"Thoughts and prayers". It's always "thoughts and prayers" and invoking an inaginary "good guy with a gun". Can it get much more magical/mystical/performative than that?
Pretty easy to make glib comments like that. How do you propose the problem be addressed? The Constitution as written makes banning guns a non-starter. So amending the Constitution is step 1, and a big step it is. 3/4 states ratifying is a non-trivial threshold. And then what? There are already more guns than people in the US. Going to confiscate them all? Good luck.
Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions in response to tragedy, has vast numbers of illegal (and legal) weapons still in civilian hands. So clearly that isn't the answer.
Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.
However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.
And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.
I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.
This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.
The founders didn't think we ought to have a standing army, either, and a militia of ordinary citizens was their answer. So I guess first we will need to bring back militias made from ordinary citizens, first, and then we can debate how that changes the applicability of the amendment. Not to mention the definition of well-regulated, which I think (hope) most people interested in this issue understand.
The two statements are not inherently contradictory.
Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.
In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it.
(Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)
> it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.
A lot of us do, I think what happened is that a majority have decided it is a political loser. It reliably spins up republicans and gets them to the polls, probably even more so than abortion. It costs a lot of political capital with near zero hope for meaningful action. So progressives have prioritized issues with broader appeal (and still somehow fail most of the time, despite what appears to be much broader appeal).
> turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards
In some places. That's perhaps part of the issue. My suburban schools lock the doors, and that's about it. No metal detectors or turn stiles. They have like two security guards for a thousand students and no cops, just a liaison at the local PD if something comes up. The school does not feel like a fortress, nor a dystopia. So this gets written off as a big city problem.
Which poses the question, is it predominantly a big city problem? What fraction of gun violence in school is gang violence? The AR15-wielding mass shooters get a lot of press, but if we want the violence to drop meaningfully then we are probably wasting time over-focusing on that. And then the question, will taking guns way from the gangs solve the problem? Or do we have a socioeconomic and culture problem? Talk about hard to solve.
I fail to understand why this should make the lack of US action on gun control any more justifiable.
Per your linked article:
> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.
> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.
People don’t evaluate risks based on stats. They do it based on vibes. We do have a disproportionate amount of gun violence for a developed nation but statistically it’s still a very low risk.
I recall pointing this out back during the post 9/11 terror panic. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack were still phenomenally low even after 9/11. It would have taken a relentless stream of constant 9/11 scale attacks to even approach automobile or drug overdose deaths.
>The European heat death figures are based on modeled "excess deaths"—a standard epidemiological approach that tries to capture everyone who died earlier than they would have in cooler conditions, including from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory failure, which casts a wide net. "But the US number," Ritchie wrote, "isn't based on this type of modeling; it's based on heat deaths recorded on death certificates." That's a far narrower count which only captures cases where a physician specifically wrote heat as the cause of death. The result is that the two figures being compared are not measuring the same thing. "If you used death certificate figures for Europe," Ritchie wrote, "they'd be far lower."
Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.
The Supreme Court likes to play games with words and disregards precedent. Expand the court and shove "well-regulated militia" down their throats. Problem solved.
They should give every student a gun at this point (/s because I feel like someone would agree with me).
Edit: everyone should also wear a bulletproof vest at minimum. Desks should be equipped with reactive armor to defend against anti-tank warheads. A Phalanx C-RAM will be installed on the roof next to the AC units.
All fantastic ideas! I bet you we could get our illustrious U.S. "Department of War" right on that without too much effort spent tryin' to convince 'em.
"I think it's worth it. It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment..." -Charlie Kirk
A top seller in Libya, Somali, Iraq, and that one particular first-world country which our lawyers from that country advise us to refrain from naming! Buy one today!
We have a corrupt Supreme Court that transmutated the Constitution’s “well-organized militia” into “any individual”, combined with that and the Paranoid Style (Richard Hofstadter) of our politics, there’s absolutely 0 that can happen.
The real question here isn't "why are we sacrificing the education of the next generation to buy tools that make us feel safe but (logically, statistically) will only prevent one in a million child deaths?" ... the answer to that is a Simpsons meme ("won't someone think of the children?").
