So if gun control isn’t the solution what is?

Lets take the thing apart like an intellectual puzzle, not an emotional knee jerk. The constant is the guns, there are simply so many. So thats not changing. So you either stop people wanting to charge ito public places, which is a whole psycho/mental health/social conditioning nightmare: Make every public gathering place a nightmare to access, which turns the nation into a Police state, Or move to some place it doesnt happen. Basically another country.
😷

A return to smaller, neighborhood schools may help. I think we broke that model when we started bussing kids to unfamiliar neighborhoods, to attend school with strangers and teachers that didn't know the parents, etc.

I remember as a teen comparing our smaller town schools to the nearby big city school. As the big city schools got bigger and bigger they became the "blackboard jungle" of the 50s where schools were controlled more by the teen gangs than the teachers. Meanwhile, our smaller small towns remained a community focal point where teachers, parents and students interacted, knew one another and by and large respected one another.

Why is this important? For one, people are less inclined to murder someone they have respectful and familiar relations with. Also it makes it harder for people to slip through the cracks, or become victims of bullies.

We sent our kids to a smaller, private school. All entrances had a school secretary to filter people entering. This was probably adapted following a horrible crime committed there many years earlier, where a kidnapper gained access by disguising herself as a nurse who was there to fetch a child whose mother had been in an accident and was at the hospital seriously injured. It was a kidnapping and after the parents paid a ransom it was discovered that the child had been murdered within minutes after the abduction. It serves as an awful reminder that there are people on this earth that will cold bloodly murder a child for reasons that normal people may never understand, and there always has to be a layer of protection to guard our children, regardless of how secure we feel.

Finally, schools have to focus on the C-minus and D students as much as or even more than they do on the A+ students. For the few dozen shining stars, there are many more non-cheer leaders, non-jocks, and non gifted students who are potential shining stars waiting to bloom, or waiting to discover their passion. Schools have to focus on every single student. A few years ago at one of the homecomings they ID's a former student from the 50s who had substantial achievements in the 50 years following graduation. In high-school though he was a marginal student that always sat in the last row and out of sight, had difficulty paying attention, etc.

1. Why wasn’t that entry door secured at that school in Uvalde?

2. Why wasn’t there armed staff (a legal option in Texas) or at the very least, an armed Resource Officer?

EVERY school in the US must have secured, controlled-entry doors and armed good guys.
Period!

That’s how you stop school shootings.
It works every time it has been tried.

Parents: check out your kid’s school:

Entry doors not secured?
Take them out of school!

No armed Resource Officer or Staff?
Take them out of school!

Ah "let's fund a private small army with everybody's taxes for any and every school in the country, because regulating guns like the rest of the civilized world would be too woke"

since this is a good faith questions i'll give a thorough answer.

first of all the most important thing is keeping it in perspective. any incident that leaves innocent people dead is a tragedy, and it's especially sad when children are involved, but emotional knee jerk reactions aren't helpful. as of parkland the odds of dying in a school shooting were 1 in 614 million. kids are more likely to die not only in an accident on the way to school, but also in an accident or from an illness contracted in interscholastic sports. while these events are horrific they're extremely rare.

it's disgusting to me that everybody attempting to politicize tragedies like this don't think of the children even a tiny bit, often while accusing the others of not caring about the children. kids dying in a school shooting is a horrible tragedy, but what's much worse is adults terrifying kids over an event they'll almost certainly never have to deal with. children are very impressionable and take things to heart very easily, making them believe school is a dangerous place is absolutely abhorrent.

second, we need to realize that just like every other horrific act people commit there is no way to completely stop it, and that "doing something" is not inherently superior to doing nothing. it's very common to hear the emotionally manipulative "kids are dying and you don't care because you're doing nothing," but that's an incredibly childish way to look at things. every action has a reaction, action that isn't helpful isn't better than no action at all. when somebody says the inaction needs to stop and we need to do something ask them what. then ask them how it'd help. you'll almost certainly find they don't know, they just think something needs to be done. these people act as if they have moral superiority, but they're really just emotional children.

third, we need to stop giving the shooters attention. somebody else made a post on this earlier so i'm not gonna go deep into it, but a lot of mass shooters do it because they want to make a name for themselves. focusing on the victims rather than the shooter in media coverage could help that.

