Where I used to live, my neighbor, a policewoman, complained that she was often sent to public schools to arrest kids for the color of their shoelaces. Because it was supposedly a sign of a gang affiliation.
Lmao
I went to Philly schools that were so “ghetto” and having some cop in school make it felt even more like a prison than it already is.
Like airport style security and xray machine… wtf… and you get blamed for being late if the security checks takes too long…
Cameras everywhere…
Jesus christ…
That stuff at school is literally just food poisoning
Also I got arrested for self-defense… cuz the schools apparantly expect “model minoity” to just endure the racist bullying and keep quiet and not say anything about it… to just somehow endure it, so when I decided to be like: you know what, screw this and take a stand, uh oh, now the system is mad because I didn’t go along with the obedient non-confrontational asian nerd stereotype.
All the virture signalling about #StopAsianHate and nobody ever stood up for me… in a deep blue city, during the height of covid (like this incident happened 1 week before schools got shut down)
Fuck this racist system
ACAB
Well, yes. That’s how America works.
Create a problem so that the solution works in your favor. Double points if it’s spinned for good publicity.
It’s the “war on drugs” all over again. It was never a war on drugs, it was a war on ethnicity.
ACAB.
It’s literally impossible to know how many shootings were prevented because the shooter knew there was an armed cop present.
And they actually have stopped active shooters, several times.
Like, real cops are bad enough. You don’t have to just lie about them. Lies can be effective propaganda but if you don’t need to lie then you’re just undercutting your message for no reason.
*The only reason to downvote this comment is if you care about vibes above truth and vibes above effective messaging. Or are pro-cop and want to make lefties look dumb. Self reflect.
**not sure if some replies are missing my point or just talking past it. I’m not saying school cops are a good thing I’m saying the tweet is blatantly factually wrong and should not be promoted.
***Oh the tweet is from February 2018, it might have actually been true at the time. For about one month until the Great Mills shooting.
school shootings in 2024 average 1.8 per every school day (0.9 at 365 calendar days a year). The next highest country - Mexico - has one every
24 school days (one every 46 calendar days)I would not call that a deterrent.
Edit: oh God, it’s actually even worse. I assumed I was looking at yearly stats for Mexico. it was actually a decade. It’s one every 15 months
And this is probably higher than usual in Mexico, since the USA-backed “Guerra contra el narco”, started in 2006-2007, brought a lot of violence and firearms, the latter mostly from the USA.
Fortunately, we’ve been recovering from those levels of violence consistently since 2021.
I do know of at least two massive school shootings - Parkland and Uvalde - where the cops literally cowered outside, and listened as the shooter murdered child after child.
Every cop is trained that their primary objective is to make it home safe at the end of shift. Anything they have to do to accomplish that is acceptable, including killing people or allowing people to be killed. Cops don’t protect anyone but themselves.
Cops don’t protect anyone but themselves.
And the rich, thank you very much.
Valid.
Not all the time, or Brian Thompson would be alive, and Luigi wouldn’t be a patsy.
Who’s Brian Thompson? I just think of him as a Corporate Serial Killer for Profit. I don’t want to know his name.
I know who my man Luigi is, though!
Just because they are supposed to protect the rich, doesn’t mean they’re good at it. They don’t get suddenly competent because it’s a rich guy. The rich are being guarded by the same dumb apes that are brutalizing the rest of us.
That was my point really. They may protect the rich and their property, but they aren’t effective, efficient, or even educated.
It’s literally impossible to know exactly how many, but it’s statistically possible to compare data from before this measure was taken to after the measure. A serious argument could be made and it’s probably already done. Also, the other point made is as important as this, since many other consequences come with armed police officers in schools. Considering the prevalence of non-white people in the imprisoned population, and the well-known bias of police officers in the USA against non-white people, well…
In this case, not really. How many school shootings were there before Columbine…?
I’m not making a point on that. I’m just saying that you can argue with numbers and not only with statements that can just be denied with statements saying otherwise. As a foreigner to the USA, I don’t even care about that specific discussion. Before and after Columbine there were way too many school shootings in the USA, anyway. Their numbers on this have always been stupidly high.
Definitely, raw data never tells the full story. Just pointing out in this specific case, Columbine was certainly an inflection point, and the presence/absence of school security seems hard to use as a metric for before/after.
Quite a few, school shootings date back to at least July 26, 1764. Yes, 1764, not 1964. Greencastle, Penn
There were roughly 14 major ones, but stats weren’t really kept as well as they are now.
Now, there’s 14 a week 💀
I imagine there’s a hell of a lot more armed school security guards today, so if anything, they’re not a catch-all deterrent.
My point was that Columbine was the first event that got mass media attention, and things have gotten progressively worse since.
We have to ask ourselves if the money that was spent on cops in schools was instead spent on counseling for troubled students, would we be better off?
I would argue that this would have been just as effective at preventing shootings without any of the negative side effects.
I agree with your comment 100%. But I down voted because of your edit. Never assume you know all the reasons someone might down vote.
I also down voted for the attitude.
