Give kids a [world] worth living in. Everything they know is a neck and neck race to some kind of apocalypse. They see their parents struggling. They don't have any hope for the future. Every day the country becomes a worse place to live, is it any wonder people are breaking into a million pieces? Some people are under so much pressure that when they break, they shatter into jagged pieces that fly everywhere. Others crumple. Nobody breaks the same. We shouldn't be asking why people are breaking *this* way rather then *that* way. We should stop breaking people altogether.

This resonated with me. Well put.

It’s a serious case for a lot of people now. Jobs (that pay a liveable wage) are become more and more rare. A dollar 25 is barely liveable in most areas of the U.S. which is sickly considering that almost the entirety of the USA still has around $8 as a minimum wage requirement. Texas currently has $7.25 while California has around $15.50 (last I checked) and $15.50 when I lived in California wouldn’t get you eggs let alone a studio apartment. Currently I’m an advocate that all wages should bare minimum provide a studio apartment with funds still being available to actually eat comfortably without skipping meals. It’s sick that the idea of missing meals to make rent is a thing in a “1st world country.”

As somebody who has driven across the U.S. countless times and been to damn near all of it, this hits hard. I love my country, but so much of it is depressing. The amount of times I've seen drug addiction, suicide, etc. for the reasons you've stated very much leads me to believe it does nothing to help prevent violence either. I got lucky man, with my family and the places I grew up. But many don't...and the struggle is real

I know it sounds silly, but I believe beautifying places certainly plays a part in this. Kids spend their entire lives riding in cars on stroads, not playing outside, and not having bike friendly places to go. No wonder they’re fed up before they’re 14.

It's so awesome seeing 'stroad' used more often in casual conversation online. People are starting to wake up en masse to the need for a major shift in north American city / road planning and I love it!

I mean people have been complaining about how ugly parking lots are since at least the 1970 Joni Mitchell song. It's something everybody feels viscerally, people have just gone along with it because they thought it was unavoidable.

I agree. The ultrarich do nothing, while everyone else is running in their hamster wheel. The whole reason people strived to get ahead in the 20th century was because there was a real chance you could get ahead. Now we're all fighting for the scraps.

Unions were invented so the working class didn’t have to resort to murder to improve their stake in the society. Remind me again why rich capitalist business owners are AGAINST this concept???

Yep, I am one of the lucky ones that is still part of a union. The factory I work at we make $32 an hour. The other factories where they do the same job but it's non-union? More like $18 an hour. And yet people will bitch about unions like they're destroying America. It's crazy.

I support unions in companies. Capitalists will aggressively negotiate across from worker collectives. Every penny ceded to a union is fought unless the negotiation on whole is seen as a good deal bs. a strike. Unions in government organizations face no such opposition as City Managers have no skin in the game. I stand with FDR who saw no need for government employee unions.

Define realistic. Realistic as in "would work if implemented" or realistic as in "Americans would be willing to implement"?

Give an answer for both

I feel like those two ideas are completely mutually exclusive XD

Yarp After Sandy hook, when they didn't just add pretty basic laws that involved a cooling off period, a universal background check, and penalties for anyone who didn't secure a firearm and someone else used it for bad (3 simple ideas, wouldn't have even taken any guns away currently) you knew we were fucked, and good

If any demographic of victim should have gotten the federal government to actually give a shit and try to do something, it's young white children, but ten years later nothing happened. If Sandy Hook couldn't lead to any kind of reform, I don't think anything will.

> but ten years later nothing happened. Worse than nothing, unfortunately — people have been actively threatening, attacking, and harassing the parents of the victims. These parents didn't just lose their kids, they became pariahs.

One of the fathers of the children ended up committing suicide. There's no way to definitively say it was all due to the harassment that he faced; but because of shit stains like Alex Jones it was an *undeniable* factor that led to it and I can't fathom what it would have been like to go through not only losing a child in such a horrifically tragic way, but to then be continually doxxed and have accusations that your child was never even real to begin with thrown at you, all based on an entire movement of people who continually say that... I just can't even put to words how monumentally fucked that is.

Being gaslit for having your child murdered. There are monsters among us.

Holy fucking shit, I did not know how deep this all runs

It would erase any belief the human race posses any positive qualities I cannot fathom the torture those people live with

I meant specifically in terms of legislation, but you're absolutely correct here.

Background checks and medical personnel reporting to federal agencies only work when actually executed. The laws and measures that could have prevented this Christian school shooting already exist, there were failures at like 3 different levels to properly report the behavioral indicators this person was showing.

You forget that under HIPAA laws, psych records may not be shared. . *Congress has not shown any propensity to change that*. Even in this case where the shooter was actively receiving treatment. The shooter was old enough (28 years old), not a felon, not addicted to drugs, etc. and except for shading the truth a bit on the 4473 form with regards to if they had been declared mentally defective or committed to a mental institution. See question 21h here: [https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-transaction-record-over-counter-atf-form-53009/download](https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-transaction-record-over-counter-atf-form-53009/download) Which reads: "Have you ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution?" And as far as I am aware the requisite "NO" answer would have been correct.

In Connecticut, the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP) must report to the NICS Denied Persons File the name, date of birth and physical description of any person prohibited from possessing a firearm, pursuant to federal law. Connecticut requires DESPP, the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) and the state Judicial Department to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the FBI for the purpose of implementing NICS. The Commissioner of DESPP is required to verify that a person who seeks a permit to buy at retail a pistol or revolver, a permit to carry a pistol or revolver, an eligibility certificate for a pistol or revolver, a certificate of possession for an assault weapon or a long gun eligibility certificate has not been confined in a hospital for persons with psychiatric disabilities within the preceding 60 months by order of a probate court, or has not been voluntarily admitted to a hospital for persons with psychiatric disabilities within the preceding six months for care and treatment (see below for more on voluntary admissions), by inquiring with DMHAS to receive a report limited to the commitment or admission status of the person. The Privacy Rule under HIPPa is balanced to protect an individual’s privacy while allowing important law enforcement functions to continue. The Rule permits covered entities to disclose protected health information (PHI) to law enforcement officials, without the individual’s written authorization, under specific circumstances including To a law enforcement official reasonably able to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of an individual or the public (45 CFR 164.512(j)(1)(i)).

Literally none of those would have applied to Sandy Hook in any way. The shooter obtained access to weapons by killing the legitimate owner(his mother), who stored the firearms in a safe.

Sandy Hook was committed with a gun he stole from his mother - after murdering her. How would any of that have helped?

It's almost like asking america to ban sugary sodas or cigarettes. Yes, it would help the overall health of literally almost everyone. But nobody would ever let that happen.

In NYC, Bloomberg attempted to *limit* sugary sodas (not even ban) and it was pretty much the single most hated thing he did in office. The reaction was *extreme*. The limit was that they could only be served in 16oz cups, max. This didn't affect what you could buy for home use like 2L bottles. It didn't affect how many drinks you could buy. It didn't affect anything except that you couldn't get sugary drinks (actually, even fruit juices were excluded from the limit) physically served to you in a cup larger than 16oz. It didn't affect the ability to get a refill. Just basically that you couldn't walk out with a giant fucking 32oz tub of diabetes to consume on the long journey to your parking space. It was a PR disaster and repealed.