The real question is ... who is stoking the irrational fear in the first place, and how do they benefit by doing so?
There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news stories, then there are boring things like road safety that loom much larger in the numbers than they do in the public imagination. Here are some numbers on causes of death for children and adolescents in the US, reported by the CDC:
Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.
This idiotic idea that must have come from a Gemini chat session will backfire in a real incident. Of course the perpetrator will know about the drones and be prepared for them, e.g. with a face mask. Conveniently for them, the pepper spray will confuse and incapacitate their targets, leading to more casualties.
If you're going to accept not being able to take guns away from the perpetrators, the only thing that will "work" is their targets being likewise armed, as well as trained in firearm combat in close quarters and outside, as well as psychologically trained to handle the real situation and not freeze, tremble or hesitate.
No passive gimmicks will stop an armed perpetrator, unless he doesn't know about their existence and is not prepared for their deployment, which is a foolish assumption to rely on.
Right; if I were a properly humble intellectual, I would be writing things like "whether the pepper spray drones will be effective or not, I don't know", rather than calling them out as a cockamamie idea that will obviously backfire.
If a person truly, really, honestly wants to kill soemone then they will be dead. The benefit of the Swiss cheese model is that most people who have that level of focus tend to be producing benefits to their lives somewhere else.
It's all pretty absurd, of course. Then we are calculating that the shooter will be outnumbered, which won't guarantee that there are no casualties on the defending side.
I'm saying that's what stems from accepting that there are going to be shooters with easy access to guns, and we're not gonna do anything about that.
Instead of spending money on educating people and making society better, lets spend our money on worthless highly overpriced gimmicks that achieve nothing. /s
These are being bought at the county/district level or even the individual schools. Gun control is legislated at the state or federal level. The people making the decision to buy these have effectively zero control over gun laws.
The article mentions that, in Georgia, funding for these came from the state budget and even quotes a state legislator on the committee on the education appropriations committee.
It also mentions that the effort is "spearheaded" (whatever that means) by the state legislature in Florida.
> Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters
Schools in the U.S.; this is what the U.S. are getting into.
Meanwhile, the majority of the civilized world solves this with gun control. Americans can't do gun control, just because of fetishism for their obsolete Constitution.
Try to explain to Americans that their Constitution was written before the Industrial Revolution and cheap ubiquitous guns, during a war, when the overwhelming majority of the population was rural. Try to explain that when Americans try to do nation building (Japan, Iraq, Afghanistan) they choose political frameworks completely different from the American Constitution.
They won't accept it. They venerate their Constitution just as blindly as the Bible, another obsolete document.
Proud American here, I don't think your comment is particularly helpful. Better can be very subjective and a country is not going to better in every single aspect; the other country will certainly have some aspects where they will be "better".
Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon 693 points by antongribok 9 months ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684934
Genuinely impressed the lengths they’ll go to in the US order to avoid doing something about guns.
Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids
"Thoughts and prayers". It's always "thoughts and prayers" and invoking an inaginary "good guy with a gun". Can it get much more magical/mystical/performative than that?
Given an active shooter threats, what is the solution if not a good guy with a gun?
Why are you assuming active shooter threats need to exist to begin with? There’s only one country it regularly happens in.
Ever see Takeshi's Castle?
"American Ninja Warrior" gameshow looks a lot like it to me; It looks like a pretty direct copy of "Takeshi's Castle" in many ways in fact.
Pretty easy to make glib comments like that. How do you propose the problem be addressed? The Constitution as written makes banning guns a non-starter. So amending the Constitution is step 1, and a big step it is. 3/4 states ratifying is a non-trivial threshold. And then what? There are already more guns than people in the US. Going to confiscate them all? Good luck.
Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions in response to tragedy, has vast numbers of illegal (and legal) weapons still in civilian hands. So clearly that isn't the answer.
So I want to know what your easy solution is.
Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.
However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.
And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.
I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.
This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.
The founders didn't think we ought to have a standing army, either, and a militia of ordinary citizens was their answer. So I guess first we will need to bring back militias made from ordinary citizens, first, and then we can debate how that changes the applicability of the amendment. Not to mention the definition of well-regulated, which I think (hope) most people interested in this issue understand.
