School shooting Florida

[Nessie]

If guns are the issue, why didn't we have this problem 40 years ago? Guns were just as available then.
Guns were the same back then but they weren't used to kill classmates.

The culture of mass shooting was still developing. At the present rate of increase, by 2050 there is likely to be multiple mass shootings in schools every single day.

I posted above how the rate of shootings has steady increased, from one single shooting every few years to by 1945 no year went by without a shooting to the rise of mass shootings.

That's what happens when a society does nothing about a problem, It gets worse.

Meanwhile, road deaths has been reduced, because society did do something.

 

[Nessie]

Whether guns were a problem 40 years ago is moot. The point is they're a problem NOW, and until America faces up to that, there will be more school shootings.

Sorry, too late, nothing can be done. The USA just needs to learn to cope.

 

[baron]

The US did have this problem 40 years ago. Not as bad as today, but still outrageously more prevalent than anywhere else in the Western world. The 70s and 80s had many dozens of US school shootings and the death toll was in the dozens. It's a black mark on US society that these are looked back on as 'the good old days' where guns weren't a problem.

Correction: death toll dozens, not in the hundreds.

 

[Ian Osborne]

The US did have this problem 40 years ago. Not as bad as today, but still outrageously more prevalent than anywhere else in the Western world. The 70s and 80s had many dozens of US school shootings and the death toll was in the dozens. It's a black mark on US society that these are looked back on as 'the good old days' where guns weren't a problem.

Correction: death toll dozens, not in the hundreds.

Wikipedia says you're right. The Boomtown Rats wrote a song about one of them.

 

[Ambrosia]

Obviously this school needs a security guard named "Kevin" getting paid $16/hour and is hot **** on Call of Duty.

Making good points.

 

[Ranb]

Have fun at the range. Just a few more bodies to step over on your way there. Club soda will get the blood on your hands off with no problem.

Blaming me personally for this carnage while I practice with my air rifle is not going to help at all.

Ranb

 

[3point14]

Back when I was I high school in the late 70's early 80's we brought gu s to school for Hunter safety classes. There were also many filled gun racks in the parking lot at all times.

I am about 30 miles east of Rochester, NY. We had fights in school that ended when somebody was down with no serious injuries. We had larger fights on rare occasions with rival schools that ended without life threatening injuries.

Never once were guns involved and there were a lot of guns available.

I don't believe guns are the issue. Society is very sick today if children have no problem shooting up their school mates without remorse.

What could possibly have changed?

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Let me guess -- with the full knowledge that bad guys won't follow the rules, good guys at this school are not allowed to carry guns. This creates a risk-free killing zone for anyone who wants to come in and shoot people until they run out of ammo.

Disarm the bad guys. Oops! Sorry for using simple logic.

School shootings such as this, while tragic and preventable, are the price of freedom. And freedom ain't free. Sometimes it's paid in the blood of teenagers. Thoughts and prayers.

That, or the 21st century is proving the old 20th c. nickname for television sets to be horribly, wickedly prescient.

 

[MikeG]

If guns are the issue, why didn't we have this problem 40 years ago? Guns were just as available then.
Guns were the same back then but they weren't used to kill classmates.

Are you just ignoring the posts which give the figures showing that school shootings were happening 40 years ago? If so, what is your motivation?

 

[Craig4]

But what problems? You've described the end point, how does a 19 year old get to the point where he has so many problems he has to solve them all at once at many feet per second?

This man is 19 and has decided that the biggest impact he can make on the world is to end as many lives as possible, solving, as you say, all his problems John Wayne style. My question is why?

What does it say about his view of his prospects for the rest of his life in the land of the free and the home of the brave where anyone can grow up to be president if he thought his best option was to go out in blaze of glory at the age of 19?

Lots of teens reach this point. The only difference is that the ones in the US have ready access to firearms.

 

[3point14]

Lots of teens reach this point. The only difference is that the ones in the US have ready access to firearms.

If you think the only difference between US culture, youth or otherwise, and every other culture in the world, is the availability of guns, then I'd be interested in you proving that.

If you think culture has no affect on actions or decisions, I'd be very interested in you proving that.

 

[Nessie]

Its the availability of guns to those who should not have them, which is the problem in the USA.

People who should not have guns in the UK, Germany and Finland have great difficulty getting hold of any gun, let alone a shed load of ammunition.