In Chicago, one politician enacted a "soda tax" of a couple cents. It eventually got repealed after backlash and when that politician ran for Mayor she lost handily.

I've written in detail on a lot of topics on Reddit over the years. I've written about Trump. I've written about the Supreme Court. I've written about trans rights, abortion access... you name it, I've probably touched on it at some point. I have never, *ever* had more shit in my inbox than one time I said that Americans' portion sizing for soft drinks was excessive. I genuinely believe that if America had to choose between the Second Amendment and the Second Amendment But Instead Of Guns It's Soda, it would be a coin-flip as to which one got to stay.

We don't have a soda fountain in the tap room that I run. Any sodas are in individual bottles, as we don't really move all that much - we're a brewery taproom after all. I'm blown away when people will come up to the bar with their empty bottle, and ask for their 'refill' which is them asking for a second one - on the house. When we inform them that's not how it works, *most* of them get pissed - then buy another half liter Coca Cola. What the actual fuck.

I thought the general understanding was unless explicitly stated or a soda fountain was accessible from the dining area that it’s a single serve unless you purchase another. Or am I just putting too much stock in the general populace

> Or am I just putting too much stock in the general populace Unfortunately, yes.

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Lmao and that's not even an opinion - you are just stating the VERY CLEAR scientific fact that our serving sizes for soft drinks are empirically horrible for you.

It sucks that people are so animalistic. One could at once enjoy sodas, as well as acknowledge how completely awful they are for health. That’s just textbook cognitive dissonance.

Parks and Rec was probably inspired by that, that’s so neat

Cigarettes is a great example though. Because half a century ago, 40% of Americans smoked. Now only about 10% smoke. It didn't happen over night, or because any single effort. It was a long, slow change from the accumulation of hundreds of little changes, mostly changing the *culture* and *perception*. I bring this up because the current American culture and perception about guns is also new. It didn't exist half a century ago. It was created slowly and purposely to increase gun sales. For the rest of American history, the idea of concealed carry was viewed as something only criminals did. The second amendment was [originally written so that the government could call up militias in order to put down rebellions,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75z37x/what_was_going_on_in_america_that_caused_the/doa494x/) not so that rebellions could overthrow the government, and not for some notion of "personal defense". This problem, like *any* important problem, cannot be solved overnight by any single change, because it wasn't created that way. It will only be solves slowly, and with lots and lots of changes.

> For the rest of American history, the idea of concealed carry was viewed as something only criminals did. Because the perception was that lawful owners practiced open carry. It wasn’t that they didn’t carry guns. It’s sort of the opposite now where open carry is looked at as more taboo than concealed carry.

A lot of people freak out if they see a gun. That changed in my lifetime. When I was a kid only detectives and outlaws kept a pistol under their jacket.

Although I do think we absolutely need better gun control, America has a deeper problem not only with its youth population, but with our overall social structure and way of living. This has not happened overnight, it’s been building up for the past 40 plus years.

You know what would actually work? Massive massive massive investment in public education, universal pre-k, and free (or extremely reduced) college. Fix class sizes, hire tons of counselors, free lunch and breakfast for everyone. Honestly, it's such an "easy" fix but by making education centers places of safety for a kid's entire upbringing would go an extremely long way to fixing the issue. Just imagine if parents could have a kid, be federally allowed to take 6+ months off to recover and begin raising them, and then be able to drop them off at a preschool that is free when they turn a certain age. Then that kid has a guaranteed area for the next 17 years or so of their lives that feeds them, educates them, and includes them in a community. It has resources for mental health (enough trained counselors to handle all the students), it has appropriate class sizes so teachers can spend more 1:1 time with them, it has no stress of being able to pay for the next meal or going hungry. You just let kids be kids and grow up without all of the unneeded stress that they have no ability to process or push back against. And then when it's time to graduate, they can choose to go to a college without jumping into massive debt that screws them over for the next 10-15 years of their lives. Our society is placing so much stress on kids well before they are capable of handling it. Then we don't even provide the resources for them to deal with it. We act like we all dealt with it when we were kids, but we really didn't. Things have been getting worse for every kid born. More debt, more opportunities to go hungry, fewer resources in the community, on top of the literal stress of potentially being shot to death at any moment (this point can't be emphasized enough, virtually no adult had this stress as a child). To put things in perspective, if you are 29 years old, then you were in kindergarten when Columbine happened. Every single person over 29 got to experience more time in grade school with out the threat of school shootings. Everyone over 29 literally doesn't understand what it is like for children these days. The moment these kids enter public schools, they are being drilled on shootings that are only ramping up every year (save for the covid years). We have an entire generation of kids who are barely able to advocate for themselves and they are being lead by generations of older people who have no clue what it's like to live in fear that you might get shot in your classroom. It's ridiculous.

I would add resources for children the moment they are born. So many parents are paying more for childcare than they do in rent. And so many mental health issues are subliminal habits we learn from our parents when we are very young. Being stressed around young children and infants has a massive effect on their mental health and how their body reacts chemically and how they deal with stress later in life. Pretty much if we can reduce the overall stress of our society it will be a true trickle-down effect which would make it better for future generations.

> So many parents are paying more for childcare than they do in rent Yup and even OP mentions 6 months paid time off after birth, but then skips the time between 6 months - 3/4 years old for preschool. What is a parent supposed to do during that time without being able to afford child care? Then once they are in school, they still need before or after school child care since the school day is shorter than most full time work days.

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Wife and I put a full budget together for kids and we need her to work but it was like a $5k difference per year between keeping kids home and her not working and sending them to daycare

Yep. Had to make that same decision. Most couples have to make that decision. I can't imagine being a single parent this day in age.

What I think is ridiculous is that a lot of people think we are spending too much money on schools. Of course we're spending a lot of money on schools -- for every neighborhood there has to be one or more schools, with the associated costs of the school building itself, administrators, cleaning/security/bus staffing, meals, and finally teachers, who are by and large quite underpaid. Many teachers around the country go to college for 4 years, then follow up with a master's degree, only to come out and make a starting salary of $40-50,000. Teachers that are more educated than most of the population, work 10+ hours per day, but are being paid as much as some genius bar associate who follow instructions from a handbook. The budget for schooling is massive, precisely because everybody needs it and it must be universally available, and almost the entire US population has made use of the school system. Nobody wants to raise their tax bill, but our society depends on us all having at least a minimum high school education, and life still becomes a lot more difficult without a college degree or trade/professional licensure. Taxes are a charity that we contribute to help our people, our United States, and our kids and our schools are a worthy cause in great need. Edit: the harsher truth is that in some areas, teachers are paid less than 30k. McDonald's workers make 30k in some states. What a travesty.

