Rooty-tooty point and shootys

[KingRoyal]

Police have been a regular fixture in schools for over a decade, at least, and have yet to prevent a shooting in that time. It's in character for police, really. The officer who was working as the security guard of the Pulse nightclub did nothing but stand by as 49 people were killed

Most people's interactions with police are in the wake of crimes. And unless you're rich, powerful or connected, they usually do little to solve those crimes beyond maybe filing a report and resenting the victims for bothering them. And all this while eating up like 50% of a city's budget. The only thing cops seem to reliably be able to do is shoot unarmed kids with impunity

[pacobird]

Yeah, and even if they did reliably solve crimes there's nothing about that activity specifically that requires them to be armed

[Grath]

IIRC schools with armed guards are more likely to have shootings than ones without. That might be a chicken/egg thing (underfunded schools getting armed guards rather than the actual help they need) but it certainly shows that armed guards don't prevent it.

[Mongrel]

IIRC the school board in question even had its own branch of the local PD. Like, not just "cops in schools".

I don't know if they actually had a cop on school grounds at this particular school though.

[Mongrel]

MSNBC actually cut Abbot off to switch to Beto outside after this.

Good.

[Friday]

My efforts to shut the news out to regain my mental health have been undermined by some of the most widely reported and serious news to ever hit the airwaves and the internetwaves. Even my total shutdown and abstinence from all of my feeds cannot remove events of these magnitudes from being known to me.

Ukraine, Roe, and now this.

Anyway, I don't have anything to say about cops that I haven't been saying for... decades? so I'll just refer you to Paco's post.

[pacobird]

And unless you're rich, powerful or connected, they usually do little to solve those crimes beyond maybe filing a report and resenting the victims for bothering them.

actually now that I think about it this is wrong; the police don't solve crimes against rich people either, rich people call them to file a report so they can make an insurance claim

[Caithness]

They also trash homeless encampments.

[Mongrel]

what the fuck



the NUMBER ONE CAUSE

[Thad]

"Thoughts and prayers" justifiably gets a lot of attention as a meaningless rote phrase politicians spout every time this happens. But there are others, and I probably wouldn't have even noticed the sheer number of politicians saying "Thank you to first responders for acting so swiftly" as part of their boilerplate response the last two days if it hadn't turned out to be so horrifyingly, disastrously inappropriate.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

In better news, Swedish authorities grabbed this guy. Yeah, it's a few months back but at least someone takes this shit seriously.

[Mongrel]

open carry!

[Mongrel]

It may or not end up different in the end, but this is certainly quite the development.

[Grath]

They're gonna do something this time.

The common assumption is that nothing will be done, but I think we're hurtling toward a particularly stupid outcome that I'd been fretting about for a while. The Uvalde and Buffalo shootings had a particular feature in common which was quite inconvenient to the "Good" Guys With Guns, and does not have protection from a bylaw that was written 200 years before its invention.

They're gonna ban body armor.

We're going to live in a country where it's legal for any psycho to own a deadly weapon, but it's illegal for you to protect yourself from it.

[Grath]

Some actual science, studying the effects of state-level gun laws.

Key results:
Universal background checks and bans on pistol ownership for violent misdemeanors were (not necessarily causation, but I believe it) associated with reduction in overall firearm homicide rates.

"Shall issue" laws were associated with an increase in firearm homicide rates. (But New York's "may issue" pistol permits were enacted specifically so corrupt politicians could arm their supporters while denying others - particularly Italians - the ability to be armed, and a lot of "may issue" laws are blatantly racist in implementation if not in intent.)

Nothing else studied - minimum age for pistols, permitless carry, state-level bans on straw purchasing, stand your ground, bans on really cheap guns, assault weapons, large capacity magazines - has a significant effect on homicide-with-a-gun rate, and none of the laws had an impact on suicide rate. (I'm kinda surprised they didn't study waiting periods, which seem like the main thing that could be likely to have an impact on rate of suicide-with-guns.)

None of the laws were observed to influence the rates of homicide in general when controlled against state-level differences, just the proportion committed with firearms.

I do suspect there's a correlation between permitless carry and similar increases to Shall Issue that either hasn't shown up yet (it's very new except for Vermont) or is obscured by states generally going from Shall Issue to Permitless.

[Mongrel]

Homicide in this case being any instance of one or more murders, correct? Because the assault ban seems to have pretty clearly reduced death rates, even if it didn't noticeably dent the number of actual perpetrators.

[Brantly B.]

[quote="Grath"][/quote]

Yeah I was waiting for that to actually pass before I started acting smug about it. Here we are!

(Do you know how many tracking protections I have to specifically disable in order to allow these Twitter embeds to even partially display?)

[Grath]

Homicide in this case being any instance of one or more murders, correct? Because the assault ban seems to have pretty clearly reduced death rates, even if it didn't noticeably dent the number of actual perpetrators.

They're using the CDC's Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System death rates, if you read the abstract. (They actually left out North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming from the homicide evaluations, the CDC only reports death rates when the absolute number of deaths in a state during a given year is ten or more so they didn't have consistent data available for those states.)

[Mongrel]

Latest update. Cops supposedly exchanged fire with the shooter through the closed classroom door.

On one hand the fact that they actually did try to do something but fucked up and killed a kid, and so pulled back would be a bit more sympathetic a narrative than what they're selling now.

On the other hand, if that weird statement about "no cop bullets killed kids" actually turns out to be true, there now exists a possible scenario where they fucked up and either incorrectly thought they'd killed a kid, or even took the killer at face value lying and saying they had, and so let the kids all die to cover up something that hadn't even happened.