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#GenerationLockdown: Two Australians shake up America with viral anti-gun ad
Here's the background story about the video: #GenerationLockdown: Two Australians shake up America with viral anti-gun ad
And here's the video itself: Generation Lockdown (The video is not graphic in any way. It's safe for work. Whether it's safe for your emotions is a different matter.)
And yet, opinions seem to be divided on the desirability of turning schools into trauma factories.
The current strategic direction isn't likely to succeed...
[Full disclosure: I'm acquainted with two instances where Florida teachers are loudly resigning over lockdown drills, and now, guns in the classroom.]
The fact that comments are disabled on their video is telling that they don't want to have any sort of discussion. pushing against guns is like taking a knife away from someone who's cutting himself and saying you solved the problem.
I think the need for disabling the comments says more about how horrible the gun debate is online. The topic is a surefire way of bringing the worst folks out to comment, and a hostile environment that doesn't do anything as a result. That's not limited to any specific side on the topic.
There's a lot of research on how gun control actually works, or doesn't. I really recommend making some searches and checking out the data if you're invested in the topic, one way or another. I don't say that as a way of minimizing the issue of mental health care, but we have to be able to have multiple important conversations at the same time.
yeah I realized it's youtube and the comments will be pretty bad anyway. I've looked at data but I think I end up either looking at things that either:
A) reinforce the opinion I already hold, or
B) reinforce completely the opinion of someone who's arguing against me.
it seems like most studies now will support one side or the other, so in the end any person just ends up having to stick to the opinion they already held. Or, worse, the opinion that someone else voiced and they cling to as well.
I feel pretty strongly about the issue. I could probably talk a lot about it and sound like a nut, but in summary I think it's wrong to take away rights of the people, and in my opinion the nation and most of the world right now is having a mental health crisis which is closer to the root of the issue and the violent attacks we are seeing are just a symptom. and yes, I'm one of "those people" who at least partially blames it on phones and the internet.
Look, I hate to reach towards levels of George Carlin misanthropia here, but you don't have "rights". There's no such thing. You have temporary privileges. Believing the U.S. constitution is anything other than an informal document which can be ignored whenever your government wants is complete nonsense. Go ask the Japanese-American Prisoners of War what they think about "rights"; or take a look at the border doctrine in place at this very moment.
In fact, a liberal reading of the second amendment would give citizens the right to own personal nuclear weapons, yet, you don't have that. Thinking guns do anything to keep you safe from others or the government is a completely misguided and deluded opinion that seems to be unique to Americans for whatever reason.
why do you think this?
It is also interesting that pro-guns people seem to tend to vote Trump, who's the likeliest candidate for a government to need to rise against, by far.
that's probably the main reason such things would not work out. However even a small portion of insurgents have managed, time and time again, to give major problems to the US. see Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.
are we honestly acting like there would ever be a point where people need to take up arms for or against the government, though? because there really wouldn't be in this modern era. the notion that we need to preserve a right based on the exceptionally unlikely, bordering on impossible probability of people taking up arms for some justified reason against government tyranny or because militias are needed when that right routinely causes vastly more harm than those hypothetical probabilities will ever be worth given how either is likely to go is incredibly silly to me. realistically, your 13 AR-15s are not going to stop government drones from taking out your entire family or rounding everybody of a certain ethnicity up if the government really wants to do those things.
I think its more telling about the quality of discussion in the youtube comments
Ensuring that the person is not dead is a great big first step in helping them not killing themselves. Add to that the fact that most suicide survivors regret their attempt, it is a big part of the problem solved there. And why is it not good enough when only part of a problem is solved? Most big problems havr many parts, and you only solve them part by part. Good old divide and conquer, binary search, quicksort, slice and eat.
On guns, well, guns are killing machines. They will not defend you from ANY government. There is no reason for people to have them, unless the nature around you is very hostile. There is no reason to even hunt today.
And when it comes to rights, societies decide what are rights. There is no natural right to have and keep
gunskilling machines.what makes you think they will do nothing?
I really wonder what makes people think otherwise. Goverments have elite armed forces with the deadliest of weapons, and once you are declared a terrorist group, you have no power to anything.
I am from Turkey, where armed factions have been trying to do stuff since decades, but people mostly hear from them when they are killed. Not that I support any side of the violence, but they are ineffective. And if decades old international terrorist organisations can't do shit, bunch of American countrymen with their rifles and pistols will not be able to do anything.
