US Politics: Let's Arm All the Teachers! 30 Pieces of Silver to Shoot a Student!

[DanteGabriel]

6 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

45 and the NRA telling us all we can do is arm teachers is a failure of the utmost.  It means that they can't see any way that mass shootings can be stopped before they happen, only reacted to when they happen and by arming teachers they are acknowledging that the shootings will continue.  fail, fail, fail

But gun manufacturers will still make record profits, so win win win. There's a ghoulish chutzpah in Dana Loesch (whom we shouldn't assume is a vampire just because she feeds on the blood of children) calling out the media for the ratings they get from school shootings, when school shootings also typically lead to a spike in gun sales because the credulous, afraid-of-everything, tinydicked NRA believers rush out to stockpile before the librul gubmint can take the guns away.

[Lany Freelove Cassandra]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Don't take this the wrong way Lany, but this is actually the worst person to arm in a school IMO. Kids, especially at that age, like to make substitute teachers' lives hell, and it's pretty easy to see one snapping after the 20th kid hit him or her with a spitball, for example. 

 I meant I had the qualifications Trump listed, and then was describing the realities of 7th grade, for a regular teacher.

Trust me, I totally know what you mean though. Even being a permanent sub, it was insane.  I was the 4th teacher that year for 7th grade Art class, and on day 1 I had a student say they ran off the first 3 teachers and they would run me off too (this was the class of mostly AP kids, they were my worse behaved kids). I told them they were a bunch of punks and I wasn't going anywhere. that held off total chaos for 3 days. I would have been happy with a strong yard stick  

 

eta: I never feel totally comfortable saying was a "teacher" since the school system never counted me as one, but yeah, I was one.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

@Ormond

Quote

The same way religious organizations pay for the venue for any religious worship service -- they count on the voluntary donations they get covering it, but they don't sell tickets or require payment at the entrance any more than is done for any other worship service.

If something is billed as a "concert" by Christian music groups, you'd get tickets sold. But I can imagine an evangelist requiring payment at the door for an event described as a worship service or "crusade."

It's not always that straight forward. Lot's of places have annual dues, and they can get pricey. My temple growing up required a $5,000 due per person, and then there were additional fees for Sunday and Wednesday. My cousins' temple was even more expensive, probably because they were conservative and we were reform. My high school sweetheart came from a religious family, and their church required them to pay about half of that per person plus Sunday donation trays. Some churches require you to tithe, which for those who don't know. means paying 10% of your salary to the church. I believe it's mandatory in the Mormon faith. You're right to say that some churches rely on voluntary donations, but a lot of them don't and they require that you pay to pray. 

[Trebla]

So about that whole "Only a good guy with a gun can stop and bad guy with a gun" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/us/nikolas-cruz-florida-shooting.html

 

Quote

 

 The only armed security guard on campus during a deadly mass shooting at a Florida high school last week “never went in” to a building to try to take down the shooting suspect, Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County said at a news conference on Thursday.

Scot Peterson, a sheriff’s deputy, resigned on Thursday after Mr. Israel placed him under an internal affairs investigation for failing to meet the standards of the sheriff’s office. Two other deputies, Edward Eason and Guntis Treijs, have been placed on restricted duty while the department investigates whether they could or should have done more to stop the shooter.

Police protocol requires confronting shooting suspects as quickly as possible. Mr. Peterson should have “went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer,” Sheriff Israel said at a news conference in in Fort Lauderdale.

 

But of course teachers will be trained to be Rambo. 

[Darth Richard II]

4 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I fon’t know about you guys, but I went through grade school, high school, university and law school. I had some great teachers in those years, quite a few ok teachers, some shitty teachers, and a couple of nut cases. Friends of mine had teachers they out and out called sociopaths.

When I was young we traded stories about the strange and cruel ways teachers punished young children. When I was in university we traded stories about the fucking asshole things professors did to students.

Now, imagine those teachers with guns.

 

I was thinking about that yesterday. There were definitely I few teachers I would not even want to have a dull knife, let a lone a fucking gun.

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, S John said:

 

Again, maybe I'm misreading the situation but I feel like this suggestion of turning our schools into fortresses with armed guards isn't playing well.  It's too obviously comfortable for R's and the NRA to be worth a damn.  I think the public is ready for them to give some ground on this by banning some shit, we'll see if they can tap dance their way out of it, but I can see this hurting them at the polls.  

Hasn't the bump stock ban basically been held in reserve by the NRA and its political lackeys so that it can be passed, by the people who like guns, as a way to say, "See, we do take meaningful action to protect people"? Passing the bump stock ban should be just enough to shut the gun control people up (or at least mute their voices) for several years

 

[Ormond]

It is certainly wonderful that the students from the Stoneman Douglas High School are being so visible and vocal after their tragedy.

