Time for State Governments to take the lead on School Shootings

If her point is that there is an increase of violence in entertainment, I would say that violence as entertainment has essentially been a constant for as long as there has been storytelling. The Epic of Gilgamesh had violence, as did the Illiad, Beowulf, Romeo and Juliet, the Three Musketeers, Tarzan, The Lord of the Rings, etc. So no, violence has not been on the rise recently, be it in entertainment, in American life, in the world, or basically in any other way.

 

That's exactly what I'm suggesting and I did say that you might be on to something about the "value of life" argument, but if you look at the numbers, it's better to have mothers kill their bastards before they are born rather than unleash them on society years later. It's a relatively small evil not to prevent greater evils later.

 

So which is it? Am I on to something or have I said absolutely nothing? From your answer I suspect the latter. It sounds as though you have applied the "Just War/Just Execution" theory to a child in the womb, completely innocent of even the concept of murder and misdeeds, as a hedge to what "the numbers" say the child, once born, is capable of doing.
Since you bring up numbers... There have been over 60 million abortions since the Supreme Court of the United States legalized the unconstrained deed. If we were to use 2013 statistics of 28 patient-care physicians per 10,000 population, we have effectively removed 168,000 potential doctors (let me save you the snark and stipulate, ironically, that this number includes abortionists) from the US population. I will offer no demagoguery to further this point; hopefully minds are free to extrapolate any number of conditional outcomes if abortion is not chosen, or if the Roe v. Wade decision is overturned and re-adjudicated by the states.

 

Historically, the violence you exemplify in Arts and Entertainment largely expresses itself via abstraction and implication; some is blunt and plainspoken, and some is clearly intended to shock. What they lack is the percussive persistence of violent expression through explicit imagery, which eventually desensitizes the previously-impressionable individual psyche... in effect, normalizing it for some. Society's saturation by violent imagery is sufficient today to the point that no rise is needed.

 

I'm pro-life, but there is a major flaw in your analysis. Abortions are not randomly selected from among the population. The group that produces high numbers of abortions may be different than the group that produces high numbers of doctors.

I haven't done enough of a survey of all historical literature to determine exactly how prevalent explicit violent imagery is in historical fiction. I do know that all of the works I listed, and many more, contain explicit, brutal acts of violence. Beowulf has Grendal eating the warriors until Beowulf defeats him by tearing off his arm. Romeo and Juliet has people stabbed to death and two teenage suicides. LoTR has people beheaded and riddled with arrows. These are not abstraction and implication. The medium has changed from the written word to visual imagery, but the violence was there all along.

 

You anticipated my response. The Constitution says what we say it says. The Supreme Court is the interpreter of the ancient texts. They said you can't regulate abortion without impinging on the right to privacy, and bam abortion is Constitutionally protected. The Supreme Court says corporations are people, and now we have dark money subverting democracy. The Supreme Court says the terribly constructed grammar of the Second Amendment does not require a well-run militia and that the right to arms is individual, and there you go we have this mess. I don't say you endorse or don't endorse any of those things. But we live in a world where the rules are not set by the Founding Fathers, they are set by the tortured legal logic of the high priests at the USSC. And now I'm supposed to say, "welp, there's nothing we can do because the Second Amendment says the right shall not be abridged." No. It hasn't worked that way anywhere else. A Congress with the balls to pass a law and a Supreme Court with the inclination to entertain some creative interpretation could meaningfully change the landscape. I find your originalism, while perfectly logical, to be annoyingly puritanical. To change things, we just need to have the desire as a people to do it. Which puts you and me back where we started: you want a pure Second Amendment while I want the whole thing deleted.

 

I think you might be on to something with the "value of life" argument, but I'm not sure it's tied to abortion. Perhaps it is, I don't know, but abortion isn't something that is going anywhere and it's kind of a non-starter to even bring up very similar to our friends on the left that fantasize about ripping up the bill of rights. It's not productive to discuss those fringe left fantasies, it's not productive to discuss a fantasy about banning abortion.

