Time for State Governments to take the lead on School Shootings

i agree with that...but once again, GOOD LUCK getting enough FUNDING for your school army...let me know how that goes...i haven't mentioned anything about banning guns, just trying to be logical here...read up on fchowd's post to learn how school funding works...

 

I think it could happen. If you had people vote on a tax to increase school security to keep children safe, I think it gets pretty good support and passes. I just think of all the money we waste on BS things, setting aside funding to keep children safe while at school should be pretty easy to do. How many things are truly more important?

 

You shouldn't say that. He gets triggered when my name is mentioned.

 

It's so hilarious that you finally think school funding is lacking. Not because of the quality of education, but because of a lack of trained trigger pullers in them.

Again, so you agree that we should detach property tax to local school funding?

 

Geez, I had to peek when chowd responded. You're honestly going to claim Republican lineage back to the Civil Rights era and Lincoln? Please open a history book. Or at least a history magazine.

 

Was that not the Republican party? Words have meaning, when people say "ALWAYS", they should mean always, not just "I DON'T AGREE AND I CAN'T THINK OF A MORE MATURE WAY TO EXPRESS MYSELF!!!!"

We could go back and forth over how the party of slavery bought the hearts and minds of those they once owned, but there's really no need for that. Let's just stick to the conversation about how words have meaning and they shouldn't be used inaccurately.

 

LOL Ths guy. As sincere as a greeting card.

 

If you have to write down "I hear you" ....

 

Someone with the expertise and intelligence that is required to manage the world's largest bureaucracy needs a talking point that states "I hear you". He needs to be reminded of THAT?


WTF

 

I agree that we likely won't agree on gun policy.

I'm pretty sure that is what I said (in different words, I said the federal government had already spoken on the issue in the only constitutional way available to them, in the second amendment. So we seem to agree on that as well.

It isn't hiding. The constitution doesn't grant limited powers, but only if the limitations imposed don't make people sad. Congress has expressly limited and enumerated powers. None of those powers relate to prohibition of guns. Then, in addition to not providing Congress the power to limit possession of firearms, they took the further step of specifically enshrining the right to bear arms in the bill of rights. So no, the states do not have free will when it comes to legislating guns, they are bound by the second amendment. What they do have is more leeway than the feds, who are both bound by the second amendment, and have to go through the mental gymnastics of saying possession of a firearm = interstate commerce.

They should not have any hope of passing meaningful gun control legislation. It is the sad state of our courts that from the 30's on they decided that the Constitution doesn't mean what it says, but rather as long as through some tortured chain of logic you can get from the constitution to some law passed by Congress, then everything is A-OK.

I have flat out said that they should do nothing to further regulate guns, and in fact roll back some regulations both locally and federally. No need for political sleight of hand.

 

What would you most want me to know about your post? What can we do to make you feel like a valued member of Clutchfans? We read your posts.

 

OP is right

 

People want change.

 

A good step from an optics standpoint, but will there be enough of them? So long as you only have 1 per 3000 students it's unlikely to make that much of an impact.

 

So much back and forth, zero-sum dialectic here... I have never posted in the "unruly" Hangout but my favorite political commentator needs to be heard... try not to miss the forest for the trees.

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Peggy Noonan
Feb. 15, 2018 7:11 p.m. ET
1727 COMMENTS

We discuss motives, but isn’t it always the same motive? “I have murder in my heart.” Why do so many Americans have murder in their hearts?

That is my question after the St. Valentine’s Day shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. We all know it is part of a continuing cultural catastrophe. A terrible aspect of the catastrophe is that so many central thoughts about it, and questions, have been flattened by time into clichés. People stop hearing when you mention them. “We talked about that during Columbine, didn’t we? That couldn’t be it.”

So we immediately revert to discussions of gun law, and only gun law. There is much to be improved in that area—I offer a suggestion at the end—but it is not the only part of the story. The story is also who we are now and what shape we’re in.

A way to look at the question is: What has happened the past 40 years or so to produce a society so ill at ease with itself, so prone to violence?

We know. We all say it privately, but it’s so obvious it’s hardly worth saying. We have been swept by social, technological and cultural revolution. The family blew up—divorce, unwed childbearing. Fatherless sons. Fatherless daughters, too. Poor children with no one to love them. The internet flourished. p*rn proliferated. Drugs, legal and illegal. Violent videogames, in which nameless people are eliminated and spattered all over the screen. (The Columbine shooters loved and might have been addicted to “Doom.”) The abortion regime settled in, with its fierce, endless yet somehow casual talk about the right to end a life. An increasingly violent entertainment culture—low, hypersexualized, full of anomie and weirdness, allergic to meaning and depth. The old longing for integration gave way to a culture of accusation—you are a supremacist, a misogynist, you are guilty of privilege and defined by your color and class, we don’t let your sort speak here.

So much change, so much of it un-gentle. Throughout, was anyone looking to children and what they need? That wasn’t really a salient aim or feature of all the revolutions, was it? The adults were seeing to what they believed were their rights. Kids were a side thought.

At this moment we are in the middle of a reckoning about how disturbed our sexual landscape has become. This past week we turned to violence within marriages. We recently looked at the international sex trade, a phrase that sounds so 18th-century but refers to a real and profitable business.