But I haven't seen any discussion yet that points out how this is related to class. Parkland, Florida is a wealthy area. The Wikipedia page on it says:

Quote

According to a 2008 estimate, the median income for a household in the city was $277,072, and the estimated median house value was $973,176.

I always thought of Littleton, Colorado, where the Columbine shooting was, as also being a wealthy suburb, but the Wikipedia page on Littleton says its median home value is $269,000 -- way less than Parkland's.

The median family income of a student at Virginia Tech, by the way, is $142,800.

It's sad, but it seems to me that it took such an incident to happen in an "upper upper middle class" place for it to cause such a reaction. The students from Parkland are able to do what they're doing because they are on average a rather privileged group, more so than anywhere else such a tragedy has taken place. They have resources and knowledge to get things done that are much greater than those of average public high school students. 

[Martell Spy]

46 minutes ago, Trebla said:

So about that whole "Only a good guy with a gun can stop and bad guy with a gun" https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/us/nikolas-cruz-florida-shooting.html

 

But of course teachers will be trained to be Rambo. 

*facepalm*

[Jace, Extat]

4 minutes ago, Ormond said:

It's sad, but it seems to me that it took such an incident to happen in an "upper upper middle class" place for it to cause such a reaction.

I thought that was a given.

I think the next generation is across the board pretty much able to communicate  more or less at the level of these kids (they do go to a REAL NICE school), but this absolutely resonates so much with privileged white people because it happened in a privileged 'white' area.

6 hours ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

@Pony Queen Jace As always, we Germans have already invented the word you're looking for. Hereabouts, they're called "Flintenweib" (pl. Flintenweiber; literal translation: flint lock wife; more modern translation: rifle bitch). You're welcome

You Germans are the most wonderful and wicked people. Could I ask you a few political/ideological questions that I'm having a hard time finding answers to?

All love, of course. I'm just curious.

5 hours ago, Gertrude said:

I watched La Pierre’s speech and I am now dumber for having done so. Such a pile of absolute shit.

I was quite annoyed that I left work about when he started, then got home and had to mute the word vomit upon getting home. Jace likes to have John Berman ready to go when I start my AM routine.

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

 

I only took one German class in college, but I found it hilarious how new terms could be created. German is a really fun language. 

 

I think their longest word (help me out, @theguyfromtheVale ) refers to a cruise ship captain? I was told that like fifteen years ago.

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Don't take this the wrong way Lany, but this is actually the worst person to arm in a school IMO. Kids, especially at that age, like to make substitute teachers' lives hell, and it's pretty easy to see one snapping after the 20th kid hit him or her with a spitball, for example. 

Jim Jefferies was right. Whenever a sub came in my school we wanted to make her cry. It wasn't personal, we just had some shit to work through.

And that was in the days of NetZero. LONG before internet trolls were a thing.

59 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

@Ormond

It's not always that straight forward. Lot's of places have annual dues, and they can get pricey. My temple growing up required a $5,000 due per person, and then there were additional fees for Sunday and Wednesday. My cousins' temple was even more expensive, probably because they were conservative and we were reform. My high school sweetheart came from a religious family, and their church required them to pay about half of that per person plus Sunday donation trays. Some churches require you to tithe, which for those who don't know. means paying 10% of your salary to the church. I believe it's mandatory in the Mormon faith. You're right to say that some churches rely on voluntary donations, but a lot of them don't and they require that you pay to pray. 

Is homeboy a Jew?

Nothing like a nice clip job!

[Yukle]

Why stop at training teachers with guns? Give them all rocket launchers. And equip all of the corridors with flamethrowers, so baddies can't get in.

Better yet - replace the concrete foundations under schools with landmines with a red button on the principal's desk. If a shooting spree begins then they just push the button and the school blows up and the problem is solved.

[The Anti-Targ]

So Jeff Bezos is now worth $124Bn.

I vote that people get to keep the first $1billon they make. But after that they have to put everything in a "public trust" where the assets and the accumulating profits get used for public good. These trusts would not be govt owned, but they would be governed by a set of codes of practice which prescribe the use of these trusts, such as education, environmental protection, health services, health research, and other things that serve the public good. The boards of these trusts can be the very people who put their wealth into them, so they still have a say in how these assets are used.

Sure, there are billionaires who are doing this sort of thing. But their personal wealth remains outrageously huge, and not all of them are doing it.

[Gertrude]

I remember in middle school one of my teachers brought a hunting rifle to school to clean at this desk while we were studying once. He mocked pointing it at me when I wouldn’t be quiet. I wasn’t alarmed, just annoyed. (Early 80s). My mom was in the high school rifle club and shot live rounds (early 60s).