We are spending too much on schools in the wrong ways. Have you looked at the salaries that administrators and coaches get? It is ridiculous compared to the average employee. It has followed the overall trend (though not as drastic) as CEO pay.

This is why I hate it. My school would rather spend 75000 on a new track for the track team but wouldn't invest a dime into new text books or raises for the teachers. But I'm supposed to give more money to the people already mishandling it? Is giving them more money going to make them more responsible with it?

Part of it may be an issue with WHERE the money for that track came from. A lot of people think that taxes are all coming from our incomes or property, but that's just a (significant) fraction of it. A lot of taxes, particularly on the level of a town, come from other inconsistent sources, and you can't plan salaries on inconsistent taxes. Infrastructure, however, is typically a large one-time cost with occasional maintenance costs that can be covered much more easily by an inconsistent tax source. It doesn't solve the book problem, but are you really surprised that a politician or administrator would rather show off a shiny new building over a pile of new books in a library? One gets them re-elected for showing "how much they care about the community", and the other is "boring", according to the uncultured idiots who voted said politicians into office. The trick is to get both good politicians and good admins into position to utilize increased taxes, and then actual hold them accountable for doing so. It can take a few years, but it can and has been done in some areas. So no, don't give more money to the people mishandling it, and especially dont elect someone because of a letter next to their name on the ballot; get rid of them and elect people who will actually help solve the problem.

Raise my tax bill. My district is crazy well funded because of property taxes. I always vote the increases. When Covid hit every kid got sent home with a tablet/laptop and they had hotspots available for families without home internet. They also had breakfast/lunch available for pickup from day one and later delivery to hubs around the city. Feeding any child (registered for school or not) under 18 for free. I’m not sure what all my tax money goes to but I’m totally on board with it going to schools: staff, specialists, buildings, books, technology, clubs/sports, field trips, do it all!

I agree. I'm a 1st gen American who grew up under the auspices of medicaid, public school education, free school lunch program, Pell grants, state university system, federal subsidized loans, food stamps. How has that paid off? I'm in med school, and will one day be someone who has high earning potential. I don't want money coming out of my bank account, but I'm still eager to pay back into the system that has supported me to this point, so that somebody else can have the opportunity that I had. Raise my taxes.

If you truly want to make america great again, return taxes to their historical norms from the era when america already was "great again", and invest it in society. Bang on. Unfortunately, if we get anything it's going to be turning schools into fortresses because our corporate overlords won't let us dare to think about raising taxes and the only thing we know how to spend money on in this country is the military industrial complex.

Yep. It is truly remarkable that heavily taxing the wealthy (as they used to be) is not universally supported. Especially when wealth-disparity is at existential highs. An entire political party has brainwashed tens of millions of their constituents (many in poverty or struggling) that taxes for wealthy not only need to be lowered, but that we need less IRS agents and measures to make them pay even their historically-low share. Of course, the same media pundits and politicians pushing this on their constituents are insanely rich. Reasonable taxation for the wealthy and tax law could bring significant, universal positives for America that would reverberate throughout our society. Instead, it's whether Mr. Potato Head can be gender-neutral or if kitty litter is being used in schools or whatever idiotic tabloid culture war is the flavor of the week.

I feel like boomers and Gen X really don't understand that by high school, most millenials and zoomers genuinely didn't believe they had a future worth caring about. I know that's hyperbole, but at least whenever anyone talked about it, my classmates almost unanimously said something like "We're never going to make enough to have a savings and retire, most of will never work less than 60 hours a week, and even if we did somehow buy a house and get a decent job, the planet will kill all of us anyway." Even if someone wants to dismiss that and say that's just young people being bitter, we work harder and make less than the generations before us and we're shown time and time again that corporations, politicians and billionaires can fuck up our lives however they want and get away with it.

Gen X. I recall my 11th grade (boomer) social studies teacher telling us, amid lessons on nuclear annihilation, acid rain, the Nestle baby formula scandal, and apartheid, that we would be the first generation in North America to experience adulthood with a standard of living lower than our parents' generation. Unfortunately she was right, and the trend has continued.

While I admit that far too many of my generation learned the wrong lessons from their Boomer parents, Gen-X was the first to dare to suggest that the our future might be collectively fucked. We were being called out by our predecessors for being a generation of cynics (even as kids) and were the ones who popularized or invented the ideas of punk, goth, grunge, cyberpunk, dystopias, and post-apocalyptic! Fucking Boomers turned around and called us the Latch-key and Forgotten Generation then pulled up the ladder behind them and wondered why we were the first to stop giving a fuck.

I'm Gen X, born in 1972, and I get it. I struggled to buy a house, worked two jobs a lot of the time until I became disabled, and I mourn the loss of what used to be a beautiful natural world. I've been voting Democrat since 1991. I think these ageist stereotypes are propagated to divide us. Just because I'm older doesn't mean I'm oblivious to how shitty everything is.

I don't go in for the generationalism angle much but in this case, I really have to mention that my generation, GenX, lived with the constant threat of nuclear war - it was talked about all the time, and many if not most of us had the distinct idea that we might not get the chance to grow up at all.

The sad part is the country has more than enough resources for this to be a long term solution. Billions of dollars invested into military to protect a country that’s killing itself, instead of investing in the future people who will in turn make the country exponentially more money AND be healthier.

More like trillions.

A real social safety net would go a loooong way towards reducing the murder rate. A lot of the violence stems from poor teenagers and young people turning to gangs because they have a god awful education and no real opportunities. And a lot of the violence that’s not gang related is suicides, which happen less when there’s a social safety net. But let’s not kid ourselves. Getting rid of the guns is the most direct solution to gun violence.

2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides. Of the remaining 1/3rd, 90% occurs in large cities with notable poverty and gang issues. You could theoretically wipe out almost all gun violence by addressing poverty and healthcare without a single regulation on guns.

Yup. Happy people dont kill themselves or each other. It's not rocket surgery.

People don’t want to talk about that though.

If people were somewhat comfortable in their lives because they had affordable/free healthcare, affordable housing, and fair employment then it would go a long way to stabilizing our country and curtailing the violence. Removing stressors tends to make people docile. However, the people in charge don’t want that and want us as wound up and angry as possible.

Look at this guy not wanting billionaires able to buy a third mega-yacht.

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Actually giving a shit about mens mental health and upbringing. Men make up ~80% of homicide victims and 90% of homicide perpetrators. I don’t know the stat but considering many homicides are by gun then that would mean men most likely also commit the most gun violence. Unfortunately people turn the focus to reactive measures rather than proactive. Just by stopping children in underprivileged neighborhoods from joining gangs or partaking in some form of criminal activity like selling drugs would reduce a large percent of homicides and gun deaths. But yet you don’t see any big government involvement in trying to help these kids. Sad that we have this data to suggest these measures would have an impact, yet the best we have came up with is trying to ban guns which sure but that isn’t gonna work for years maybe decades. We need to act now. Edit for those who say “what about other countries that…”: No this won’t stop it all. It would reduce it though as the question asked.