fourth, we need to identify the problem. people keep citing the "27 school shootings already this year" but i've yet to see a single person discuss what caused most of them. if you go through the list of shootings most line up with overall gun crime statistics, fights in high crime areas. the school shooting that everybody thinks of where a crazy kid kills a bunch of people at random are incredibly rare (even in the context of already incredibly rare events), most shootings that happen at school share the root cause with the majority of violent crime. focusing on the anomalies that are incredibly difficult to stop is ignoring most of the problem.

as far as actual actions, i think it's contextual. mental health needs to be addressed, lack of social cohesion needs to be addressed, the consistent failure of law enforcement to deal with known threats needs to be addressed. inner city schools often already have metal detectors, but a large portion of school shootings don't happen inside the school. inner city schools also usually have police presence or armed guards, both of which can help. arming teachers is scoffed at but it's actually very effective, but the teachers need to be willing to go through the training.

overall the "kids are dying we need more gun control" is possibly the stupidest take one could have on the topic. most of the areas with the most gun violence already have strict gun laws. the vast majority of gun violence is committed with illegal guns, and when it is committed with a legal gun it's pretty silly to think somebody that is willing to shoot children wouldn't be willing to get an illegal gun if denied legal access. multiple mass shooters have stated they chose their target based on strict gun laws and gun free zones because they knew they'd have a higher likelihood of success.

in the end we need to stop politicizing these tragedies and look for actual proven solutions. whining about "doing something" and advocating completely infeasible things like gun bans doesn't help anyone, especially not children.

It's not that giving guns to good guys don't work, it's the training, most people don't train for active combat scenarios. They have to have training to fundamentally practice day in and day out until they know the layout of the school or place by hearing alone. What most people think of as training is essentially daycare and NOT training at all. You've got multiple issues to worry about with training, you need to train fight or flight responses, you need to train for any threatening stimuli, SERE training is good (survive/evade/resist/escape,) you need to desensitize yourself, you need good target practice.

All of that goes into training and let's be honest, unless it was specialized security, they're not going to be trained right because the average person doesn't do that. It's like with bush crafting or survival wilderness training, most don't have the skills because most don't have that mindset but you kind of need that mindset to have successful gun training for active shooter scenarios.

I'm not saying it's a solution but my solution would be to actively train "good" people for that situation but they're not willing to do it. Believe it or not, I've worked in govt agencies but not in a higher tier level job, let me tell you the training of anything no matter if it's dishwashing, food service or whatever... even small menial tasks are not trained properly at all. The management for anything in govt is SO incompetent that if people were to find out how these agencies are actually managed, they would be scared. Even hospitals, I've worked in hospitals where I wouldn't be surprised if a person's surgery was botched because of poor management and other things.

If people only knew.

So that's just my thoughts, it's not that giving guns to good guys doesn't work but there's a lot to take into consideration, you have to have good training and to make it into something that is repetitive so the person trains for those things. You can't just get a certification, hit some targets and then have a gun, think you're going to take someone out.

@Montanaman

While this is a super tragic event that will captivate the political squabbling for a few weeks, it's also worth mentioning that ...

About 275 +/- Americans die daily from drug overdose and rarely do politicians or the media give it much attention.

About 20 +/- People are murdered in Chicago alone each and every week, with comparable numbers in many big American cities and it only seems to gain attention near election times. Add all the big cities together and it's a slaughter.

Attention to the school shootings seems to be more about political opportunity than about the tragedies themselves. Like why do some tragedies become headlines while tragedies with far greater loss of life escape with a shrug of the shoulders?

Interesting details about Ramos emerging.

Mom with a drug problem. Police called frequently to the house.
At some point he moved in with his grandmother. The one he murdered.
Teased and bullied at school over speech impediment, stopped attending.
Had difficulty interacting with girls.
He may have been a cutter.
One of his friends said that they's drive around and shoot people at random with a BB gun and egg other cars.

A sad situation all around. There is far more to all this killing than gun control. Was there no safe haven for the kid to get validated and find refuge? Church groups? Boy Scouts? School/youth clubs? etc. Otherwise troubled kids will eventually find one another or just let the resentment ferment until it explodes.

