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Mass shootings: Solution(s)

Mass shootings: Solution(s)

  • Just one thing needs to be fixed.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    26
  • Poll closed .
It's too late. You're so locked in by your constitution that the constitutional rights of potential psycho killers can't be violated. It's as if your history carried a poison pill that's just now kicking in.

We actually have an amendable constitution. Part of the problem is people don't want to accept the fact that life is perfect, people aren't perfect, and some things can't be changed to perfection. You're going to have nutjobs and evil people no matter what laws you pass. History has proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
 
Believe it or not, we've already got much of that and more in place and have for decades with Child Find, special education and 504-financed evaluations, and EPSDT.

What we need more of is follow through and catching youth throughout the aging process, putting pressure on private insurance providers, and probably aiding primary care physicians in doing so.

I've heard of similar programs, anyhow.

Obviously they failed in this pretty glaring case, so I'm looking for whatever resources\empowerment it would take to make it effective.
 
I've heard of similar programs, anyhow.

Obviously they failed in this pretty glaring case, so I'm looking for whatever resources\empowerment it would take to make it effective.
Well, if youre talking about service provision beyond that of screening, this might help.

Expansion of these Medicaid state plan amendments (1915c and 1915i) across the country would require that Medicaid stays intact rather than divided up into per-capita caps or block grants (ie. not the GOP's healthcare bills last year or the President's current budget proposal).
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Mass shootings: Solution(s)

Is there just ONE thing that needs to be done to end (severely lessen, tbh) mass shootings, or is it a matter of fixing several things for a complete solution?

Leaving the question open and not naming any possibilities, although you are certainly free to mention them if you like.


I was tempted to say it is too complex and will never be solved, but I chose multiple fixes instead.

Not that I think it will or can be "fixed" 100%, but reduced a great deal yes.

Some good points have been raised by some previous posters... here's my list.

1. Minimum 5 armed guards per school, of one sort or another. Whether this is volunteer teachers, principles, coaches, administrators or hired guards, whichever. Frankly I'd prefer armed guards as their full-time attention would be on security, but training/arming some staff would be far cheaper and people bitch about the cost, even though it would be less than 3% of current school spending nationwide. This would act as a powerful deterrent and also as a safeguard if someone tried anyway. What's the first thing schools do when there is an active shooter? Call the good-guys-with-guns (police), who take too long to get there and too long to act, compared to armed protectors already inside...


2. Improve background check data... work on making sure criminal convictions get added to NICS along with treatment for addiction or serious mental illness where the subject is deemed a potential danger to others. That last bit is tricky and would have to be done carefully to avoid trampling rights, but it would help.

3. Everyone from police and government to parents and students, stop ignoring red flags! Take positive action when they are encountered.

4. Address our inadequate mental health infrastructure and failure to institutionalize dangerously ill people. We gutted our mental hospitals and system in the 80s, clearly that was a mistake.


5. It isn't the guns; we've had those forever. We didn't have mass school shootings of this frequency until rather recently.... consider what changed. Fifty years ago we taught morality as an absolute rather than a mushy mass of relativism; had civics classes that taught not just your rights as a citizen but your DUTIES as a citizen; and we had considerably more discipline in schools and more willingness to remove habitual troublemakers quickly. We also had almost no school shootings.



The part that keeps me up at night is that we show all the signs of a sick society, perhaps a terminally ill one. We have individuals like this Cruz, with all his red flags and dozens of police incidents going un-addressed until he murders 17 people. Then we turn around and blame everything and everyone EXCEPT the person who did it... as if individuals have no agency or responsibility for their actions. We blame the AR-15, which was available 50 years ago when there were almost no school massacres like this, instead of asking what has changed. We won't look in the mirror and realize the world we've created is a mess. Yes we have done some good things in the past 50 years, correcting and addressing old wrongs and prejudices and oppression, but we went too far and "threw the baby out with the bath water"... we threw overboard our moral rudder, our ethical compass, and all our anchors of moral restraint and societal cohesion.

