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Universal healthcare would go an extremely long way
This would be my solution as well. Caring for each other is a very strong but passive way of reminding people that they are part of the group, that they are wanted, needed, and worthy of health and happiness (mental health). I think it would go a long way to countering the alienation and isolation that I believe is the primary driver for these shooters. Sure, they get radicalized online, or in radical spaces, but what drove them to seek those spaces or forums in the first place? The feeling that they didn’t belong. If you feel like you belong you see others as extensions of yourself, and the idea of gunning down a bunch of yourself becomes less palatable.
Creating a society where people actually give a shit about each other would help. So free healthcare, housing and education.
Then theres the disgusting habit our society has of ignoring signs of psychopathy and our how we currently reward bullying. A lot of these shooters were violent bullies before grabbing a gun, and nothing ever gets done about that.
Rewarding kindness needs to start being a thing too. We all need to live together so encouraging a hostile and competitive environment is fucking stupid and needs to stop.
I remember being an edgy teen fantasizing about that shit. It was because I was profoundly unhappy at school and wanted to destroy it, even if the way I was envisioning it was horrifying. You could say it was because I had undiagnosed mental health issues, which is true, but when you consider that 1 in 4 Americans have moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety or depression, that’s pretty unremarkable.
While I’m tempted to say “guns don’t cause school shootings, schools cause school shootings” it wouldn’t be true. Guns offer a very specific way to destroy the thing you hate. If there was an anti-school organized student movement like in France, there would be fewer school shootings.
There’s a double bottom line to me: Schools create miserable and misanthropic people, and guns provide them the means to destroy what they hate.
The first step is to democratize schools. Give students more power, let them pick their courses, put kids in charge of hiring and review, put them in charge of the PTA budget, do away with grading, use testing as a measure of learning instead of a bar to clear. Leave those awful buildings more often. Fire the cops. Do away with detention. Make it start at 10 and still end at 3. Pay the teachers. Hire more counselors, librarians, nurses, etc.
The next is to reduce the number of guns. Don’t do this by regulating who gets to own guns along lines of felony, mental health, etc. Instead, go after the gun companies. Give them advertising bans. Make the accounting for any injuries that happen with their products. Ban lobbying. Regulate the hell out of them. Reduce their profits to next to nothing. Better yet, institute the Bolivian system and have every poor person serve in the military and then take their gun home and then destroy the consumer gun industry.
I’m with you on hating school. When I stopped going because everything collapsed around me, they basically told me they didn’t want me there either. If I wasn’t such a massive lib at the time (who supported gun control) I might have shot someone.
I’ve been thinking that along with proper staffing and funding, there needs to be a specific sort of deradicalizing program in every school that targets the sort of at-risk people (lonely men aged 15-20 who are likely to join gangs, white supremacist, or incel groups) and tries to integrate them into a healthier community and teach them basic life and social skills without also funneling them into college or the military.
I’m not even against those guys radicalizing as long as it’s into lefties. Radicalizing as an anarchist was probably what stopped me from doing something dumb or going down the alt-right rabbit hole and becoming the bisexual Milo Yiannopolous or whatever.
Like, the cops are scared of anarchists as violent and chaotic, but I think a lot of them have always been that way and anarchism is literally the safest possible outlet, and the one that’s most likely to fix the root issues.
Socialism and re-education camps
I think we need to do something even if it’s a bad or dumb thing because school shootings are gaining a reputation as an intractable issue and THAT’S the thing we gotta get rid of because school shootings are so anomalous there’s no way it could possibly be intractable besides assuming it is.
I’m not anti-security theater in principle. I could do the Matt Yglesias take “acktually school shootings are an infinitesimally small fraction of violence”. eeeeeh yeah ok but it is extremely terrorizing. My hot take (and remember my first paragraph, I favor ANYthing much more than I favor my OWN opinion) is that millions of kids spending their childhood being afraid with zero say in where they spend their weekdays is as atrociously evil as the gunmen they’re scared of. So here the only security theater I’m against is if it’s unconvincing.
I’m not going to go through mental health, outreach, suicide. There’s so many things we could do that we have choice paralysis.
More doing, less thinking. More experimenting, more failure and lots lots more action that kids see we’re doing for them and can understand and follow.
Kids have zero say in most aspects of their lives so it’s impossible to exaggerate how unjust this whole thing is. It’s so unjust that I’d even support multiple TSA’s worth of security theater (9/11 had justification so I don’t support actual TSA security theater).
