this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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I'd start by admitting that school shootings are, despite being extremely sensationalized, also extremely rare. Then I'd look at the risk factors that the FBI outlined after looking at "school shooters". (In scare quotes, because the people that commit random acts of violence in schools---versus targeted violence--are so uncommon that it's hard to draw definite conclusions about risk factors. School shootings are also used by certain organizations to include things like parents shooting each other in the parking lot at a football game.) There's a myth that school shooters are always the victim of bullies, but IIRC it's slightly more common that they'll be bullies. Almost all of them 'leak' information in the days or weeks prior to murders; I do think that there needs to be a way to seriously investigate things like that, but I don't know how you could do that in a way that doesn't infringe on other, equally fundamental rights.
When you get right down to it, a lot of it is an issue of culture, where people feel like violence is a reasonable way to express feelings. That culture needs to be changed, and I believe that it can be changed without removing the tools used in the violent acts.
Violence in general is a very complicated problem, and it's tempting to look at simple solutions and believe that there's this one simple trick that the NRA hates that will turn everything into a utopia. But that's just not so. (Case in point: the UK and Australia both have combined rates of violent crime--battery, forcible rape, robbery, murder--comparable to the US, and, in the case of rape in Australia, likely rather higher. The US does have a sharply higher murder rate though; our violence is more lethal.)
The unfortunate truth is that you can't have rights without someone misusing those rights to hurt other people. If people can drive, sooner or later someone is going to drive a rental van into a crowd, just because they want to kill people and that's the way they can do it. If you allow freedom of religion, eventually an L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, or Joe Smith is going to turn up.
There have been multiple school shootings this year alone. Your statement would have been reasonable had you made it in the wake of the Columbine shooting, but to say it today is frankly absurd.
That is not relevant. Targeted violence in school isn't tolerable either.
Indeed, so we're going to have to solve this problem in whichever way minimizes harmful side effects. Unfortunately, that may involve inconveniencing gun owners, but it's better than depriving everyone of privacy and going full Minority Report.
Mass shootings in particular are usually committed by someone who has no intention of still being alive afterward, and they do indeed almost always end in the shooter's death. That's not merely a “way to express feelings”.
You're contradicting yourself. How can American culture be uniquely violent if those other countries have similar rates of violence?
Because we have guns.
Yes, and we preserve those rights despite that because the alternative is worse.
The alternative we're discussing right now is gun control. Is that worse than the status quo? If so, why?
This equivalence is questionable for two reasons:
That's not actually really relevant to the point. First, despite there being multiple school shootings this year, school shootings are a tiny fraction of the overall homicides in the US, which are, in turn, dwarfed by the number of suicides committed with firearms. Second, looking at your link you provided, you see a lot of things like, "A gun was fired during a fight near a basketball game at Appoquinimink High School. No injuries were reported", and "Bullets struck two windows of classrooms at PS 78 in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. One classroom was occupied by ten adults, but no bullets entered the classrooms" being counted as "school shootings:, which you then compare to Columbine. You are intentionally, and in bad faith, conflating entirely different things, and placing them all under the heading of, "firearms near schools".
It is relevant, because it has different causes, and is thus addressed differently.
Are you willing to engage in good faith, or have you already decided that the only solution is banning firearms?
Which are also often committed with guns…
I'm not talking about suicide.
I did nothing of the sort. There are multiple bona fide school shootings in that list, such as the Michigan State shooting and the Covenant shooting.
That's not a meaningful answer. Let's have some details.
Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you've argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn't seem like good faith to me.
No matter how you define "school shooting", they are rare. The total number of people killed in all shootings that occurred on school properties in 2022 was 40 people, over a total of 51 incidents (that number, BTW, includes suicides). This is in a country over 98,000 public schools (that does not include private schools), and 56M K-12 students.
Any way you want to look at it, that's rare. It's far more common than any other (western, 1st world) country, but it's still objectively a very, very rare occurrence; the odds of any single student dying in a school shooting--including suicides at school--in a single school year are under one in a million.
Once you start removing suicides, parents shooting each other in school parking lots over football games, and other similar incidents, and look only at mass-casualty events--where a person intentionally targeted students at a school in order to murder as many people as they could--your numbers go down even more.
I didn't say that at all. I said that there were things on that list that do not fit the commonly-accepted definitions of "school shooting". When you say "school shooting", people hear Uvalde, or Newport. They don't think, "a bullet went through a school wall at 3am on a Saturday morning when no one was in class", or, "a cop shot himself in the leg" despite those being included on the list of "school shootings".
Because I don't have the FBI report on mass casualty events at schools in front of me. But here's one, I'd suggest giving it a read. The things that motivate mass shooters can't be directly addressed by the kinds of things that are going to reduce ordinary violent crime; you need different approaches.
So no, you aren't engaging in good faith argument. You've already reached a conclusion.