By David Futrelle
Another horrific school shooting, this time in Santa Fe. Ten students are dead, ten more are injured. The alleged shooter, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, is in custody; another student has also been detained. So far there is no clear motive beyond a desire to kill; he recently posted a photo of a duster emblazoned with an assortment of symbols, including an Iron Cross and a hammer and sickle.
Here’s a thread to discuss this tragedy and its broader context. No trolls.
The school shootings, mall shootings, random killing sprees.
Sometimes I just want to give up.
I know it’s not the right way to think, but it’s genuinely how it makes me feel.
Time to go hug a cat or two.
EDITED TO ADD: https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/watch-trump-supporter-shows-texas-high-school-shooting-gun/
Assholes gonna asshole.
I wish I were a US citizen just so I could help vote those NRA enslaved a**holes out of office.
An iron cross and a hammer and sickle? Not a very politically sophisticated kid, I guess.
Annnnnnnnnd cue Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott pretending to give a shit about Texans and not admitting anything about all the NRA money they’ve gotten.
Don’t forget about Cornyn, Parasol. He does at least send me a response via snail mail every time I call his office, but he still basically votes right along with Cruz.
@Victorious Parasol
Fortunately there are plenty of replies of those people’s tweets that are basically “fuck off nra shill.” It’d be more fortunate if Ted Cruz was given the boot.
And then there’s the random Trumpanzee showing up with a pistol and a flag.
Why? Because he wanted to help stop the shooter??? OF FUCKING COURSE NOT! No, just to show that he could. I mean, why else do you show up with a fucking flag if not to showcase that you are an ammosexual fully willing to rub in your support for the “Second Amendment” in the face of grieving parents and children.
Fuck it, can’t say much more about him without violating comments policy.
Here, have some Alondra de la Parra owning it to de-stress:
Texas is my home. I have nothing to add to this conversation but sorrow. I’m so sad.
Oh, and now Dan Patrick has decided to open his mouth and declare that the building code needs to be adjusted. Because that’s better than any sort of gun control, in DanPatrickLand.
Makes me glad Mr. Parasol and I both voted against the current gov and lt gov.
Brain bleach
I think we need emergency Ruby:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMh8-htFRhw
Okay, I need emergency Ruby. And more baby bat burritos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uuvaos1WHTk
*sigh* Glad it’s the long weekend up here. Gonna hit up High Park this Sunday… enjoy some wildlife….
@cornychips
Yeah, same here. Sometimes I really hate it here, but it is also my home.
Apparently NRA supporters would rather ban doors than guns.
Self and usual crew here are having a few drinks, this is all so disturbing, and you wish you could ‘fix it’. The best idea we can come up with is: The entire school system needs to be looked at and revised.
They do this in work places, and manufacturing processes. Traffic and peoples’ shopping habits are also studied more.
And yet the US school system remains largely the same as it was 50, if not 100 years ago.
Why isn’t the same sort of analysis applied to educational systems? Obviously there are many things wrong here.
Logistics and urban planning factor into these things too. The One Who Studied Architecture told us: A lot of traffic congestion in “suburban areas”, developed through the 1970s, have traffic bottlenecks because it was assumed only ONE person (The Breadwinner) would be driving from the house.
We think many things need to be looked at with a new eye, so to say. And definitely including these suburban high schools. There are systemic problems with it all.
To add to my previous thoughts, which I thought might’ve been a bit vague,
I thought of shopping too, like going to the grocery store. They try to make it a pleasant experience. People study these things and adjust things.
The don’t make a store like a giant clusterfuck of 3 to 5 thousand people trying to get to a boring class that they don’t care about. (IKEA excepted).
Your “neighborhood grocery store”, as example. Even here in a dense urban area. There’s enough parking, or buses stop there, and they have cab stands, and they manage to put in a little “garden center” in a corner of the parking lot at this time of year.
And people (the workers there) are friendly and helpful. And I’m thinking of a big chain of stores here, which have local shops throughout the area.