>Unfortunately people turn the focus to reactive measures rather than proactive. Just by stopping children in underprivileged neighborhoods from joining gangs or partaking in some form of criminal activity like selling drugs would reduce a large percent of homicides and gun deaths. But yet you don’t see any big government involvement in trying to help these kids. Also unfortunately, it's a community-based trap. If someone is brought up in that type of neighborhood and tries to escape it by actually caring about their education and a career, they're looked at with a mentality of, "Oh, so you're better than us, huh? You're from here and don't ever forget that." It's unfortunate, the pressure from one's own surroundings

Many, if not all of the recent Mass shootings, have been committed by people who have been recognized by several different organizations as having mental issues. Had those mental issues been treated perhaps there would not have been the needless mass shooting.

Read up on one mass shooter who had pretty bad mental health issues, attempted suicide, and called a mental health center to seek help. The facility ended up not returning his call because they erroneously logged his case as a "non-crisis", and he killed 21 people the next day. There is a big part of me that wonders if he would've still done what he did if he had access to the mental services he clearly needed. We have a ton of people who need help, but not enough to go around.

When I was in crisis, I had to call them every day for 2 weeks before I finally took myself to the hospital and refused to leave without someone finding me inpatient help. I'd seriously contemplated pulling some big stunt like standing on a bridge or something just to get some fucking attention because no one was taking my crisis seriously. If I'd been inclined toward violence, the whole experience certainly could've driven me to heinous things.

I get that feeling. I remember being in a horrible mental state when I was 6-7 (bullying), up to and including making plans to set fire to my elementary school and killing multiple students/teachers before taking my own life. Nobody really took me seriously back then even when I openly expressed wanting to kill myself to my teachers and started sneaking matches into school. And like... yeah, realistically I wouldn't have been able to carry that plan out, being a dumb kid with no access to weapons, but I do know that at the core of it all I really wanted someone to take me seriously, instead of ignoring my problems or telling me to ignore the people who were bullying me. Fortunately I've grown into a huge empath and pacifist, so I don't even think about harming others anymore. Haven't for years. Unfortunately, my parents never believed in mental health care (ironic since they both work in the industry) and I've never even so much as seen a therapist all my life because they won't let me. I still don't have the money to do it myself. I obviously don't sympathize with attacking innocent people and ruining lives, but I find it baffling how people are still turning a blind eye to the very real mental health problem that tends to lead to these kind of events.

I’m sorry you had to go through that :( I feel you, I’m in Canada but had to resort to the same thing. Years and years of “hey, I’m suicidal”, no one really did anything to help until I walked my ass into the emergency room telling them I wanted to die. It’s disgusting that it had to get to that point, especially as the psych emerge experience was pretty traumatic by itself.

[Mass shootings kill less than 100 people in the US per year](https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-victims-in-the-united-states-by-fatalities-and-injuries/) while [overall gun deaths kill 30000-40000 in the US per year](https://usafacts.org/data/topics/security-safety/crime-and-justice/firearms/firearm-deaths/). Stopping all mass shootings wouldn't even move the needle on reducing overall gun violence in America, the individual gun violence problem is that much bigger, even if the news headlines don't reflect that.

Yes, but I think we can all agree it would cut down school shootings if we focused on mental health. Who tf would shoot kids? Honestly.

> it would cut down school shootings if we focused on mental health. Also, suicide.

And, in all likelihood, a large swath of non-mass homicides. A lot of homicides are crimes of passion: someone experiencing an emotional reaction extreme enough to desire the death of another. Getting these people the help they need *before* they're driven to that point would do wonders.

People with poor mental health

No, but sending your kid to school to participate in mass shooting safety drills certainly isn’t helping future mental health issues either.

When I was a kid we had nuclear bombing drills. Basically get under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye...

There's a term for these kinds of things: "panic porn". It's entirely theatrical and does basically nothing except gin up moralizing and demands for preemptive action on behalf of the motives of political manipulators.

We lined up, sitting alphabetically in the hallway by our classroom so they could identify the bodies easier.

Honest question - in a little kid’s mind, is there really any significant emotional difference between a tornado drill and an active shooter drill? I had both when I was in grade school (2000’s) and I don’t have any lasting mental health issues from it

True. I am not taking away from the fact that mental health has always been an issue, but I quoted what I quoted and spoke to that point. There are **SO** many variables that go into why someone is the way they are. We never truly know until they feel comfortable or safe enough to discuss their issues. Until then, I have zero idea as to how we can help people

Free healthcare for all citizens that includes mental health and a stronger welfare system would change the landscape so much that the US would be unrecognisable. Poverty and crime go hand in hand. If you can address poverty and in conjuction mental health it will go a veru long way to reducing crime in general as well as mass shootings

The most recent shooter was actively being treated or had recently been treated for metnal issues. Legally speaking, they would've had to lie on the ATF form 4473 (a felony already) to be eligible to buy a gun.

Technically not true. You can still seek mental health help and not be adjudicated as mentally defective.

This is why I really respect old-school rap music because they talk about (not glorify) life in the ghetto being shit. Dr Dre even rapped about why is being able to afford groceries considered "selling out"? It was all about getting out of there.

This comment lost to the great Reddit purge of June 2023. Enjoy your barren wasteland, spez. You deserve it.

“Gangsta rap” is a term that the media & record companies labelled the music as. The rappers themselves called it reality rap, cause they were talking about the things going on in their hoods that mainstream America would never see or choose to ignore.

Yeah, in the past few years I’ve noticed how within some communities there does seem to exist this culture of like I don’t know I guess disdain towards people who’re trying to do better for themselves. Maybe I shouldn’t speak of other communities, but in my experience growing up within the Mexican community, you’re kind of mocked as being too white or being a “whitewashed” Mexican for walking your dog or carrying a bag to pick up their waste. You’re mocked for desiring affection from your partner as being not manly or too gay. It’s no coincidence domestic violence and femicide is prevalent in Mexico. And it’s becoming even less of a coincidence that I’m finding more and more piles of dog crap just on the grass every day I walk my dog. I guess I never realized that being a decent human being was a “racial quality” and only white people are capable of it. There’s a lot of self-harm in the culture of Mexican communities that nobody wants to talk about.

I'll back you up on your experiences! I'm from a small Latino heavy town in South Texas. We are probably generationally apart but I had many of those same expectations. I'll add in elitism to the mix. 300 kids in school from K-12, maybe 260 family "units" total. Probably 240 Latino families. I'll let you guess which families had money. And yet, instead of helping each other it was "Don't study too hard, people are gonna say you're a nerd". "Stop crying homo, people die all the time". Just awful.

The callous lack of empathy needs to be countered and rebuked if this behaviour is to be stopped.

