Bear Bussjaeger on all the things that didn’t happen.
A sampling:
You want to blame someone for the Parkland dead? Try the school adminstrators and police who looked away. Don’t blame me or the other fifty-five to one-hundred-twenty million who did not do it, and who have proposed solutions.
Solutions that do not involve assuming the innocent are guilty, and criminals will obey laws.
Solutions that do not violate rights.
Solutions that would work.
Solutions that do not involve:
The way to solve people being irresponsible is to punish the responsible, works every time.
Solutions that do not violate rights.End state schools all education should be private
Solutions that would work.End any and all laws about the possession and carrying of a weapon
Solutions that do not involve:attempting to control people, it never works
Looking at the situation from outside (I’m Canadian) this blame game is nonsense. The first step to salving any problem is look at the root causes. Today’s children are too shielded from reality, much more so than when I was a kid. Hell the kids today can’t even go outside and play anymore without some do-gooder calling the authorities about child neglect. Friends with kids over in Germany think this is nothing short of ridiculous.
Add to the hampering of child development, an education system where children are not permitted to fail lest the parents fly into an outrage leading to possible court issues. A whole class partakes in a sporting event where everybody gets some sort of award for just participating. How is that supposed to teach a child about dealing with failure? Then there are the parents who misread Dr Spock and refuse to correct bad behavior.
Take all the above, add what passes for media entertainment and you get kids going off the rails. If you think I’m wrong compare how many mass shooting by school children took place in the fifties and sixties then ask yourself what changed.
As for blaming the gun, it was a tool nothing more or less. Without access to one, the instrument would have been a stolen truck, large machete, home made pipe bomb etc. Blaming the tool has always been a cop-out.
The FBI got multiple warnings about Nikolas Cruz planning a school shooting. First one was last September from a YouTuber. But one came just a month ago from someone who knew Cruz, knew he had guns, and knew he wanted to shoot up a school.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/fbi-nikolas-cruz-shooting.html
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/15/lie-see-something-say-something/
Seems like everyone has rights these days-no one has responsibilities.
I am anything but an FBI apologist, but blaming them for this is not going to help, and blaming them perpetrates the notion that the federal government is here to nanny us. A local shooting, perpetrated by a local citizen with no foreign nexus is the purview of local police, not the feds. The FBI failure was in not notifying the county sheriff, not in taking no further action themselves.
This crime, no matter how horrendous, does not justify yet another insult to the Constitution. Each time the federal government takes over functions that should be state or local hastens the day when we have a truely national government instead of the federal one our Constitution provides. It won’t take much after that to eliminate the other provisions and protections afforded by that system.
I’m going to agree with Mike and Bud.
Mike’s post – This participation award thing is so ridiculous already that it can only get worse. Pretty soon even the kids showing up to watch the team play will be lettering in that sport. You’ll be able to letter in 3 sports without ever getting off your marshmallow butt. Kids need to be taught to deal with being disappointed, with being defeated, and with life handing them a bag of turds and calling it candy.
Bud’s post – We should never ‘insult’ the Constitution because of the actions of anyone or any group. Liberty in America is for all, and we cannot preserve it by whittling at it to eliminate a criminal, or a threat. But people are now so irresponsible that they think anything that offends their comfort is a crime, and as long as it’s someone else’s rights diminished, they don’t care about the Constitution. Maybe when its their turn, they will. IMO, we need a legal equivalent to ‘stop whining and suck it up’. If we start at the fed level, it’ll force people use state’s rights, eh?
As to the FBI and “whittling,” you guys have great points.
BUT given that two people passed serious information about Cruz to the FBI (and given that the FBI does have some claim to jurisdiction when a potential killer announces his intentions online), what about the FBI’s responsibility if not to act on its own, then to pass credible information about a school-shooting threat to local authorities?
I’ve never been much impressed with the “prior warnings given to, but ignored by our masters” line of thought. Speech is speech. I do not want the guys with guns checking up on us–no matter what we say. And I mean that a direct threat is still only speech, words. Forcible defense, legitimately, comes ONLY after a harmful action has been taken. In a culture where this was understood, perhaps an inquiry as to whether ANY words take one beyond the pale could be useful, but we are not that culture. I’m just fine with our masters ignoring what we say. Them investigating our words just moves us more intensely into Minority Report times. Let ’em find a few car thieves, dammit.