 

I was prepared to accept your premise (the implication of racial/ethnic hazards aside) had I not been bugged by the apparent virtual absence of single young, white pregnant women as a proportion of society. I found this:

One of the peculiar facts the Brookings Institution pulls out is that the abortion rate is higher for the highest income bracket they looked at, which was 400 percent of the poverty rate. Single women who make $47,000 or more a year abort 32 percent of their pregnancies, whereas single women making $11,670 a year or less abort only 8.6 percent of their pregnancies. Women in the middle abort 11 percent of their pregnancies. That may seem hard to square with data from the Guttmacher Institute that shows that the majority of abortions are obtained by women living in or near poverty: Nearly 70 percent of abortions are for women who make 200 percent or less of the federal poverty line.

How can it be true that middle-class single women abort nearly one-third of their pregnancies, but lower-income women, who abort a smaller percentage of their pregnancies, still make up most of patients sitting in abortion clinic waiting rooms on any given day? The answer is simple: Lower-income single women get pregnant way more often. Way more often. The Brookings Institution found that single women at or below the federal poverty line were three times as likely to get pregnant in a given year than middle-class single women. That's because lower-income women were twice as likely to have had unprotected sex.
[slate.com]

I won't attempt a statistical calculation but I would say it kind of evens out over all segments of the population.

 

The right-to-privacy argument upon which abortion rights is perched could have been, at least in the fashion of contemporary judicial maneuverings, extended to protect the institution of slavery prior to enactment of the 14th Amendment; the problem that slaveholders and anti-abolitionists faced was that they could keep neither slaves nor freedmen quiet about what the institution of slavery imposed upon Mankind. Horrifically, we lost virtually an entire generation of young American men because half the nation would not accept the truth.
The practice of abortion relies on the silence of those afflicted by it; would anyone, then, venture to dismiss as fantasy the notion of extending 14th Amendment protection to a prenatal human being announcing to all that would listen... "I want to live"? I'd like to think no war would be needed.

 

I reckon I am least consistent... pro choice, pro death penalty. In fact, I am probably one of the few here that sat on a capital case jury. And I was one of the first group in that jury that said guilty (in the guilt-innocence part of the trial) and also one of the first that said death in the sentencing part of the trial. The guy was/is a monster and was an easy decision.

Guess I am not as "libtard" as many think...

 

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that there should be a legal right to abortion, I can admit that it's 100% killing babies, I just view it as more of a euthanasia situation that I tolerate due to the effectiveness of it when it comes to lowering crime and more specifically homicide numbers. Like you said, a utilitarian perspective.

 

It doesn't even out. It is an interesting phenomenon, but the numbers are what they are. The vast majority of abortions are done on children that are statistically less likely to become doctors than members of the population at large, thus you cannot use the rate of doctors in the population at large to calculate the number of likely doctors lost to abortion.

The famed penumbras argument.

Money doesn't subvert Democracy. No matter how many ads you see, you can vote for whoever you choose.

Thankfully, though for a good chunk of time 'twas not the case.

At least you can acknowledge the required torture.

Yes they could, to the detriment of the country and our freedom.

Why not use the process contained within the document to delete the second amendment then, instead of end-running the Constitution? Why could the prohibition of alcohol be done by constitutional amendment, but not the prohibition of assault weapons (or whatever)?

 

NPR has reviewed some of the national statistics for school shootings, and has found that many of those reported by schools never actually happened. A fascinating bit of reporting by NPR:

charts etc. and much more at the link

 

Here's a piece about media coverage of school shootings. Here's the money quote:

"Dahmen said giving so much attention to the shooters is dangerous. 'Certainly, no journalist wants to think his or her work contributed to further carnage, but we give free advertising to these perpetrators,' she said.

"She added that news organizations should consider whether the value of providing these images to the public outweighs the harm they may cause."
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more at the link:

https://www.thetrace.org/2018/09/mass-shootings-media-coverage-shooters-victims/

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Ha...data science study of a data science survey. How can they be so off to publish numbers so high without doing what NPR did and calling them back first. "Uh, these numbers seem high. Let's call some of these schools to double-check, especially in Cleveland."

More and more data scientist are getting "certificates" from boot-camp classes. We will see more and more bad data studies in the media, from cheap-labor studies that are making "Real News" studies actually "Fake" just by bad statistical analysis. Happens in Sports all the time. lulz

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One reported shooting was a coding mistake that converted a kid brandishing scissors with an actual shooting.

Don't try that in China where there's school girls in boots and mini-skirts trained in Taekwondo.

this is sooo hot!