“It’s natural to want an answer, and it’s natural to want a fix. We do ourselves no favors when we identify answers and fixes quickly and glibly. When, in the heat of grief, we decide that if the shooter’s name was not in the paper, these things wouldn’t happen. When we wonder why someone else didn’t see that this was about to happen and just stop it. When, exhausted by another school shooting, we tell each other that now we will ‘do something’ about gun violence. You know, just do something.” – Shawn Vestal in No easy answers after Freeman school shooting [via spokesman.com]
This is your school system on feminism. In my day, you took the kid that was bullying you and kicked him right in the crotch followed by an elbow to the back of the head. That bully never bothers you again. In modern feminist run schools, the bully’s victim would be in trouble.
Well what do you expect when you want the State to raise and educate your kids for you? And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad city to city, state to state, but every school wants that Federal Pork so the administrators at the top and the teacher’s unions can stay plump so you get Federalized standards across the board that ensure that the insanity is taught in all schools.
We have the government we deserve.
There really is value to a basic fight. It teaches maladjusted individuals to stop harassing people.
Note that I am referring to the fights of yesteryear where children popped each other a few times and rolled around on the ground and walked away with some bruises and scratches. I am not referring to the more recent trend of knocking someone down and then kicking them in the head until they have a concussion or severe/permanent brain injury.
And before anyone screams otherwise, go research the topic of rogue elephants.
Yup. A parent CANNOT teach their kid to just sock the bully, or the victim of bullying will quickly become the victim of a zero-tolerance system too. Especially since a lot of today’s bullying is verbal/mental/emotional.
Yes, or the child could become a victim of future retaliation at the hands of a humiliated bully or his/her mentally ill family members.
It helps to have friends willing to get your back.
But there are no easy answers.
Just teach your kid to stand up for themselves because there is no escaping zero tolerance.
Zero tolerance means that they have the following choices:
1) sit there, take it, and nobody gets caught.
2) Sit there, take it, someone gets caught, and they get the same punishment as the bully. Victimized twice.
3) retaliate, nobody gets caught, POS learns a lesson, or the “parents” of said POS find out my definition of zero tolerance when they bother me about my POS.
4) retaliate, you get caught, you get the same punishment as the bully and the same attempt to sweep it under the rug with zero consequences for the school.
I’ll take 3 or 4 any day of the week if it has to come to that.
That’s one reason. When I was in school in the 70’s and eighties, we were allowed by the teachers and the principal to stand up and fight back against the bullies. The teachers all knew who the bullies were and when a kid fought against one of the bullies, the bullied kid was not punished, and even given an atta boy, with a wink and a nod, for standing up for themselves.
Now? There is no acceptable outlet for a bullied kid to defend themselves, because they will be punished equally with the bully. What an abomination! What injustice!
Modern school children are being pushed out naked into a lions den during feeding time, left with no ability to defend against predators, whether from fellow students, or by mass murderers from outside.
But this is just a symptom of a society that has turned from the authority of G-d’s word and the authority of intact families over the raising of their own children, and giving that authority to the state. And we see the result.
That is true. Kids all learn sooner or later tht no one really “wins” a fight, one just gets hurt less. By the time we start throwing real punches, those that can break something, we should have learned this lesson.
With age, some wisdom is gotten. The sooner the better.
What do you mean, “no one really wins a fight”.?
I fought bullies when I was growing up, and I won, and the bullies didn’t bother me or other kids after that. I fought a mugger as an adult and won, and that is when I started carrying a firearm.
People carry a firearm because we want to “win” against a predator. And studies show that people that use a firearm are more likely to “win” against a predator with a lower chance of being injured than when using other methods of self defense.
So I am curious what you mean by that statement.
This may be a bit presumptuous of me, but I think what Paul meant was morally. Fighting can garner success, but it’s usually the final carriage to that end, and failing to use successfully use any other method first is a poignant loss of it’s own.
But, real world, and all that.
I disagree. Fighting is the only appropriate response, if the choice is submission to tyranny and slavery, or being free. Whether that is the temporary tyrant of a bully in the school yard, or an adult predator in an alley; or the long term tyrant of a government imposed tyranny.
