Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Of course they think that, they’re still kids. Who’s going to protect them from surveillance?
IMO this is way over the top - and it’s conditioning future generations to accept this level of surveillance as adults.
These topics are much easier to tackle than the real issues effecting students.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/778015261/experts-worry-activ...
It seems to me that that public acceptance of such surveillance is a side effect of the mainstream media pushing scares and sensationalist coverage (because this is the only thing they have a chance of selling), not some grand evil plan, but not sure.
What's your basis for saying that they're commonplace? One silly tweet doesn't really show anything.
The link points to one example.
The OP didn't support their assertion that constables commonly confiscate screwdrivers during weapons sweeps, but I don't think OP intended the picture prove that, just to show the definition of "weapon" in use.
This is a red herring in any case, since schools in the US would be perfectly entitled to remove scissors, guns, machetes, etc. etc. from their premises if they chose to, regardless of the 2A.
Moreover, to the extent that items such as scissors actually are banned in any significant number of UK schools (I doubt it), this is a new development that has nothing to do with gun control. There has been no significant change to gun control legislation since the mid 90s, whereas I can attest that scissors were certainly available in UK schools into the mid 2000s.
Are there laws in the UK that allow the police to enter your house and steal all your tools? For people who didn't click on the link: It is a picture with literally nothing but tools supposedly found during a "#weaponSweep"
This is fucking dystopian
It's almost as if fear sells.
When someone's selling fear, only cowards are buying.
Counterpoint to your conditioning point: kids tend to rebel against oversight, and will probably include this in the list of things they reject.
The public school system functions as a major conditioning environment to get children used to the norms of society, including deference to authority, following rules, and other things that are generally accepted as good. This is the ideal time for those things to happen because of how pliable the young mind still is.
However, we must be very careful how constrained we make such environments and the idea that safety is guaranteed by subjecting kids to what is effectively zero privacy means we've traded, yet again, liberty for security, thus relinquishing the effective right to both.
This will be as effective at rooting out violence in schools as bombing 3rd world villages has been in rooting out terrorism. Until the underlying issues are addressed (mental health, social disparities, racial divides, etc.) the kettle will continue boiling over and more-and-more unpredictable and chaotic ways.
Which may very well be fine; perhaps it's a useful normal.
In the US, we used to consider dueling to be a freedom and a proper behavior for gentlemen to engage in. We changed our minds on account of the unnecessary death. Maybe people in the future may consider "dropping off the grid" to be weird and quirky, or downright dangerous.
Maybe that's okay. We've known for millenia that unlimited freedom is more damaging on average than partially-constrained freedom. In the era of these new technologies, I don't think we're sure yet where the constraints should be.
All currently under surveillance and have been since the invention of the security camera. No one bats an eye, these are to document crimes that have occurred.
Suddenly public schools also use cameras for the same purpose, and this is where the line is drawn? Personally, I feel much more comfortable having a government that represents me and offers me a recourse in charge of security footage than some asshole who runs the gas station and does who knows what with the footage when he gets home.
They will absolutely never be free of surveillance in a modern society, whether private or by government, anyway. Might as well get them used to it. They will always have devices on them that track everything they do. Society is beyond caring about privacy. Having toys and convenience is much more exciting. Hopefully they're also conditioning future generations to become docile slaves of their workplaces.
Once we're all dead this won't even be an issue.
Maybe your old enough to remember a time when you could walk away and live somewhere without anyone from your old life being able to find you...I'm not.
Maybe you remember when "everyone" 15+ didn't have a constant connection to the internet or at least the police....I'm not.
Maybe you remember being able to go places alone as a child... I don't.
I remember being able to break school rules (running in the hall) and evade punishment because there was no way to prove it... these kids will not.
My great grandparents remember a time when going to another country didn't require the permission of your home country, when leaving your country meant you weren't a part of it anymore... I'd bet you do not.
--Edit (added conclusion)-- It seems like with each generation we become used to a little less freedom and a little more control. A little more comfort and a little less connection with the non man made world. Maybe this is how it's always been. Maybe it's just another by product of the agricultural revolution drawing us all closer together.
This has probably been true to a certain extent ever since we began organizing into tribes. However, I would put forward that even if you aggregate all of the liberty concessions humankind has made for the last few millennia, it would pale in comparison to the supreme control afforded by technological improvements of the last 20 years.
Fahrenheit 451 is a view of that future.
Will it happen in the U.S.? Definitely not. Political influence on daily life is astoundingly weak here compared to China. Government is far more efficient in China too and can manage big projects like this (whereas the U.S. recently took 100 years to build a new subway line in Manhattan while China is criss crossing their vast country with high speed rail and probably hundreds of other transit projects).
Our knack for mismanagement of contracts and political disunity save us from ourselves. Plus you don't get sent to death camps for your political or religious ideology here unlike China and Oceana in 1984, so there isn't much worry even if one were built unless you are one to go off robbing and killing.
Not only does the poor kid have a school-issued laptop with heavy monitoring tools installed on it, but they are also required to bring a smartphone to school! My Aunt had made them tape over the laptop's webcam and explained that everything the kid typed could probably be seen by the school, but she was still concerned about the microphone. And the kid is completely incapable of avoiding the more toxic aspects of social media and adtech, because the constant use of smartphones has become a central part of their education. At the age of what, 11-15?
I can only imagine what this is teaching the child. When we caught up over the holidays, they seemed to be more fed up and disgusted with technology than interested in it.
There's already a plethora of studies about the negative impacts screen time may have on early child development and the development of their brains in particular. But even from the observable social aspect, the interactions with our smart devices with notifications always vying for our attention and flashing widgets distracting us, I'm really worried for kids who already have struggles with focus and attention.
I know that we get tired of the "sky is falling" rhetoric, but I will just point out that many aspects of modern life that have become "normal" for us are still bad. Sedentary lifestyle, short attention spans, need for constant entertainment, less time spent outdoors, larger processed food consumption – the health and social problems associated with all of these are just accepted now, and a couple of generations ago we didn't have them (at least, not to the same degree).
Was everything perfect before? No, of course not. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. We can adopt technology and progress responsibly, rather than w=recklessly as we have for the past few decades.
Often modern home schooling looks more like private school (because almost no one actually does it home, they send their kids to parent run “co-ops”) and you won’t have to deal with most of this stupidity.
The Co-op my sister went to banned smartphones inside the building. IMO that was a little extreme and made logistics more difficult than they needed to be but it meant they just focused on school work.
Only in the past several years, and in that time there's been a lot of pushback to it and a growing consensus that it is likely harmful when people don't moderate their usage. I was in high school less than 10 years ago, and phones of all kinds were banned. If a teacher saw an iPhone, it would be confiscated and your parent would have to pick it up.
The schools are optimizing for convenience and cost, not the cultural zeitgeist.
Smartphone applications are designed to be addictive and have demonstrably negative effects upon the mental health of adolescents. Their usage should be vigorously discouraged by anyone who cares about the mental health of school students.
It is quite illegal to furnish alcohol to minors
>All states also make it a crime to supply an underage person with alcohol even when there is no money involved.
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...
And:
>Depending on the situation, one can be charged with a misdemeanor or a felony for supplying alcohol to minors. Most often, supplying alcohol to a minor is considered a misdemeanor offense, but in some jurisdictions, it may be considered a felony depending on the circumstances. Felonies for supplying minors with alcohol are typically charged when there is some type of accident or injury involved with the use of alcohol or the person supplying the alcohol has been convicted of repeated offenses. Typical penalties are outlined below.
> For the purpose of this section the word ''furnish'' shall mean to knowingly or intentionally supply, give, or provide to or allow a person under 21 years of age except for the children and grandchildren of the person being charged to possess alcoholic beverages on premises or property owned or controlled by the person charged.
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXX/Cha...