Yup that happened to me. My bio family is your stereotypical white trailer trash methheads. My abusive POS dad OD'd when I was in high school and I haven't seen my methhead sister in person in almost a decade. I'm the only person in my immediate family to graduate high school, have a bachelors degree, and I joined the military to get the fuck out of Oklahoma. Yet, the majority of the family hates me even though I'm not a druggie. They say that I think I'm better than them, that I don't deserve all the money that I have so I might as well give it to them for safe keeping, they especially didn't like it when I went to college, etc. The list goes on. People in poverty, in my experience, hate it when their family members try to better their lives. They believe their family members don't deserve to have good lives so fuck them for trying and succeeding. I have a cousin who got into a fight with my grandma about it cuz she's the only other sane one from my generation and she told my entire family that they are right, she is better than them and to leave her the F alone. So they kicked her out of the family and refuse to have anything to do with her. I haven't officially been kicked out of the family because I ran away at 17 and now live in a different country. I only see my family once every couple of years and they always seem to be happy for me but always give me back handed compliments for being married, not drowning in debt, etc. I never bring any of these topics up. It's like they see me for the first time in 3 years and pounce on me

*They believe their family members don't deserve to have good lives so fuck them for trying and succeeding.* I think that a major piece of this attitude is that they subconsciously realize that you and the cousin succeeding shows that they could have succeeded as well but they didn't because of their own actions. When everyone is in the same crappy situation, it's easy to blame the 'system' for keeping them down. When multiple people in the same starting situation succeed, their argument of it being the 'system' falls apart but they don't want to admit that they are the problem.

Some People of any affliction will drag you back down. I remember starting to lose weight and get healthy for the first time. I had a lot of people I considered friends get very nasty about my appearance, my habits, and pathologizing my weight loss. Not everyone. Some people, maybe even most people, are happy to see their loved ones shine. But there’s always a few that can’t stand to let another crab out of the bucket.

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This actually happened to me when I was younger and it wasn't until I was 29 years old it started to sink in that I was worth more than my surroundings. This is a very real problem that doesn't get addressed eboufh.

That's a good point w.r.t gender, some [CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html) data to add: > The suicide rate among males in 2020 was 4 times higher than the rate among females. > Firearms are the most common method used in suicides. (52.8%) To all you people who only fixate on guns in the wake of tragedy and say mental health is a "distraction" please understand how much addressing mental health could help reduce gun violence. Most gun violence is self-inflicted. If gun control will go nowhere due to politics at least we could addressing mental health.

And suicides make up about 55% of all gun deaths.

And gang violence make up another 20(ish)% last time I checked the stats.

Strangely, men do commit suicide at much higher rates than women. But women report suicidal thoughts and have statistically more attempted suicides than men. I believe that men are much more likely to attempt suicide by firearm, whereas women are more likely to pursue other means that are more survivable.

Well, that makes sense. Imagine a town where 10 times as many suicides were attempted by woman, than by men. Turns out that it was 1 woman taking a box of painkillers with wine 10 times. And 1 guy who blew his brains out with a shotgun. Woman attempt suicide more times because you only get one attempt if you succeed.

>Strangely, men do commit suicide at much higher rates than women. But women report suicidal thoughts and have statistically more attempted suicides than men. I believe that men are much more likely to attempt suicide by firearm, whereas women are more likely to pursue other means that are more survivable. There are actually numerous reasons why this appears to be the case although there is a lot more nuanced involved. - a lot of hospitals (in the US at least) consider self harm scars to be previous attempts so for example if a women came in with obviously not lethal self harm scars they'd report that she's attempted suicide multiple times. - another one that *in my opinion* should be more obvious is that given the tendency for women to use more open ended methods it makes sense they have more attempts.

Yes, this. People have had this "boys are easy to raise" mentality for a long time and it's bullshit. They're not less complex emotionally than women, we're just conditioned to neglect boys'/men's emotional health. I also think there needs to be a lot more discussion and resources for dealing with the whole Incel culture. I don't think most people realize how insidious online algorithms are for targeting kids and sending them down extremist pipelines.

People are always quick to point out how America is the only developed nation where shootings happen in these numbers, and correlate it with guns. And sure, less guns will probably equal less shootings. But is it a cause or a symptom? What's left out are the other things developed nations have that we don't that imo would make a much bigger difference: social safety nets and functioning civil governments. Healthcare, public assistance, education and early childhood resources, responsible police forces. If "guns don't kill people, people kill people", then let's figure out why our people want to kill each other so much more. It seems pretty obvious to me. If you have ever said "the problem is we need to address mental health!" and you're not voting for universal health care, you're a hypocrite. If you have ever said "it's mostly inner city gang violence" and you're not in favor of expanding public assistance and changing the way the justice system works, you're either a hypocrite or you genuinely don't give a shit about poor people. We're the wealthiest nation on earth. We have the resources to lift our sick and poor out of desperate situations. Crazy people commit murder, desperate people commit murder and those who feel they have nothing to lose commit murder. There are solutions to these problems.

because nobody cares if the poors are killing each other unless it spills into suburbia. that's why mass shootings that are less than 1% of gun deaths are made as a big deal; whereas the same number of people were shot over any given weekend. Chicago alone has had 51 (41 wounded, 10 dead) shootings this week. and before someone says "but this was children being shot". read this: https://time.com/6182856/children-gun-deaths-mass-shootings/ edit: updated chicago shootings for this week, and the week's not over yet. edit edit: updated chicago shootings for the week, final numbers. 51!

We could eliminate over half of all US gun deaths just by ending the drug war. A giant portion of the "gun violence" problem is due to inner city gang violence, which is itself merely a consequence of drug prohibition. Whenever you ban anything, you create a black market, which then becomes the financial fuel for organized crime to develop. In the same way that alcohol prohibition lead to the 1920s mobsters and tommy gun shootouts in the streets, the modern war on drugs is directly responsible for much of the gang violence we see in our cities today. Legalize all drugs and it goes away. Plus then you're solving the problem by making people more free rather than less, which is just better.   Big fan of addressing root causes rather than just slapping gun ban bandaids over the symptoms.

I think you're onto something & I very much agree with your thought process, but there's a missing piece. Drug prohibition caused a rise in gang violence but removing it will cause these groups to find other ways to make money. Demilitarizing police & getting them involved positively in the community would be the best first step to curb that. I can't find the reports but I know some recently came out about efforts in KC and Oakland were gun violence fell by more than 50% by getting police involved in religious & community activities. Cure the divide between police & the people and they'll work together to solve their common problems. You know, like how things worked decades ago before the like of Biden and Clinton went on about "super predators" followed by Bush giving surplus military gear to any PD willing to take it.

Illicit drugs are lucrative. Much more so than most other crimes, except maybe white collar. So just baldly stating that 'remove the prohibition and they will just find other crimes to commit' is assuming there are other crimes as accessible and lucrative. Crime wouldn't disappear overnight. And people engaged in that life wouldn't either. But the money would dry up, and a vast amount of the negative externalities of the drug trade would too. Put all of that drug prohibition money into addiction treatment and demilitarize the police, vastly lower the rate of incarceration, and things will get better.

teach your kids not to be nasty little fuckers/bullies, let your kids know they can talk to you at any time about anything, give them examples "hey do you feel stressed out, depressed, bullied, suicidal?" dont be scared to use adult words. teach the importance of being a good person, that every action has a consequence. edit: i have tried to reply to all comments, its getting late here now. be the change you wish to see in the world.

