be work.

Nobody that believes in gun restrictions thinks we are going to wake up the next morning and everyone will start being nice to each other. We don't live in the land of unicorns and sprinkles. But my God, can't we TRY. Can't we try some strategies that make sense and see if they help? Maybe by doing so it will help shift our thinking, it will change the conversaion, it will show this country actually cares a tiny bit about the slaughter of children. Stop saying nothing will work. We pass new laws every day to enhance penalties or limit access to things or create new regulations. We put sudafed behind the counter and it hurt meth. Just because we have laws doesn't mean they are the right ones. Maybe by doing so it will change the way we think, maybe we'll decide hey, this isn't so bad, and people don't kill 5 year olds in closets any more.

According to Pew research 70% of US adults do NOT own guns.

Did you read the New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell that Beagles posted, Robo? It offered an explanation of sorts as to why this type of killing is escalating. I think many (most?) people assume that perpetrators of mass shootings are mentally ill, simply because we cannot fathom another reason for that behavior. But the article makes a compelling argument against blaming mental illness for the shootings.

As the mom of two high schoolers, I had to turn off coverage of the horror. The photo of the crying mom who still had the ashes on her forehead from the Ash Wednesday service gutted me. How horrible to have come from a very solemn church service where we are reminded of our sinful human nature, and beginning the season of Lenten introspection...to be immediately confronted with this hellish slaughter. Makes you question everything. I decided that I needed to “DO” something, so I wrote letters to my senators and congressman. I explained that I am a Republican but I fully support a ban on assault rifles. Yeah, I hear the NRA argue that we are giving our rights away and government will be the only ones with assault rifles. I decided I just don’t care. Civilians are slaughtering civilians; it is hard to feel comfortable or safe. I guess the government could start slaughtering us if they were the only ones with automatic weapons, but at least we’d know who the enemy is. I don’t want to worry that some kid at my children’s school will start worshipping Eric Harris & take an AR 15 or whatever it is to school.

It keeps happening here because we have access to weapons of mass destruction. Fixing mental health services will improve society but it will not change the excess number of murders, accidental shootings and even suicide deaths this country sees compared to other first world nations who also fail to adequately provide mental health services yet have tens of thousand less needless deaths per year than us.

Hey the police are already killing civilians at a rate greater than any developed country and bump stocks don’t seem to have slowed that assault by the state down.

Our high police shootings are another horrible result of our failed gun laws :(. Police, rightly worried for their lives, are trigger happy as a survival response....

The reasons the shooters get so much press is so that we focus on THEM (guns, don't kill people, my child .... here's who kills people .... it's weird young men ...misfits ... outcasts .. lets look for clues ...listen carefully and analyze the people ... JUST SHUT THE EFF UP about the GUNS, please!)

The other thing they love to talk about, as if they are taking credit somehow, is the "brave first responders". Heck yes they are. But I am sure those responders and their families would prefer fewer opportunities to show off their bravery for you!!!

PS by the way, the focus on school shootings is also disingenuous. The gun threat is so much more than that!

One reason I don't want a gun in my house is because i know that every single day, every day in this country, guns cause accidents, esp w kids, and guns facilitate and expedite suicide and turn fits of passion into murders.

Schools draw attention because so many people (voters) are moved by white middle class kids coming in harm's way. Not so much by urban kids of color caught in crossfire. There are 100,000 public schools in the US, not including colleges and uni. The incidence remains small.

I am not saying that makes it an ok risk; I am saying the gun lobby is distracting us. Metal detectors in schools! That is not the issue.

As most Americans, I'm a gun owner.

No, most Americans are not gun owners.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/

PUT THAT IN YOUR DOUBLESPEAK MACHINE AND SMOKE IT

I am guilty about bandying about the term "mental illness" as one causative factor, when that is an assumption. Certainly not adjudicated mentally ill status.

But I hope I can assume that the behavior is a somewhat abnormal response to societal pressures.

With regard to police violence in America...I think that along with the police who go into a relatively underpaid, relatively dangerous job because they want to protect and serve, there are men (in particular) who go into the force because they are violent and this is an outlet.