Consider how much those three countries have changed over the years and how different they are from each other, there is one factor which is similar, the lack of easy access to guns and ammo, which over the years has got harder, as all three countries tightened gun controls and accessibility.

Hence very few school shootings, a total of 10 between those three countries going to back to 1913.

 

[BobTheCoward]

Well, that would solve every single American problem within a generation. I'm really not sure why you aren't just tacitly accepting this, but actively promoting it.

It is the logical conclusion to the first principles I have adopted and there is no reason to alter those principles.

 

[ponderingturtle]

If guns are the issue, why didn't we have this problem 40 years ago? Guns were just as available then.
Guns were the same back then but they weren't used to kill classmates.

Were guns the same? Or were there fewer semi autos in intermediate rifle cartridges out there and more bolt action rifles and such not semi automatic guns with high capacity magazines.

I believe the Univeristy of Texas shooting is the only high scoring shooting with a bolt action rifle.

Similar weapons were available sure but were they as prevalent?

 

[BobTheCoward]

If you think the only difference between US culture, youth or otherwise, and every other culture in the world, is the availability of guns, then I'd be interested in you proving that.

If you think culture has no affect on actions or decisions, I'd be very interested in you proving that.

Here is a good chart for culture not being a significant factor.

 

[Nessie]

The US did have this problem 40 years ago. Not as bad as today, but still outrageously more prevalent than anywhere else in the Western world. The 70s and 80s had many dozens of US school shootings and the death toll was in the dozens. It's a black mark on US society that these are looked back on as 'the good old days' where guns weren't a problem.

Correction: death toll dozens, not in the hundreds.

Wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shootings_in_the_United_States

1900s - 15
1910s - 19
1920s - 10
1930s - 9
1940s - 8
1950s - 17
1960s - 18
1970s - 30
1980s - 39
1990s - 62
2000s - 60
2010s - 143 (so far and including this shooting)

The problem was steady around 14 a year for the first 6 decades and the increase began in the 1970s and it has gone on since then.

 

[GlennB]

At would point do you think the cost would become unacceptable to the "some"?

Possibly when a gun-fan senator or senior NRA type lost a kid or two? A "Silence of the lambs" moment? But even then I doubt it.

 

[Dave Rogers]

What is it with the idea that we can talk about "the" issue.

There are lots of issues. Yes, society is sick. It is possible for people to drift through life with little or no connection to the human beings around us. That's sick. Oh, and by the way, while we are floating around with no connection to each other, it's really easy to buy lots of guns and ammo.

This. There seems to be an assumption that either the solution to the problem must be a trivially simple one, or that there is no solution to the problem and it must be accepted, and a precursor of this type of thinking is that there is such a thing as "the" cause of the problem. Clearly the ease of access to guns available to mentally unstable and murderous individuals in the USA is a part of the problem, but there are clearly other parts to it. Multiple causes require multiple solutions, but at present the prevailing attitude seems to be that there is no simple single action that can on its own provide a complete solution, therefore there is no point in doing anything.

Dave

 

[3point14]

What happens if one takes the information in the graph linked here

What could possibly have changed?

and overlay the information in this post here.

Wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shootings_in_the_United_States

1900s - 15
1910s - 19
1920s - 10
1930s - 9
1940s - 8
1950s - 17
1960s - 18
1970s - 30
1980s - 39
1990s - 62
2000s - 60
2010s - 143 (so far and including this shooting)

The problem was steady around 14 a year for the first 6 decades and the increase began in the 1970s and it has gone on since then.

I'm not good with graphics, so I can't actually make the graph and correlation doesn't equal causation, but...

 

[Nessie]

This. There seems to be an assumption that either the solution to the problem must be a trivially simple one, or that there is no solution to the problem and it must be accepted, and a precursor of this type of thinking is that there is such a thing as "the" cause of the problem. Clearly the ease of access to guns available to mentally unstable and murderous individuals in the USA is a part of the problem, but there are clearly other parts to it. Multiple causes require multiple solutions, but at present the prevailing attitude seems to be that there is no simple single action that can on its own provide a complete solution, therefore there is no point in doing anything.

Dave

It does not matter how many causes there are for a kid to be murderous. If he cannot get hold of a gun, he cannot do a school shooting.

There is one solution, make guns inaccessible as possible for the wrong people. That is proven by other countries compared to the USA, which is an outlier in terms of lack of control of guns and the number of mass shootings and shootings of all kinds.

The problem is that the USA let guns get so out of control and there is no consensus to regain control that it can never even enact that simple solution.