Political Memes

Even places like Switzerland, which have a high gun ownership rate, don’t.

When my dad was young, he and his brother found one of great-grandad’s old revolvers in a storage trunk, and brought it to school. Once lunch rolled around, they took it out and showed it to the teacher, who thought it was a very cool antique, and they and the teacher spent the lunch period oohing and aaahing over it. A school shooting wasn’t even something people thought about. It just didn’t happen.

Schools here also used to have firearms clubs and drill teams; my high school actually had an all-women shooting team if I remember correctly. And it was an inner-city school.

Somewhere, something changed here in the US. I don’t know when or why. But a good deal of gun owners and 2A supporters grew up in those days and remember them well, and I think they don’t want to believe that change happened?

Maybe it was when people started fetishizing guns? I don’t know, but I wish it would stop. No other countries deal with this kind of nonsense.

All incidents of gun violence are included if they occurred on school property, from kindergartens through colleges/universities, and at least one person was shot, not including the shooter. School property includes but is not limited to, buildings, fields, parking lots, stadiums and buses. Accidental discharges of firearms are included, as long as at least one person is shot, but not if the sole shooter is law enforcement or school security.

That's kind of important since that definition doesn't line up with what most people are thinking about when they hear "school shooting". To provide an example, let's say a drug deal goes bad in the parking lot of a football field after hours and someone gets shot - that's a school shooting. Not as bad as some definitions though, since a street shooting where a stray bullet happens to strike a garage building used to maintenance school buses probably doesn't count under this definition.

Also, I find it interesting that the rates spiked way the hell up for the Biden admin, like 2021 to present is way higher than before.

Also my state has a really low rate despite having extremely lax gun laws (literally allowing open carry to everyone 18+ who can otherwise legally have a gun and concealed carry to everyone 21+ who can otherwise legally have a gun).

As a lefty, part of me wishes we learned into the well regulated militia part and viewed firearms as a part of community defense. But, also as a lefty, there's much more important things we could do to improve community resiliency before we finally get to firearms training.

In the context of when it was written, the authors didn't believe having a standing army was a good idea, machine guns either didn't exist or would melt after any sustained use, and artillery was meant to either break walls or make infantry nervous that they might end up being one of the few hit.

The ship has sailed on all of those and many other assumptions people had in those days, which makes me think that maybe it's time for a new constitution. And maybe codify some of the gentlemen's agreement stuff and harden the system against those who just want to ruin it from within because it's more profitable for some if governments don't help people meet their needs.

Which was kinda weird to me. Bowling Green happened a couple years earlier, and there had been school shootings in this country ever since the mid to late 1800s. Seemed like an overreaction to me.