Shooting #24601

[touchingcloth]

The blackout front pages are a bit old hat now. They should put a dead kid on there.

Remember birthday cards that came with a "I am 28 today" badge pinned to the front? They should've done that, but with a gun.

[Cold Meat Platter]

The blackout front pages are a bit old hat now. They should put a dead kid on there.

You sometimes got a luminous comb or something similar with 2000AD.

"If your dead kid is missing please inform your newsagent"

[Mobius]

I used to buy this magazine and each issue had a dinosaur bone, and after like 50 issues you could build a dinosaur.

Just an idea.

[jamiefairlie]

You sometimes got a luminous comb or something similar with 2000AD.

"If your dead kid is missing please inform your newsagent"

A "space spinner" free with issue one, out now!

[Zero Gravitas]

I hadn't been to the onion in a while:

[JamesTC]

Ban onions.

[touchingcloth]

Since 1999 was guns have no longer been produced in the city of Assault, MI, and manufacturers have been obliged to label them Assault-style weapons.

[Fambo Number Mive]

@harikunzru
Red line is when Bush allowed Federal assault weapon ban to expire. Never let them tell you nothing can be done

https://twitter.com/harikunzru/status/1530327437464281089

If the right get their way and schools are turned into fortresses with armed guards patrolling the hallways and teachers being asked to carry firearms, and it doesn't stop school shootings (or causes more deaths if pupils get hold of teachers' guns or an armed school guard accidentally shoots a pupil) what will they suggest next? I do wonder if part of this is linked to the right's hatred of the American state school system, and if they have some fantasy of more people homeschooling their children as a result of schools feeling like army bases.

I can't imagine going to school in a place where armed guards are roaming the hallways and teachers are collecting handguns from lockers in the faculty lounge before the first lesson of the day. Schools buying guns for teachers and paying for armed guards will make a lot of money for gun firms and private security firms, I wonder who on the right has shares in them.

And for those on the right who call for schools to have only one entrance to reduce the chance of mass shootings, what happens if there is a fire at the school and hundreds of children and teachers are queuing to get out of one entrance? Or, for that matter,if hundreds of children and teachers are heading to one entrance to try and escape someone firing a machine gun?

[Sonny_Jim]

Some entrances are 'one way' in that they have a crash bar on the inside but no door handle on the outside.

[Martin Van Buren Stan]

One in an ozzy today

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/06/02/us/tulsa-hospital-shooting-thursday/index.html

[JesusAndYourBush]

Nightclub. Have a drink have a dance get shot. Guns.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/06/05/three-people-killed-and-14-wounded-in-shooting-outside-nightclub-16773857

[monkfromhavana]

Schools buying guns for teachers and paying for armed guards will make a lot of money for gun firms and private security firms, I wonder who on the right has shares in them.

You have a lot of faith there, I'm sure they'll find a way to make the teachers pay for their own guns and the parents to pay for the security firms.

[Fambo Number Mive]

That's true. I can imagine adverts for new teachers requiring them to not just have spent money and time learning how to fire a gun but to own one and bring it to school every day.

Imagine getting a written warning at work for forgetting to have your gun with you. Do American schools do written warnings for teachers or is it just hire and fire?

[PlanktonSideburns]

Getting executed for not bringing your AK with rocket launcher attachment to school

Your students are getting significantly less contact time and your ofsted score is tanking because you spend all morning calibrating the anti missile deflector array on the roof

Just another day at

Eastern Kentucky tactical nuclear high school

[touchingcloth]

That's true. I can imagine adverts for new teachers requiring them to not just have spent money and time learning how to fire a gun but to own one and bring it to school every day.

Imagine getting a written warning at work for forgetting to have your gun with you. Do American schools do written warnings for teachers or is it just hire and fire?

There's been quite a lot of coverage about the "negligence" of one of the teachers at the school in Uvalde for not properly locking the door (or not properly checking that it was locked, it's unclear whether there was a problem with the latch) that the shooter got into the school through.

If we start arming teachers and during a future shooting they don't go charging Rambo-style at the gunman - y'know, like the police - I can imagine the rightwing press trying to blame the teachers.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Start ARMING teachers

start SUING their remaining families as their mandatory health insurance Fitbit reveals they were cowering under a table for the duration of the skirmish - DNA analysis of the puddle of urine under aforementioned desk of shame double confirms the poor standard of edu-combat in this school that's going to really not help next years round of funding

[Martin Van Buren Stan]

If they started arming teachers how long until a teacher snaps and does a mass shooting.

[PlanktonSideburns]

If they started arming teachers how long until a teacher snaps and does a mass shooting.

Better arm all the kids also

Mexican stand off teaching

[JaDanketies]

Research into some airborne non-fatal tranquilizer that you could pump into mass shooting situations to knock out all the victims and the perp would be good though. Maybe it can find its way onto the black market and they can pump it into raves at a lower concentration

[Martin Van Buren Stan]

I do wonder why school shootings have become such a thing recently. If you look at the list of school shootings in US history a big majority of the multiple causalty ones have happened since 99. Guns were still pretty common and unregulated throughout all American history but what changed?