Man that says more about you if you interpret OP as having an attitude. You can infer that from some text. Grow up 😂
It was hyperbolic, but I wanted to explicitly call people out for rejecting reality when it doesn’t line up with the most convenient possible narrative. Something which feels like a growing problem on lemmy.
Indeed. It’s not a defensible argument because it’s too categorically strong. I looked up some reasonable counter examples just to make sure I’m not crazy, but I will not be in the position of defending pigs, so I’ll leave it at that.
Definitely fuck the police, but don’t stoop to their level.
It’s not defending the police to defend the truth unless you think the truth makes the police look good. Knowingly spreading lies is just bad from every angle. Tactically, rhetorically, intellectually, etc.
It’s doing the right’s job for them if stuff that is easily disproven is being presented as a reason that cops suck.
I am quite sure they were agreeing with you.
I didn’t read it as *disagreement and wasn’t arguing with them. I was just prickling at the ‘defending pigs’ bit and reiterating.
I am pretty sure they were saying they weren’t going to share the examples they looked up in defense of cops, not suggesting that you were defending them.
My main concern is lack of critical thinking skills clouding the message. I want to stick to actual facts as much as possible, but for some of my brothers and sisters, vibes is all they’ve got to work with, and we still need these people too to present a united front and affect real change. Their heart is in the right place.
If you want, you can find the data on the number of school shootings before and after Columbine. Here is a website with those stats: https://echomovement.org/school-shootings/
You can see that the change was slight at first, but in the last 10 years it has gone through the roof.
So, you can argue that there is no way to know how many were prevented, but we can see that they occur in MUCH larger numbers than they did pre-Columbine. Maybe the numbers would be higher without the cops there? Whose to say. I can tell you that there seems to be a problem that we aren’t addressing, and sending cops into schools to arrest little children of color doesn’t seem to be the answer we all are hoping for. Maybe we can look at the system in systemic racism and see what systems need to change? Does that system involve gutless fucking pigs who like to shoot minorities and hide while children are being mowed down? Maybe we should have a fucking barbecue.
So, yeah. You can’t say how many they’ve prevented, but I can tell you how many dead children are buried now on their watch, and that tells me they aren’t worth the salt in the cure.
There was a Federal ban on certain military style assault weapons from 1994-2004. During that time, mass shootings were fairly rare, as you stated. The Columbine massacre was in 1999, and kind of started the era of modern mass shootings, but it didn’t really kick in until the ban ended a few years later, as you stated.
The assault rifle ban worked as planned, and it’s clear that the minute it was lifted, mass shootings began.
I think that’s mostly incidental. That ban was mostly on cosmetic features, not the core functionality of the guns. You could, and I did, still buy AR-15 and M-16 platforms. They just didn’t come with the tactical/ military style stocks and magazines. I could get smaller mags and just swap mags faster.
This is a feature of almost every gun legislation that has managed to pass in the US. They manage to make people who don’t know much about guns feel safe, and the gun manufacturers don’t lobby against the laws because there are loopholes that one could drive a tank through, so they won’t lose any profits.
I just wrote this in response to another post, but it applies here, so please forgive me for the cut & paste:
This is an important subject that doesn’t get ANY discussion. The type of gun makes a HUGE difference in these cases.
Military assault rifles aren’t much different than a standard hunting rifle, like a Ruger. And yet, they are overwhelmingly the choice of most mass shooters. When was the last time you heard of a shooter using a standard hunting rifle?
The reason is psychological. Nobody would dispute that anyone who has committed to a mass shooting is psychologically compromised, and so their warped psychology has to be applied to everything they do, especially their choice of weapon.
The overall objective of any mass shooter is to show the world that they are someone powerful who should be taken seriously. They feel weak and victimized, and it’s time to turn the tables. They want their victims to feel fear, and shame, and humiliation as they cower at the end of their gun, and to that end, they need a big scary black weapon to impress not only his victims, but himself. That gun provides the psychological motivation to carry out their mission. Other weapons may be scary, and equally lethal, but they don’t have nearly the same psychological effect on either the victims or the shooter.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if gun manufacturers recognize this, and actually design guns to appeal to this particular psychological profile. I expect it. After all, whenever there is a school massacre, gun sales for this type of weapon go up. School shootings are among their best marketing.
It wouldn’t be the first time corporations have done something that evil. Tobacco manufacturers covered up their own studies confirming tobacco addiction and cancer, and marketed against it for years, even as they manipulated their formulas to be more addictive, addict people faster, and make it harder to quit. Oil companies knew about Climate Change from their own studies years before it became widely known, and still deny it to this day. Evil companies do shit like that routinely, and it’s hard to imagine a more evil industry than arms manufacturing.
So we can ban assault weapons, without banning hunting rifles with the same lethal potential, because standard hunting rifles aren’t designed to attract and inflame the most psychologically broken individuals in our society.
And BTW, just because the VTech killer used handguns, does not negate the truth about MOST mass shooters using military style weapons. It’s still a fact in most massacres.
I will agree with most of your points, the point that I was making is that I would like some gun legislation that actually bans those guns, not the cosmetics.
