Plan B Forum

Not worth a mention?

What score do you have to achieve to be particularly news/comment worthy these days?

I thought about starting a thread about it, but for me the question wasn't "is it worth mentioning?" (it certainly is) it was "do I really feel like starting yet another gun control thread?"...

Which any thread about any of these terrible incidents inevitably turns into within just a couple of posts. It's impossible to try to have a discussion about the incident itself around here (and this one has some features to it certainly worthy of discussion; the fact that the killer obviously planned much larger carnage by bringing pipe bombs, the fact that you didn't have a long history of mental health issues, etc.) without just having a regurgitation of everybody's positions on gun control, which have already been regurgitated dozens of times...

If people want to do that fine and dandy, but I don't really feel the need to start the thread that sets it off...

But having now replied to this thread, let me perform a public service, and try to save people a bunch of key strokes:

Repeal the 2nd amendment!
Repealing the 2nd Amendment will never happen!
Sensible restrictions!
Sensible restrictions aren't enough!
You don't care about dead children!
You don't care about our Constitutional rights!
Arm the teachers!
Arming the teachers would make the situation worse!
More mental health care!
It's not about mental health, it's about guns!
Trump!
You can't blame Trump!
It's the parents!
It's the guns!
The killer is to blame!
Our sick gun culture is to blame!


There, I think I've just about covered it. You'll thank me later...

Not worth mention--just the opposite. I suspect many are like me--mentally speechless at this continuing horror. The first post in this thread feels like the tv reporter shoving a mike into the face of one who has just suffered unspeakable tragedy and asks "how does it feel. . . "

I refer the reader to the series of blogs by Stonekettle on this topic, where he has found nothing new to be worth writing since March. This all seems to be symptomatic of something, perhaps complex enough to call it a syndrome. But I have no idea what that something is. Even less of an idea what is actually doable in our present society that will end it. Hug your significant other, your children and grandchildren.

Unspeakable tragedy.

snailgate.

This kid got his guns from daddy; I’m weighing in to say that I’m outraged and sickened by the reality that prosecutors nationwide continue to give a pass to parents and guardians who allow children to have easy access to firearms and ammo; we need to be sending these parents and guardians to prison for a very, very long time for criminal endangerment, negligent homicide, and/or murder by accountability - whatever theory of prosecution applies in the specific jurisdictions. THEY DO NOT DESERVE OUR SYMPATHY! They are reckless idiots who have allowed their own children to die, or other people’s children, because they are too freaking lazy to LOCK UP THEIR GUNS! This is one gun control that SURELY we can all agree on? Make firearms owners strictly liable for any homicide or suicide that is connected to their negligent managing of firearms in their possession.

Another high school shooting?

Say it ain't so.

BSG, it is a personal risk/reward management issue. When my first child was crawling around, I sold my pistols and moved my long guns to my father-in-law's home. I knew as a little kid my curiosity and motivation to get into things were beyond my adult parental ability to accept the limits of my own adult imagination and possible harm that might be done. Eventually I came to believe I could trust my children in the presence of firearms and ammunition. I never had a gun safe, never locked up the ammo. My children never betrayed that trust. They never even told their friends or other adults that we had guns in our home.

I lived thru that period, which included training three hunting dogs to not be gun shy while there were children 4 and six years old early on, and with the third dog when both kids were teenagers. My son went rabbit, dove, geese, quail, squirrel, ground hog hunting with me as an early teenager. My daughter told me she wanted nothing to do with guns or hunting. It is an assumption in many households that the younger members of the family can be trusted to a greater extent to use a firearm responsibly at an earlier age than they could be trusted behind the wheel of a car.

That assumption can be wrong. The results of such wrong assumptions have been many dead children, killed by other children. In this case with now ten dead in Texas, the shooter seems to be goth. IMNSHO, kids become goth when they are teased, bullied, abused, ostracized and Goth is a self-preservation reaction. Goth is a warning sign that children are being harmed.. Would adult intervention by school staff for individuals who are 'Goth' be an aid the healthy development of those children or would it be just one more imposition of authority to control non-conforming behavior? There is no question that causing child to die is harm. What about allowing children to behave in a non-conforming manner that leads to harm for themselves and others? It is no long good pedagogic behavior to smack a child's hand with a ruler if they desire to use a pencil in their left hand. But once it was generally desired for teachers to do just that--because such behavior was generally accepted to lead to personal and social harm.

Where to we accept outside intervention to prevent harm to children now? BSG, I don't think you are advocating periodic inspection of all homes suspected of containing firearms to determine if there is safe storage of guns and ammo in that home. Would knowledge that if a child shoots another human being, the adult owner of that gun would be held criminally and civilly responsible, just as if that adult had pulled the trigger changed the behavior of the parents of Dimitrios Pagourtzis? I don't know.

Gail Collins, in an opinion essay in the NY Times quoted Texas governor Patrick after the shooting in the gay nightclub in Florida "God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." Collins calls this 'Blame the Almighty theory of mass shootinThis time that same man said part of the problem is that schools have too many doors. Dimitrios gave evidence along the way that he was being harmed, before he took these guns to school. I go to the Good Book and find "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." Luke 17:2 KJV
So who offended these little ones, the child who pulled the trigger, or the adults who observed Dimitrios and stood aside and waited for the consequences?

As my fingers said above, I have no answers.

snailgate

I thought this NYDN front page was 'photoshopped' but I googled it and it is true.

Sadly, they will be able to use it again... maybe next week.

So I guess this Houston Oilers football player J.J. Watts is paying for all the funerals, which is really decent.



Oops I guess he’s a Houston Texans player - I missed when the Oilers moved to Tennessee because I couldn’t care less about football.

SANTA FE, TEX. — They, like so many others, thought they had taken the steps to avoid this.

The school district had an active-shooter plan, and two armed police officers walked the halls of the high school. School district leaders had even agreed last fall to eventually arm teachers and staff under the state’s school marshal program, one of the country’s most aggressive and controversial policies intended to get more guns into classrooms.

They thought they were a hardened target, part of what’s expected today of the American public high school in an age when school shootings occur with alarming frequency. And so a death toll of 10 was a tragic sign of failure and needing to do more.

From the Washington Post — read the rest here.


-"BB"-

Donald tRump would've rushed in there unarmed and taken care of the shooter.

Right?

one could only hope

Bicycle Bill wrote:
The school district had an active-shooter plan, and two armed police officers walked the halls of the high school.

Who on earth would send their kids to such a place? If your school needs armed cops in it, it's not a school anymore.

econo--that's one of the saddest cartoons I have seen. Attention must be paid.