The school would do nothing about the bully that beat me up, I didn't fight back and was 3 day suspended 3 times. The last time my dad said next time he starts a fight to fight back and fuck that kid up. I smashed that kids face in with my backpack full of books and was given a week-long suspension. I was told by the admin that I shouldn't have fought back, I yelled at them that they didn't stop him the first 3 times so why the fuck would he have ever stopped.

This is one of the reasons a kid would go shoot the school up. Lack of mental support. Lack of school doing something. Stupid asshole kid won't stop and beats up kid over and over again.

Honestly the kid had a shitty life at home, he didn't even know who his dad was, his mom worked in the evening so she was never there so the kid was left to fend for himself and he hung out with some bad dudes.

Seems like an all too common story. The kid probably didn't see his mom but for a few minutes each day where she was probably berating him. He goes to school and projects that outward. It's definitely not an excuse, but it just shows that the school most likely failed 2 kids in your situation.

It's amazing that the conclusion in this thread is that the school failed, not the bully's parents. *Tremendous* amounts of shame needs to be poured on these dads that just bail on their kids.

The school DID fail though. They were told multiple times and chose to do fuck all about it. They failed.

My child got bullied and now he’s not allowed to take the bus… but the bully kid still sits out in front of my house (where the bus stop is) and gets to take the bus.

Unfortunately this line of thinking is seen as blaming the victims for too long. When kids who are bullied go shoot up a school, all the unfair protection of bullies gets ignored. These kids have literally said it over and over again, but god forbid we as a society do something about the high school jockocracy/gangbangers and their protectors.

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Your dad did good! did the bully stop?

Yes. He was expelled.

Most surprising reply in this entire post.

He wasn't expelled for fighting, they found marijuana in his locker.

Aaaaaand there it is. That tied the whole goddamn thing together in the most asinine yet totally believable way.

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I'm sorry that happened. Some admins just don't know how to deal with these sorts of problems. You're story seems very common (unfortunately)

The majority of bully kids I have met had at least one bully as a parent

I was bullied pretty viciously by two guys in high school. Met both of their dads through recreational baseball. They were bullying their own sons. It clicked right away why they were the way they were.

yeh its a learned behavior, as is racism/xenophobia etc...

You are forgetting a big one.. Lock your fucking guns up where your kids can't just grab them.

this is the only reply to my comment that i agree with so far. yes, this is also a great step to take!

The best way to reduce gun violence is to actually have enforcement of the current laws. People are arrested daily for illegally having firearms yet our detention system allows them to be set free. They are not buying them legally. The gangs, cartels and mobs smuggle guns in daily for criminal intentions and use. When someone breaks the law we need to punish them. The other thing is no fear of punishment again. Want to have people follow the law again go back to public execution and hanging for murder. I bet people would straighten up again. (I’m in my mid 30s and went to a school in the south. I was allowed to have my semi-auto rifle and shotgun in my truck and no one ever shot up my school of 4000+ students.) if we don’t let our law enforcement officers do their jobs and we don’t incarcerate criminals than we will never fix anything.

First we have to be honest with ourselves about where the most gun violence is occuring. And sadly, we refuse to do that. Espeically on Reddit. Reddit only likes talking about 1-5% of the gun violence, generally. Ignoring the other 99-95% of it. Source: I live in Detroit. The national news never talks about all the children that are killed on our streets weekly. You don't know there names, and you never will. But they're dead kids none-the-less. I guess they were just murdered in the wrong location, so no one cares. We lost more kids this year in one city, than you have in school shootings nationally. But you people don't really care, you just pretend to. The second inner-city gun violence gets brought up about Chicago or Detroit, you want to change the subject.

Yeah in Philly, we have over 300 murders every year and it's all handguns and gang related but no one cares about those murders nearly as much

Unfortunately those don't draw in as much attention as mass shooting headlines, less ad revenue for the media

Finally. Someone being truthfully, and not purposfuly feigning ignorance. What a breath of fresh air on Reddit.

Wasn’t the media more focused with gang violence in the 90s than now? I was born in ‘97 and raised through the early 2000s and I vaguely remember programs like DARE (obviously more drug related, but they did teach about gangs a bit). I’m curious if it has gotten worse or better since then. I never hear of gang violence unless I go out of my way to find stories about them. A lot of times they are blanketed under the mass shooting headline.

D.A.R.E was disbanded in the early 2010s as studies showed that it was causing more kids to actually want to try drugs rather than keep kids away from drugs. Show a gym full of kids how bad drugs are like shrooms makes you see weird shit and you bet some will wonder what its like and try it themselves.

They don't draw attention because they're less relatable. "300 kids are dead from gang violence." "PHEW! My kid is not in a gang, so I won't lose sleep over it." "20 kids were gunned down in a school." "Fuck, *my* kids go to school! This can happen to *my* kids!" It's not some nefarious media conspiracy. It's human nature.

And in all fairness, its not entirely unreasonable. Gang violence happens in limited areas and doesn't really effect everybody, so they don't feel endangered by it because by and large they're not. People want to do something about something they feel threatened by. When the suburban middle class white people feel threatened we get a big push for gun control, but when its black and brown people in the hood getting capped they don't give a shit, in fact we'll just straight up be racist about it.

But reddit sure as hell loves including those numbers in their gun stats, pretending like the stats reflect all the media-grabbing school shootings, not the major metro problem we actually have in huge numbers. Then Dem politicians turns it into an AW ban discussion, even though it is handguns being used in the vast majority of the stats they use. Or redditors just lump the problem into gun is involved = gun is cause. But they ignore things like suicide rates, which are similar in Japan (for example) to the US per capita.

AW Ban is just like every other stupid thing. It's an easy way to make a blanket statement that people will think is a good move and also something they know they can never pass so it makes them look good while changing nothing.

It’s because they’re mostly poor people

Everyone just wants to ban assault weapons because the TV tells them it'll allow them to go back to ignoring the real issues of a poverty stricken, role-model vacuum inner city where kids see their future as hopeless and their lives as inevitably short so they take guns to the streets

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"When a white kid shoots white kids that's a tragedy. When a black kid shoots black kids that's just Baltimore."