But this would not even be an issue, except that we are in the down ward spiral of societal disentigration as we reap the whirl wind of turning away from the laws of G-d and embrace the rule of the human ego.
Until we, as a nation, voluntarily return to G-d’s law, as given to us by the Christ, we will continue this spiral to collapse and absolute chaos, mass death and tyranny.
Wait so,
There’s no simple answer
but we have to DO SOMETHING
To what, feel better about yourself?
To them, doing *anything* is better than doing nothing.
Even if it’s the *wrong* thing.
Their (utter lack of) mentality…
Clarification -By doing something, even the wrong thing – “They meant well!”
Poke them with a nice, freshly sharpened Thoriated electrode and start babbling about cancer.
Shits ’em right up and counts as “doing something”.
I read about his father buying him guns & giving him access to the gun safe, and that he was recently suicidal, so where where his parents between the guns and the identification of the mental illness? His parents who are responsible for him? That’s who I blame until until I see evidence that they did what they could to raise a well functioning member of society and he was flawed in some way.
That kid was a lot of talk. Among other things, he said he knew how to build explosive devices. But the fact is that he could not clear a simple malfunction in an AR, nor with the handgun, strongly suggesting that his father had not taught him how to shoot. And having the combo to the safe is not proof that the father gave it to him, especially if he knew his kid was suicidal; more likely the kid simply picked the lock.
Why? Because shit happens. Good people, well before their time, sometimes die in horrible ways. Bad people sometimes profit from evil and live long, destructive lives. Shit happens. Most of the time, there is no knowing possible, just loss and grief and emptiness. And most people will attempt to avoid those feelings at all costs, doing anything to avoid peering into the abyss.
They’ll do almost anything even though they know it won’t work. Someone uses an AR-15 to cruelly murder school children, ban the rifle, even though the shooter killed his own mother to get it. Someone that lost, that evil, will do anything to express it. And you cannot – with any certainty – prevent evil. Why? Because shit happens.
What you CAN do, though, is explore what you can do to mitigate the affects of evil on you and yours. Some people barricade themselves at home and don’t go out after dark. Some people tool up and have a life. Some people just demand someone else protect them.
Evil exists. My experience tells me it exists as a possibility in every person. No amount of progressive programming or leftist ideology will erase it. Me? I accept it, I help others when I can, I tooled up, and I went out there and built a life. Works for me.
The answer for both school ‘gun violence’ and gang ‘gun violence’ is the same, although a compound one:
Home schooling, and a big FU to anyone attempting to lay those problems at the feet of other law-abiding gun owners.
Don’t let me hear even a moan about the potential loss of “socialization skills”. You get another big FU for that if you think that’s any success to hang a pennant on.
Not every parent has the wherewithal to stay home to teach their kids, whether that is financial, educational, or intellectual.
“Not every parent has the wherewithal to stay home to teach their kids”
The majority of parents today are themselves children, stunted adolescents, who cannot teach their children proper values, regardless of family income level.
Yeah I’m sorry but I don’t care. I don’t care about the Freeman shooting anymore than I care about any random shooting. The only reason ANYONE cares is because the MSM DEMANDS you care about every single little time a gun is shot in anger near a school. Never mind that the insane overwhelming majority of gun deaths that are directly connected to some prick committing a crime.
On a long enough time like the survival rate for everyone is zero. 2.5 million Americas are going to die each year. Even with the most extremely loose definition of ‘school shootings’ where a shooting happens anywhere within a mile of a school day or night you STILL barley break 100 a year. And actual real school shootings like this one barely happen once in a few years.
These incidents don’t happen on a daily basis in Europe, Canada, Japan or Australia.
This is not Europe, Canada, Japan or Australia.
In my opinion I think every high school should have a rifle range and marksmanship classes needed for graduation.
At the least, guns would be de-mystifyed and more urban students would learn safety and that gun violence displayed in the crap movies from Hollywood is BS.
