Vocal Voices

Yes, the plan, from a Taser manufacturer, is to have drones in schools ready to take down the shooters.

It is bonkers.

Once the shooter is in the school he or she is going to start shooting long before the drone can be armed, released and on its way. And, anyway, the shooters don't care. So, stop them getting in in the first place, but then you get other problems.

The shooter is now locked out and on the street. This leads to shopping mall, nightclub, cinema and entertainment district massacres. of which there have been many. So, stop them getting guns.

And therein lies the BIG problem because the Yanks like their guns and will not give them up. In the US there are more registered guns than people, and nobody knows how many unregistered ones there are - ex WW1 and 2, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.

Yes, that drone idea is about as bonkers as anything I've heard.

The biggest worry to my mind is the large number of Americans who genuinely believe that the only way to deal with shooters in schools is to arm the teachers.

Yes, that is a whole new can of worms.

TheOstrich wrote:The biggest worry to my mind is the large number of Americans who genuinely believe that the only way to deal with shooters in schools is to arm the teachers.

Well if the teachers were the most stable people in the world, then it would have some merit. After all this is America, not the UK. Police go armed in more countries in the world than countries where the police go unarmed. The concept is that you arm the protectors and teachers are, in that mindset, the protectors.

The big problem with the US and weapons is that they grew up as an armed society. The country was simply too large and too dangerous with wild animals and natives to be unarmed. This led to several situations where universal weapons ownership allowed militia to defend the US which led directly to the second amendment of the constitution to ensure the right to bear arms.

Therefore their view of the situation is entirely different to ours. We can shake our heads and say that they're completely insane, but, to them, the situation is radically different and they don't expect "old Europeans" to understand. We lost our right to bear arms when the Romans came. That is a very long time ago.

There was a situation down in Miami that criminals were being blown away because they attacked armed people with concealed carry permits. All very legal, one violent criminal dead, one potential victim alive. So the solution the local authorities decided on was to rescind all concealed carry permits form general citizens and force them to wear their weapons openly.

A lot more criminals alive and a lot more general citizens dead because the criminals knew what they had to do.

Yes, I know, the whole situation is entirely insane. But you might consider this. The ratio of murders by knife in the UK is directly proportional to the ratio of murders by gun in the US. the same is true of UK guns to US knife murders.

So before we get all complacent it is worth having a long hard look at our own society before pointing fingers. Yes guns allow much more mayhem in one go and a lot of madmen seem to think that schools are a soft target which will do the most damage. But we are far from being a model society without weapon related murder.

As for drones? I'd say the tech is impossibly immature and cannot be relied on. So, yes, barking.

The drone idea is completely loopy.
The US is as Suff says, an armed society. 400 million guns are in circulation. You'll never get that amount of toothpaste back in the tube no matter how hard you try, or how often Joe Biden and Obama say that all you need for home defence is a shotgun.
The big question is, why have our societies become so casually violent, so different from what they were?
Firearms have existed for centuries, school massacres are a very recent trend.
The UK gives itself too much credit for pretending that we are more civilised than the US. Look at the knife murders in London and think what the situation would be like if we allowed anyone to buy a pistol. In five minutes flat the teenage gangs in London would be shooting each other dead in droves.
That's not a civilised society. Denying firearms to citizens is an admission that they can't be trusted with them, that we are in fact not very civilised at all.
A gun is an inanimate piece of metal. Stick it in a cupboard and it isn't suddenly going to jump out one day and mug you.
It's the proliferation of evilly inclined people that is the problem.

cromwell wrote:A gun is an inanimate piece of metal. Stick it in a cupboard and it isn't suddenly going to jump out one day and mug you.
It's the proliferation of evilly inclined people that is the problem.

I've said this for years. "Knife Crime" is not about a knife jumping out and stabbing you to death. It is a criminal using a tool to attack you. It doesn't matter if it is a knife, a gun or a broken bottle. For some people hands and fists are lethal. You cannot "blame the weapon" for these atrocities.

There is the issue in the US that semiautomatic weapons allow murderers to kill more people. But if they think that getting rid of the guns will stop this kind of violence then they are deluding themselves. Torching a classroom on the 3rd floor of a building then standing outside the door with a knife is going to kill a hell of a lot more people. Ditto creating and using gas based chemical weapons. 7/7 on the tube showed the effectiveness of simple chemical bombs.

The issue is a society in which some people think they have the right to murder others and even the right to survive it and then be treated as "innocent" until proven guilty and then to be protected from everyone else in their life in Prison.

In my world impalement would be a soft option for those who go into schools and murder children.