Rez, you're not gonna see eye to eye using gaslighting.
Woody
Woody
You said we need to have real conversations about this topic so I'm conversing about it. Will we see eye to eye? Maybe, maybe not. It's ok for people to disagree on most topics.
Every day, there are many individuals that prove that not everyone should have access to firearms.
There are two very difficult points to consider:
How do we identify those individuals & how do we keep them from acquiring firearms?
I’m not sure we are willing to go there.
There are two very difficult points to consider:
How do we identify those individuals & how do we keep them from acquiring firearms?
I’m not sure we are willing to go there.
All I know is that my sons were raised around unsecure guns. By the age of 6, they were pretty well versed in shooting them, and seeing ol' dad demonstrate what damage a bullet can do to a body by using carp we would catch at the river. Even .22 HP leave a pretty good size hole on exit. .44 mag would send big chunks flying.
Took the mystery out of shooting, and they never tried to sneak one off or "play" with one when I wasn't around without asking if we could go shooting.
Same thing with fire. If they wanted to start a fire with matches, we went to the back yard and let them start a pile of leaves on fire and talked about what could happen if the fire got away and into the house or the neighbor's house. There was no longer any mystery to making a fire, and those life lessons went on as long as they lived in our home.
Conversely, got a call one night from a co-worker that wanted to know if I knew anyone wanting a .38 S&W Model 10 revolver. I get calls like that on occasion and said I would ask around and let him know.
He said, he couldn't wait. He needed to get it out of the house tonight as his 4 year old came out of the bedroom carrying it. His wife told him the gun or him was out of the house that night, hence the call.
He wasn't a gun guy, just thought he needed one for protection and had it tossed into the nightstand. Still have that pistol, 40 years later. Saw him with his new wife last year at a steakhouse. Asked him if he wanted it back. Nope, it's yours.
Kids get hurt with power tools, kitchen knives, unsecured furniture falling on them, choking, etc. The list of what might hurt a kid is endless. Guns are just part of that statistic.
Took the mystery out of shooting, and they never tried to sneak one off or "play" with one when I wasn't around without asking if we could go shooting.
Same thing with fire. If they wanted to start a fire with matches, we went to the back yard and let them start a pile of leaves on fire and talked about what could happen if the fire got away and into the house or the neighbor's house. There was no longer any mystery to making a fire, and those life lessons went on as long as they lived in our home.
Conversely, got a call one night from a co-worker that wanted to know if I knew anyone wanting a .38 S&W Model 10 revolver. I get calls like that on occasion and said I would ask around and let him know.
He said, he couldn't wait. He needed to get it out of the house tonight as his 4 year old came out of the bedroom carrying it. His wife told him the gun or him was out of the house that night, hence the call.
He wasn't a gun guy, just thought he needed one for protection and had it tossed into the nightstand. Still have that pistol, 40 years later. Saw him with his new wife last year at a steakhouse. Asked him if he wanted it back. Nope, it's yours.
Kids get hurt with power tools, kitchen knives, unsecured furniture falling on them, choking, etc. The list of what might hurt a kid is endless. Guns are just part of that statistic.
I would expect most people to not really agree on much of anything. It's like how there's a million denominations of Christianity because everyone interprets the source material differently somehow.
So, as far as measurement --- tough metric to quantify, but I would think offhand that we would want a goal-zero of kids getting shot. Right now, we are not there obviously. I don't believe that SRO's really do much. Even back when I was in school, the SRO never did anything other than harass kids that should have been getting help from a counselor. In high school we had to go through metal detectors which could be defeated by showing up 2 minutes late since they were staffed by teachers. 1 officer ain't really going to do much with 2500 kids in the school anyways.
Thinking right offhand about some notable examples, the SRO at Marjorie Stoneman didn't prevent or stop anything. The SRO and hundreds of officers at Uvalde were notably disasterous. Those are examples of responsive incidents, rather than preventative incidents. The preventative's likely don't make the news cycle to be perfectly fair, so it's harder to gauge what those incidents might look like. Ultimately schools, like most places, are soft targets and would be easy to penetrate if someone (student or external person) wanted to penetrate them. So do I give some credit to SRO's as a deterrent? I mean, maybe but not much.
To the question of measurement that goes back to the top of the thread, I'd be very curious what the data would look like measuring "after the shooting starts" incidents. How many shooters are taken down by LEOs, how many by bystanders. How many are taken down by unarmed persons. What do we know about the incidents when the shooting took place? How many "saves" took place?
Unfortunately, I'm relatively sure that none of that data is captured anywhere. There's almost no uniformity in standards for reporting any of this --- by design. Funding has been blocked to even study these concepts from a federal level for eons, and any private sources studying it get vilified by the gun community so if they manage to turn something out, it's DOA in many minds.
Ultimately I'd like to see real research done into what can be done to prevent people from wanting to go shooting people. Then I'd like to see what could be done to stop people from carrying it out. Addressing the source is more critical in my mind when all our current systems are not really preventing anything --- they are "lessening" the damage.
My take, which I realize is an ultimately unpopular take on this forum where there tend to be many loud voices from Camp Punitive, is that we as a society will never punish our way out of the cycle of violence we're in. That doesn't mean we stop punishment of those that commit crimes and break the law, but we should be actively working to make people not WANT to break the law, even if it's impossible to root out evil from the world entirely.
I think a big part of having SROs on campuses is the deterrence factor. It's definitely not a perfect solution, but it's geneally a good start. Yes, there have been incidents where they sat on their hands while kids were murdered. Those responses were also in direct contradiction to current tactics where it doesn't matter if you have one SRO available or 30 patrol cops responding, you immediately move to the threat and neutralize it.
Will we be able to "punish" our way out of violence? No, not with the current political leadership in this country. NYC just released a bunch of illegals who beat the crap out of some cops. Five years ago those illegals would've received some serious hickory shampoo, if not death. Times have changed and not in our favor.
You are all over the map. Whether its crayons you like our your mom’s makeup mirror I could care less.
Poorly handled guns get kids killed. Other times kids are saved with guns. Two things can be true at the same time.
The amount of kids safely delivered to school in cars has little to do with the amount of kids killed on the highway. The numbers don’t line up you say. Yeah, that’s life. All you can control is the guns in your house.
I’ve read all your comments. You mostly just sound like you like to argue.
Name me one person on this thread or forum who doesn't like to argue??? Half the internet is arguing and the other half is porn. But thanks for the insightful response.
As Mark Twain once observed: "There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics."
