Tim Walz has said he’s “sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers” following the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, which left four dead.
Walz, who was named as Kamala Harris’ running mate in the race for the White House in August, spoke about the Wednesday (4 September) shooting at a campaign rally at the Highmark Amphitheater in Erie, Pennsylvania on Thursday.
He told his supporters: “We believe in the freedom to send our kids to school without being shot dead in the hall.”
“The news cycle moves on within a day,” he commented of the incident, adding that kids had returned to school feeling excited and “now we have four dead”.
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
We now go live to the official reaction of the American Fascist Party:
mtg seems to be really lovin this part. Are we sure she’s not like 3% demon from hell?
easy: strict gun control. look at Europe.
Sadly that won’t happen because Americans are special - and I say ‘special’ in that Midwestern-US, ‘bless their heart’ way
The US government tries to pass (or enforce) any meaningful gun legislation, a third of the country stamps their feet and tells ‘NO!’ and the gov’t backs down. Rinse & repeat
shiiiii it doesnt even get to us s’more like 2/3 of the country asks for (x) regulation, the govt starts making noises about regulating (x), a bunch of political ads come out to convince public (x) regulation is bad, contributions come from the (x) companies to the politicians regulating (x), business (x) is added to the commitee deciding rules for (x), regulation is watered down or outright defeated.
at almost no point in the process is the public will treated as anything other than a problem to solve.
Americans love prosecuting people, making new crimes is how we keep our prisons full. I fully expect a “reasonable lockup” law for gun crimes committed with unsecured firearms would play well.
basically the only way to get restrictions would be for several states to adopt a Black Panther Esque political party that has significant adoption and policing
You know what would immedately get us gun control? If that black panther party decided to spend their time guarding our schools. The “good guy with a gun” theory only it’s black and latino people guarding the schools.
Racism would get us gun control so fucking fast.
(And I hate how likely this is)
Yeah but people always bring up the talking point “but over in Europe only the criminals have guns now! How can they defend themselves?”
However I really have to wonder… Where do criminals get those guns? 🤔
Europe also has things like universal healthcare and much less of an opioid crisis and whatnot. Without those, this wouldn’t have been prevented – the kid would’ve just used a knife or explosives or something instead.
i agree with specific point you’re making about the cause of shootings being lack of healthcare access in the US. You are also correct in my opinion that all three things are necessary for a healthy society. I think you might be missing your own point here with a typical assumption i see thrown out by the media, that asking for one of those 3 things precludes our ability to have the others. In other words, that we can’t advocate equally for all 3 at the same time!
The idea that it is impossible for the US govt to work on these things in tandem over DECADES (these issues are DECADES in the making) is pervasive, effective, and inhibits progress on any. So why does it persist?
Somehow while we know we should have them all, we are convinced to argue we cannot have one without the other first. Should not ask for one without the other more important issue first.
The thing i’m trying to say is, yes we can. The government is (yaknow, hypothetically) able to tackle multiple issues at once and anyone who gets tricked into arguing which one we should pick allows the big G to have an excuse for not working on ANY of them.
As you say, without all three the problems will not cease, they’ll just change shape. All the more reason to advocate for each, always, until they’re tackled, one by one.
I’m just saying that everybody loves to jump to the conclusion that the reason the US has school shooters when other countries don’t is the 2nd Amendment, disregarding all the other differences that could also be part of the cause.
Or said another way, there are at least two reasons why school shootings happen: (1) because they have access to guns, and (2) because something is driving them to murderous despair in the first place. Banning guns does fuck-all to fix reason #2!
Frankly, it disgusts me that so many people see banning guns as some kind of panacea and don’t give a shit about fixing the underlying problems.
America has a gun culture though. While Europe doesn’t. In plenty of European countries you can get a gun license if you are willing to go trough the process and fill in the paperwork. It’s not super hard. Yet almost no one owns or wants a gun in those countries. And if they have one it’s usually a hunting rifle and not weapons for personal protection or target practice. If the US had the same gun rules as in Europe the demand for guns wouldn’t drop. Americans would still want a gun.
i was talking about serious restrictions and in-depth background check for everyone. nothing about gun culture. you can survive a little paperwork and a few months wait for a lethal tool.
Yeah and I was saying that even with those restrictions that Americans still want to buy guns. You brought up Europe. Europe doesn’t have a low gun ownership because of strict gun control alone. Europe doesn’t have a gun culture. The US needs a cultural change besides gun control.
Germany wants to get tough on knife crime with stricter laws
shrug Definitely better than people being able to walk out of a 7/11 with a pair of 9mms, I suppose.
But at some level, this is a people problem, too. Social anxiety inflamed by fascist social media. A 24-hr news cycle that tells people they are being immiserated by evil foreigners. School bullying in buildings where you’ve got 40-60 student class sizes and teachers with barely more than a six-month certificate expected to manage the room. Rising rates of malnutrition, homelessness, and general poverty. And this endless deluge of people telling one another “The civil war is happening any day now”.
You’re going to have people freak out as a result. This is a pressure cooker of a social system and climate change is only going to make things worse. Whether its gun crime or knife crime or people just trying to bite one another in fits of rage, the volume of hate we’ve ingested combined with the commercialized scapegoating of anyone we’re told its okay not to like means… Violence. You’re going to get more violence.
Whether its gun crime or knife crime
How to defend yourself when attacked with a knife: https://youtu.be/kvlrnc7hlQI?si=DhxdyaCoE0qJPa7g
Yes, root causes need to be dealt with as well, but when violence does happen there’s a world of difference between how much damage someone can do with a knife vs someone with a gun.
there’s a world of difference between how much damage someone can do with a knife vs someone with a gun.
