He looks about 12, I'd be pitching it at older cops/security professionals with a clean record (or at least what constitutes one in 'Murica).
Or they could just leave things as they are, those thoughts and prayers are a powerful deterrent after all.
The great strategist Manu strikes again. They have to date escaped from Le Pen and Zemmour but they will soon end up with such a person in charge as the country is just fundamentally broken (so are we, but fortunately our system has way more checks and balances, to the point where even a determined Boris Johnson can be turfed out fairly quickly). Probably time for the sixième république.
Zut alors.The French president was supposed to have been hosting King Charles for a day of pomp and ceremony on Monday, but had to cancel the state visit because of the demonstrations. French opposition politicians on the left and right said France’s image and diplomacy had been damaged by the last-minute cancellation.
Last edited by Jimmy Floyd; 28-03-2023 at 08:48 PM.
One of the best comedy routines of all time, and also very poignant. I don't think it can ever be shared enough.
It's a simple answer for us as we're not only prepared to do it, we already have. It's not at all a simple answer for Americans though as it's clear by now that all children could be shot dead at school tomorrow and that still wouldn't be enough for a majority/those in power to accept proper gun control measures. They don't think like us - the death of children are acceptable collateral damage for them if it means keeping their 'freedoms', so you might as well suggest the tooth fairy as a solution - it'd be as likely to happen.
Christmas Eve.
The problem with armed guards at schools is as shown they aren't a deterrent or infallible. If you a deployed to a school with a sidearm and some maniac rolls up tooled up like they are going to do black ops work, we'd all like to think we'd die a hero but people never think it will be them that die in these scenarios, the reality shows true colours.
Rick Rescorla berated the cops at Columbine for their glacial response, rightly so. But not everyone is a mentalist who volunteers for Vietnam and lols at incoming fire. Everyone hopes they will be, but in practice it's rarely the case.
Last edited by Lofty; 28-03-2023 at 09:50 PM.
And to add to that, this is at least the 377th school shooting since Columbine. We had our Columbine in Dunblane and that was it, one avoidable tragedy and it was game over for the gun rules at the time. Anyone still suggesting gun control as a way of stopping this happening after three hundred and seventy-seven school shootings not being enough to usher proper controls in is, well, insane.
Well no, they're not. They're right. That's like saying "those saying the right thing for a Crack addict to do, is to give up Crack are insane".
It is the only solution to the problem in both scenarios. It is also a really fucking hard solution to achieve in both scenarios. But it doesn't change that fact.
I think 'school shooting' is some weird cultural thing at this point, and even if you managed to completely ban guns you would just get school frenzied stabbing or school attempted gassing, because the sort of people who do it do it for the newsworthiness of it. It's the same with how a lot of terrorism is actually quite crap on an objective killing level, but thrashing around at randomers with a knife is for some reason seen as the way to go.
The USA will break apart rather than have gun control come in. Happened before and will happen again at some stage.
The gun control suggestion is a solution coming from a perfect World perspective and we don't live in one, so pragmatism is needed. By all means keep the lobbying going as times do eventually change, but they sure as shit aren't going to anytime soon, so what are you suggesting happens in the meantime? More thoughts and prayers?
And Spikey, you can't seriously be comparing the difficulty of giving up crack (which can and does happen) with the difficulty of bringing substantial gun controls into the US (which still hasn't happened after 377 school shootings)?
This is a psychopathic take. It's bad enough seeing them at their airports here. Imagine turning up to school as a 6 year old and some fat old cop is kitted up like he's about to bust down doors in Iraq.
Even if you did that in every school across America, who's to say said cop doesn't freak out and blast away some innocent person because they got scared. There's plenty of these sorts of incidents up and down the country. That's not even including the huge amount of cases where cops get mad that someone bumped their car off duty and decide to light up a random citizen. They'd end up airholing a 12 year old for giving them lip.
With the state of obesity as it is in the US a daily Mandarin might help tbh.
It's not. It's unpalatable in the extreme and not a fucking chance would I want to live in a World where my kids (if I had any) are going to a school like that, but if I had no choice would I prefer it to a World where they run the risk of facing a shooter and no one in the building has any way of fighting back? Abso-fucking-lutely.