I was thinking those things are obviously relics of the past, but lol - nope. That asshole teacher I had would be the type who would want to be armed. He was decent overall, but he was a hard ass and liked ‘scaring’ kids. I once saw him lift a girl and her entire desk to pin her up against the wall for chatting in class. She wasn’t hurt, just really fucking startled. That was his MO. To his credit, he was a good teacher and generally had good relationships with his students, but he also had some legit anger issues. Heard years after that he was close to getting fired a few times for pushing the line between discipline and abuse (abuse is probably too strong a word, but I think you get it). I don’t know if I would have felt safe if he had been armed for my protection, you know?

[Gertrude]

Just now, The Anti-Targ said:

I voye that people get to keep the first $1billon they make. But after that they have to put everything in a "public trust" 

But, but ... then how would they know who has the biggest dick? 

[Sivin]

12 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

So Jeff Bezos is now worth $124Bn.

I vote that people get to keep the first $1billon they make. But after that they have to put everything in a "public trust" where the assets and the accumulating profits get used for public good. These trusts would not be govt owned, but they would be governed by a set of codes of practice which prescribe the use of these trusts, such as education, environmental protection, health services, health research, and other things that serve the public good. The boards of these trusts can be the very people who put their wealth into them, so they still have a say in how these assets are used.

Sure, there are billionaires who are doing this sort of thing. But their personal wealth remains outrageously huge, and not all of them are doing it.

Yeah, but then their first amendment right to buy politicians will be hampered by a socialist restriction of Free Spends Speech and I'm never going to get behind that because I'm not a poor white person. I just haven't won the lottery yet. And no, stupid! I don't spend my money on lottery tickets, either! 

I don't want to sound like a liberal optimist here, but if in about six years or so Democrats were to implement an actual (watered down, of course) weapons ban then it wouldn't be beyond belief that actual human considerations could be interpreted into our laws.

Personally, I would run my campaign on making the sending of junk mail a criminal offense. COPPA seems like a good model from which to determine fines. 

[Lany Freelove Cassandra]

42 minutes ago, Gertrude said:

I remember in middle school one of my teachers brought a hunting rifle to school to clean at this desk while we were studying once. He mocked pointing it at me when I wouldn’t be quiet. I wasn’t alarmed, just annoyed. (Early 80s). My mom was in the high school rifle club and shot live rounds (early 60s).

We had a rifle range in the basement of our school, a safe with the rifles JROTC used to qualify and we made up the school rifle team. And this was the early 80's. (but hey, it was Idaho  )

Our range got closed down my senior year due to poor ventilation, so we were forced to join the NRA (memberships paid for by the army) so we could shoot at a private range. 

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Gertrude said:

But, but ... then how would they know who has the biggest dick? 

If they started measuring their dicks by how many poor kids they educated through to high school graduation I'd be OK with that. As long as they didn't show their dicks to those kids as a condition of them getting the education (which I think would have to be part of the code of practice that they didn't do it, because apparently powerful men like to show their dick to people).

[OldGimletEye]

On 2/22/2018 at 0:31 PM, Rorshach said:

I don’t often read economics. I can understand some of it, but it takes much effort and time, something I don’t have normally.

Today, I found this linked on my facebook wall. 

As I am more or less economically illiterate, what do the resident economist (yes, I’m bestowing this title on you. Deal with it) @OldGimletEye have to say about it?

I constantly make jokes about the Republican Party being the "Party of Business". It's been over 30 years since the so called Reagan revolution, and the deal was supposed to be, that if you'd let conservatives bust up your unions and destroy the safety net, and cut taxes for the wealthy, then you'd so growth that was so good you wouldn't mind.

But that has failed and the promised "business friendly pro growth" policies of the conservative movement hasn't amounted too much and regular workers have gotten a raw deal in the process. The era of Franklin Roosevelt from his taking office in 1933 to about 1979 was a better deal for most workers.

And from the way Republicans and conservative talk about their own economic prowess you'd think they were on the pro bowl team of economic growth, but using their own rhetoric as the standard, they are more like a some guys ridin' the bench on the local JV team. In fact, during the 20th  Century Democratic Presidents have proven to be better at producing growth than their Republican counter parts while improving the income gains for people at the bottom. There is a paper out there by Blinder and Watson that discusses this. Democratic candidates should talk about the Democratic record more.

Of course, I'd be remiss, If I did not mention, that even though, Republicans haven't proven to be better at producing growth, simply framing everything in terms of growth, to some extent, kind of gives conservatives a bit of an advantage when having economic disputes. Because ultimately what we are concerned here with is human welfare. And it doesn't necessarily follow that better growth, makes people better off. I mean you can have a lot of growth, but if the gains are mostly going to the top, while the pie shrinks for those at the bottom, then arguably, more equitable, but slower growth might be more welfare improving.