As I recall, many divey bars would settle for "sibling." As a teenager in Illinois I heard tale of a mythical land to the North where we could drink in restaurants with our parents.
https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/125/I/07/...
Not a great analogy, since the effects on alcohol are quite different than the effects of using a smartphone.
We can't have children being used to constant surveillance and accepting this as a part of life. It sets them up for so many problems in the future, where they won't understand the serious implications of constant tracking and surveillance.
And sure, nothing too bad comes out of this stuff right now in most of the world, but have you seen China? The minute a government decides to do so, all that data that's been collected on you your whole life will be used against you to give you a flawed AI-generated social "score" that determines what you can or cannot do, or to determine whether or not you're a "threat" (see: someone who speaks out against wrongdoings) to such a government.
The clear backpacks are silly I'll admit, and also pointless. I agree that kids getting conditioned to be okay with surveillance is bad, but this is all coming from the private sector right now.
In China, you now have to submit your face to be scanned into a database to get a new phone. This has already been normalized by all the face swapping apps, like Zao. Kids in the west wouldn't think twice about accepting the Ts and C's for Snapchat or IG or anything else that includes face scanning tech.
Blocking has been standard in some workplaces, and stricter blocking has been standard in schools, but monitoring isn't. Small and medium businesses and academia often have little or no blocking.
No-one gets any alert if I write "I want to kill myself or maybe the president" here (over TLS), nor will they when you download this page. For some children, this does generate an alert -- even on a secure site.
There hasn't been a company of any size I've worked for in the last at least 25 years which didn't require signing an acceptable use agreement which includes notification that all activities may be monitored.
Schools have started constant CCTV surveillance. Often with flawed AI systems in place. Clear bags and all these practices condition them to value their privacy less, which is a very bad thing.
> Kids in the west wouldn't think twice about accepting the Ts and C's for Snapchat or IG or anything else that includes face scanning tech.
Surely you understand why that's bad, right? What they're taught hasn't been updated in decades, whereas the world around them has changed so much. They're taught as kids not to trust strangers. Why are they not taught to not trust random apps?
To me the upsetting part is that these kids must feel unsafe / monitored. Which is exactly what they shouldn't go through in school, it's far from a good start in life.
But then again with all the school shootings I don't blame the security companies, it's a deep cultural/societal issue. It's similar to what happened in Europe in the last few years, now it's business as usual when soldiers in full gear + assault rifles patrol the streets in major cities or during big public events. It sucks but there isn't a perfect answer to the problem.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/school-shootings-are-...
Nothing drives an economy like fear.
The Culture of Fear - Barry Glassner
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Minorities-Mic...
I've not seen a lot of that.. More at US Christmas markets.
At any rate, I view policing events in that fashion or China adding security guards for their knife attack problem as not actually the same as US schools. In most cases the perpetrator is an adult that is dropping out and hard to reach. The US is worried about youth going through their social integration system who become violent as a result and that it apparently doesn't catch deteriorating preemptively as much as other societies. Many arguments can be made as to why, i.e. a litigious society leads to little personal risk to address abnormal problems.
A child who goes to a US school and observes the precautions should become paranoid about trusting themselves and their friends not to go on a killing spree. A child going to a Chinese school should mostly be more afraid of a scarier world.
Many larger schools have their own police officers, because they have to. My fiance is a high school teacher and just out of her classes in the past 2 months she's had one student arrested and expelled for bringing a firearm to school and another for bringing nearly a pound of marijuana (in a state where it is illegal at the state level) to school. Earlier this year they had two students expelled for having sex in a classroom after school while filming part of it with one of their phones.
Even from 1998-2002 we had school police. We had multiple people dealing marijuana, MDMA, LSD, and probably other stuff I wasn't aware about. We had several students investigated pre 9/11 for threatening to deploy pipe bombs at the school, we had more than one overdose (all MDMA I think), I'd watch a girl in study center once or twice a month sit there and rub her face the desk or her binder with pupils the size of saucers, we had students drinking on school property in the middle of the day. We had at least one student that I know of on an ankle monitor for most of high school. If you went out for a sport you would be drug tested regularly, without notice, pulled out of class at random and people would occasionally fail. While we had students doing FFA and being volunteer junior firefighters after school we also had people with extensive juvenile records and children.
When I was in middle/high school 16-21 years ago you could buy drugs/pornography/bootleg cdr movies/alcohol/other things that were age restricted like ephedrine (we abused ephedrine so much I have no idea how I didn't have heart failure) in the hall or bathroom between classes just by walking up to any number of people. I've found talking to people this is not a unique experience and most of the same is still occurring in high schools right now.
Many schools across the country simply are not utopian dream lands. If I had kids, I'd be 100% fine with them being forced to have clear backpacks and I'd go a step further and suggest they only be allowed to and from their locker upon arrival/departure and not allowed between classes. It's one small step that considerably reduces the risk of a kid lugging a weapon, explosive device, non-personal use amounts of drugs. Sure, I could have hidden a small arsenal and a large quantity of drugs on my person between my hoodie and jnco jeans in high school but a clear (or no) backpack drastically reduces the likelihood of these things being taken to school.
Maybe the schools need to change, and kids need to be integrated into the real world, instead of being retained in relatively pretty prisons with bad food until they're adults.
Perhaps we should. Companies exploiting peoples' irrational fears and inability to do math are huge part of the problem. It would be less bad (but still bad) if they only scammed people, selling school shooting protection charms or other magical items. But instead, they're selling ineffective solutions with bad side effects, taking away freedoms, creating stress and feelings of insecurity.
Few things irk me as much as people making money from hurting other people.
What country are you talking about? Honest question, just curious. I am in the US, but even today many small and medium sized companies do not monitor internet (block parts, sure, but not monitor) and 10 years ago even large companies did not do it.
- 2 FA
- geofencing at VPN level (you can't take work laptop to Russia, India, China, etc)
- everything is whitelisted. Some employees can only access x.theirBank.com, everything is else blocked. This is the case with tellers, folks in the retail banking
- even for IT/dev, one should get explicit permission to get access to youtube, github
- every work laptop comes with an agent like ZScalar, which enforces these policies by coordinating with a central server.
The Levandowski incident at Google revealed that they had VERY extensive logs. They appear not to look at them routinely, but the logs are there when needed.
Every URL accessed via a proxy will be logged, even no one is actively reviewing those logs regularly
Monitoring is done everywhere and has been done for a long time. Whether or not they check it depends on how lazy IT is.
Furthermore, children can't actually accept T&C's as a matter of binding law. The fact they just push the button notwithstanding.
What has been normalized is legal predation (something parents should be paying attention to and warning children about as they get older), and apathy toward actively slapping down abusive corporate business models. This is showing indications of turning around, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
In terms of monitoring Internet usage at schools; it may be done to a point, but I'm far more concerned with the trend toward omnipresent physical surveillance through facial recognition or device fingerprinting. It's one thing to try to police content to appropriate subject matter for a school; it's completely different to start holding a child accountable to having a digital footprint to manage all the time. Adults can't even manage that responsibly, and I don't think forcing them to do it while they are young will play well with ensuring they understand how to navigate the physical world well.
Given the adversarial objectives of most technology companies, I can't see the sense in putting in the effort to basically manufacture "trained consumers" for big tech. I'd rather see them taught computing in general and gradually introduce them to software creation and program awareness so they can make their own decisions. Of course, that seems to end up the kind of thing you get at vocational schools instead of primary Ed nowadays.
Monitoring work or school internet use without specific prior suspicion is illegal in the entire EU; so this level of surveillance may be "standard" in some countries, but hardly globally.
> In China,
Not exactly the reference I was looking for, though from this perspective any level of surveillance is normal.
Monitoring usually means logging all activity and then automatically or manually sifting through the logs to look for things, possibly much later, and possibly in response to other subsequent events.