When I worked for schools in New Orleans, I don't think there was even one year where an elementary student from one of my schools didn't die from a hail of random bullets for being in the "wrong" place (read: playing outside in their neighborhood). We had one 7 year old die after being shot during their own birthday celebration with all their family around them, along with one other kid and a couple adults. Dad had just gotten out of jail and a couple of gang-bangers decided to shoot up the entire median in order to get their mark. Dad survived without being shot. The first time it happened, it really disturbed me-- mostly because it was accepted as "just the way things are" and was more or less brushed aside. Not because enough people didn't care, but because the cops there (and most everywhere) aren't equipped or capable enough (if even willing) to follow up on a homicide committed in any of these neighborhoods where this type of violence is commonplace. My entire life, gun violence due to gangs has been an issue in all the same major cities against the same types of citizens (the poor) and I've seen almost no improvement or even reaction to it aside from passing "hard on crime"-type laws, which have been shown over and over again to prove ineffective if not work in the opposite direction entirely. But we sure as fuck have plenty of resources to make sure crackhead dave gets his shit beaten in and sent to jail for becoming addicted to drugs while living under these conditions.

What's funny is the way people discuss mass shooting. When people discuss the number of mass shooting they'll always include gang violence. But when people discuss the perpetrators of mass shootings they'll always exclude gang violence.

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Literally got banned from the News subreddit last week for pointing this out.

Got banned from /r/news a couple days ago for saying if the shooter hit that school with political motives, it’s terrorism. This site will talk endlessly about doing good and fixing everything but it’s being instilled into people that providing uncomfortable truths is grounds to be removed from discussion. When I politely asked why I was banned, I was muted from their mod chat. No response. Permanent ban and mute. Visible post karma and anonymous moderators are an absolute nightmare for honest discussion.

I got banned from r/news a few days ago for pointing out that the study claiming guns are the number one cause of death for children included 18 and 19 year olds.

Funny how the only way you can fudge the numbers to get them to show firearms as the #1 cause of death for children is by excluding children under one year old and including adults under 20 years old and you hardly EVER see anyone questioning that. We just had a televised House Subcomittee (sp?) on the ATF overstepping their authority and democrats paraded around that blatantly false statistic repeatedly and were unchallenged.

They also list accidental death by firearms as "Gun Violence" now too lmao

Also suicide, which should be its own category.

> This site will talk endlessly about doing good and fixing everything but it’s being instilled into people that providing uncomfortable truths is grounds to be removed from discussion. Because the mods have too much unchecked power. Especially the Power Mods (the 6-8 people who control the vast majority of the main subs)

r/news is just r/politics with a different name. Almost all of the defaults on this site are shitholes.

Seriously. Look at deaths per firearm type. The biggest problem is clear, and it does not include "AR" by a huge margin.

You are 100% and it isn't even close. People fixate on AR-type firearms because they are "scary" and most people advocating for their ban know very, very little about them. Watch any news conference where some dem senator talks about what makes an "assault weapon" an assault weapon. It is comical, and nobody who knows anything about firearms can take them seriously.

>BaRrEl ShRoUds kIlL KiDs Seriously, I've had great debates and conversations that changed my mind. But that kind of discussion requires both sides to be well informed on both the statistics of the problem and firearms in general. Want to have a conversation about how people should be better trained or go through more robust background checks before carrying pistols in public? I'm here for it, let's talk. Wanna tell me how suppressors should be banned because John Wick could kill an entire building without anyone knowing? Ain't nothing useful in that conversation.

The only thing I will say on training is this. Requiring training will inevitably discriminate towards those with legitimately disposable income. That makes it a privilege, not a right. Historically, this has discriminated against low income people, because taking multiple days off is something not everyone can afford. It's like requiring an interview with the police department to get a pistol permit. An old remnant of Jim crow era gun control where your "melanin count" was very important. Background checks should be robust. The issue is the agencies which should be reporting the up to date felonies to it are doing a piss poor job.

> Reddit only likes talking about 1-5% of the gun violence Hey reader, if you think Assault Weapons are the problem, and banning them or magazines is the solution, you're the 1-5%! Handguns make up over 95% of firearm deaths. Suicides make up about half of them. Any response in this post that doesn't target one of those two facts, is useless.

it's not about data it's about feelings. mass shooting in media make people feel very bad. it's not about the actual 95% of gun violence

Young black males killing each other with handguns is the primary source of firearm murders currently. An "Assault Weapon" ban may save roughly 400 of the 30,000 firearms deaths each year. Edit: deaths -> murders.

> Young black males killing each other with handguns is the primary source of firearm deaths currently. That's actually the secondary source. The primary source is suicide.

Should have phrased it as murders. Suicides are 50% of the ~30,000 per year. So you're correct.

Shoot the guns

The only thing that can stop a bad gun with a gun is a good gun with a gun.

Just ban schools duh

Unpopular opinion: I grew up shooting competitively and hunting. I was around guns from a very young age, took hunters safety at 8 and started competing at 9. Competed until I was 18. I was also horrifically bullied. Tormented mentally, physically, emotionally for years and years. Never once did the thought to use a gun on the people who bullied me come to my mind. It’s an aggression and impulse control issue, and it will continue to get worse if politicians refuse to allow social and emotional learning to take place. Edit to add: if anyone is upvoting this because they think I am super pro gun and anti anything else… please read my comments. I agree that access to guns is part of the problem. I agree with stricter gun laws. I don’t agree with fear mongering, black and white thinking, and willful ignorance. I am only trying to point out my experiences.

For what it's worth, the "school shooters are kids who were bullied" thing turns out to not be the whole story-- Often school shooters were the bullies themselves and the public only gets the sob story of the times when victims fought back, or kids were engaging in mutual bullying where it's difficult to tell who was victimized worse. Even the poster children of school shooters, the assholes who shot up Columbine, turned out to be bullies rather than victims. [https://youtu.be/EG0PtwYJU0M](https://youtu.be/EG0PtwYJU0M) It's very much an aggression and impulse control issue, and you know who has problems with aggression and impulse control? Bullies.

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A big contributer to the political anger from the right too is the fact that gun violence stats primarily fueled by inner city gang violence are constantly being used to push new laws that will do nothing but make life harder for rural firearms enthusiasts who had nothing to do with said violence. It's unfair legislation being written by people who at best have no clue what they are talking about, or are at worst intentionally misrepresenting things. Like oh because gangbangers are using stolen glocks with already illegal auto sears to do drive bys in downtown Chicago, now we need this new arbitrary rule that'll make it harder for a hobbyist in Wyoming to put the right type of plastic foregrip on his MK18 clone. It's so fucking stupid.

> It's unfair legislation being written by people who at best have no clue what they are talking about, or are at worst intentionally misrepresenting things. And if you don’t like that you don’t like American politics! Fuck this country’s politicians, man.

> Fuck this country’s politicians, man. They don't deserve the pleasure.

I grew up around latin gang violence and biker gangs. I knew exactly which of my old classmates would end up as meth heads, gangsters, and young moms. Race really has nothing to do with it. I'm a black person raised in a black immigrant community and the black kids I knew went on to get college degrees or trade jobs. I feel like blaming black 'culture' ignores the fact that these kids you're talking about are pretty much living in a war zone. When you're born and raised in poverty and an environment where gang violence deaths are common, you're likely going to end up with a mindset of 'kill or be killed' and a resignation towards becoming the stereotype that you see *everywhere*. That's why instead of saying "Black people need to be better", we need to be actively giving *everyone* living in poverty better options.