No, I don’t entirely agree with that last. Some speech is actionable, most especially direct threats. If somebody threatens me you can be sure I won’t shrug and placidly wait to be murdered in my sleep. I’m not convinced cops do more good than harm but if they must exist this seems like the sort of thing we’d want them to look into.
Look: The occasional rant is very likely to be just blowing off steam. But a steady iteration of threats goes beyond that. Note the number of times that the cops had already had to deal with this creature. Add in the psychiatric involvement, as well.
This kid was a candidate for a rubber room well before the murders.
” Speech is speech. I do not want the guys with guns checking up on us–no matter what we say. And I mean that a direct threat is still only speech, words.”
Can’t agree. A threat — particularly a specific threat that the speaker is capable of carrying out — is actionable. The degree of action is arguable. If someone says, “I’m going to murder firstdouglas” or “I’m going to blow up firstdouglas’ car” I think you’d want some sort of action taken. By somebody. Before the speaker actually shows up at your house — surprise! — with a knife or a bomb.
That’s particularly true if you’ve contracted with a protective service and they knew about the threats but did nothing.
OTOH, if someone says, “I wish firstdouglas would drop dead” that’s clearly not a threat and therefore not actionable.
The remark this week’s murderer made on YouTube saying he was going to “be a school shooter” may not have been a direct threat, but it was very likely a cry for help from a troubled kid, and should have been actionable in that sense. Preferably by adults close to him.
It also seems the kid may have told his plans, or at least intimated them, to someone who knew him and knew that he was armed and capable of carrying out the deed. That “speech” was much more actionable. For our supposed “protectors” to have totally ignored it was inexcusable.
Or do you really believe everybody should have just ignored the kid until he showed up on campus?
The root of the issue may be the toxic stew created by the schools themselves. As long as immature teens are dragooned/shamed/and brow-beat into attending these pods of concentrated immaturity, there will be an undercurrent of lord-of-the-flies mentality, which will drive some to become depressed and anxious, which will prompt well meaning teachers/parents/administrators/and doctors to take away their pain with helpful meds….that make some of them act out their frustration and rage. I’ve watched teens in my own life go down that road in the past couple of decades, thankfully without shooting up the school.
The therapist that worked with some of these kids told me “there’s nothing wrong with the kids. There is something wrong with the schools…but I can’t change the schools so I try to change the kids.”
Can I trust that readers here might be generally comfortable with the idea of establishing ownership of land through homesteading? And if so, I’ll hope that it won’t be a stretch to imagine that local property boundaries might be determined by other means than congressional edit. Rules agreeable to inhabitants of the plains–how much, for what uses, so on–might differ significantly from the property rules which evolve in more mountainous territory, just for example.
I’m suggesting that similarly, what becomes seen as actionable speech might vary noticeably across times and cultures. But in the present day U.S., I hardly see the point of opening a conversation about what is and isn’t actionable (aside from here) so long as almost everyone is as comfortable as they are with initiating the use of force to accomplish their social aims.
Essentially, I’ll know a threat when I hear it. And if I haven’t dealt with the threat in the moment, and if I had the readers here as my nearby friends, I expect that I would be informing them ..as I-we sorted out what action if any should follow. But I am not wishing to see costumed, badged, armed (but mindless) enforcers sitting in judgment on anyone’s mental health. And I rather fear that this is exactly where these incidents are taking us.
Perhaps the behavior reported in the present instance made some response an obvious imperative. I don’t follow those details as closely as I once did, and I much, much less believe what we’re told about these things anymore anyway. But for the moment I am satisfied to acknowledge that in our present sorry culture no authority exists but our own which is qualified to sit in judgment on the speech of others.
And all of this kind of skirts the real issue, I think. What would anyone here suggest as examples of speech which called for defensive response, and what actions might you take?
I think the NRA are asleep at the wheel. Eventually the sheer number of anti gunners will force changes on everyone. The same old same old isn’t working.
What could possibly be a way into the future would be an organization which is independent of the government that administers firearms training and licensing and screening? This guy never should have had those guns. But then what do you do about gun control in the age of 3d printing where any teenager with basic computer skills can build one in the basement?
A threat is actionable. But the incompetence of the Federal Blockers of Investigations goes beyond mere idiocy, or even blatantly political election-rigging “insurance”.
Am I the only one asking the question about “see something, say something” that goes something like —
“Why would anyone who’s been paying attention want to give the Deep State a pointer to their next patsy?”