It’s why media and politicians use school shootings as a cudgel and whip. It’s so awful and so terrifying and so hideous that it blots out all other considerations. Most people will do nearly anything to protect kids. Most of the “solutions” proposed are expansion to the police state - More cops, more surveillance, more repression, more control.

We know how to reduce violence targeting kids - You build community centers and third places in impoverished neighborhoods. You give kids safe places to hang out and work on homework. You set up alternative conflict resolution methods so kids can settle beefs and fights without shooting each other. You improve wages, address food deserts, make sure everyone has good healthcare. Violence is driven strongly by neoliberal austerity and the poverty it ruthlessly enforces. Politicians and media cannot address that because they’re the ones strip-mining society and pulling the copper out of the walls. A relentless focus on the most sensational and frightening acts of violence, along with sensational but ultimately meaningless gun control efforts, keeps people focused on individual problems; People who own guns, “mentally ill shooters”, whatever, instead of seeing the system problems that underlie so much of this violence.

The whole gun control narrative serves to keep people mad and distracted, focusing their anger on gun owners and republicans, while the politicians they vote for are ruthlessly enforcing the very austerity that drives the violence. It’s not the GOP driving youth violence in cities, its the democratic mayors and city councils cutting funding to every social project, gutting schools, gutting libraries, sending legions of heavily armed police in to kidnap people and destroy families and communities. And, for that matter, the most violent places in America are overwhelmingly GOP controlled second and third ring suburbs, and the vast majority of that violence is domestic or petty crime related.

Idk, the whole situation is so fucked, and people’s views of it are so frustratingly distorted. I was one of the “trenchcoat mafia” kids at my school, the mostly queer, mostly neurodiverse goth kids who were targeted for harassment and repression after Columbine because it couldn’t be admitted that the shooters were ideologically motivated Neo-Nazis who staged a massacre on Hitler’s birthday. The problem couldn’t be Nazis overrunning rural and suburban Colorado. It had to be bullying in schools, it had to be kids having access to guns, it had to be goth music and rap, it had to be something else than admitting that we were up to our tits in fascists while the neoliberals were butchering society and selling off the carcass. Idk, the whole situation is just so, so fucked. Democrats have been using it to whip votes and fundraising my whole life and all they’ve accomplished is a steady increase the ratio of gun violence to other forms of violence (though, again, violence as a whole went down steadily right up to the start the Pandemic). Meanwhile their policies are driving a spike in youth suicides that kills more kids each year than have been shot in schools since 1999.

That’s what makes me so angry. We could drastically reduce youth murders, youth suicides. But the solution isn’t turning schools in to nightmarish police state prisons, it’s reversing the neoliberal destruction of society. It’s been achieved many times on a small scale - One community center can drastically reduce youth violence in a wide area. Building a few basketball courts, having more services at a library, food security programs, real access to medical care, all these things can provable, dramatically reduce youth violence. And Democrats systematically crush these programs when they start to show results because if word got out it would effect their bottom line. It’s just fucked. I hate it so much. I’ve been watching it happen ever since I started really digging in to homicide and gun violence statistics 10-15 years ago. It just sucks. : (

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