Make the American dream attainable again. Happy successful people don’t shoot other people.

Stop the media fest involved around killers. School shooters getting publicity only breeds more psychos Murderers getting publicity should never happen. Why does the news tell us more about the people who killed rather than the people who DIED??? any social media site that gives the murderer a platform is wrong. Don't film their trial.... film their execution Bring back the death penalty for any cold blooded killer

Mass shootings (let alone school shootings) are less than 1% of gun homicides in America.

>Don't film their trial.... film their execution These school shooters don't tend to make it to trial. Bodycam is their effectively filming their "execution"

Yup. Mass shootings are just the current cultural "fad". There was an era back in the day where cults were the big publicized phenomena that happened a bunch. Jamestown, heavens gate, etc. Then there was a time when serial killers were all the rage. The bundys and dalhmers and whatever. The public was captivated by it. Now starting with colombine it's been mass shooters. Tons of news coverage and attention which leads to a self perpetuating cycle with a bunch of copycats. Eventually it'll get played out and we'll move to our next horrible fascination. The fastest way to make it stop is just to quit talking about it.

This is a weird thought I’ve had for a while, but mandatory gun safety classes in schools. I remember reading someone’s comment along those lines once, and of course all the arguments of “you’re just encouraging kids to use guns!” popped into my head. And then I realized that all those arguments are the same ones that people use against teaching comprehensive sex education in schools. We have guns in the US and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. We can at least try having a healthy gun culture instead of a toxic one.

> mandatory gun safety classes in schools Basic gun safety might help negligence. But would that reduce *violence*?

Well DARE was the best sales pitch for drugs I had ever heard. Didn’t even think about them before that.

I would argue DARE is way closer to “abstinence only” education than it is to safe sex education, with both DARE and “abstinence only” having similar results for drugs and sex respectively.

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Do you mean “reduce gun deaths” or “reduce mass shootings”? Most gun deaths are suicide, which implies the need for more mental health support, community and social involvement, and the like. There’s lots we can do there. Most of the remaining gun deaths are gang related, in many cases with straw purchased guns. Straw purchasers often aren’t prosecuted, usually because it is a sympathetic defendant (e.g., the girlfriend or grandmother of a gang member). We could start enforcing those laws. Mass shootings are tragic and shocking, but are statistically extremely rare. It’s difficult to conceive of a way to substantially reduce them. Red flag laws, maybe… It’s easy to say assault weapon bans, but that’s not an actual category. Fine, ban the AR-15. The Mini-14 still exists and shoots the same round (which isn’t especially powerful). Alright, ban all semi-automatic rifles. The Virginian Tech shooting was the deadliest, and was done with run-of-the-mill handguns. Alright, ban all firearms. There are something like 400 million in civilian hands in the U.S., owned by 45% of households. How, exactly, are those to be taken out of civilian hands? A buyback, sure. Let’s be optimistic and say 90% of those guns get turned in. Now we have 40 million remaining. And there’s the real problem. You’ve just disarmed the people who are willing to abide by the law. The 40 million left are owned by a combination of violent people, and government skeptics. And you don’t know where they are. So you have to go door to door. How many people will die as the police search for firearms across the country? Innocents will die, too, just because of the huge number of searches being conducted—mistakes happen. And that’s where I circle back to the opposite approach: armed civilians. The criminals and crazies will always be able to commit violence. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: when seconds count, the police are minutes away. We need more Elisjsha Dickens. If we could go back in time and uninvent firearms, maybe we’d be better off. But we have to live in the world that exists, and there’s no way to solve this through blanket bans.

*So you have to go door to door. How many people will die as the police search for firearms across the country?* And how many police would be willing to even enforce that law in the first place? Further, how evenly would that law be enforced? A "war on guns" would disproportionately affect marginalized groups the same way the "war on drugs" did.

This is by far the most honest and well-put post made so far. Mental health supports would create a wider net for those who fall through the (many) cracks in our society and feel the need to commit heinous acts, including (but not limited to) mass shootings. The rest is just modern politics playing out exactly as it was intended to. Guns are built in to the fabric of the United States of America. Gun-related deaths are the obvious result of that. Keep in mind that the right to bear and take up arms against the indigenous population helped fuel the expansion of the colonies, and established the US as the country it is today. Since those days, generations of Americans have inherited the belief that they have the right to "defend" their "property/land". This belief is held more closely to the heart than God, and will not change anytime soon regardless of law or lawmakers.

Non gang related mass shootings are rare. 4 this year compared to the 150 or whatever number is getting thrown around a lot. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/ The best way to reduce gun deaths is to improve our social safety net and help underserved communities. And when around 40% or more of the gun deaths depending on the age group you look at are suicide, yet are still lumped in with overall gun violence that's a bit ridiculous. Law abiding gun owners aren't the ones committing these shootings, in fact in MN, CCW holders are less likely to commit crime than police officers https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/ooc/news-releases/Pages/BCA-Releases-2022-Permit-to-Carry-Annual-Report.aspx With the rarity of mass shootings outside of one's that are gang related, and the amount of suicides that make up a large chunk of gun deaths, currently proposed gun control measures are not going to help. Addressing the poor socio economic status of Americans that leads them to gangs and a life of crime will do more than making it harder for people who aren't doing crime to buy a firearm The issue is neither party is doing much about improving our social safety net, one party wants to ban guns, the other wants to ban drag, we are getting nowhere and we are becoming increasingly divided and nothing of value gets done, and not just with gun violence The leading cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and as long as underserved communities aren't invested in, and we have no social safety net to fall back on, and with how insanely divided we are politically to where we literally hate each other over stupid opinions, Americans will keep killing each other Edit: I appreciate at all of the responses to my comment. But I'm at work and trying to respond on breaks, I will likely not be able to respond to everyone.

This is the correct answer and realistically the only approach with any chance of success. Its no wonder it has so little exposure compared to the others. >improve our social safety net and help underserved communities ***THIS*** is the difficult conversation that needs to be had. There might be strategies from the left or right about how this can be both *defined* and how strategies might be implemented, but it is absolutely the ***only*** way this problem will be fixed. We (both the right **AND** the left) are wasting time slapfighting over political talking points until this happens again. edit: happy this is gaining traction!

Social safety nets. Universal healthcare Increased funding for education (schools/teachers) Universal Pre-K Higher wages, guaranteed sick leave and vacation time A culture shift away from Rugged Individualism, toward Community Connectedness Wideley accessible public transportation End the War on Drugs Overhaul the Policing/Legal system so that it's not just a racist meat grinder for the poor

Make life worth living for everyone, help those with mental health issues and stop those fear mongering media outlets. The US doesn't have a gun violence problem that just a symptom of a way bigger and worse social issue. FYi: I live in a country with more weapons per capita (and fully automatic weapons aren't illegal here) but gun related violence is almost zero here.