Sure it just looks like a hunting rifle, but someone that wants to use my AR-15 or M-16 for something like that, would still be able to do so, and they can order the tacticool shit online and change out the stocks with a few turns of a screw. I shouldn’t have been able to buy the platform. The cosmetics aren’t an effective ban.
The style of gun doesn’t cause mass shootings, thats silly. Though it probably increases dead:wounded ratio. Then again vtech was done with handguns.
This is an important subject that doesn’t get ANY discussion. The type of gun makes a HUGE difference in these cases.
Military assault rifles aren’t much different than a standard hunting rifle, like a Ruger. And yet, they are overwhelmingly the choice of most mass shooters. When was the last time you heard of a shooter using a standard hunting rifle?
The reason is psychological. Nobody would dispute that anyone who has committed to a mass shooting is psychologically compromised, and so their warped psychology has to be applied to everything they do, especially their choice of weapon.
The overall objective of any mass shooter is to show the world that they are someone powerful who should be taken seriously. They feel weak and victimized, and it’s time to turn the tables. They want their victims to feel fear, and shame, and humiliation as they cower at the end of their gun, and to that end, they need a big scary black weapon to impress not only his victims, but himself. That gun provides the psychological motivation to carry out their mission. Other weapons may be scary, and equally lethal, but they don’t have nearly the same psychological effect on either the victims or the shooter.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if gun manufacturers recognize this, and actually design guns to appeal to this particular psychological profile. I expect it. After all, whenever there is a school massacre, gun sales for this type of weapon go up. School shootings are among their best marketing.
It wouldn’t be the first time corporations have done something that evil. Tobacco manufacturers covered up their own studies confirming tobacco addiction and cancer, and marketed against it for years, even as they manipulated their formulas to be more addictive, addict people faster, and make it harder to quit. Oil companies knew about Climate Change from their own studies years before it became widely known, and still deny it to this day. Evil companies do shit like that routinely, and it’s hard to imagine a more evil industry than arms manufacturing.
So we can ban assault weapons, without banning hunting rifles with the same lethal potential, because standard hunting rifles aren’t designed to attract and inflame the most psychologically broken individuals in our society.
And BTW, just because the VTech killer used handguns, does not negate the truth about MOST mass shooters using military style weapons. It’s still a fact in most massacres.
So would there be fewer mass shootings if all guns were required to be colored pink and have no fewer than 3 floppy dildo attachments?
Almost certainly.
I took it that they were talking about active shooters that went ahead with it.
That that after all this expense and day to day intrusions, etc, that none of the thousands of shootings were ever stopped by the people who were employed and trained to do so…That’s the thing, they have. However, turns out the tweet is from February 2018 and the earliest example I could find (not looking very hard) is March 2018, funnily enough.
Last Week Tonight did a story on police in schools a while back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgwqQGvYt0g
I feel like this would have a bigger impact if it mentioned how many school shootings have happened since then as well.
It’s a sad commentary on society that 1 million brown kids being persecuted isn’t impactful enough.
I don’t think that’s what they meant. It’s a “yes, and…” statement. It goes to show not just that they cause harm, but that they also don’t do any good.
The truth is our society loves cops and doesn’t like solutions.
Sauce? Seriously, somebody give me a paper or data. Now I’m genuinely curious about historical trends in school cop hiring and student arrests.
“trust me bro”
10,000 and 1,000,000 seem like pretty high numbers, can we get a fact check on that? How does one submit a claim to snopes?
EDIT: I guess nationwide the 10,000 number is believable
It’s definitely a pulled-outta-ass stat. 1 million arrests by 10,000 school cops over 20 years averages out to like 5 arrests each a year…
Which is way too many school kids sent to jail when they otherwise would be a community problem with community solutions. Now they’re a kid with a record and no prospects.
TBF it could be unique students not unique arrests, in which case a lot.
not that they did anything at Columbine either – police were on site pretty much the whole time, SWAT arrived half an hour later – and they both sat on their thumbs for another hour
I specifically remember watching the Columbine massacre live, and being angry that the cops were dawdling around, chatting in groups, laughing, taking their time. It was like a paid day off of work for a fun training exercise on a sunny spring day. There was absolutely no sense of urgency at all.
Meanwhile, students were being murdered the entire time.
Are you thinking of columbine in 1998, in Colorado? Or are you thinking of that one in Texas about 2 years ago, where they gathered in the hallway, and wouldn’t let people through while the killer shot something like 23 kids?
Then there was the Parkland cop, who cowered outside, listening to the killer shoot one kid after another, then convinced the first cops on the scene to not go in, too.
He was later charged criminally, but was acquitted. He may have beat the charge, but he will always be guilty of abject cowardice.
yep, Columbine, not Uvalde – suicide at 12:08, SWAT entered school 1:09
It was wild. They hired a cop on my high school campus after Columbine. He was going to stop me ditching, but I got to know him and instead, every time I ditched I bought him egg rolls (because I was always getting Chinese food).
That’s a lesson worth learning, they’re no smarter than a guard dog. If you can work them right you can get away with everything. They’re also unpredictable and reactive so you have to be careful when they’re emotional or scared.
Maybe get them used to police presence as early as possible?
At least as many.