Sure. But you can play this game with lots of things. A fertilizer bomb can do far more harm than a hand gun. A shiv is more deadly than a fist.
By all means, regulate away. But the scary thing, at it’s root, is the individual who has decided to throw their life away on some El Paso Walmart killing spree. Selling hand grades at Target won’t make anyone any safer. But it’s the media screaming about Latino Invasion and White Genocide that’s got people really worked up to begin with.
Europe doesn’t have 434 million guns already in the hands of civilians.
Buying and owning a gun should require a lot more than it does now, but this isn’t going to solve this problem. It will, at best, slightly mitigate it.
This shooting in particular shows major society-level failures. The parents were victims of the opiate crisis. Society failed to treat that problem at an appropriate level when it first cropped up and they failed to claw back the profits pharmaceutical companies made off creating addicts. We failed to fund school mental health services that could have helped a child who everyone knew was struggling. Society failed to recognize and address the domestic violence situation, failed to intervene when the child was being raised by addicts, and failed to remove guns from such a volatile situation. There are so many levels on which any significant intervention could have prevented this chain of events.
This is the real takeaway. The Republicans want to do nothing, and the dems want a quick fix in gun control. Neither addresses the root of the problem. The world as a whole needs to invest more in social services, education, and public health. It should be where the majority of money goes really.
I’ve heard plenty of arguments from Dems for mental health care at various levels. Those things need to be funded, and who do you think keeps trying to defund government agencies and services for social/mental health issues? Usually not the Dems. The Dems have plenty of faults, including their lack of spines (in at least some cases), but the lack of funding for social services is not usually one of them.
They talk about it sometimes. But never do anything. And more importantly, it doesn’t even make Americans top ten. I don’t have much faith in politicians doing anything about it until it is in the top 5. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642887/inflation-immigration-rank-among-top-issue-concerns.aspx
On the other hand some of those “quick fixes” are actually modernizing our gun laws to be like other countries that allow gun ownership. We should put all the work in but calling Universal Background Check and Red Flag quick fixes is like calling a highway lane expansion a quick fix. Yes we need a bus system, but the 2 lane road built in the 1950’s isn’t cutting it anymore either way.
One would think it would be a bipartisan idea that a kid with two parents who are addicts should receive some sort of government intervention.
Conservatives hear “sins of the father” and assume it means that children MUST suffer for what their parents did wrong
And yes, I’ve legitimately heard multiple CHRISTIAN conservatives use that line in that manner and it amazes me they didn’t realize they had it fucking backwards
We don’t have bipartisan ideas anymore. Both sides run on hate for their opponent. So they can’t be seen as working with them.
Yes. We need full societal fixes. But gun control is part of that.
14 year olds have no business having unsupervised access to weapons. We need better storage laws. We need better red flag laws, national licensing laws so that everyone with a gun has to take a basic safety course, and we need universal background checks where ALL branches of law enforcement share info with each other.
Start there and you will significantly cut gun violence while we spin up the mental health infrastructure to deal with the rest. Which is going to take time. And money. Neither of which the current government wants to spend.
While I think all of those laws make good sense. I don’t think they will actually reduce gun violence much. Most of them people will just ignore like they do the advice to store guns better. The law will only punish people after the fact. And everyone else will always think that it will never happen to them.
And the system fails to protect people with straight up restraining orders against others. It won’t be able to do much with all the other things you mention.
So focusing on those, and of course never achieving them, is just the carrot on a stick the dems use to get the voters out. If they weren’t a political focus they would actually have a better chance of happening.
This kid was already reported for threatening a school school shooting last year and the investigation stopped after they asked him if he did that and he said no. It’s a fucking joke.
Country that insists we have a “mental health crisis” providing absolutely zero mental health care to people who are clearly showing all the symptoms of said crisis.
If they did literally ANYTHING after that it would have Infringed on his Second Amendment Rights! Your ONLY allowed to take someone’s Guns away AFTER they’ve killed people! Or they’re Nig Black!
He should have been institutionalized. I’m of the opinion that if you’re too dangerous to possess a gun, you’re too dangerous to be loose in society.
This may be the first coherent analysis I’ve ever seen on Lemmy. Every other take on shootings are always 100% asinine comments about guns.
I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have asinine opinions on guns, but there is very little anything but the most authoritarian gun control can do about school shootings without first addressing the social problems behind it. We would be just as likely to get kids building bombs or driving cars through crowds.
I don’t want to argue against mental health services, i think mental health services could be helpful. However, i do want to point something out here: saying this is a mental health problem really doesn’t make sense. You know a group that has mental health problems? Women. You know who else? Black people. You know who barely do any mass shootings? Either of those groups. We’re not (just) talking mental health issues, we’re talking about people who view “shooting up a school” as an appropriate way to resolve their social grievances. You can help that with mental health services, you can take their power away by blocking easy access to guns, but that’s a pretty big component here as well.
The expression of mental health problems varies widely based on the cause. Societal and cultural pressures are vastly different for different groups. Men in general are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than women for example. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer major depression.hormones also impact the expression of mental illness. Men experiencing depression are more likely to exhibit irritability, sudden anger, increased loss of control, risk-taking, and aggression. Men are also more likely to feel social pressure to deal with their problems alone and are more likely to turn to drugs or alcohol.
Whoa buddy, too soon. Now is not the time to talk policy. Trans kids are playing soccer.