We dared think we could perfect humanity in the absence of any such absolutes, when the opposite is true, we're destroying our humanity. We're pointing the blame 180 degrees out of phase when the truth is we are collectively to blame, for thinking we can build a perfect society while throwing out the moral foundation of the past and substituting a Godless relativism, a lack of any moral absolutes and standards, in its place.

50 years ago there was considerable social pressure for parents to teach their children manners, respect, responsibility and morality. Today we deny anyone has any right to expect any such thing, and many actually celebrate how they're letting their children raise themselves without "imposing values on them".

We are reaping what we've sown. Ultimately no legislation, regulation or security plan will "solve" anything until we recognize that we planted this garden, and if we don't like the fruit it is our fault for the seeds we've sown.


Yeah I know, a lot of people won't like all that. We don't want to face what we've done or hear that we screwed up, that our post-modern humanism is to blame for destroying the foundations and replacing them with unstable rot, but it is the truth.
 
Take real steps to combat bullying in schools and social media.
Free mental health services for anyone who needs it.
Better security in schools. (not armed teachers). Guards, door hardware.
Parents taking more time with their children.

Not sure how to actually achieve these things.

Combatting bullying and schoolhouse security are simple to deal with.

Parents spending more time with their kids is more complex, obviously. We can't force people to be better parents and unfortunately, we can't force people to be licensed to have children.
 
4. Address our inadequate mental health infrastructure and failure to institutionalize dangerously ill people. We gutted our mental hospitals and system in the 80s, clearly that was a mistake.

While there are gaps at the higher levels of care, and it is unquestionable, by far *the* biggest gap is in basic community-based mental health care.

Prior to the 1980s we put all of our eggs into the institutional placements and they were god awful in how they treated these patients. Very few people in the consumer movement clamor for the days of insane asylums of yore.

However, when deinstituionalization came, states did not fund or prioritize community services. They were tremendously cheaper than the sheer millions they were pumping year after year into the aslyums and were going to produce far better outcomes, but most legislators didn't give a damn.

All throughout the 1980s, if they didn't "dump" people on the streets with no access to community services, they did what my state did, which was merely to move people from the institutions into nursing homes. And you know what, my state actually patted themselves on the back for that.

Here's how we should be looking at mental health services, but we often don't. https://www.samhsa.gov/prevention

The President doesn't look at it this way and that's a God damned shame.

In the pursuit of stopping incredibly rare mass violence, Americans risk turning back the clock on 20% of the American population by going after locking up 4-10% of the American population--the overwhelming majority of whom should not be in institutional placement.


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While there are gaps at the higher levels of care, and it is unquestionable, by far *the* biggest gap is in basic community-based mental health care.

Prior to the 1980s we put all of our eggs into the institutional placements and they were god awful in how they treated these patients. Very few people in the consumer movement clamor for the days of insane asylums of yore.

However, when deinstituionalization came, states did not fund or prioritize community services. They were tremendously cheaper than the sheer millions they were pumping year after year into the aslyums and were going to produce far better outcomes, but most legislators didn't give a damn.

All throughout the 1980s, if they didn't "dump" people on the streets with no access to community services, they did what my state did, which was merely to move people from the institutions into nursing homes. And you know what, my state actually patted themselves on the back for that.

Here's how we should be looking at mental health services, but we often don't. https://www.samhsa.gov/prevention

The President doesn't look at it this way and that's a God damned shame.

In the pursuit of stopping incredibly rare mass violence, Americans risk turning back the clock on 20% of the American population by going after locking up 4-10% of the American population--the overwhelming majority of whom should not be in institutional placement.


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I'd have to disagree somewhat. When I was in LE, we had a lot of people in jail who should have been in an institution. In some cases the family had been trying to have them committed for years, but there were no beds... so it went on until they did something that brought them in conflict with the law.
 
I'd have to disagree somewhat. When I was in LE, we had a lot of people in jail who should have been in an institution. In some cases the family had been trying to have them committed for years, but there were no beds... so it went on until they did something that brought them in conflict with the law.

Some, yes, but overwhelmingly, they need community-based services. This is why states across the country have been sued for violating the ADA.

