Well. Yes. A traumatized resident of bloody Birmingham poses the essential question. What sort of city routinely grants operating licenses to establishments expressly designed to attract killers?
Well. Yes. A traumatized resident of bloody Birmingham poses the essential question. What sort of city routinely grants operating licenses to establishments expressly designed to attract killers?
This is a city with not even 200,000 people. Turns out nobody likes to get shot. And Alabama is ALL about guns.
A Washington Post survey of 51 of the country’s largest school systems showed that 58 percent of [gun] seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations... Even an exhaustive review of local news sources cannot account for guns carried into schools undetected, gun seizures never disclosed by districts and guns found on campuses located in communities underserved by news organizations... In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings. [That’s found, mes petites.]
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Here’s the beginning of an official communication from a typically gun-soaked American high school: “While any weapon found in our schools is not a positive thing…”
Not a positive thing. Do you know how many principals don’t tell students and parents when a gun is found? Lots of ’em. I mean, it’s not a positive thing…
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Hot off the press, here’s today’s high school killing field report, complete with all the blithering idiocy/pathetic denial that keeps kids going in for the kill.
America’s long luxurious gun-soak has reduced the reality of some high schools to that of hookah lounges in the deep south: Choked with human and techno security (which makes the experience of being there creepy and oppressive), they are nonetheless incredibly dangerous, as ways continue to be found to smuggle in weapons.
When there are five ill-secured guns inside many of your students’ homes, do you really think students are going to leave them alone? There are 450 million smokin’ hot guns in this country – whaddaya expect some sixteen year olds to do with that? Leave them alone?
So you’ve got this sick toxic thing of high school principals stubbornly thinking they’re high school principals rather than bouncers, and meanwhile students die or almost bleed to death or run screaming from armed psychos in restrooms pretty much every day all over America’s public school system.
The future is fucking obvious. In the next few years, we’ll get to 500 million guns – or more. And the weaponry will be much more lethal. Every news story about an insane sixteen year old blowing ten peoples’ brains out will inspire many more insane sixteen year olds to try their hand at it. Only insane parents will keep their kids in creepy oppressive public school. Private school/home schooling will be the only way out, and public high school as such will cease to exist.
[W]hether you’re the firearm owner yourself or anybody who lives in the home [where] there’s a firearm present, their risk for death by suicide goes up three to five times.
And it’s not that the firearm makes them vulnerable to thinking about suicide. It’s just that if someone is thinking about suicide and they have quick and ready access to the most lethal method, then they’re at greater risk of dying. If you take all the other suicide attempts together in the United States to combine them, less than 5% of those attempts to result in death. There’s nothing that compares to firearms in terms of how deadly they are in a suicide attempt.
A Birmingham AL politician gets it said.
Weeks later, the police can’t find the killers.
I…. dunno. When does Birmingham Alabama become so blood-soaked that, well, it ain’t really what you’d call a great city? The letter to the editor from which I’ve drawn this post’s headline is written by a person who has made sure to live well outside the bloody city limits; so it’s not really his great city. He moved out years ago.
And, as I say, Birmingham doesn’t really strike UD, who has seen multiple videos of police hosing gobs of blood off of its main streets, as a great city. The people who gunned down 24 souls the other night, killing four, only wanted to kill one particular guy standing with the crowd outside a club — this was a standard-issue gang vengeance killing, apparently. So what kind of city produces people who say hell since I’ve got a machine gun I think I’ll kill that guy plus everyone else? Not a great city.
This is far from Birmingham’s first mass shooting. And of course the numbers killed and injured all over Birmingham all the time keep rising. The letter writer seems to think that letting teenagers open carry any old gun without needing a permit or anything is maybe a mite unwise…
“Soon applications to our UAB University and Medical School may be affected.” Yeah, and just when everyone is bleeding out all over the street. Since Alabama also has a punitive, total ban on abortion, I can imagine potential students and medical staff explaining to UAB that “Welp, after I get out of prison for providing maternal health care, I’ll be gunned down in front of my favorite brunch spot. I think not.”
NRA says: WHOOHOO. Let’s go for 10.
UD gets how you don’t want to admit– smiley-face principal that you are — that the high school you lead is a very violent institution which needs to be militarized (nothing smiley-face there) in order to continue to function without killing people. Vicious fights are common at Oregon’s Gresham High, and now loaded guns stalk the halls, in the possession of sixteen year old sociopaths.
The combination of a doofus who thinks all conflict can be resolved by chats/hugs, and plentiful weaponized assholes, will almost certainly produce beatings/mass shootings galore.
Parents, teachers, and students beg the principal to see their school as the killing field that it is becoming, rather than the Experiment in Loving Co-Learning that her narcissism seems to want it to be.
Guns being what they are in America, this country can no longer afford to assign school leadership positions to feel-gooders who are on their way to enabling the shooting deaths of students and teachers.
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Today’s walkout.
More guns means more murders … Murders carry some of the stiffest criminal penalties and are more likely to result in an arrest and imprisonment than other crimes. As a result, some experts draw a line between America’s large number of guns and its incarceration rate, which is among the highest in the world.
… [There’s a] hiring crisis for police officers. People don’t want to start a career in a field that seems so dangerous. “This proliferation of civilian weapons makes policing much less attractive,” John Roman, a criminal justice policy expert at the University of Chicago, said. (A similar argument, he added, applies to teachers, given the proliferation of school shootings, although the on-the-job death rate for teachers is, of course, much lower than it is for police officers.)
Steve Dillon directs the UW School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice, but said he spoke Thursday as a citizen and teacher.
He said that when he first moved to Laramie he encountered men in orange hats with guns at a trailhead. They’d asked him what he was doing, and he told them he’d just moved there and wanted to go for a hike.
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Part of a campus discussion about whether concealed carry should be allowed on campus.
Looks as though strong majorities don’t want to go to a school where anyone you see might be carrying a big gun. But they’ll get concealed carry. Will they ever get it.
Year or two after that, they’ll get open carry at the University of Wyoming. Already got it in the rest of the state. Permitless. Only gotta be 18.
Big ol’ rap sheet, just a really dangerous person, and he has a kid who’s allowed to live with him? He got ten years in 2016 for malicious wounding etc etc, and he’s not in jail? Thinks it’s funny to put a loaded gun in his six year old kid’s school backpack? Why does this convicted felon have guns?
Lemme tell you. It’s hard enough for gun-soaked Americans to protect themselves from quiet schizy little nobodies who decide to shoot up schools; shouldn’t it be easier for us to defend ourselves from shriekingly rampant criminals among us? Easier to defend innocent children from them? WTF.
If you’re in a hurry to get your pain pills and you pull your car in front of other people waiting in the pharmacy drive-through and the people in one of the cars object to what you have done, you can brandish your loaded gun right in their faces as they approach your car window! That’ll shut em up. HAHAHAHAHA
‘Kinda tricky and gross cuz lots of glass and blood at the scene plus two messed up and I’m pretty sure dead bodies but main thing is FREE GUN IN ONE OF THE CARS.’
“While this incident occurred on a school campus, it was not directly related to Skyridge Middle School activities,” officials wrote in a press release Wednesday.
Whew. I can’t stand middle schools where 11 year olds brandishing guns is part of official school activities.
If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1 p.m. NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?