[dead]
The two statements are not inherently contradictory.
Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.
In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it.
(Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)
> it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.
A lot of us do, I think what happened is that a majority have decided it is a political loser. It reliably spins up republicans and gets them to the polls, probably even more so than abortion. It costs a lot of political capital with near zero hope for meaningful action. So progressives have prioritized issues with broader appeal (and still somehow fail most of the time, despite what appears to be much broader appeal).
> turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards
In some places. That's perhaps part of the issue. My suburban schools lock the doors, and that's about it. No metal detectors or turn stiles. They have like two security guards for a thousand students and no cops, just a liaison at the local PD if something comes up. The school does not feel like a fortress, nor a dystopia. So this gets written off as a big city problem.
Which poses the question, is it predominantly a big city problem? What fraction of gun violence in school is gang violence? The AR15-wielding mass shooters get a lot of press, but if we want the violence to drop meaningfully then we are probably wasting time over-focusing on that. And then the question, will taking guns way from the gangs solve the problem? Or do we have a socioeconomic and culture problem? Talk about hard to solve.
More Europeans die from lack of air conditioning than people in the US die from guns.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/europe-heat-wave...
I fail to understand why this should make the lack of US action on gun control any more justifiable.
Per your linked article:
> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.
> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.
People don’t evaluate risks based on stats. They do it based on vibes. We do have a disproportionate amount of gun violence for a developed nation but statistically it’s still a very low risk.
I recall pointing this out back during the post 9/11 terror panic. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack were still phenomenally low even after 9/11. It would have taken a relentless stream of constant 9/11 scale attacks to even approach automobile or drug overdose deaths.
>The European heat death figures are based on modeled "excess deaths"—a standard epidemiological approach that tries to capture everyone who died earlier than they would have in cooler conditions, including from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory failure, which casts a wide net. "But the US number," Ritchie wrote, "isn't based on this type of modeling; it's based on heat deaths recorded on death certificates." That's a far narrower count which only captures cases where a physician specifically wrote heat as the cause of death. The result is that the two figures being compared are not measuring the same thing. "If you used death certificate figures for Europe," Ritchie wrote, "they'd be far lower."
Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.
It's not something that you can just wave a magic wand. The steps to change the constitution is really really hard (deliberately).
The Supreme Court likes to play games with words and disregards precedent. Expand the court and shove "well-regulated militia" down their throats. Problem solved.
[dead]
You could ban guns completely and you’d still have to deal with active shooters. There are 500M guns in the USA. Those dont just disappear.
Its idiotic not to harden targets. The best way to do that’s debatable, but schools should be hardened.
Having to think of schools as “soft targets” in a first world country is absolutely wild.
They should give every student a gun at this point (/s because I feel like someone would agree with me).
Edit: everyone should also wear a bulletproof vest at minimum. Desks should be equipped with reactive armor to defend against anti-tank warheads. A Phalanx C-RAM will be installed on the roof next to the AC units.
All fantastic ideas! I bet you we could get our illustrious U.S. "Department of War" right on that without too much effort spent tryin' to convince 'em.
"I think it's worth it. It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment..." -Charlie Kirk
What do you want the USA to do? Keep in mind shooting kids is illegal. Feel free to share your proposal.
Fwiw guns should have never been allowed to spread to this extent but undoing this is nigh impossible
> Next stop - magic incantations to bestow bulletproof status on schoolkids
They already sell Kevlar backpacks
A top seller in Libya, Somali, Iraq, and that one particular first-world country which our lawyers from that country advise us to refrain from naming! Buy one today!
We have a corrupt Supreme Court that transmutated the Constitution’s “well-organized militia” into “any individual”, combined with that and the Paranoid Style (Richard Hofstadter) of our politics, there’s absolutely 0 that can happen.
ETA until a drone pepper sprays an innocent student or teacher?
ETA until a shooter brings a mask? They spend weeks if not months gathering guns and bullets. Oh noes, they have buy one more thing off the web.
ETA until a student presses the button when the teacher isn't looking
Does Polymarket allow wagering on school shooting?