[touchingcloth]

I do wonder why school shootings have become such a thing recently. If you look at the list of school shootings in US history a big majority of the multiple causalty ones have happened since 99. Guns were still pretty common and unregulated throughout all American history but what changed?

Columbine is probably partly to blame. It was one of the biggest news events in the 90s and like the OJ Bronco chase and September 11 attacks it took place in the earlier days of rolling 24/7 news coverage. A lot of school shooters since then have cited the Columbine attackers as inspiration. The grim irony is that Columbine was really supposed to be a bombing rather than a shooting.

[Sonny_Jim]

Getting executed for not bringing your AK with rocket launcher attachment to school

Only about 20 years off on the date:

Research into some airborne non-fatal tranquilizer that you could pump into mass shooting situations to knock out all the victims and the perp would be good though

I figured you were joking but this was exactly what the Russians tried doing during the Moscow theatre crisis.  The problem being it's hard to get a dose high enough that everybody falls asleep, but not so high that it kills people.

[buzby]

Columbine is probably partly to blame. It was one of the biggest news events in the 90s and like the OJ Bronco chase and September 11 attacks it took place in the earlier days of rolling 24/7 news coverage. A lot of school shooters since then have cited the Columbine attackers as inspiration. The grim irony is that Columbine was really supposed to be a bombing rather than a shooting.

The public mass shooting trend predates Columbine - before then it was known as 'Going Postal', after the wave of USPS workplace shooting incidents in the late 80s and early 90s. There was even a rather poor taste isometric shooting game released in 1997 which took the incidents as inspiration to much controversy, and in the original version the final level involved the player attempting a mass shooting at an elementary school (though the developers realised that might have been too much, and so the children are invunerable to the player's weapons).

[touchingcloth]

The public mass shooting trend predates Columbine - before then it was known as 'Going Postal', after the wave of USPS workplace shooting incidents in the late 80s and early 90s.

It's possible that the postal shootings inspired (if not directly, then culturally) Columbine and subsequent mass shootings at schools. It feels like they might have different causes, though, based mainly on the differences in demographics - middle aged men for the postal shootings, adolescent and young adult men for the school ones. That said they're similar in that postal shootings were overwhelmingly carried out by employees against their employers, and school shootings are overwhelmingly carried out by current or (very recently) former students.

As I understand it, the rash of postal shootings are thought to have been caused by structural issues with the USPS at the time - long-tenured workers suddenly finding themselves at risk of being fired or at the very least not promoted, extremely aggressive targets being set for workers by their (equally put-upon) managers, a lack of agency for the USPS as an organisation due to Congress stripping their funding right back and not allowing the service to offer non-postal services to supplement their income (USPS isn't allowed to offer the things that are common from post offices in other countries, such as banking services), and that having a knock-on effect in lack of agency for the individual workers.

Maybe something similar has happened with the US school system since the late 1990s, with it becoming a much more brutalising environment which combined with easy access to guns leads to people channelling their rage through mass shootings, with the huge amounts of media time spent reporting on these shootings providing some sort of inspiration to would-be shooters.

[Alberon]

The public mass shooting trend predates Columbine - before then it was known as 'Going Postal', after the wave of USPS workplace shooting incidents in the late 80s and early 90s. There was even a rather poor taste isometric shooting game released in 1997 which took the incidents as inspiration to much controversy, and in the original version the final level involved the player attempting a mass shooting at an elementary school (though the developers realised that might have been too much, and so the children are invunerable to the player's weapons).

If only they could work out how to do that in real life.

[Dex Sawash]

A lot of military veterans landed in US postal service as it was a straight across continuation of time served for defined benefit federal retirement plans. No idea if the shooters tended to be ex-military or not but the culture surely would have been influenced.

A friend's dad was on scene in his plumbing truck when they shot the feller that shot up the IBM office in Raleigh after a car chase (mid 1980s). The pleasemen kept his pistol for a few days while they cleared him.

[Glebe]

Nightclub. Have a drink have a dance get shot. Guns.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/06/05/three-people-killed-and-14-wounded-in-shooting-outside-nightclub-16773857

Fuck. Awful.

John Oliver's done an interesting piece on police in schools:

[Martin Van Buren Stan]

The public mass shooting trend predates Columbine - before then it was known as 'Going Postal', after the wave of USPS workplace shooting incidents in the late 80s and early 90s. There was even a rather poor taste isometric shooting game released in 1997 which took the incidents as inspiration to much controversy, and in the original version the final level involved the player attempting a mass shooting at an elementary school (though the developers realised that might have been too much, and so the children are invunerable to the player's weapons).

Looking at the list from 1970- the 1990s there were about 7 incidents. That's not comparable to the spate of school shootings and general mass shootings in the last 22 years.

[Captain Z]

Superintendent! I was just, er, resting my gun on the windowsill, isometric shooting game. Care to join me?

[PlanktonSideburns]

Superintendent! I was just, er, resting my gun on the windowsill, isometric shooting game. Care to join me?

Very good