That is the choice at hand here, at least in the short term (our lifetimes and beyond I'd imagine). And if you break it down what you're effectively saying if you're against it is that you'd prefer more deaths of kids over all of them being schooled in an environment where an extra from black ops is hanging around.
Answer to gun problems.
'We'll just add more guns'.![]()
If adverts are anything to go by, America's parents are more worried about their kids vaping.
I doubt having an armed guard at a school would move the statistical likelihood of your child being killed in a school massacre very much, in the grand scheme of things, and would in all probability displace whatever tiny marginal gain you'd have on that front with an equally tiny chance of the guard going postal or accidentally shooting them.
You are right that there is probably no answer, but that line of thinking applies to more guns being the answer as well. It isn't.
Well, apart from actual gun control, that is the answer, but isn't on the table, so yeah, thoughts and prayers and RIP in pieces and all that.
Well, we don't really, do we? You see the odd cop tooling about in airports with an MP5 or whatever but that's about it, where else do we have armed guards? Do the palace guards count? I guess they are strapped.
My point was more that the actual chance of being shot at a school is tiny. It would remain tiny with a guard.
We've never been a gun nation, to be honest. The airport guard is more likely to tase than spray bullets.
The last time the American Constitution was amended was in 1992.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2776515if the attack was targeted; total number of weapons brought to the scene; number of shooters; and weapon type. Results are presented as incident rate ratios in Table 2 and show armed guards were not associated with significant reduction in rates of injuries; in fact, controlling for the aforementioned factors of location and school characteristics, the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present (incidence rate ratio, 2.96; 95% CI = 1.43-6.13; P = .003).
I guess they can't account for the attacks that might have happened had a guard not been present, but nonetheless that's pretty damning and they do address that point. Thoughts and prayers are going to need to up their game.
At this point, you just gave to accept that kids being killed in school is something enough of America is cool with and move on. They value a gun more than their child (unless it's unborn then it is heavily protected).
We've had two shootings in a month in Hamburg (regular kind not at a school).
I think you're more than clever enough to see what I'm driving at. Solutions are often hard. Sometimes near impossible. But that's no reason not to try.
And yeah, this is spot on, but stabbings would be far less deadly and be far easier to stop and gas attacks and bombs are harder to make work. Right now the problem is that assault rifles are readily available and easy to use.
Gun death stats are really stark. I don't know what French gun laws are, but they've had 2,000 deaths (all causes) in the last statistical year and we've had 162 with the same population.
America 37,000, and probably another combined 100,000 in the various Latin American countries where crime revolves around drug trafficking to America. Land of the free etc.
I remember seeing a video of a kid who got turned away by the shops for alcohol, cigarettes and lottery but he managed to get a gun.
Their gun murder rate isn't particularly outrageous once you take blacks killing each other out of the equation, and, given the number of guns out there and the general gun culture, three-hundred school shootings is probably not that many if I'm right and it is a THING, which also suggests that it could be prevented in large part by removing the newsworthy aspects of it (although how you do that...). Really though lol who cares it's America.
Literally the leading cause of death in children in the US is gunshots (19% of total deaths) so for some reason I don't think it's just 'blacks killing each other'. Gross, small minded take.
The last time I saw that statistic half of it was literally black teenagers shooting each other.
I don't think anyone doubts school attacks are a THING, as with that many of them there clearly must be an allure to it other than the chance to use a gun (Charlie Brooker was commenting on this nearly 20 years ago, I'm sure many others would have been too), but with firearms so readily available what else are you going to use?
The Nashville PD deciding to release footage of the shooter firing out the school front doors and stalking the corridors looking badass is an absolute disgrace.
Not 'OK', but true. Two thirds of childhood gun deaths in the United States are homicides (most of the rest are suicides), and black children - who overwhelmingly aren't being killed by whites and Asians - are seventeen times more likely to be killed by a firearm than white children. If you remove their half (from something like fifteen per cent of that age group), you're left with a bunch of mostly white suicides and the odd school shooting.
Gross, small minded take.
For some reason, I have the urge to watch Gran Torino again this evening.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...without-charge
What's this then? Daddy looks a bit of a gimp so what the hell has led to this act of retribution?
Some sort of Custody drama.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/17...Cambridgeshire
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65118681
One of them that twat who went there on holiday and got evacuated once already.