"Hey, live feed. Active shooter in Texas."
"Where?"
"Santa Fe."
"Isn't that outside Dallas?"
"I dunno."
"Just another example of the government not doing their job."
And then we called attendance.
________________________________________________________________
When I went to college 20 years ago, there were signs up about what to do in the event of a fire. This time? There is no room, hallway or bathroom without an 11x17 placard telling me what to do in case some fucking nutbag with an AR-15 decides to kill me.
We keep hearing "it'll never happen here" and statistically they're right but fuckin' hell, a buddy's daughter lost a friend in a school shooting so statistics or no, that is FAR too few degrees of separation between a statistical fluke and me and my loved ones. You know what I grew up with? I grew up with a constant back-of-the-mind fear that the Russians would get itchy and we'd end up as mohawk-wearing dogfood eaters on the edge of the Great Nuclear Desert.
Forty years. Strangelove, Failsafe, Wargames, Day After, Threads, Road Warrior, the Russians would eventually blow us up. It left an indelible mark on culture and fuckin' hell if the 'boomers didn't wallow in that shit like it was sausage gravy. If you were a kid? You just knew that between AIDS and Andropov there was no fuckin' point in planning for the future.
"I've always felt like eventually it was going to happen here too."
By the time I graduated high school most of the fallout shelter signs had come down because it had just been accepted that there was fuckall that could be done. It feels like we're getting there with school shootings. But while the 'boomers made sure the whole fucking culture understood that death was coming from Ivan the Terrible, everyone is fucking ignoring the fact that we've raised an entire generation to expect one of their classmates to turn an assault rifle on them sometime.
Friend visiting from Fresno. She's talking about the junior soccer league there. Apparently there was a barbecue and one parent got into a fight with another parent and pulled a gun on him. AT A BARBECUE. Which meant there had to be a meeting. About whether concealed carry was okay at soccer league functions. One faction argued - in all seriousness - "that it just isn't a party until the guns come out." And we have to humor that. Because that's the culture. But if anybody said "it just isn't a party until the tits come out" it'd be national fucking news and someone would be required counseling before they were allowed to work in an occupation around children ever again.
I'd rather my kid be around tits.
When I was in high school I had ready access to weapons. Went plinkin' multiple times a week sometimes. Friends of mine got in an armed standoff because someone made someone else mad. Nobody died. I used to fantasize about walking into a classroom with an AR-15 loaded with blanks to shoot at the ceiling. Never did. (1) I knew there would be dire consequences (2) I cared.
I think the caring part has decreased. When the Russians were going to kill us all, it was about fearing a natural disaster, basically. Nothing we could do. Active shooter shit? If you're at the end of your goddamn rope, and you have no real concept of mortality because you're seven-fucking-teen years old, the choice between popper and poppee is a moral one. And in these here United States, you aren't allowed to say "If you have a fatalistic attraction to tools designed to kill multiple people at once and minimal affinity for socialization and thriving, you are sick and we need to help you." Because if you love guns, you're a True American and if you think there should be not just access controls but oh, I dunno, maybe a concerted effort to disrupt a culture that values the tools of military aggression in the hands of civilian sportsmen... well, you don't understand, you're wrong, and I'm a responsible gun owner why are you punishing me?
It was just as easy to get guns 20 years ago as it is now. By any measure, the murder rate has gone down while the gun ownership rate has gone up. You are much less likely to die by gunfire now than you were then.
But back then, you were a lot less likely to die out of the goddamn blue, for no goddamn reason, by gunfire.
The NRA aren't terrorists. Gun owners aren't terrorists. Gun rights advocates aren't terrorists. But every mass shooter is a terrorist and our country has a hobby that is the proximate cause of terrorism.
Most people will never face a mass shooting. But every school student in America has to prepare for them as if they are, and they have to face the reality that we'd rather they memorize "run, hide, fight" instead of "stop, drop & roll" because a splinter fraction of the populace is concerned that if they give an inch, we'll take a mile and the next thing they know they'll be in fucking FEMA camps.
She was Serbian. She'd lost two houses in the war. Her neighbors had firebombed her house in the country and burned it to the ground. Then NATO had bombed her city and leveled her condo. I asked her which was worse. "The country," she said. "Carpet bombing you don't have to take personally."
The entire country arranged its culture around eventual, impersonal armageddon at the hands of unseen Soviet aggressors. Yet that same generation is perfectly okay with kids wondering which one of their classmates might shoot them in the face some day.
When the Run-Fight-Hide generation is tasked with taking care of the Duck'n'Cover generation, I wonder what they'll do.
I wonder if despite all their triumphs, they'll end up eating alpo on the edge of the desert.
And it takes every inch of my generosity to not wish for it earnestly.
Yes, neither have helped, but I don't see they have changed at the rate of this phenomenon. It seems like a genuine trend in the expression of despair. I think social media may be no less a contributing factor than guns, gun culture, and a lack of resources, possibility, and even norms for empathic individual interventions.
Yeah, I think the isolation + fringe opinions part is key. Lord knows there is a niche rabbit-hole for every bizarre desire and destructive emotion on the internet. Micro-communities can now easily form around fleeting ideas and phases of despair, giving them a place to take root and grow. Then add the intersection with gun culture and you're baking a cake.