What if US HS’s were run this way? And in fact that reminded me of something else, because self and many friends and people I’ve met through the years, who got part time jobs in HS, said that working at shops like this was likely the greatest thing to happen to them, got you out and going, and pursuing more, go to city college and like that, but also, doesn’t it come down to that you were treated like a person?
AND you got a pay check?
And it’s a sad tale when the local Jewel or Kmart treats you better than your school.
All of us here grew up in some Upscale Suburban Area, and the schools were run like prisons. And if any asshole bully was giving you shit it was too goddamned bad, they didn’t care one whit, they had paperwork to do and way too many kids to deal with.
I think the whole US educational system, especially high schools, need to be seriously looked at and completely revised.
Yeah, saw that. These idiots can’t even think far enough ahead to see how detrimental it would be to create a bottleneck in future emergencies, whether because of a fire or in another shooter scenario.
Meanwhile, conservatives are saying we should be more violent to kids (spanking) but, by the hint of anger in their voices and the narrative of their messages, it seems they want that violence directed towards kids protesting gun violence instead of the actual fucking shooters. Because “MUH 2ND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!”
Looks like the shooter is ethnically Greek. I always smile bitterly when people from groups the Nazis persecuted come out as neo-Nazi/Nazi-adjacent.
Though I think it’s a little misguided to call this kid a neo-Nazi for having an Iron Cross pin, because his pin collection also included a hammer-and-sickle (we all know how Nazis feel about communists), a Rising Sun, a Baphomet, and a Cthulhu – in other words, a bunch of stuff an edgy 17-year-old would think is cool. It just sucks this edgy 17-year-old had access to guns.
The NRA and their enablers are death-loving* Dementors.
It’s no coincidence that JK Rowling worked at Amnesty International before writing the Harry Potter series. In her capacity as a researcher, she read about torture and saw photos of the evidence of torture. These stories haunted her dreams (that is, her nightmares) and very much informed her worldview.
She took her experience at AI and turned it into art.
Warning: Her discussion of her time at AI, although brief, is tough to read.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/
*No offense to Death: When you arrive at the right time & in the right way, you rock!
…and here we go again. I’m finding myself becoming more and more desensitized to mass shootings. I know it’s wrong, but that’s the way it is for me these days.
I feel so sorry for the kids who grow up in here in the US, performing spree-shooter drills, hiding under their desks, etc.
When I was in high school, circa 1984, a local news item came out about a student who brought a gun to school. This was in the high school in the town to the east of my town. I don’t really remember any details other than thinking to myself, “What would anyone do that for?”
When my son is at school, I don’t worry about his safety. The worst that could happen (barring a disaster) is getting in the middle of a punch-up at lunch time. Because he’s my boy, he’s always in my mind, somewhere, but I’m not afraid that I might not see him at the end of the day. I can’t even imagine what that fear must feel like. I just went and hugged him, and he said “Oh – the school shooting?”
I hope you folks kick NRA butt at the polls.
@Diego Duarte,
Thanks for posting that clip. She is mesmerising, and watching the whole thing was the equivalent of taking a long, deep, cleansing breath.
I’n sure the President will fix it.
@Petal
The President left the office a while ago. We’re stuck with a SROTUS now. 🙁
SCROTUS? (So-called ruler of the United States)
@Kat
Yeah, looks like I lost that battle with auto-correct (fixed it a few times, missed that letter though).
What is fueling this current wave of young mass murderers? The 70s was the decade of the serial killer and this decade is the decade of the mass murderer. It’s so weird.
So what do you guys think will happen in the next presidential election? I don’t think Trump will win again, but is Sanders going to run again? He’s the only one I see popular enough (currently) to completely oust a Rebuplican candidate. Who will the Democrats offer up and they better start doing that soon to gain momentum long before the last summer left. Maybe this time a third party will emerge victorious.
I hope its a non-Christian woman of color. Nothing against Christianity but there are other religions that Americans are into. And then of course there are atheists and agnostics too.