Put in a rapid response force on school grounds when school is in session. Make it a death sentence to attack a school. Hardened targets utilizing veterans and law enforcement training is already there keeping their skills sharp is necessary and cheaper than training a guy with minimal firearm training. As far as body armor is concerned steel core m855 (green tip) can go through most body armor*

@LeopoldBloom you know most scools have 1 maybe 2 armed officers who are cops mostly retired not in the best physical shape. + they have zero constitutional duty to act or protect. Utilizing private services for this would eliminate that. Im also all for having armed staff custodians administrators and teachers. Hardened targets do not have mass shootings when was the last time Fort Knox or Quantico had one? Never because they would turned into Swiss cheese before they made it inside the building. Hardened targets dont get hit. Gun control doesn't work because it only makes it harder for law abiding citizens to gain the tools of self defense criminals will get firearms regardless of the laws.

What do you mean "if gun control isn't the solution"? You guys have never tried it on a national scale.

Gun control is the solution. Maybe after you've had a mass shooting in Congress , that fact might actually dawn on those opposed to it.

Unless a person is dressed as this
There are ways to take a person down regardless.

Open carry like the old days

Mass shootings is terrible and makes everyone jump up and down in disgust, what is the murder rate by guns in the USA

Sadly, nothing. Nothing will fix it. It will continue. There is no way in hell we can ever get rid of all guns. And we can't predict who will do this or when this will happen. The nation is sick, mentally and emotionally. Sodom and Gomorrah on a larger scale. So the smart thing is to brace up! Anything else is delusion.

Instead of banning guns I think we should ban the gun fetishists from living and declare the NRA a terrorist organization.

Gun control is the answer. Americans picked this, and they can stop whining over the uptick in the body count.

Ethics class, law class. You don’t follow, you don’t get to participate in society.

Republicans want more kids around for target practice. They're tired of clay pigeons. I really think that if you want the definition of someone that is anti-God don't think of satanists or atheists, it's Republicans. They are pure evil. The party of Trump. Just ish, icky...

Figure out the root causes and deal with those. We know not everybody who owns a gun goes out to murder people so restricting access isn't going to solve the problem if we don't deal with the root cause. It might prevent a very small percentage but it will continue to happen.

Thoughts and prayers, of course!

Shut the elementary schools.
Home Schooling Mandatory
Solves Unemployment to boot.

This is such a conundrum and the answer(s) are as likely to gain traction as easily as getting politicians to work for the greater good of the nation rather than all of the bipartisan nonsense that is happening now.

I’ve long said that guns aren’t the issue, ammunition is. Make ammunition cost prohibitive and I mean really expensive. Criminals are still going to find access to them through crime.

This is likely to be the most ridiculous thing you will read today.

The USA have gun control ???

Seems to work well in many other countries

Removing guns out of law abiding citizens hands and leaving the criminals the only people armed isn't a good idea. Js government entities included

Is getting rid of criminals

Looks like all schools need to be fortified. Starting at the gate, which needs to be some distance from the school building.
Have every parent use an entrance card to activate the gate.
Each child to be admitted individually.
Armed guards at every school.
This sounds really scary but extreme measures need to be taken.

Education: if we are doing to have this right, we need to teach about it in schools. Safety, proper care, how to secure them, and so on. This does not solve everything, but it's one step that is important.

By recognizing the right, we deflate some of the "rebel culture" that drives some gun ownership while providing tools and information to serious owners.

By making it a school subject, it also steals some of the "cool factor". Demonstrating the weapons as tools and not toys.

Ultimately, we need to shift cultural perception of guns. Guns are not the tools of tough and manly people. They are tools of the weak and cowardly. That shift alone would change A LOT.

We would still need to take serious efforts on mental health. I feel that is a given and it's talked about every time but then we don't do anything about it.


There's no "silver bullet" for solving gun violence. There are multiple cultural and health issues to tackle. We can actually tackle them without changing anyone's access to or rights to the weapons. But it's a long, challenging road.

Thank you for posting this question. We need to navigate the rough waters ahead after the tragedy today. Maybe those in power will raise their white flags and lower the walls to save our children. 😞💔❤️🤗🙏

Half of Americans are totally batshit gun nuts. Nothing can help.

The opposite. Zero gun restrictions so everyone can protect themselves.

Here's a solution-. Stop caring about people. The next shooting is nobody. No sympathy. It's natural when you have guns. Relax.

Stop criminalizing those who use guns to defend themselves and others.

Start killing these kind of people head shot

Bullet control?

Stopping groups for organising shootings just to get gun control

All kids see is killing Iand hating and fighting its on almost every movie, it's in real life video games are killing and fighting. The news is always bad news. Hate is all they see. School bullying and so forth. Lock downs masks all death. It's how they are being brought up in an evil world