Wtf world do we live in that this sentence exists.
...or perhaps one guilty of thoughtcrime.
Don't those schools have sprinkler systems they basically never use?
And what happens if a parent disagrees with this policy and does not want their child in a school with weaponized drones?
The real question here isn't "why are we sacrificing the education of the next generation to buy tools that make us feel safe but (logically, statistically) will only prevent one in a million child deaths?" ... the answer to that is a Simpsons meme ("won't someone think of the children?").
The real question is ... who is stoking the irrational fear in the first place, and how do they benefit by doing so?
What are you talking about? Schools are targets for shooters. Sad but certainly not fake.
There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news stories, then there are boring things like road safety that loom much larger in the numbers than they do in the public imagination. Here are some numbers on causes of death for children and adolescents in the US, reported by the CDC:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/
Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.
Shooters or protesters?
This idiotic idea that must have come from a Gemini chat session will backfire in a real incident. Of course the perpetrator will know about the drones and be prepared for them, e.g. with a face mask. Conveniently for them, the pepper spray will confuse and incapacitate their targets, leading to more casualties.
If you're going to accept not being able to take guns away from the perpetrators, the only thing that will "work" is their targets being likewise armed, as well as trained in firearm combat in close quarters and outside, as well as psychologically trained to handle the real situation and not freeze, tremble or hesitate.
No passive gimmicks will stop an armed perpetrator, unless he doesn't know about their existence and is not prepared for their deployment, which is a foolish assumption to rely on.
Whether they will be effective or not I dont know. But something tells me you dont know more about this than the people deploying them.
Right; if I were a properly humble intellectual, I would be writing things like "whether the pepper spray drones will be effective or not, I don't know", rather than calling them out as a cockamamie idea that will obviously backfire.
If a person truly, really, honestly wants to kill soemone then they will be dead. The benefit of the Swiss cheese model is that most people who have that level of focus tend to be producing benefits to their lives somewhere else.
>be prepared for them
Hasn't that been a problem with active shooter drills? That future shooters also get drilled.
It's all pretty absurd, of course. Then we are calculating that the shooter will be outnumbered, which won't guarantee that there are no casualties on the defending side.
I'm saying that's what stems from accepting that there are going to be shooters with easy access to guns, and we're not gonna do anything about that.
Is there any way to buy guns online and have them shipped directly to your doorstep?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bKu4c2Y405E
Ukraine war inspired school safety subsidiary of Mithril Defense of Austin, TX.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/28/school-sho...
https://www.campusguardianangel.com/
https://www.mithrildefense.com/
Its impressive that US schools are adopting drone warfare quicker than some NATO allies.
Instead of spending money on educating people and making society better, lets spend our money on worthless highly overpriced gimmicks that achieve nothing. /s
to waste money instead of education or gun control. the miracle of propaganda
These are being bought at the county/district level or even the individual schools. Gun control is legislated at the state or federal level. The people making the decision to buy these have effectively zero control over gun laws.
The article mentions that, in Georgia, funding for these came from the state budget and even quotes a state legislator on the committee on the education appropriations committee.
It also mentions that the effort is "spearheaded" (whatever that means) by the state legislature in Florida.
yeah, no, i get the grift.
How is a school corporation supposed to implement gun control?
This is a incredibly US specific headline.
> Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters
Schools in the U.S.; this is what the U.S. are getting into.
Meanwhile, the majority of the civilized world solves this with gun control. Americans can't do gun control, just because of fetishism for their obsolete Constitution.
Try to explain to Americans that their Constitution was written before the Industrial Revolution and cheap ubiquitous guns, during a war, when the overwhelming majority of the population was rural. Try to explain that when Americans try to do nation building (Japan, Iraq, Afghanistan) they choose political frameworks completely different from the American Constitution.
They won't accept it. They venerate their Constitution just as blindly as the Bible, another obsolete document.
Our country is better than yours because of the constitution
Proud American here, I don't think your comment is particularly helpful. Better can be very subjective and a country is not going to better in every single aspect; the other country will certainly have some aspects where they will be "better".
Idk, I think the constitution is pretty awesome.