This govt-goes-rogue argument is a huge strawman. Not electing assholes is the key there.
You ever see a trained military?
Where is this 50-90% of the population number coming from?
You ever see what a couple desert farmers with soviet weapons can do?
Taking away the knife should not be the only thing to do, but it's absolutely the first thing. Prolonging the farcical "debate" about guns is just a tactic to keep people distracted from interfering with profits. The idea that we can agree to driver's licenses, speed limits, vehicle registration, car insurance, etc., but not mandatory background checks and safety training for guns... it's ludicrous.
that should definitely be in place, and it kind of already is in place. Perhaps a better system would work of course. But taking away the knives from everyone to stop a few people from hurting themselves, for example, isn't the right thing to do.
Guns and knives are different things. People can hurt themselves or others, deadly, with so many things that if anything with the potential was banned, we would remain with nothing, not even pillows, and our hands and feet cuffed. So your line of argument, and similar ones that is easy to find out there in the wild, push that into one extreme, and then they themselves make an extreme simile that is invalid.
First of all, nobody's advocating anything that's potentially harmful be banned. Knives, saws, scissors, axes, etc. have many uses in everyday life. Just like cleaning substances. They are dangerous, but when handled well, they are useful tools. I'm definitely not including stuff like swords or what not that people collect. They are killing tools. Can't chop an onion with a katana. At least you don't need one. Same goes with many chemicals, cars, other vehicles, etc.
And then, the relation that this kind of argument establishes between guns and other potentially harmful everyday objects is invalid because those objects primarily serve non-violent necessities: with knives we prepare food, with cars we go places, etc. They can be used to cause harm, but then a pillow too. Whereas, a gun (or a sword or other weapon) is a tool mainly made to cause harm to some living thing. For most weapons that's the only purpose, and maybe there are some where there are tiny possibilities for other things. But yeah, a gun is a tool to cause harm. It is not necessary for any good at all.
When someone hurts themselves or someone else with these objects, like knives, scissors or pillows, it is abuse thereof. When someone uses guns and other weapons to hurt themselves or someone else, it is essentially the intended use. The line is so easy to draw, it is so simple, that it is remarkable that people fail to understand this. So remarkable that I feel for many this is a purposeful "failure" to understand things. It is almost as if pro-arms people trade actual security of people off for a false sense of security: "I'ma shoot their asses off when they come to me with tanks and choppers!" No, they'll probably get rid of you with a drone in this day and age. These things are already being used out there.
Yesterday I read the news that a kid shot dead his brother, while he was playing with his dad's---a police officer---gun. It is often that you hear these news. Kid plays with dad's gun behind his back, some unlucky person dies. Or the guy's cleaning the gun, goes off, someone's killed. Gun was handy, things escalated, someone was killed.
For me, to mentally and legally "merit" a firearm is not enough, you gotta "need" it. Even if there were rights a priori, owning killing machines is not one of them.
I see that you recognize your own potential bias elsewhere in the thread (which is admirable), so I really shouldn't be surprised... but you're still missing the forest for the trees. Has anyone seriously suggested taking guns away from everyone, or are you repeating vague fearmongering? Besides that, people aren't just hurting themselves, they're hurting others, and at a level of lethality that bears consideration because it scales way easier, faster, and higher than the hypothetical knives. Ironically, Japan's slasher incidents make for obvious comparison to US mass shootings.
Wouldn't that be a sensible thing to do?
it would be a temporary solution that at first solves the problem but doesn't address the root cause. I have many knives and don't cut myself, and taking a knife away from me, for example, would not be doing anything.
It is very jarring to us Australians. Our school kids do not practise lockdown drills. Fire drills, yes. But not lockdowns.
Different perspectives, for sure - to you "lockdown can happen for a variety of reasons" seems normal; to me, it seems as though there is either a significant and ongoing danger or (much more commonly, in my experience) a culture of fear disproportionate to the actual danger.
Yeah like those stats aren't shocking in the US, but they should be. Because those are really jarring stats for a lot of the rest of the world who don't have this problem.
I don't think these lockdown drills are good to do. They traumatize children in and of themselvecs and the chance of it, first: mattering, and second: helping a given child are so minuscule, the cost/benefit doesn't seem there. I was in high school when Columbine happened and I remember being shocked like everyone else that this terrible thing happened "over there" somewhere. But my school didn't do anything in particular about it, and I wasn't any less safe because of it.