Monitoring is considered by most people to be worse, and may come with more legal liabilities.
Clear backpacks is such an absurd thing that I still find it difficult to believe that adult human beings came up with such an idea in the name of security. It's something I'd only ever expect to encounter in a novel about a dystopian future.
Also, I find this part highly disturbing: “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”
This is eerily close to a typical oppressive state. See a troublemaker, make up a rule that you can prove they broke, punish them. Not a similar scale, of course, but it's still pretty bad.
No. If you are using a school/employer provided email account you should be using them for school/work stuff. If you are using a school/employer device, you should be using them for school/employer stuff.
If you want to tell Jack or Jane that they fuel your fire and you want to do sexy time or that you violently soiled your pants and wondered if they could bring you their gym shorts to the upstairs bathroom then use your own device on your own service.
My fiance is a high school teacher, in the past two months they've had a student come to school with a handgun and be expelled and handed over to the police and another expelled for having legit dealer quantities (nearly a pound) of marijuana (packed and placed in mason jars in her backpack) in a state where it isn't legal at a state level.
I can see why some might want clear backpacks.
I think you'll find the opposite effect. Kids are being taught to hide things far better than before. Increasing their privacy skills for their adult lives :D
Is it not possible to buy a used phone there? I got my last several phones on Ebay; like cars, they depreciate a lot in the first year or two, so getting a 1-2 year old model will save you a ton.
The solution to keep people from killing should focus on teaching others that life is not meaningless or worthless. Also, teaching kids humility wouldn't hurt either.
Edit: Perhaps this should be obvious, but teaching about nihilism is not teaching nihilism. People teach nihilism more, if anything, through their actions.
It’s not like I was taught that the Holocaust will happen again because humans are inherently bad and such everything is meaningless; instead it was that if we seek the goodness in the world we can prevent something like that happening again. Furthermore, if we were taught anything about nihilism, it would be that the Nazis used it to justify mass murder, which we were taught is the worst thing ever, because it is. Just my experience
The moral philosophy of the high school student is "get grades that are good enough to graduate and/or get accepted into your 'safety school'". If objecting to or evading surveillance, or using a non-clear backpack, risks suspension or expulsion, it is therefore a moral imperative to use a clear backpack and submit to panopticon surveillance.
It is only later, after graduation, that the experience of being treated like criminal suspects at all times is applied to their developing worldview. And their conclusion will be "the elder generations are all paranoid assholes". They won't be wrong.
I get the sense that the backlash will probably take the form of "You want to strip away my privacy and pry into my personal life? Fine. I will push so much of my personal information onto you that you will recoil in absolute cringe at my oversharing. Here are pictures of me doing all the things you find abhorrent, like having nontraditional gender and sexuality, or voting for a democratic socialist."
The phony compassion delivered by public schooling taught me to be nihilistic. I think that's what the parent poster was getting at. It wasn't a strict adherence to some system I once got a lecture about (because I didn't get one either), but as a natural response to the platitudes they taught.
I could shake off that "wrong" way of thinking because I was under the impression it was abnormal and needed to blend in with the crowd. So in retrospect from writing this post... I guess what they really taught me was doublethink.
Credit Scores, Cell Phones, Social Media. These kids will be tracked for the rest of their lives whether they have clear backpacks and ssl mitm or not.
I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves.
The oft-regurgitated "x cameras per thousand people" narrative tends to overlook obviousness like this.
I certainly can't.
I'm also entirely fine with this.
Backdoors in cheap CCTV being accessed illicitly at a mass-level is an entirely different problem, and one which I'd agree would need questioning.
I doubt there's much value in that concern for another decade, until the majority of CCTV cameras are ultra high resolution/30+fps, which they're not.
Yes, there are possible exfil paths, but not ones that can reasonably be executed on a large scale. Realistically, the danger from break-in and hard drive theft (or warrant/subpoena) is greater for the average user.
Unless you believe governments have backdoored SSH, I would say it's good. Definitely not a turnkey solution though.
I can understand less and less how other programmers can do this kind of work.
Everyone got to put food on the table, but if the money comes from destroying personal freedom, I could not sleep at night and I would take any other job.
Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.
These systems aren’t integrated into larger systems to help track and ID people.
That said, some of this could change if many shops go to nest or ring solutions... but most shop owners will not keep video footage indefinitely in the cloud as it’d be cost prohibitive.
But I think it also has to do with the fact that at least with him people actually have someone to be mad about. As opposed to their usual mode of surveillance where they are being filmed by a 'security' camera (hey, it's security people! nevermind if it doesn't actually make anything any safer) operated and owned probably by their boss or someone who they are not on equal grounds with.
It makes me kind of sad.
in the old days we'd have God watching over our conscience.
now we have cctv.
Funny how some people choose to react when the concept of 'God' is dropped into a response, irrespective of the author's belief or sincerity.
So what's the deal with the selfie obsession and the instagram obsession and so on? Is it that people dislike being watched live? Or is it that people dislike other people having control of the footage?
That said, the reason people get depressed by platforms like instagram is that they don't show real life but a photo-shopped, re-touched, carefully-curated version of life. People only see what others allow them to see.
Furthermore, I know that most of the footage taken by a surveillance camera is discarded. Most of the footage filmed by humans is created for a specific purpose and will be used. Someone else will likely watch it.
Finally, if I walk into a grocery store with a camera, I am going into someone else's establishment informed. If someone walks into a classroom and films me (like in the "Surveillance Camera Man" videos), there was no such agreement, implicit or otherwise.
I really do hate being watched, and hate others taking video. I hope surveillance cameras go out of use, and people stop recording everything on phones. However, there is a difference between that and some silly two-bit social network.
Unfortunately, the source for that article costs £100.
Only if you ignore Atlanta, GA at #10.
While I've no doubt that London is highly surveilled, that data is, to put it bluntly, horse droppings, and should never be cited.
If you look at the sources they cite for stats like "There are 2,985,984 cameras in Shanghai" (Wow, look at the precision on those figures! Six decimal points, if we express it in scientific notation!), you will find that they take a random unsourced number from a blog post from 2013, then add 20% to it 6 times over, because they assume (Also unsourced) 20% year-over-year growth.
Meanwhile, that same source claims that there are only 3,600 cameras in San Diego. As anyone who's ever been in a convenience store, bank, airport, or workplace can tell you, that's complete baloney. You can probably visit enough businesses in a normal day that will have you walk past 3,600 cameras. (And the source for that number? A news article about the city government installing 3,000 new intersection cameras. Apparently we are to believe that across all the businesses, government buildings, and private residences of San Diego, there are only 600 cameras.)
I'm not sure if the authors in question are just incredibly stupid, or incredibly intellectually dishonest... But my money is on the latter.
tl;dr - please think critically about your sources, especially when they reinforce a pre-conception that you hold. Most of the 'data' you can find on the internet is garbage.
Some say it benefits security, but I think the calculation is flawed. You will never get engaged citizens in a open-air prison. People implementing these policies should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
Oh wait, I think there was a movie about this...
I‘d rather not be in prison than hoping I‘m the chosen one who gets out
The got around it by using a Google doc to chat in real-time.
Your kids will raise theirs under the watch of Alexa AI-Webcam and Apple Watch Child Protection kit.
And one day they'll sit on courts and find the Fourth Amendment quaint.
Ideally, we can also pass along what life can be like.
What about friends? If enough of you agree, the range is more free for the kids.
Finally, in your home, you can be permissive.
My own kids escaped much of this, and I was an active parent.
Turns out, I am going to have to help another one, my granddaughter due to son's big fail and meth. (Not good, I have no words. It is all insane hard for him now)
Maybe we can largely home school, or potentially move.
When I compare my school experience to this mess?
Who knew? It all seems crazy and so very unnecessary.
