Tim Walz has said he’s “sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers” following the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, which left four dead.
Walz, who was named as Kamala Harris’ running mate in the race for the White House in August, spoke about the Wednesday (4 September) shooting at a campaign rally at the Highmark Amphitheater in Erie, Pennsylvania on Thursday.
He told his supporters: “We believe in the freedom to send our kids to school without being shot dead in the hall.”
“The news cycle moves on within a day,” he commented of the incident, adding that kids had returned to school feeling excited and “now we have four dead”.
Germany wants to get tough on knife crime with stricter laws
shrug Definitely better than people being able to walk out of a 7/11 with a pair of 9mms, I suppose.
But at some level, this is a people problem, too. Social anxiety inflamed by fascist social media. A 24-hr news cycle that tells people they are being immiserated by evil foreigners. School bullying in buildings where you’ve got 40-60 student class sizes and teachers with barely more than a six-month certificate expected to manage the room. Rising rates of malnutrition, homelessness, and general poverty. And this endless deluge of people telling one another “The civil war is happening any day now”.
You’re going to have people freak out as a result. This is a pressure cooker of a social system and climate change is only going to make things worse. Whether its gun crime or knife crime or people just trying to bite one another in fits of rage, the volume of hate we’ve ingested combined with the commercialized scapegoating of anyone we’re told its okay not to like means… Violence. You’re going to get more violence.
How to defend yourself when attacked with a knife: https://youtu.be/kvlrnc7hlQI?si=DhxdyaCoE0qJPa7g
Yes, root causes need to be dealt with as well, but when violence does happen there’s a world of difference between how much damage someone can do with a knife vs someone with a gun.
Sure. But you can play this game with lots of things. A fertilizer bomb can do far more harm than a hand gun. A shiv is more deadly than a fist.
By all means, regulate away. But the scary thing, at it’s root, is the individual who has decided to throw their life away on some El Paso Walmart killing spree. Selling hand grades at Target won’t make anyone any safer. But it’s the media screaming about Latino Invasion and White Genocide that’s got people really worked up to begin with.
I do believe that would actively make people less safe.
2 things can be true, and we can do both things. Deal with the root to cause, while also limiting access to dangerous weapons.
Doing either seems beyond the capacity of the modern electoral system. Popular ideas are incapable of permeating a lobbyist firewall in the legislature. Meanwhile, any act of violence just gets folded into our “War on Crime” which justifies more cops and more surveillance and more media hysteria around evil foreigners.