For over thirty years Republicans have relied on some myths about what went down in the 1980s. According to them, the recovery was due to the Reagen tax cuts. Pure nonsense. I have discussed this before, but everything that went down in the early 1980s was due to monetary policy. When Paul Volcker tightened monetary policy a recession occurred. When he eased up on it, a recovery occurred. But conservatives have sold the whole affair, and got many people to believe it was due to tax cuts.

Of course Republicans always talk about supply side policies. I have two points here. One is being Keynesian sort of person I believe that managing the demand side is important and that demand side policies are extremely important for restoring full employment. And in fact, most recessions are due to demand side problems, as theorized by Keynes and shown by others like Blanchard and others. And of course with hysteresis effects, demand side problems can become supply side problems. Over the last 10 years the Republican Party and conservative have shown themselves to simply incompetent when dealing with demand side failures. Says Law is bullshit. And Walrasian market clearing is bullshit, and needs to be regulated as a historical curiosity in the appendix of advanced Micro Economic textbooks, rather than taking up a central place in general equilibrium theory. Like Keynes, who was a Marshallian, I think we need work on models of Marshallian GE theory, but I suppose I'm getting too far off topic here.

Anyway,

The second point here is liberals or center lefties I think should emphasize their own version of supply side polices, which among other things promotes education  and jobs for regular people, and wise infrastructure investments. And growing wealth inequality could have very bad supply side effects if it means means under investing in human capital for most people. And then I think there is a political economy angle as growing wealth inequality can breed both mistrust and makes it easier for the wealthy to engage in rent seeking behavior, which can harm growth. I haven't read the IMF paper in detail, yet, but it would seem that these perhaps are some of the reasons why "trickle down" have bad supply side effects.

And finally I'll add, that this also ties into something I have complained about before, which is the low natural rate of interest, which is dangerous because it makes ZLB episodes more likely. If there was less wealth inequality, then the FED policies rate would be higher, meaning it would have more room to maneuver during recessions. Now this might not be particularly a problem in a sane world where we had sane macroeconomic policy making ie using fiscal stimulus and aggressive monetary policy measures to push us out of ZLB situations. But, right now we have one party, the Republican Party, that is just bat shit crazy insane and so getting a rational response is unlikely. And accordingly, it would probably be best if the policy rate were higher, given political realities at this time.

[karaddin]

2 hours ago, Pony Queen Jace said:

I thought that was a given.

I think the next generation is across the board pretty much able to communicate  more or less at the level of these kids (they do go to a REAL NICE school), but this absolutely resonates so much with privileged white people because it happened in a privileged 'white' area.

 

I think the biggest thing that affluence grants kids in situations like this is the belief in themselves that what they have to say is actually important and will be listened to. It's a healthy thing when not taken to unreasonable levels of entitlement and it gives these kids such a leg up over others who are just as capable, but whose experiences have taught them not to bother because they'll just be ignored.

And both these beliefs are then borne out in reality - poor kids would be ignored much more than these kids are. It doesn't detract from them personally, or in what they are saying, at all - its just a commentary on class.

[Jace, Extat]

Just now, karaddin said:

I think the biggest thing that affluence grants kids in situations like this is the belief in themselves that what they have to say is actually important and will be listened to. It's a healthy thing when not taken to unreasonable levels of entitlement and it gives these kids such a leg up over others who are just as capable, but whose experiences have taught them not to bother because they'll just be ignored.

And both these beliefs are then borne out in reality - poor kids would be ignored much more than these kids are. It doesn't detract from them personally, or in what they are saying, at all - its just a commentary on class.

Exactly. Personally, there's no difference to me if it's a bunch of kids with the awesome Odell Beckham Jr. haircut (Michael B Jordan in the new Black Panther movie has one I think) who were saying the same thing. But it does matter to a lot of people. We don't need to take potshots at those people yet, but there's nothing wrong with pointing it out.

[Fragile Bird]

The things a person learns when reading stories about the events in Florida.

Did you know there is a car fatality death belt in the US, in the Deep South and the Great Plains that correlates with gun fatalities and states that refused to expand Medicaid? From a Paul Krugman op-ed in the NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/guns-nasty-brutish-trump.html?action=click&contentCollection=Media&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

Quote

Yet traffic deaths could and should have fallen a lot more. We know this because, as my colleague David Leonhardt points out, traffic deaths have fallen much more in other advanced countries, which have used evidence-based policies like lower speed limits and tightened standards for drunken driving to improve their outcomes. Think the French are crazy drivers? Well, they used to be — but now they’re significantly safer in their cars than we are.

Oh, and there’s a lot of variation in car safety among states within the U.S., just as there’s a lot of variation in gun violence. America has a “car death belt” in the Deep South and the Great Plains; it corresponds quite closely to the firearms death belt defined by age-adjusted gun death rates. It also corresponds pretty closely to the Trump vote — and also to the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, gratuitously denying health care to millions of their citizens.

US Politics takes many strange twists and turns.