The other disturbing trend is criminal records at increasingly young ages. When do kids get to learn from mistakes without being badly marked before they even come of age?
1. Active shooters, while rare, have completely eroded our trust in our fellow humans. Either a gun is safe to bring into a school or it's not. If it's not, then why do we allow open carry/concealed carry permits in public spaces? Active shooters have been both kids and adults. You might make the case that kids can't handle firearms safely -- though I was once a kid with access to firearms and I knew how to handle them safely. (Don't take this paragraph to mean I'm pro/anti gun control. It's just an observation)
2. Public Schools are public property. Private schools are private property. In either case, it's perfectly legal to have a surveillance system.
3. Parents feel more comfortable knowing the school has a means to keep their children safe. After all the school is responsible for the children while they are at school. Worse, should something happen to a kid on school property, there will be a lawsuit claiming the school did not do everything in its power to protect the children -- hence the need for surveillance.
It's often not allowed to carry in places like schools (varies depending on district or state). However, many pro-gun supporters make the argument that CC supposedly makes public spaces safer because active shooters don't really need a license to murder people anyway, so anyone carrying during a situation has more defense (just stating the argument, not certifying it's correctness). But I'm interested in hearing how often it's the case that some licensed idiot badly secures their weapon in a public space leading to an active shooter situation (and for this reason I definitely wouldn't trust students to CC. But I'm also not in favor of clear backpacks, as that similarly feels like a case of "solving the wrong problem").
Note that in most of the geographic US, concealed carry is the norm, not the exception:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Conceale... (blue and green are either constitutionally protected rights, or the state is legally required to give a permit)
Maybe this elaborate demonstration of surveillance is being used as a teaching moment by a woke English teacher?
One side of things that has me worried is I recently spoke with my brother over the holidays and he's a highschool teacher. ALL of his students use VPN's to bypass the schools monitoring and blocks on what they can do. What has me concerned is how many of these students understand the implications of funneling all of their private data through VPNs and vetting their VPN choice in the first place.
At this point I have a pretty flippant attitude to my private data because of how much is out there. Telemarketers know my number and personal details. Spam emails do too. Even snail mail junk.
My info has been bought and sold dozens of times by now, probably originally from Verizon as telecoms openly engage in this practice. VPNs leaking my info is the least of my worries, the cat is already far out of the bag.
However, what can these companies even do? Not like I engage with their targeted advertisements or junk mail. If my identity was actually stolen, credit card numbers sold, it would probably only be mildly annoying for a month or two rather than some catastrophic thing.
* Car crashes (teach people to drive more defensively)
* Suicides (provide better mental health services)
* Violence that occurs outside of school (intervene to stop conflict before it becomes an issue, which would also help prevent these shootings)
* Opiods
Automobiles are something of a sacred cow. Even outside your neighborhood school, prioritizing pedestrians & cyclists, traffic calming, and the like are an uphill battle because it is inconvenient to drivers.
No, it looks insane to the 6 countries mentioned in your article that have significantly less schools shootings.
The other 188 countries in the world are purposely not discussed, since many of them have extremely high violent crime rates despite restrictive gun control laws...
19th highest in the world is Argentina and it has less than half the deaths US has.
In top 30 there are countries with less than 1/4th the deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
That's not a reason not to implement these policies but infringing on privacy, which should be considered a fundamental right, for an at best insignificant decrease in the homicide rate is.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
I wonder why :)
Have you considered the possibility that easy access to guns make suicides more common?
Which includes suicides & accidents.
It also ignores the overall homicide rate, which is much more important. Do dead people care whether they are murdered with a gun or a knife?
Which are more common when the access to guns is easier.
> Do dead people care whether they are murdered with a gun or a knife?
Deaths caused by guns are easily preventable. Why not prevent them?
Again, you are ignoring all the countries that have strict gun control laws and still have high rates of suicides.
> Deaths caused by guns are easily preventable
They clearly aren't, since there is no correlation between gun control laws and homicides.
The risk of being involved in every other incident class I listed is higher, so that is where we should be focusing our efforts because ultimately a death is a death regardless of what people are scared of. This is basically the terrorism problem: terrorism in the US is this big scary boogieman until you actually look at the data and realize that there's very little terrorism. The school shootings make the news precisely because they are very rare and surprising (and because some media outlets have readership that is in favor of strict gun control so it will play well).
If you want controls to stop school shootings anyway then why not just put in place general healthy population controls: stop bullying, keep a cop visibly on school grounds to deter criminality, engage with parents, and create a healthy environment for learning. All of that costs basically zero dollars and would likely do far more overall good than these silly, expensive, and invasive surveillance systems.
Using the same criteria there were 0 gun-related deaths in schools in my country (10% of USA population) in last 50 years, probably more. And it's not hard - you simply have to be rational and control the guns where it's easy (at the point they enter the market, when they enter the market) instead of controlling them where it's hard (in every school every day).
It's the low-hanging fruit of death prevention. It would save you money and hassle (no need to check every kid every time it enters the school, no need for transparent backpacks and all that security theater).
> If you want controls to stop school shootings anyway then why not just put in place general healthy population controls: stop bullying, keep a cop visibly on school grounds to deter criminality, engage with parents, and create a healthy environment for learning. All of that costs basically zero dollars and would likely do far more overall good than these silly, expensive, and invasive surveillance systems.
You should do all these things anyway (except for keeping cop in every school - that's just absurd and shows how far into irrationality USA has gone).
> All of that costs basically zero
Hiring 100 000 cops full-time costs basically zero? I would disagree :)
Don't forget ownership. Bloomberg never discloses that their owner has spent hundreds of millions to circumvent 2A when they cover mass shootings or gun politics.
I agree that there is a bit too much reliance on technical measures (ex: monitoring software) to police computer usage. This can be in absence of teaching kids personal responsibility. However, in a classroom environment it helps teachers immensely. While 80% of your students might handle themselves mostly, trying to police those remaining manually can eat up a lot of instructional time.
One point on the article:
> Teenagers are warned that the school is tracking what they do, and that they can get in trouble for visiting inappropriate websites.
If the school gets gov funds for IT, they have to be CIPA compliant[0]. This includes filtering adult websites and logging access to them. Fail to do so and you lose access to a lot of government funding through E-Rate[1]. The law is vague and somewhat up to school admin interpretation. I've seen some pretty intense surveillance regimes implemented in the name of CIPA.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Internet_Protecti... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Rate
Which is ridiculous.
Fashionable backpacks do nothing.
Sources edit:
https://www.bicycling.com/news/a20026414/why-biking-to-schoo...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/03/parents-outrage-...
I personally believe most school violence is induced by the prison-like nature of schools. They are inmate riots of 1.
This sets the entire society up to be unable to resist government overreach in the future.
Clear backpacks increase the risk of death from tyranny.
I must be missing most of my brain then because, to me, this sounds unfounded.
But even if you can apply that, it doesn't work. The gun and ammo you can fit in a textbook is smaller than what can fit in a backpack. Backpacks are good at carrying things, that's why we - and school shooters - use them. So if someone wants to pack heat, they'll be less effective.
Maybe the effect from this is insignificant. But how sure do you have to be for the risk of dead children to be less bad than someone not being allowed a cute backpack?
How sure do we have to be to ban them all?
There is in my opinion a very clear danger associated with setting up draconian surveillance states borne out by history. How sure do we have to be before we ban those?
>There is in my opinion a very clear danger associated with setting up draconian surveillance states borne out by history.
In my experience, if everything that was compared to 1984 was actually like 1984, we'd be at war with Eastasia.
Besides if we deal with this low probability extremes shouldn't we factor in early blooming girls who kill themselves after being bullied and shamed over carrying their feminine products without any privacy?
A minor correction: it's untrue to say that suicide usually involves severe depression.