Maybe a graduation requirement should include a couple of weekend nights in the ER as a volunteer too.
Those places have no freedom either…..
No freedom of speech, religion, or thought (unless you are a Muslim, then you can get away with anything!!)
No right to defend yourself.
They can house government inside your homes on a whim.
You can be searched for any reason.
No right to a fair, speedy trial.
Their press is state run and more biased than ours.
Higher taxes paid.
Yes I’ll take my dangerous liberty over not-so peaceful slavery awash in violent rapefugees. Oh I guess you forgot about the weekly bombings and vehicle attacks in your oh so peaceful Europe. Oh and they have mass shootings too but the media is is so biased and left-wing they ignore them because that would mean their social experiment is a failure which it is.
Paris and Norway come to mind which alone dwarf our “mass shootings” every few years coupled with the regular mass shootings over there routinely covered up.
So go crawl on your knees and lick the hands of your masters, peasant. Good boy, good boy!!
Hey moron. These incidents DON’T happen on a daily basis. That’s why commie trash like yourself have to wait for years to get ANYTHING that even approves a school shooting. Obvious stooges like yourself from Everytown have to inflate their numbers by counting incidents that happen NEAR a school as well as after hours.
News Flash: we are a nation of 350 million, 100 million of which own guns, and 25+ millions people with concealed carry permits. Yet magically the ONLY people that ever murdered (statically speaking) are about 10K people are murdered by DIRECT CRIME, usually involving criminals killing other criminals. Yet at the same time at bare minimum people use guns to DEFEND THEMSELVES about 60K a times a year.
It isn’t hard moron. This is just basic math. And that’s before we get to the hard reality that we will literally gun you scum bags IN THE STREETS before EVER giving out the 2A.
America is DONE playing this game with you looser.
I read the linked article. Didn’t find any of the usual anti-gun fantasy. The article pointed out the complexity of life, and how so many things are interconnected that simple solutions are nowhere to be found. The writer also chastised the bleeding left about feel good solutions. Obviously, the writer is not pro-gun, but does recognize that clinging to the hope that “if only….” is pointless, and cannot reconcile anyone to the kinds of killings reported. Even the parents came in for some criticism. Overall, a fairly balanced piece about absorbing and preventing the next big thing.
One thought I came away with is that if there is no simple key to preventing crazy people from killing others with a gun, the idea of “guns everywhere” is not a solution, either. Shouting RTKBA as a preventative is the opposite side of the coin bearing the motto, “common sense gun control”. “Guns everywhere” is not a preventative, but a response. Sometimes, we seem as dumb as our opponents. Guns as a defense against attack is not a concept that can ever address any of the root causes of attacks against persons. POTG should be at the forefront of activism to meet head on the complexities of a huge population, stating that simple solutions are not working, and guns are a last resort against a society that wants to avoid hard decisions.
A good guy with a gun is not a solution, it is a mitigation. The bad guy gets opposed immediately instead of whenever the cops show up.
I’m not religious but it seems a fair number of people could use a good read through the book of Ecclesiastes.
Just sayin’.
Question: “What to do when we want to do ‘something’ about gun violence”?
Answer: Guns are not violent, nor are they the victims of violence, nor do they instigate violence, as they are small collections of metal parts, springs, levers, polymers, wood, steel. As such, gun violence is a misnomer.
HUMAN violence on the other hand is a seriously different kettle of fish.
What we do is we pass laws that sound good, that appear to be a positive step toward ending HUMAN violence aided by the use of firearms, yet we pass laws targeting every firearm type EXCEPT the one type most commonly used in crimes, the venerable handgun, pistol, revolver.
What we SHOULD do, is have like, a Constitutional Amendment that guarantees the state does NOT have the power to divest the people from their inalienable rights to “keep and bear arms”. This Amendment SHOULD stand above the individual states legislative prerogative as anything else limits this right. Course, you have to add competent parenting, socio-economic factors, and a plethora of other lovely things, which aren’t EVER going to be addressed, and more importantly CAN NEVER be addressed by legislation. So we is, as they say, where we be.
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