All this change, compressed into 40 years, has produced some good things, even miraculous ones. But it does not feel accidental that America is experiencing what appears to be a mental-health crisis, especially among the young. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported as many as 20% of children 3 to 17 have, in any given year, a mental or emotional illness. There is research indicating depression among teenagers is worsening. National Public Radio recently quoted a 2005 report asserting the percentage of prison inmates with serious mental illness rose from less than 1% in 1880 to 21% in 2005. Deinstitutionalization swept health care and the psychiatric profession starting in the 1960s, and has continued since. The sick now go to the emergency room or stay among us untreated. In the society we have created the past 40 years, you know we are not making fewer emotionally ill young people, but more.

And here, to me, is the problem. A nation has an atmosphere. It has air it breathes in each day. China has a famous pollution problem: You can see the dirt in the air. America’s air looks clean but there are toxins in it, and they’re making the least defended and protected of us sick.

Here is one breath of the air:

Two weeks ago the U.S. Senate blocked a bill that would have banned most abortions after 20 weeks. Exceptions were made—the life of the mother, incest and rape. Twenty weeks—right up to the start of the sixth month—seemed reasonable. But Democrats said it was an assault on women’s rights. So as far as the Senate is concerned, you can end the life of a 6- to 9-month-old baby that can live outside the womb, that is not only human but recognizably and obviously human.

And even if you are 100% for full-term abortion—even if you think this right must be protected lest we go on a slippery slope and next thing you know they’ll outlaw contraceptives—your own language might have alerted you along the way to your radicalism.


Imagine you are pregnant, in the last trimester, and suddenly feel movement in your belly, a shift from here to there. You say, “Oh my God, feel,” and you take the hand of the father, or of another intimate, and you place it on your stomach. You don’t say, “The fetus lurched,” or “A conglomeration of cells is making itself manifest.” You say, “The baby moved. The baby’s moving.” You say this because it is a baby, and you know it. You say it because in your wonder at it, and at life, you tell the truth.

I should add who used that example with me. A great liberal journalist who sees right through his party’s dishonesty on this issue.

The failure to ban late-term abortion is one of those central things we rarely talk about.

And I’ll tell you what I think a teenager absorbs about it, unconsciously, in America. He sees a headline online, he passes a television in an airport, he hears the quick story and he thinks: “If the baby we don’t let live is unimportant, then I guess I am unimportant. And you’re unimportant too.” They don’t even know they’re breathing that in. But it’s there, in the atmosphere, and they’re breathing it in. And it doesn’t make you healthier.

The National Rifle Association too fears their slippery slope, and their fear means nothing common-sensical can be done regarding gun law. Concede anything and it will mean they’re coming for your hunting rifle.

Congress has been talking, at least recently and to some extent, of a trade on immigration. New protections for Dreamers on one hand versus increased border security on the other. This would be a good deal. Dreamers are integrated into American life, and a good many work in education and health care. And America is a great sovereign nation with not only a right but a responsibility to control its own borders.

Compromise is often good.

On gun law, Republicans oppose banning assault weapons such as the AR-15, the one the Parkland shooter used, because of the numbers, power and contributions of gun owners and the NRA. Democrats oppose banning late-term abortion because of the numbers, power and contributions of the rising left, feminists and Planned Parenthood.

The idea: Trade banning assault weapons for banning late-term abortion. Make illegal a killing machine and a killing procedure.

In both cases the lives of children would be saved.

Wouldn’t this clean some of the air? Wouldn’t we all breathe a little easier?

-------------------------------

“We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other.”

-Mother Teresa

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It's time to look long and hard at root cause, where the many 'liberation movements' since the 1960s have left us as a mission-less, undisciplined, suicidal society coming apart at its neatly-tailored seams.

 

Ms. Noonan is writing from a flawed premise. We are not "a society so ill at ease with itself, so prone to violence." In fact, violence has been decreasing for more than 20 years (with some minor upticks, but generally trending down).

 

I'm going to completely duck the abortion part of this and focus only on the assault weapon ban part. Given that we already know an assault weapon ban would be ineffective, why is that what is being focused on? Why would that be the "compromise"? I mean, we had the assault weapons ban during Columbine and it didn't help. The assault weapons ban didn't decrease the rate or lethality of school shootings or of mass shootings as a whole. I mean, we know this. It's well documented fact.

Yet for whatever reason that's immediately what we go back to any time something like this happens. I don't think what is needed is any kind of compromise, I think what needs to happen is for both sides to focus on things that would really help instead of looking to advance political agendas tied to gun bans or for this woman, her anti-abortion agenda.

While I admit that the "value of life" argument could have some validity to it, what she fails to see in her anti-abortion take is how many lives abortion saves....and that's why I really don't want to get into the abortion discussion in the middle of a discussion about school shootings. I think if it wasn't for abortion you'd have a lot more violence by young people against young people so it's a net positive.

 

Just throwing this out there, given that assault rifles are always the target for bans after this, how many of the top 10 deadliest school massacres in US history used an assault rifle?

Going by the hype, You'd probably say most of them right? Wrong. Three of the 10 deadliest school massacres used assault rifles and only 2 of the top 5. The most deadly ever school massacre happened back in 1927 and used dynamite, the 2nd deadliest used handguns.

The narrative simply falls apart under scrutiny.

 

I propose that the violence to which she refers stems not exclusively to that ripped from the headlines or from the police blotter; it's what is represented in the popular culture and is often presented as entertainment. Man dies from the inside out.

 

Abortion always takes at least one life. Are you suggesting some sort of utilitarian end, then?
That's entirely the message that she writes about, the cheapening of Life to where the thinking you just expressed is the norm.
This is the Culture of Death, and the grip it has on the collective youth psyche grinds down on hope.

Forest for the trees...