I know some EMTs and while most of them go into emergency services to help save lives, I know a couple who have become EMTs because they like nothing better than a good violent injury. I knew one who thought that accidents where people were disemboweled or dismembered were "cool". He found a severed hand one day down the street from a freak machinery related accident. He was beside himself with pleasure.

I think as Mtn said, there is a certain amount of attention that gets paid to certain types of shootings for their "romantic tragedy" value. A shooting in a black school is "business as usual" and of course if those people weren't so obstinately poor and rooted, they would just move to a better neighborhood and send their kids to better public schools (see "vouchers").

If I had the energy I would pull out my stat charts, for I have lots of research, of the extra number of suicides our country experiences because of access to hand guns, or my chart of the number of children killed by finding an unsafely kept gun or the number of idiot owners who shot themselves carelessly handling their own guns or the proven stats that people with guns were unable to stop mass shooters at all in actuality and that homes with guns are indeed far less safe than homes without them. If I had my way no one, mentally ill or not, would have the right to take away a life with a gun. Australia is my idol!

i do not have the energy and after years of trying to convince gun supporters with logic and stats I have learned it has been a waste of my time.

We are looking into moving to my husband's birth country.

nini, I'm Republican and I hate our gun laws too! I feel the same way you do.

eta: I read the article Beagles posted. It's much more than mental illness-and guns, but the guns make it easier.

I happily retract my 'most Americans' comment. Even though I've done some work for Everytown, I thought that percent was higher. I'm happy to see not only is it lower, but it's lowering.

Roarah, I do wonder why foreign nationals stay. I know it is complex.

Between the embarrassment I feel that I share my country with so many awful mean petty ignorant greedy people and those they elect, and the risks to health, life and limb, and risks to my portfolio (via the deficit, the disdain for excellence, the immigrant brain drain) ... I have also actively investigated what country might "grant me asylum" ... albeit more like sell me asylum, but ok!

There are so many ways we express our collective disregard for children in this country, from the way we fund public education to the way we neglect healthcare for youngsters whose families lack insurance. Our budgets reflect our priorities.

After Sandy Hook I was utterly convinced nothing but a generational shift would alter the political landscape on gun control in America (and frankly, I am no longer sure of that.)

Edited for bizarre spelling mistake.

I just looked at my town FB page and my blood pressure is through the roof. The things that people are saying about the FL shootings are mind boggling. It is no wonder this country is going to hell in a hand basket.

I listened to a podcast this morning on my hike in the snow-This American Life. The title was "Words you Can't Say." While both "acts" were good, it is the second that was interesting and somewhat pertinent to this conversation. It was about Louisiana's Republican state representative Dodie Horton who agreed to sponsor a bill that would make it illegal for anyone to bring an imitation firearm to school, to school events, or within 1000 feet of a school. First time offenders would be fined $250 and sentenced to 6 months in prison.

It was enlightening to me what followed. She ended up pulling the bill.

Here's a transcript of both acts; scroll down about halfway (if you're interested) to Act 2 to read about this.

It made me realize (maybe again) how this issue is so pervasive.

Florida laws need to change: florida-laws-have-limited-barriers-gun-ownership

Despite his expulsion from high school and reports of bizarre postings on social media, Nikolas Cruz faced no legal barriers under Florida law to buying the AR-15 rifle he allegedly used to murder 17 people at his former high school Wednesday.

Unfortunately, this is what will probably happen again

Here’s another super creepy thing - pro gun right wing Russian twitter bots have seized on this event.

https://www.wired.com/story/pro-gun-russian-bots-flood-twitter-after-parkland-shooting/

“Russian-linked Twitter accounts have attempted to spread confusion and angst on topics ranging from police violence against black people, to NFL player protests, to Al Franken’s sexual misconduct accusations. (On other topics, like special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 election, the bots have worked in concert to further the Kremlin's agenda.)

But in this case, Schafer suspects the use of pro-gun control hashtags like #guncontrolnow are being used sarcastically, particularly since they're often paired with the anti-gun control links. ”

Terrik I hope maybe since this year has seen more than a school shooting per week there is little time to forget and move on. I hope but am not holding my breathe. I am also inspired by this week's victims, many who will be able to vote in the near future, calling out political bs. The students of these numerous shootings are our future voters and there are thousands of victims in numerous states who will soon be able to stand up against the NRA and their pocketed politicians, or at least I can hope.

fyi, not that it matters, but there have not been 18 school shootings so far this yr, iirc it is 3?

just so some gun rights bully doesn't use an error to deligitamize

This, from my twitter feed...

