The latest school massacres

[Griff]

The root cause of these events isn't guns. It is a lack of empathy. Empathy developed by having real connections with people. A friend was telling me today about something the teaching staff of the school she used to work at started doing after Columbine. Every Fall they would put every kid in the schools name on a 3x5 card on a wall. The teachers would put a check mark by every kids name that they felt they had a relationship with. They took away all the names of kids with a connection to staff and focused on the remaining kids the rest of the year slowly trying to build emotional connections with every one of them. This was a huge multi-year effort, but I think much more useful than pointing fingers left or right.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Griff

The root cause of these events isn't guns. It is a lack of empathy. Empathy developed by having real connections with people.

So suddenly we no longer have sufficient empathy? Nonsense. Empathy did not change. We now openly encourage everyone to use violent tools.

The study is indeed intriguing. But it does not address what has changed. We know throughout history, more guns means increases in violent deaths. We know people today suddenly 'need' to defend themselves where it was not so necessary BEFORE propaganda promoted that need and fear (ie 1950, 1960s).

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by DanaC

But having a gun and having a fucking vagina are not the same thing.

I agree, however to me they're equally as dangerous.

Originally Posted by DanaC

To stay fully armed against the highly unlikely and wholly hypothetical possibility of the government going to war against its own people seems kind of bizarre to me.

Yeah those are nut cases. They are small but vocal, I put them in the same drawer with second coming zealots.

[eta] I suspect a lot of that is down to a different history. Not least the history of law enforcement. The reason we only have specialist units of police that are armed, with the majority of police unarmed is something that comes from the way in which law enforcement developed here during the early days of police forces.

Our history is much different, in that large swaths of the country had no police, or just a US Marshall who covered thousands of square miles, self defense was a necessity. We also have a history of hunting, first for subsistence, then mostly for sport but still tradition. (A friend in north Jersey sent me a picture of a Bobcat in her yard, today.)

...for the same reason we have, for most of the early modern and modern periods, had relatively small standing armies except in times of war. Because standing armies swore their loyalty to the monarch, we have always tended to have quite a large 'militia' component to our land forces.

I wonder about that since we've moved from citizen solders to professionals. Where is their allegiance?

Originally Posted by Griff

The root cause of these events isn't guns. It is a lack of empathy. Empathy developed by having real connections with people. A friend was telling me today about something the teaching staff of the school she used to work at started doing after Columbine. Every Fall they would put every kid in the schools name on a 3x5 card on a wall. The teachers would put a check mark by every kids name that they felt they had a relationship with. They took away all the names of kids with a connection to staff and focused on the remaining kids the rest of the year slowly trying to build emotional connections with every one of them. This was a huge multi-year effort, but I think much more useful than pointing fingers left or right.

I think that's big step to better results. Reminds me of this teacher.