For many people it's something more usefully described as "rapid onset despair".
>if they are looking to commit a public atrocity they'll...
Which gives everyone else a sooner notice to run away. This won't work for e.g. gang violence.
>Mandating clear backpacks is just as much security theater as is banning 4 oz liquid containers at the airport
Yes, they started that after someone actually tried to blow up a plane with bottles of explosive disguised as soft drinks.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/21/us/school-shooting-us-versus-...
We do absolutely have higher rates of targeted gang violence than other countries, which after controlling for factors like density and poverty is highly correlated to young urban male demographics that aren't as prevalent in other developed nations. There is no single policy that can solve the numerous social and systemic failures that generate this problem, but due to the nature of these vendettas they would assuredly be carried out with knives and shanks in the absence of guns.
All mass shootings in schools are school shootings, but not all school shootings are mass shootings.
Anyway, in principle any death for any reason is unacceptable. In reality, however, we need to decide how to allocate limited resources to making various classes of death less likely. Given that dying in a mass school shooting is much less likely than dying from a lightning strike, and is about as difficult to prevent[0], it doesn’t make any sense to focus on.
[0]: No, we can’t just “make guns illegal”. The political structure of the US makes this impossible.
America has a lot of problems. I would say school shootings are not terribly high on the list. Same with mass shootings. Gun violence is a very touchy subject in America, as outright bans violate the 2A of the constitution which many believe was inspired to protect against formation of tyranny. Personally, I see the value in citizens being able to own rifles; not so much with handguns (which seem to only be used for murder and suicide).
But imagine if Hong Kong had 2A rights. Protests would be much more violent, yes, but the violence would be up-front instead of postponed until the next revolution (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure...). Beijing would be forced to either back off or straight up invade. Instead, I predict HK's rights will be slowly eroded in a war of attrition until they are all trapped under the tyranny of the CCP for generations to come (which is arguably worse than up-front violence).
You have no idea what would happen if Hong Kong had "2A rights".
Right, because they don't. Just like every other country that slips into tyranny. The absence of 2A rights in countries ruled by tyrannical regimes is deafening.
A 4 year old girl was killed crossing the street to school in my neighborhood just over a month ago, horrible tragedy:
https://laist.com/2019/10/22/pedestrian_deaths_vision_zero_p...
This article shows it's not only LA that is failing at vision zero. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/vision-zero-d...
Surely the US has by far the highest gun murder rate in schools among developed countries.
EDIT: The down votes are interesting - are you down voting because what I said is not true, or because you just don't like that it is true?
... but it is how human psychology works, so the school must account for it.
Schools are turned into high-security institutions, or the appearances of it. Watching kids for fear of them freaking out is not a good signal to send. It means you only care when it's too late.
It's not whataboutism, it's cost benefit analysis.
GP didn't make that analysis; they merely implied that nothing should be done about school shootings because more kids get run over. That's whataboutism in its purest form: "We should doo something about school shootings!" - "But what about all the kids getting run over???"
We don't have to accept high rates of vehicular deaths either. Automation will make this moot in the end, but far stronger punishment for inebriated driving is due, among other things.
That is what you concluded from what I am saying. Why did you conclude that?
> you could hold the same if school shooting fatalities were in the 10,000s instead of 200s; too insignificant
Oh but look at those magnitudes!
> You're either a) tacitly saying that the certainty of future school shootings is absolutely fine with you, or b) that it can't be helped, which isn't true. Pick one.
I did not intend to say either of those things. That's your interpretation. But again, why did you think that? My take: A good chunk of the population in the US is sold on alarmism and "something needs to be done".
> far stronger punishment for inebriated driving is due
Great. Another non-solution giving the appearance that something is being done.
Then when that doesn't work you cry for still more to be done. More punishment. More prying. It's a cycle I won't participate in. I'm disgusted by it!
Why aren't we discussing the resources these kids had, or didn't have, facing their adulthood? How come they decided the way to feel in control was shooting their peers? They're not the only ones! A lot of kids feel that. Few act it out. Thankfully. Why do they feel that? No matter, let's watch their backpacks for guns.
> Oh but look at those magnitudes!
You're saying again exactly what you're being cute about in the first sentence. Not much to deduce here.
> I did not intend to say either of those things. That's your interpretation. But again, why did you think that? My take: A good chunk of the population in the US is sold on alarmism and "something needs to be done".
That's interesting because your "take" completely ignores those suppositions you insist do not apply to you. It it CAN be helped, those who believe so would explore solutions: which one do you favor, and why?
> Great. Another non-solution giving the appearance that something is being done.
"Our calculations reveal that increasing rates of prosecution and conviction for DWI would reduce re-arrests for DWI and by implication drinking and driving more generally." -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472385/
It works.
> I'm disgusted by it!
You're disgusted by putting drunk drivers in jail?
> No matter, let's watch their backpacks for guns.
I never said I was in favor of the clear backpacks, not once. That won't deter anything. I do however think the ease of accessibility to guns is great among disturbed young people.
> Why aren't we discussing the resources these kids had, or didn't have, facing their adulthood?
We should. No one says we shouldn't. And yet, are you going to vote or write legislators to allocate resources this way? I doubt it. It's just another way to brush off the whole thing from cons who don't give a fuck and wish people would just not talk about it.
Well thanks.
There can be other conversations about the effectiveness of public transportation, and how the US infrastructure was designed around cars instead of buses/trains, but there is a pretty big difference beyond the number of deaths caused.
There’s nothing legally stopping you from buying a car with cash, not registering it at all, and driving it on your own property.
I recall driving farm trucks (and tractors, etc.) while hauling hay when I was about ten years old.
It might be true that France has by far the highest stray-golf-ball death rate in the world. But this wouldn't mean it is a significant cause of mortality, or an important object of public policy.
(Also your example is very poor - you should use per capita statistics so countries of different populations can be meaningfully compared.)
I suspect it's some variant of “amend the US constitution to allow the federal government to ban guns”. This is essentially impossible in practice due to the political structure of the United States.
If your response to that is “well then, change the political structure of the United States” then that would involve a violent revolution or some other chaos, which would almost certainly kill more innocent people than mass school shootings do.
> you should use per capita statistics
It doesn't matter, since my example was meant to illustrate a point, not to be quantitatively meaningful. But since you asked, the corresponding per capita numbers would be:
3 per billion inhabitants per year in the US.
149 per billion inhabitants per year in France.
Sigh. You Americans have been taught to think in such black and white terms. It's either "have guns" or "ban guns". You honestly think there is no middle ground, which is utterly and completely moronic because virtually every developed country in the world has a way of dealing with this that America is convinced can't work. Even though the evidence is blatant.
In many, many countries (including the US actually) citizens are allowed to own certain types of guns, and not other types. I ask how many anti-aircraft guns Americans are allowed to own? Or missile launchers? Or tanks with live rounds?
Clearly there are some weapons that regular people can have, and some they can't.
All America needs to do is tighten down what's acceptable, just like other developed countries do. For example, I live in Canada. I have a large calibre hunting rifle, and it isn't even registered. My friend has a handgun which is tightly controlled. Australia is similar.
So people that "want guns" can still "have guns", but the murder rate is much, much lower in those countries than the US, because other more powerful weapons are restricted or even outright banned.
Further to this, it's a simple idea that people should be required to have licenses and training to own a firearm, just like a vehicle. So what if you need to amend the constitution to do that. You've already amended it 27 times - it's not like the thing was perfect the day it was printed and will still be perfect in the year 3500 or some such nonsense.
Be very clear, I am in NO WAY talking about "Ban guns" or "Take guns away". I'm talking about restricting certain types of guns, and restricting certain types of people, which of course America has already done.
It's really not hard. The rest of the world has done it very well, but you guys are still busy arguing black and white while kids are literally being slaughtered in schools, and people at concerts and movie theatres get gunned down.
