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Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

My daughter hears about gun threats at her high school weekly. I don't know how many are actual threats, but they have implemented a transparent bag policy, it's a real problem.

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> they have implemented a transparent bag policy, it's a real problem.

This makes the assumption that all policies have a reasonable justification, so that the existence of a real problem can be inferred by the implementation of a policy which would only make sense if (1) there was a real problem, and (2) the policy was an effective mitigation.

I would suggest that this assumption is both false and dangerous, in that it makes one trivially manipulable by anyone in a position to set policy.

You are correct in that I did not specify what the actual problem is. There is a problem of perception, which the transparent bag policy will at least partly address, at relatively little cost. The problem of perception is almost certainly more troublesome than the reality in the majority of cases - the exceptions being notable - and while transparent bags may not be an effective deterrent, that doesn't mean they don't serve as one at all. There is also, in this case, a very real and well-known problem in American schools, including multiple guns confiscated and at least one credible threat in the past semester at this particular school.

I too kind of roll my eyes at the bag policy but it's at least an acknowledgement that something needs to be done about the problem - more than we've gotten from our politicians in the past two decades.

If it was a real problem they'd have metal detectors and security rather than security theater.

Who exactly is paying for those, and the training and staff to effectively operate and maintain them?

The taxpayer: this is a drop in the bucket in the areas that need them.

I'm sorry, I hope I don't come off like I'm minimizing a real problem here, but from the outside looking in, it just feels like an entirely alien line of reasoning that could only describe a solution to an imagined problem. However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now, and especially missing the context of being a child with peers that make threats like that weekly. I'm empathetic to that situation, but not to the framing that surveillance is somehow stopping those weekly rumours from being weekly atrocities. That's a huge leap.

> However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now,

I’m in the US and this story feels extremely foreign to me. Even hearing a rumor about a gun threat at my kids’ school or any of my friends’ kids’ schools would be a topic of discussion for the next year with parent-teacher meetings, the school communicating with parents to shed light on what happened, action plans, and so on. Fortunately nothing like that has happened, but this is the level of communication that happens for even rumored threats.

The US is a huge place, though. Some times I don’t think outsiders understand how big and diverse this country is.

When I was in school, the administration would work itself up into fits about "gangs infiltrating the schools" because an 11 year old wore a red or blue hat to class, clearly gang colors and a sign of the times.

This was in a wealthy suburb where people like that have to make up imaginary threats in order to feel something, and what better population to fret about than the kids.

There was also a wealthy suburb with an actual gang whose existence was swept under the rug for years until they murdered a random 16 year old: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/how-a-homegrow...

The cops' reluctance to investigate probably had something to do with the fact that some of the gang members were white student athletes with very wealthy families.

That's a real thing that actually happened, my school administration was worried about "ethnic" gangs and rappers they saw on MTV turning 11 year old white kids into, using their words, "gangstas". Same people were running around like headless chickens about "rainbow parties" and FPS games a couple of years before.

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