List of shootings that have happened at schools 2018.

Different then mass killings, still shootings.

List 2018

I would love to see this idea to fruition. Best idea I have seen to initiate change! Posted on fb yesterday.

Hello teachers, please organize. Walk out. Don’t go back to work until the guns are gone. Shut it down. Nationwide. Preschool to college. Paralyze the country. Demand the right to your own beautiful, nurturing life. Insist that our children will not die in your classrooms. Silence equals more death. Lead by example. Shut it down. Organize. Stop prepping for the day the gun comes to you. Your lockdown drills are not helping. Teach us that all those slain children’s lives mattered. Your life matters. Our children’s lives matter. Be epic. Be the change. I’ve got your back. Don’t fear for your jobs. Send my children home. I won’t complain. I would rather keep them home than ID their bodies after our nation’s next school shooting.

If you live in a state where representatives already support stricter gun laws, what can you do to change things?

I looked at the Everytown site but I don't see a lot of concrete advice except for asking for donations and buying gear.

I echo what d says.

As a general matter, I think there is a need for more advocacy journalism (labelled as such). As much as I appreciate MSNBCs evening lineup, for example, you could curtail it some ...it is very repetitious and every night I just end up angry. We risk outrage fatigue. At this point, I am not longer satisfied with the media simply exposing.

We need people to to examine the issue of what we can do to change things. I know that is a vague remit. But there is no reason for me to write to my senators and congressman when we are on the same page. I do give them at attaboy once in a while but that's not what is needed.

We need to push our senators and congress to reinstate the national bans that expired, better known as the Brady Bill. After expiration It failed to be renewed in the republican run congress but also failed to be reinstated in a democratic majority controlled senate. So do not assume if your reps are democrats and your state laws are strong that they are not also in the NRA pocket. Even Bernie sanders, who no longer takes NRA money, owes his career to NRA backing years ago and has a long history of voting to preserve many unpopular gun laws...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/nra-donations/?utm_term=.b03e4773fd58 Link to politians who received NRA support in 2017. Click on your state and it lists who took how much. Majority are republican but there are enough democrats that stand in the way of reform as well.

I supposed I could donate to organizations like Everytown so they can do more work in anti gun law states. But that seems kind of weak considering the depth of my disgust.

This was posted on my Facebook. Good idea that needs to spread, be organized and promoted. All students and concerned citizens be invited to join. Spread the word.

"David Berliner issued the following call for a national teachers’ strike on May 1. Teachers are now first responders, trained to protect their students if a shooter gets in the building. Some have given their lives for their students. Parents should join teachers. Enough is enough.

Berliner writes:

”It is way past time. Between now and May 1st teachers have to agree on the gun legislation they want. They can consult with Giffords and Kelly, and others who have suffered, such as the parents who have already lost children to this horrible characteristic of our culture. If by May 1st they have not received assurance that their legislation for sanity in gun ownership will be acted on soon, they need to walk out of our schools. It would be May Day, when workers should exert their strength.

“Our country’s legislators, and the voters who send them to make our laws, can then choose: Teachers and (most) parents for sane gun laws, or, the NRA that provides our legislators money to avoid making the laws that could reduce the carnage we see too frequently.

“Almost all of America’s 3 million teachers— nurturers and guardians of our youth– want sensible gun laws. They deserve that. But they have to be ready to exert the power they have by walking out of their schools if they do not get what they want. They have to exert the reputational power that 3 million of our most admired voters have. Neither the NRA nor their legislative puppets will be able stand up to that. My advice is to start meeting now, write model legislation, submit it to state and federal legislators, and if rebuffed, close down our schools until you get what you (and the rest of us) deserve.”

Save our children.

PS: There is no link. He sent this message to me. We are in despair. "

The national teacher's association is on par in political influence as the NRA it might take other lobbyists to bring down the Nra's political power more than it will take our vote.