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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.
Enact socialism and hunt fascists like British nobility hunt for foxes
Taking things seriously when a kid is looking like or asking for help. Teacher treating a kid like shit, probably is something that needs to be dealt with. Kids treating other kids like shit, needs to be dealt with. Kid has a less than great home life, assess the situation and find ways to support the kid (maybe their family to if the situation demands it)
Pushing media to create watchable/enjoyable content where the moral of the story IS NOT, one man murder machine rights wrongs by spraying hot lead at all those who did wrong. Either better forms of conflict resolution. MAYBE, stories where things like guns and tanks and bombs are made to be REALLY REALLY boring.
4chan, KiwiFarms, StormFront, Prager-U etc can be nuked from orbit. It won’t stop those thoughts but maybe breaking up the ability for large groups to do the echo chamber thing on a large enough platform that normies constantly stumble into will have some positive effect. (Probably nuking things like the NRA, in meatworld would be good too.)
There’s gotta be some way to make firearms more of a normal thing and not some special thing that seems cool and dangerous AND exciting. Like, the Army did a good job of making all the “fun” stuff really boring. 9mm pistols and 40mm automatic grenade launchers and high [gender reveal devices] and driving tracked vehicles was cool the first few times you do stuff with them… but after awhile its just tedious.
everyone trains in the people’s defense militia for a few weekends and instead of dehumanizing break you down, “build you up” bootcamp it’s just endless classroom instruction with the most monotone technical teachers explain every weapon system, endless tear downs and rebuilds…just suck the fun out of all of it.
Well for starters. The feds can stop using narcs that they eventually put into a position that makes them lash out.
The uvland shooter had over 9k in just guns and ammo on him. He was most likely a narc for local enforcement or feds.
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.
