Another School Shooting

[Speaker to Animals]

Fair amount of applicability to several threads lately:

As Keith Henson wrote in a famous Analog magazine essay on memes, positive beliefs can protect against negative ones. Fifty years ago, most students probably thought they’d go to hell for committing murder. But that’s hard in today’s relativist culture.

College professor Kay Haugaard, who has for years taught Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery, about a town that stones one random inhabitant to death every year, reports that students used to react with horror — but now they say who are we to judge human sacrifice if it’s part of someone’s culture? Unsurprisingly, a culture that finds it hard to condemn human sacrifice will do a poor job of convincing people that school shootings are evil and wrong.

Moral relativism -- a.k.a the degeneracy and decline of our civilization -- nets poor social and personal results.

[Fife]

Fair amount of applicability to several threads lately:

As Keith Henson wrote in a famous Analog magazine essay on memes, positive beliefs can protect against negative ones. Fifty years ago, most students probably thought they’d go to hell for committing murder. But that’s hard in today’s relativist culture.

College professor Kay Haugaard, who has for years taught Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery, about a town that stones one random inhabitant to death every year, reports that students used to react with horror — but now they say who are we to judge human sacrifice if it’s part of someone’s culture? Unsurprisingly, a culture that finds it hard to condemn human sacrifice will do a poor job of convincing people that school shootings are evil and wrong.

Moral relativism -- a.k.a the degeneracy and decline of our civilization -- nets poor social and personal results.

I clicked through to that Henson piece in Analog (from 1987), and it's worth a look. http://www.churchofvirus.org/bbs/index. ... adid=29007

[SilverEagle]

Public schools seem to keep producing school shooters.

Hadn't thought of this put so directly. +1

We should question why kids shoot up their own schools. They don't often shoot up their own churches or shopping malls, or other places they are associated with. Why is there so much anger and violence directed back at the schools.

Social pressures and bullying run wild through high school halls. Those things always existed but what has changed? Well quite a lot, the biggest thing is Social Media. Now the bullying and social pressure is 24/7, 365 days a year. Before social media the kids could escape that once the bell rang and now they can't/won't.

[Okeefenokee]

Kids who don't have jobs are using three hundred dollar phones and thousand dollar computers to browse social media only because their parents enable them.

[Speaker to Animals]

Their parents also teach them the moral relativist dung like we have seen in recent threads. They have no moral or even cultural grounding.

You teach kids that babies lives don't morally matter, you should not be surprised if they take that a step further and decide your life is equally worthless.

[Okeefenokee]

[Fife]

But, but . . . muh narrative!

There Are Fewer School Shootings Now Than During the 1990s

And when it comes to things like homicides, there is no evidence that things are getting worse. It is indeed true that things aren't like they were "when we were kids," but that's a good thing. There were far more homicides in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s than there are today. Things were even worse than that during the 1970s. In fact, the homicide rate in the US was cut in half between 1991 and 2014. And while the homicide rate has inched up over the past two years, it is nowhere near where it was "when we were kids."

. . .

Many observers will still point out that even a small number of school shootings is too many. That's true enough, but when the multi-decade trend is downward, it would hardly be honest to attempt to frame the current situation as a "crisis." Indeed the challenge should be to discover what factors have led to the decline in violence, and act accordingly. Given that gun ownership has greatly increased in recent decades, it may be that the answer lies somewhere beyond a simple government prohibition on guns.

More guns . . . [fill in the blank].

[Okeefenokee]

We've been saying that for a while.

[BjornP]

https://indystar.com/story/news/crime/2 ... 644379002/

A Noblesville West Middle School science teacher is being hailed as a hero after students and parents say he intervened as a student opened fire in his classroom Friday morning.

Jason Seaman, a seventh-grade science teacher and football coach, was shot several times after Noblesville police say a boy in his class asked to be excused and returned with two handguns, shooting Seaman and a 13-year-old girl.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

But, but . . . muh narrative!

There Are Fewer School Shootings Now Than During the 1990s

And when it comes to things like homicides, there is no evidence that things are getting worse. It is indeed true that things aren't like they were "when we were kids," but that's a good thing. There were far more homicides in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s than there are today. Things were even worse than that during the 1970s. In fact, the homicide rate in the US was cut in half between 1991 and 2014. And while the homicide rate has inched up over the past two years, it is nowhere near where it was "when we were kids."

. . .

Many observers will still point out that even a small number of school shootings is too many. That's true enough, but when the multi-decade trend is downward, it would hardly be honest to attempt to frame the current situation as a "crisis." Indeed the challenge should be to discover what factors have led to the decline in violence, and act accordingly. Given that gun ownership has greatly increased in recent decades, it may be that the answer lies somewhere beyond a simple government prohibition on guns.

More guns . . . [fill in the blank].

Huh. Looks like it started going down a little after the '94 assault weapons ban.