@hightor,
hightor wrote:
The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing
Quote:...
What works to prevent school shootings
Gun violence experts say simple things like locked doors can make a difference. Authorities say that likely saved many lives last month in Minneapolis. But a locked door doesn't necessarily prevent a shooting.
Researchers say investing in school communities that promote a culture of emotional support and trust, as well as robust mental health services, are key to preventing gun violence, as most school shooters are current or former students and are suicidal.
Jillian Peterson, who leads the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University, has interviewed people who planned a school shooting, but didn't carry it out. She said there are often two key reasons they change their minds: The first is that they had trouble accessing a firearm – which is why, she says, safe storage laws are crucial.
The other is that someone helped a young person find hope while they were in crisis.
"We're spending billions of dollars that could be going to mental health or counselors, all the stuff that we know creates inclusion," Peterson says.
Still, she says, she understands the allure of an impenetrable school.
"I think it preys on people's worst fears," she says. "How do you say no to something if you're telling me it might save my kid's life? Of course I want that thing."
She said trying to buy safety feels very American, just like school shootings.
npr
{added
red is mine, for emphasis}
Have you ever noticed that a lot of bridges have razor wire around the areas where it's easiest to climb up? This is to prevent desperate people from jumping and committing suicide. It's called
means restriction.
By making it just a little bit more difficult to climb up and kill themselves, means restriction prevents suicide. How small is the amount of difficulty thrown into the equation? It may take longer to climb. Or a person might go home (or to a hardware store) to buy wire cutters. Or they might not relish the thought of ripping their clothes (or their skin) on the wire—which includes people who tried anyway, and realized it was painful and inconvenient.
Never mind that hitting the water at the kind of velocity you'd kick up from the top of, say, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in NY would be like hitting cement. But I'll take it, if it keeps someone alive for another day. A day when they might start to get the help that they need, or at least something positive in their life happens, and they postpone their chosen day to die. The more postponements, the better for them, yes?
This is all well and good for people choosing jumping off a bridge as their means of ending their lives. But according to the CDC, firearms are used in over half of all suicides. See:
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
Note: the most recent data is from 2023. That page also says that men are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than women. The race with the second-highest incidence of suicide was non-Hispanic whites (although the CDC cautions that sometimes the data they're pulling from plays fast and loose with who's considered to be Hispanic, or not.
Then there's the NIH data, see:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9712777/
They say {I added the line breaks to make the numbers more readable}:
Quote:In all age groups,
55% of men and 30% of women used firearms;
28% of men and 29% of women hanging/suffocation;
9% of men and 32% of women poisoning, and
8% of men and 9% of women “other” methods.
Men age < 45 had higher likelihood of firearm and/or hanging/suffocation use than those age 45–64. Women age<45 also had higher likelihood of hanging/suffocation than those age 45–64.
That article also says {again, I added the
red}:
Quote:The findings call for the following suicide prevention strategies: (1) restricted access to firearms; (2) improved access to mental health/substance use treatment; (3) improved long-term and palliative care services for those (mostly older adults) with physical health problems; (4) financial/housing support policies to mitigate economic hardship; and (5) more research to identify effective strategies to curtail the increasing use of firearm and hanging/suffocation among young and middle-aged adults.
So, why not use means restriction on firearms as a means of lowering the number of successful suicide attempts? Frame it not as a rights issue, but as a way to keep people from offing themselves. And since the demographics of people who use firearms as their means of self-destruction tend to skew male and non-Hispanic (both white and Native American), doesn't that play right into MAGA's concern over the very Nazi-era "Great Replacement Theory" where white people are being 'replaced' by people of color?
Add such a strategy to their own push to get white folks to have more kids (good luck with that one; kids are expensive!), and the MAGA crowd
might just get behind this, at least to the extent of keeping their precious white dudes alive long enough to add to the population.
And don't they also want their precious white children to stay alive to shore up their numbers?
Then quit being insane about gun fetishes and require background checks to weed out violent felons and the mentally ill and use—oh, look, it's those magic words again—means restriction on them.
Meet MAGA where they mentally are, and convince them that it was their idea all along....