You seem to be arguing against what you think a typical American believes, rather than against my actual position.
I’m not arguing that policy shouldn’t be changed. I’m arguing that it’s so difficult or impossible to change, for relatively little benefit compared to other possible reforms, that focusing on it isn’t worth the cost.
The salient difference between the US and other developed democracies is the US’s uniquely broken political structure. What most people don’t understand when comparing the US to Canada or Australia is that the US can’t “just” pass a law making serious and major reforms. It’s simply not possible. In almost every country, when most people agree a law should change, the Parliament just passes it, the head of state agrees to it if necessary, and then that’s it. Not so in the US.
In our naturally gridlocked and fundamentally broken political system, there are only three ways a law can change in a major way at the federal level:
(1) It is obscure enough that nobody cares about it,
(2) It is so widely supported that it can actually get through the deadlock, or,
(3) It doesn’t go through the legislative process at all, but arises from the Supreme Court changing its interpretation of the constitution.
For example: the vast majority of Americans have believed since the 1970s (as far back as my data goes) that abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances. A majority have believed since the early 2010s that gay marriage should be legal. And a solid majority have believed since 2000 (as far back as my data goes, and to be fair it dipped to around half during the Obamacare debates) that the healthcare of all Americans should be the responsibility of the government.
But because of the brokenness of our system, the first two reforms could only be made by the Supreme Court, and we’re still waiting on the third.
We can’t even agree to switch to the metric system, despite practically every educated person agreeing it’s superior.
Given these facts, if you’re going to spend the huge amount of political capital, years of debates to the exclusion of everything else, waiting for once-in-a-generation supermajorities, etc. that were necessary for even a relatively minor reform like Obamacare, you’re better off focusing on something more impactful, like improving transit infrastructure, mitigating climate change, subsidizing poor people’s access to healthy food, or any number of things that will save more lives overall than making mass shootings less likely.
It sounds terrible, and I'm sad so many people have to live like that.
Next you're going to tell me your pro football team is doing just fine because they're better than a high school team. (Even though they're literally on the bottom of the pro ladder)
Surely, what is ostensibly the best country in the world should at the very least be comparing itself to OECD countries if it ever hopes to improve.
I’m just confused about this attitude about the United States. I don’t see people being as smug about the entire spectrum of countries. I don’t see endless threads on message boards about how unbelievable it is that Eritrea and North Korea are governed poorly. And I think if you went to a forum filled with people from one of those countries and constantly talked about how it’s not as nice as yours, people would get annoyed.
We know our country has a ton of problems. Lucky you for being born in one that doesn’t, but that’s not a license to constantly lecture us about something we have zero power to change.
I bring up countries that people don’t hold to as high a standard despite them being so clearly worse-off than the US to invite you to reflect on why that is.
I think for most the most part it’s one of a few reasons: (1) people conflate geopolitical power with development, and think it’s abnormal that the most powerful country isn’t the most developed; (2) people conflate wealth with development, and think its abnormal that the wealthiest country isn’t the most developed; (3) people are just racist and think a country with a mostly Western culture should naturally be highly-developed and well-governed; (4) people see the unwarranted patriotism of a loud fraction of Americans and want to knock them down a peg.
Not sure which it is in your case, but I suspect based on your comments that it’s some combination of (2) and (4). But both are total fallacies.
Wealth is not particularly strongly correlated with quality of governance: Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE are all deeply corrupt yet richer per capita than the US. Hong Kong is one of the richest territories in the world and not a democracy at all. Uruguay and Botswana are vibrant, well-functioning democracies despite being developing countries. So it’s actually not very surprising that the US has a more poorly-structured political system than Canada, Australia, and most countries in Western Europe despite being monetarily richer.
As for point (4) it is obviously a fallacy because at no point did I ever claim the US is the greatest country in the world or that we have more freedom than anyone else or that Canada is a Stalinist shithole or anything else, regardless of the fact that some percentage of Americans might believe those things. On that note...
> what is ostensibly the best country in the world.
Your words, not mine. I think the US is better than most countries in the world, but worse than Canada, Australia, or most countries in Western Europe. Why is that so surprising or confusing?
> Next you're going to tell me your pro football team is doing just fine because they're better than a high school team.
I don’t follow football at all. I find baseball and soccer much more interesting. Funnily enough the political discussion parallels the soccer standings. Can’t tell you how many Europeans have a smug attitude about how “bad the US is at soccer” (as if that’s some sort of moral failing!) despite us having a FIFA ranking of 22 out of 210 federations. Funnily enough I’ve never heard anyone smugly shitting on the national soccer teams of China, India, Canada (sorry!) or Palau.
That right there is resting on a huge unsubstantiated assumption on your part. I personally don't think giving people the right to bear arms necessarily reduces crime but I say this because evidence doesn't really bear the notion out. You say the opposite without any backing evidence. By way of opposing arguments: In most Latin American countries (including the extremely violent one I live in) private gun ownership is either outright banned or extremely curtailed. Despite this, most of Latin America has murder rates per 100,000 that are several times to several DOZEN times higher than those of the U.S. Another example, in the U.S itself, homicide rates (same metric of deaths per 100,000 people) vary enormously from state to state, county to county and municipality to municipality, and the correlation between this variance has very little visible connection to gun ownership rates or gun access restrictions in those same municipalities. Go look at the stats yourself: this is why states like Wyoming, where gun laws are extremely lax, can have extremely low murder rates while places like the city of Chicago, Illinois or Baltimore, have enormously higher homicide rates despite having local gun laws that are nearly as strict as those of many European countries. Other factors besides gun laws are largely to blame for the higher-than-average murder rate in the U.S (by western standards), not access to lots of powerful guns.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-09-15/pedest...
Gallup conducts a firearms poll every year, and the closest thing to a total ban question is a total ban on handguns.
"Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?"
should be: 29
should not be: 70
no opinion: 1
This sounds more like, in common with most polls, it shows how the manner of asking a question alters the answers given?
I'd be really interested in how the poll would go without "the police and other", and with using a construction based on "allow ..." instead of "ban ...".
Not really. Only a few states have FOID or FID license requirements:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_United_States_...
You might be thinking of license to _carry_ which every state has, though some of have been making progress in removing that requirement as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry
The US usually puts the balance point at "own" vs "operate in public" for how rights are structured. There are rare exceptions where even ownership is considered too dangerous.
I was under the apparent misapprehension that the license you needed to purchase a gun was an ownership license - ie you got the right to own, then could purchase.
Yes, unless prohibited by law (criminal conviction, judged mentally infirm)
> you just have to get someone else to purchase it?
No, that's not lawful.
I don't think anyone sane would read that page, the questions, and in particular trends, and come to the conclusion that gun regulation is a "very unpopular opinion".
But on this site: yes, it's unpopular.
[1] https://www.fedpol.admin.ch/dam/data/fedpol/sicherheit/waffe...
[0] They do have a high rate of suicide by guns than the rest of Europe though and that number has dropped as, surprise surprise, gun laws have been tightened.
There are just way too many guns in the US (i.e. "it's just way too easy to get a gun in the US").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
US has a mental illness problem. At some point, a societal sickness entered the country. A sickness of nihilism and hopelessness. A sickness where (mostly men) feel lonely and unloved and powerless to change their futures. A sickness where hatred for peers is harbored for years until it festers and explodes out in a violent way.
Why does America have these kinds of people at such high frequencies compared to Switzerland?
Could part of the problem be bullying? I've watched a lot of American movies and any time a school is depicted it has some pretty awful bullying going on. I've not heard of anything remotely like it elsewhere. Sure, there's bullying, but most of it ends in name calling or sometimes fights, rather than this harassment that goes on for years.