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Attacking the Vulnerability:

-All schools should have security doors in corridors and common spaces which can be remotely looked and unlocked to compartmentalise the school and limit the movement of mass shooters within the school. Compartments must have emergency exits out of the school in the event of fires.
Normally I keep full quotes and highlight in red, but you have too much text in both posts, so I'm going to condense.

Anyway, that's quite the list you have there. This one point jumped out at me though. If I understand this scenario correctly...

1) Some students and teachers could be LOCKED IN with the shooters, and

2) If the students and teachers can escape, so can the shooters.
 
It has everything to do with being locked in. Other western countries also have widespread gun ownership but they don't have the same problem and when anyone tries to do anything it hits the same wall.

Which Western countries have "widespread gun ownership"?
 
Normally I keep full quotes and highlight in red, but you have too much text in both posts, so I'm going to condense.

Anyway, that's quite the list you have there. This one point jumped out at me though. If I understand this scenario correctly...

1) Some students and teachers could be LOCKED IN with the shooters, and

2) If the students and teachers can escape, so can the shooters.

radcen:

Good points. One I had considered, the other I hadn't.

1) The security doors would be in common places and hallways but not in classrooms which the teacher would lock.* The security doors would be controlled by trained security professionals in the school who would be in contact with staff throughout the school and would be tied into the security camera system of the school. Hopefully the monitors could time the compartmentalisation of a section of the school to isolate the shooter(s) but if not the grim calculation of trapping a few students or staff to save many others might have to be made. There are no easy answers. The secondary purpose of the acoustic suppression system would be to quickly drive students and staff from hallways and common places into lockable classrooms and other secure areas. I can't imagine the stress and survivor's guilt which a teacher and students would experience if a gunman threatened to kill hostage students in order to gain access to a classroom. I am a teacher and I hope I would have the intesinal fortitude and callous determination to keep a classroom door locked knowing that a few terrified teens would die but more would remain secure behind locked doors. The asterix denotes a grim idea that the security monitors could block a teacher from unlocking a classroom door in the event of a hostage taking to force a teacher to open a door in order to allow a shooter(s) to gain entry into a classroom. I haven't made up my mind about this yet.

2) I thought about that before posting but from the school's perspective you want the shooter(s) out of the school ASAP and in the open where he/she/they can be taken down by police using whatever means necessary. So if a shooter(s) decides to use a one-way escape door to bolt, then that gets him/her/them out of the school and reduces potential deaths. The students remain locked down until the shooter(s) are dealt with. The weakness in this plan is if the shooter(s) start a rapidly spreading fire in the school. Fire suppression systems might not be able to deal with it. Then you override the escape doors in the uneffected compartments where shooters are not present and keep other compartments locked down to trap the shooters, while you evacuate the rest of the school. Then unlock the escape doors to compartments with shooters when the other students outside are far removed and the police are waiting. No system is perfect and human beings would always be in control of this to make the best decisions possible given the circumstances barring malfunctions.

Cheers and thanks for the critique. I appreciate criticism, suggestions and additions.

Crikey, it's late!

Cheers.
Evilroddy.
 
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Which Western countries have "widespread gun ownership"?

Sometimes the verbal trap set by the questioner is so obvious it's not worth responding to.







However, if you mean as widespread as the US then no other country but then we're in the moronic situation of claiming the US is "unique" and cannot be compared to any other country. Americans seem quite happy to compare the US to other countries in plenty of other situations though..

If we mean widespread as in anything over 25% of the population then there are plenty of countries such as France, Austria, Canada, Germany and Switzerland. However, I guess you already knew that as Google has plenty of answers to your question.
 
Mass shootings: Solution(s)

Is there just ONE thing that needs to be done to end (severely lessen, tbh) mass shootings, or is it a matter of fixing several things for a complete solution?

Leaving the question open and not naming any possibilities, although you are certainly free to mention them if you like.

The biggest thing that needs to be fixed, not only for mass shootings but for violence in general, is to address obviously dangerous people being allowed to run around loose. That is the single biggest issue and the one that neither side has the balls to address. I am a little encouraged recently by hearing that in several cases people have been turned in and arrested BEFORE they actually carried out a mass shooting. It's about time.
 
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