I've had similar thoughts to mk in that what used to be suicides are now turned outward. I'm not sure that the hopelessness or despair have gone up though. I think it's more that those with that despair have access to networked micro-communities that celebrate taking others out with you, they see the media reward others who have, the constantly growing list of others who have done the same, all against a backdrop of a culture where the NRA add below is mainstream for large communities in our country:
1977:
1988:
Yet even the most thorough timelines don't go back past '84.
Used to be we'd talk about school shooters to the point where Kurt Russell played one.
Now? Now the NRA and their lickspittles instruct us to shut the fuck up because apparently "copycats."
Access to guns has not appreciably changed since Kennedy was shot. Yet mass shootings are through the roof. Know what has changed?
A Facebook friend invited me to watch coverage of the aftermath on some lefty website. Fucking seriously dude?! We both agree a lot politically but I'm way less "confrontational and prone call people stupid." Unless they're obviously stupid of course
Both the fucking sides are wrong. The left needs to quit fetishizing the attacks as political opportunities because that's why the right thinks you're going to take away all the guns and the right needs to admit that guns are dangerous weapons that need to be strictly regulated because that's why these have become fetishized by the left
It's a vicious cycle of brain dead children arguing
To put it simply.
Wait, what qualifies as feteshizing the attacks as political opportunities? Are you able to discern genuine public health concern manifest as calls for gun control from rabid anti-2A folks looking to... what, stick it to gun owners?
Actually yeah. There does seem to be some smugness after attacks from liberal assholes. Like there's smugness on the right for attacks that are stopped by guns. By lying about those.
Anyway, I'm going to go back to waiting for my phone ringer to stop scaring me.
No. How my liberal Facebook explodes in gun control memes after every attack? I have extremely obnoxious people from both extremes and it's just frustrating.
I dunno man. May just be best to ignore me for a few days. I just typed had instead of typing was.
You gotta give me some credit for typing that on my phone after being awake for 72 hours.
Do you think some people will see this news story as glorifying shooters?
Actually I get your comment although it wasn't my first reaction to the event. We remember the names of killers more than the names of their victims. This could be encouraging to people with guns and no other ideas for an identity-defining experience.
Every year that we commemmorate the shooting of 14 women in Montreal, we say their names and keep the shooter nameless.
Is there another way to report on mass murder that doesn't seem like glorifying to you?
I'm interested in your thoughts.
Local news should acknowledge that it happened, and then move on. National news should make it a footnote. 50 people die in a suicide bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it gets mentioned and then on to the next thing.
It's not about the victims; they'll be remembered by the people who matter to them (and to whom they mattered) whether it's on the news or not. But we've seen time and again that when you give someone a mass shooter a scorecard, it invites someone else to say "I'm going to get me some of that."
Some of the commenters here would rather feel like their dicks are big and ignore reality. But the thing is, the real world doesn't give two shits about what we want. So for those of us who don't think "cowardice" is a good tool of public policy, we have to figure out what to do.
Consistently, I've seen someone willing to step up and refuse to give notoriety to a mass shooter. The sheriff after the community college shooting in WA did this, but the media ignored him and released the shooter's name anyway.
So the media has to grow up and take some responsibility (either their reporting matters or it doesn't), and we have to stop giving them pageviews. Journalism is ultimately market-driven, and it's up to us to vote with our wallets. It's simple, which is not to say it's easy.
- Is there another way to report on mass murder that doesn't seem like glorifying to you?
Maybe we just shouldn't be reporting on this in the national media. These are always given multiple days of wall-to-wall coverage on cable news. This is known to encourage copycats and attract others to outdo the carnage in previous incidents.
Suicide clusters among high school kids were drastically reduced when the act was entirely eliminated from local news. I have no idea how you could replicate that since internet fame is a thing and the two are very different things, 20 kids mowed down vs withholding cause of death. It would also require voluntarily standards set by competing networks. Which is impossible
Theory is not unsound though in magic land
No fuck that. Every yeehaw gun mutherfucker on here wants to stop talking about it because they don't like to be reminded that their perfectly safe hobby kills children.
We gave a full fuckin week to Baby Jessica trapped in the goddamn well before most of y'all were born. We gave months to Natalee Fucking Holloway. We gave several days to that guy who stole a tank and drove it on the freeway. No copycats anywhere.
Kids are dead. It's news. If news makes you uncomfortable, take it up with your conscience.
So I mean, then what's the appropriate radius from an event within which the local news should be allowed to report on it? 25 miles, 50 miles, what? We could limit such news to the boundaries of the school district which is impacted?
Imagine being related to a child who goes to a school at which there was a school shooting and having absolutely no idea about it.
Imagine hearing about school shootings by quality-degraded word-of-mouth instead of on live broadcasts straight from the source or through reading vetted, accurate, news/journalism articles which meet a certain accepted (and removed) standard.
Refusing to run news about such events has easy parallels to outlawing abortion: you're not going to make it stop happening, you're just going to make people have to go about it in messier, more complicated, less convenient, less accurate ways.
A child whose reaction to hearing about another child's suicide is to attempt suicide is a child who needs help, not a child who would be perfectly fine if they hadn't heard about the other one. I assure you the feelings they have which make them think suicide might be a good choice do not suddenly pop up in their skull in response to hearing about someone else who committed it.
"don't report on it, it encourages them" is the "just ignore it and they'll stop bullying you" of the gun control world, and it's a reddit comments section-tier analysis of the situation
i wish i could spit on an opinion
Doubtless you can see the hypocrisy in dismissing what I said with cliche while simultaneouly accusing me of cliche?
Granted it's easier to do that than actually engage with someone.