The mental illness occurs when their cognitive dissonance is strained to the breaking point. When someone realizes that they have labored their whole life, possibly at significant risk to life and limb, for the primary benefit of other people, who do not even return a minimum level of respect, a psychic pseudopod of rage reaches out, questing, for someone or something to blame.
And it usually lands somewhere that is merely close, rather than deserving. They do not understand why their life has been considered disposable, and become determined to make their mark--even if it is to be a scorch mark or track mark--on the world. We are likely already familiar with some common modes of midlife crisis: buy a motorcycle, buy a sports car, buy a boat, get really into one's religion, volunteer for some charity, go back to school, etc. It may well be that when those sorts of outlets are financially unavailable, then "buy a gun, write a manifesto, and start the revolution" is one of the few that remain within reach. Or it may be that they just preferred that one from the start.
Perhaps Switzerland is better at making people feel important, and is not exploitative to a point far beyond the breaking point?
Almost all of the mass shootings were committed by men with a history of domestic abuse and violence. I think the real root cause is entitlement and not seeing other people as humans.
And what makes women immune to being entitled and not seeing other people as human?
Personally I would explain the fact that most of these shootings are committed by men by the fact that men are generally speaking more likely to react in a physically violent way to stress than women are. That plus the fact that these shooters are an incredibly tiny portion of the population would explain why most shooters are men.
>Personally I would explain the fact that most of these shootings are committed by men by the fact that men are generally speaking more likely to react in a physically violent way to stress than women are.
Men are not rabid dogs incapable of making their own decisions. If someone lashes out violently and murders a bunch of people, they're responsible for the choice to play god with other people's lives.
Public schools.
But maybe they have functional public schools...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/#!po=0....
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-o...
If the progressives were willing to accept the Swiss laws in the US under the stipulation that they would never again be made more strict, the US gun owners should be thrilled.
Part of the problem is that US gun laws are often motivated by misunderstanding or spite rather than reason or compromise.
[0] It would be practically impossible to enforce because states can't put up barriers from things coming into their state from other states.
That's because those increases are never compromises or exchanges. They are simply demands. Republicans and the NRA look at what the gun laws in DC and Chicago were before the Supreme Court cases and think: "That's their end game. Zero guns. Because look: when they had the political power to take them away, they did." They have no rational reason to support increases in gun control that come in exchange for nothing.
If the Democrats offered a compromise, in the form of a constitutional amendment, not repealing the 2nd amendment but detailing it out, we could probably see real talk and progress. If it's not an amendment then it's simply "pray I don't alter it any further".
The whole NRA situation in USA seems so absurd from outside.
And to the most common objection: yes they are. Gun control proponents often bring up and praise the UK (near total ban) and Australia (significant limitations compared to the U.S.) as examples to emulate.
And in Chicago and DC, before the Supreme Court cases, there were effectively total bans. And when the plaintiffs sued, they didn't say, "well I guess we went a little too far, let's establish a regulated framework under which responsible, qualified and trained citizens can own guns". Instead, they went all the way to the Supreme Court to try to defend their bans.
So, even if a gun owner agrees with a particular piece of proposed regulation (and I'm sure plenty do), they would be acting against their own long term interests giving the block trying to ban guns political momentum and capital.
Their current tactic is to revoke a law that makes it too far into the judicial system to avoid having it receive constitutional review by the Supreme Court and thereby invalidate it nationally.
It speaks volumes to the underhandedness of the gun control proponents.
That's actually wrong. Gun control isn't banning guns, and if you consider background checks a "ban" - then driving licence requirement is a "ban on cars" :)
If someone had the bright idea to put the right to drive a car in constitution - Americans would be now arguing whether countrywide requirement to have a driving licence to drive a car is ok or not :)
I said that there is a large political block trying to ban guns. Not that they are banned, or that they are more regulated than cars. Is that what you're referring to?
The question is always where the tradeoff point should be, not whether there's any tradeoff.
... but a younger me was born before Columbine.
Consider that the news cycle and FUD have created a terrible availability bias in our country that increasingly leads to draconian actions like those mentioned in the article.
https://quillette.com/2019/11/29/the-availability-heuristic-...
The bodycount might not be "spectacular" but the rate of school shootings in the U.S. dwarfs other developed countries. Fatalities 200+ so far. At any rate, you don't know what they were 'estimating' exactly.
> The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens.
Criminals retrieve their weapons through underground networks. School shooters do not. They're just students. They've either grabbed what was lying around at home or bought them. Such that, accessibility to school shooters is hampered were it the case that legal distribution were more restricted.
Add to the fact, circulation of guns in the underground is only possible and bloated because of the sheet number of legal guns.
Didn't say that, nor do I believe that. Just correcting the above.
> So the vast majority of gun death happens because of illegal guns
Well the majority are suicide, with legal guns. As for homicide, yes. But people don't care about that, really. They care about mass shootings, or school shootings.
> The wretched cesspools that we call public schools are creating a bullying environment that makes kids suicidal and in this way kills lots of kids
We don't know to what extent it's about bullying in the school system (kids haven't gotten meaner), or exacerbation of issues as a function of modern living (e.g. more isolation), or neither. What's clear is that guns are easily accessible to angsty homicidal loners.
I don't think schools in and of themselves are so different than those in every other developed country as to be responsible for shootings.
> And the most famous school shooting of all time, the one that started it all, columbine, sources it’s guns from an illegal gun dealer,
Yeah, they did, from unlicensed sellers. Not most.
..., the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, ...
1) in the context of the constitution, "person" or "persons" is used when referencing an individual or individuals but "people" is used when speaking generally about a collective group. This can also be seen in the 4th amendment:
The right of the **people** to be secure in their **persons**, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...
Bearing this in mind, I do not believe that the 2nd amendment was written as a right provided to individuals but instead as a right afforded to states.
It would be naive to think that any change to US law with regards to guns will change anything overnight but we have to start somewhere and allow for the culture around gun ownership to change over time.
As an American I don't need a legal precedent to say I can own certain property, a legal precedent needs to be set to say I can't own certain property.
If you want to argue that the "persons" part means the individual, then that would require that you ignore the first part. This contradicts what you said earlier about "being modified by what comes before it".
The 4th amendment outlines specific rights afforded to individuals. There is no such verbiage in the 2nd amendment. Instead, all that is referenced is the State.
Exactly, that protects the state from it's persons being searched. Because as you just said, the phrase "right of the people" denotes a collective right:
> The 4th amendment outlines specific rights afforded to individuals. There is no such verbiage in the 2nd amendment. Instead, all that is referenced is the State.
When the 4th amendment mentions "right of the people" it means the right of the state. Any persons are just entities of the state and the right does not belong to the individuals. Otherwise it would have said "the right of the persons", as you had argued earlier in the thread regarding the language of the 2nd amendment.
QED.
But liberals don’t care because they live in their mansions, far away from any danger. And rich SV CEOs throw money at anti capital punishment efforts while they relax in their mansions where they are sure to never encounter anyone that it might be used on.
Because the grown-ups can't figure out how to solve the top-level problems, they are instead dealing with the low-level symptoms and applying band-aids.
It also reeks of political pork to me.
I admit that enumerating the top-level problems is politically fraught, but I think they can be neatly condensed into:
* that mass shootings occur, ever
* that we cannot control childrens' use of the internet in any meaningful way
* that children are seeing through the thin veneer of meaningfulness that life in the US is supposed to have (notably traditional career paths and religion)
I don't pretend to have easy answers, but see-through backpacks is security theater that is the stuff of Bruce Schneier competitions.
Would we rather live in a society where people are only doing the right thing because they're being watched, or where people do the right thing because they've internalized morals and ethics so it doesn't matter if they're watched?
I'd argue the latter is better. Merely pleasing your watchers is not personal responsibility. It's control and confinement to whatever you think the watchers want to see. But, when/if the surveillance rails come off, then what happens? Then we have people who have never stood on their own ethical two feet.
