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Comment by qwertytyyuu | Hacker News Reader

America is a society that accepts regular school shootings. What society will accept is a low bar

I think you'll find societies are incredibly inconsistent in what they will and will not accept. For instance Europe is currently accepting constant death toll due to drownings of African refugees [1]. Hell, Europe accepted, without much complaint, that North African countries drove refugees into the desert and abandoned them to die, including children [2].

[1] https://ecre.org/mediterranean-rise-in-crossings-on-two-rout...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/tunisia-thousands-of-migrants-being-du...

It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that, and yet the problem remains.

It is an emergent property of our political system.

> It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that

I'm not seeing any evidence of the other half of the US society not accepting school shootings.

If people truly cared about it, you'd go out on the street and protest, and waging a general strike in school and related areas until something is being done about it.

Instead 99% of the population seems complacent, and do mostly nothing about it, everyone (mostly) is still sending their kids to schools, teachers are still going to work and everything is business as usual.

I think a very large portion of the 99% aren't complacent so much as they are not realistically able to opt out.

Everyone is realistically able to though, if they're willing to sacrifice temporary pain. Many countries been through it before, and general strikes seems to have been the only non-violent way of getting wide-scale change enacted, and many of the people participating in those strikes "wasn't realistically able to participate" yet did so regardless.

It helps that other countries have some solid foundation for doing general strikes, particularly when they have strong unions that make people able to strike yet survive and get food and shelter.

But the upper-class seems to have anticipated this and fostered a really strong anti-union culture in the US, so now people have to suffer because there is no way of protesting, and there is no way of changing the status quo.

Protesting, sure, although it's pretty obvious protesting does little in the US (and there's no "right way" to, either).

Pulling their kids out of school? Quitting their teaching jobs? I'd say not so much.

Strikes are also iffy.

I'm from France so, you know, I'm down with strikes, protests, and all that.

I also lived more than half my life in the US and, as you wrote, it's just different (and not accidentally so).

I don't think anybody accepts school shootings, and anybody accusing half of the population of "accepting" this obvious problem is likely making a bad faith argument attempting to paint their political opposition in a bad light.

I'm not attempting to paint any political opposition in a bad light, I was trying to paint the entire population at large in a bad light, as most of the people living there doesn't seem to do anything, not even weekly protests, even less a general strike.

I'm sure most of the population wants it to end, but also most of the population isn't doing anything about it, that's why I say most of them are complacent.

61% of people according to Pew research center think that guns are too easy to obtain. That includes some conservatives/republicans.

The group of people least likely to think guns are too easy to obtain are firearm owners, but even so 38% of them think it's too easy. 34% of Republican/Republican leaning people think it's too easy.

What we can say is most people think it's too easy to obtain firearms. And yet - the issue persists. I'm not trying to make it a partisan issue, I'm suggesting it's (as I wrote) an emergent property of our political system. Majorities can't get laws changed for various reasons.

Source:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...

American does not agree on what to do about school shootings, but to claim we accept it is a sever distortion trying to shut down the voice of others who do find guns useful (and would never shoot in a school).

Guns are useful, to kill people with. Maybe we'd have fewer gun deaths with fewer guns?

The majority of gun owners use them for hunting animals that they eat. They also use them for putting holes in paper targets. Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans.

> Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans

Ephedrine, anhydrous ammonia, syringes, drones/UAVs, fireworks, high powered laser pointers are just a few things that are misused by a small minority but are restricted because the bad actors create outsized harm

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