The rights of children have historically been neglected, and so we inflict on them what we dare not inflict on ourselves.
I realized as a child that my parents were sending me to a fucked up place. They did it because they were out to lunch and not paying attention. I've never understood why most people, who sincerely love their children, send them to these places.
Education per se is the secondary reason for their existence. The primary reason is conformity, which they are much more successful at achieving (than education.)
The single, simple metric to tell whether or not your school system is actually educational is the ratio of teachers to children. The range of 1/6 is probably the upper limit. You might get away with 1/10 if the teacher is truly magical. The modern ranges pr 1/20 - 1/40 are absurd. Fucked up Lord of the Flies shit goes down when you get that many kids together w/o adequate supervision. You were all children once, you know what I mean.
Modern "school" systems are hell-worlds. If you love your children, don't send them to hell-worlds.
Recently I’ve had a change in opinion though. I started volunteering at a daycare because I am so passionate about the shortcomings of public schools. And working with the kids has made me realize that most of them have no problem with public schools. Most of them aren’t smart enough to benefit from better education. True intellectual curiosity is very rare. And most of them enjoy the petty games of social hierarchy that dominate in public schools.
The one aspect of my opinion that hasn’t changed is that there should be more discipline. Bring back the paddle and rules. Boys need it psychologically, order and structure and consequences.
I think "Transparent Society" has the right idea; these technologies are ubiquitous and cheap, and the question of the near future isn't going to be whether they're deployed but who controls the feed. If we pretend the answer can be made to be "nobody," we're dodging the conversation that needs to be had.
"Ban cameras" isn't going to cut it, because if you make it an issue of either-or, society's definitely going to choose stores being able to protect themselves over the relatively low risk of occasional homosexual outing. So we need a better approach than "ban cameras" (maybe the store owner is fined for sharing private information unredacted that's unrelated to a store security issue? Or we find out that that sort of thing happens all the time, so maybe homosexuality isn't a horrible society-destroying perversion that ignorant people were assuming it is?).
Given the huge range of drinks available in the USA, especially soft drinks, I'm curious to know what colour isn't acceptable.
(That was sarcasm.)
Why respect authorities or society at all when it's arbitrary like that. It teaches learned helplessness and corruption and creates crappy people. Public schools don't have money, and when they get it, they spend it on this? Private schools and homeschooling programs seem to have a bright future.
All of these epiphenomena will get worse until we take social trust seriously.
[1] - https://www.bi.team/blogs/social-trust-is-one-of-the-most-im...
That being said schools shouldn't feel like prison. Students shouldn't feel like their privacy and agency is forfeit. They should not feel subhuman.
As an aside my brother-in-law has been battling his childrens school for several years because he refuses to allow their school issued laptops to connect to his home network. The laptops use a proprietary WiFi setup dialog that states the network password will be saved to the cloud with no option to opt out. The school doesn't understand why he would be concerned with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel...
Download the book for free: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
The environment, for example, though I could pick obesity, teaching to the test, or any number of other examples. The "Crying Indian" public service announcements from the 70s https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/remember-single-tear-anti-... reveal that the amount of plastic and waste that we once considered a crying shame, we produce monthly today, and is increasing.
We consider pollution normal that our ancestors cried at. Remember the first time you saw a picture of a beach covered in plastic junk? Now there are millions of such images. How many of us have plastic bottles next to our computers despite a tap giving healthier water a few steps away? How many of us ordered junk we knew we'd throw away manufactured twelve time zones away, knowing the pollution it would cause, but everyone else does it and that's just the way things are now?
We used to consider splitting atoms a crazy alternative to lower population growth. Now, especially in this community, people want more of it. Do you consider nuclear energy a solution instead of a symptom of deeper problems? Think of it from the perspective of the past, when there was more natural abundance per person. At the same time, think of how future generations may value greater encroachments into their freedom and privacy that we would consider unacceptable today.
The top post on this thread starts, "THIS IS NOT OKAY." How much that we consider okay today would past generations have judged "NOT OKAY"? If we would want future generations to claw back to now if these trends continued, should we claw back to a less-polluted world? To a more fit world? To an educational system that helps mature children into responsible, capable adults, not excellent sheep?
Gun rights at the expense of privacy rights
No, but these are important lessons for kids to learn.
1. Don't trust somebody else's device, such as a school- or work-issued device.
2. Learn to use social media responsibly. Your public social media output is.... public. Don't put things on social media if you don't want them potentially used against you.
Death from terrorism is 4000X over represented in the news
Prescient.
When will this country start addressing the root cause?
Consider how much news coverage was given to the Las Vegas mass shooting. That resulted in 58 dead and 413 wounded.
Compare that to how much national coverage is spent on car accidents. About 40,000 Americans per year are killed by cars. That's about two Las Vegas massacres worth of dead each and every day of the year.
The news industry thrives on sensation. Politicians don't even wait for the blood to dry before leveraging drama for their cause. The schools are now just mirroring the public's ill-formed opinion. This is all great if you are preparing your kids to be cogs in a surveillance state. It is less great if you care about freedom.
The US has already done about all it can to regulate cars to maximize safety. There is, perhaps, more to be done, but since the Constitution doesn't include a right to keep and bear cars, regulation and law in the space of publicly-operated vehicles is already large and mature.
The same is not true for firearms, which is why it's such a contentious topic in the US.
Also, people feel more in control when they drive, and who doesn’t like to think they’re a better driver than others?
Halving speed limits on highways and interstates would save many lives. But we'd prefer to "move fast and break things"
Texting while driving. Hypothesis disproved.
Now that it reached your own kids, only now, it is outrageous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...
"Make sure"? Yeah right.
But the reality is that schools are a lot more dangerous than they were just 10 years ago.
If our response to that shouldn't be cameras and backpack checks, then what's an appropriate response? (Perhaps the bigger picture political answer is "gun control", but that's not something schools can sit around a wait for to happen)
Do you have a source for this?
Compare 2000's to 2010–2014 to 2015 to 2019.
Keep in mind that the site was founded in 2001, was growing rapidly through the 2000s, and (along with much the rest of the Internet) saw a huge boost in use and access with the spread of mobile devices.
Inconsistency in reporting is a general problem with crime (and other human activities), with reporting rates rising and falling for numerous reasons. But a standardised crime reporting database would be preferable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/V8zMSpOAM50-sxWp--S6J...
Shootings are still rare, just less so.
But certainly school safety is a bigger issue than just shootings.
My own emphasis, personally, would be on mental health issues being on the rise for young people.
Only in certain places in the western world, due to the governments refusal to implement gun control. Most countries haven't had a school shooting in decades (or ever).
Gun control doesn't work? Go tell that to the graves of children who died due to school shootings, just because the country they were born in refused to implement gun control.
It's frankly ridiculous to the rest of the world how easily people can buy guns in the US.
This is not a problem that can or should be solved with surveillance. It's a gun problem, that should be solved by making guns harder to get.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Is anything I've said not true? Please do explain.
Then how come gun ownership is negatively correlated with homicides?
https://medium.com/@tgof137/gun-ownership-rates-do-not-predi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#United_States
> Then what's an appropriate response?
Get rid of the security theater and actually do something about the causes.
Work to heal the divides in the country and improve social cohesion. Figure out how to reinstill the sense of community that prevented these things over the course of history. Help all students find a supportive peer group.
> If our response to that shouldn't be cameras and backpack checks, then what's an appropriate response?
Money. This country is literally running out of teachers. We do not have enough adults in a typical school to tutor, observe, and guide students. Adults don't want to do the adulting anymore and the kids are having to learn to fend for themselves. None of these technological "solutions" are there to make kids learn or keep them safe. It is there to save some money for responsibilities the schools no longer meet.