Wisconsin school district says active shooter 'neutralized' outside middle school, lockdown ordered

Wilshire@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 168 points –
Wisconsin school district says active shooter 'neutralized' outside middle school, lockdown ordered
apnews.com
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“Not here,” she said in disbelief. “You hear about this everywhere else but not here.”

Translation: When this was happening to other people's children, it was fine. It's not supposed to happen to mine.

That's quite uncharitable. We don't know anything about the woman, much less that she thought school shootings elsewhere were "fine".

It's pretty normal for people to mentally compartmentalize these types of shocking incidents as "things that happen in other places" rather than their own local community.

No kidding. There's no need to be so judgemental of that woman over such a short quote. People react to all sorts of events this way. Tornados, fires, kidnappings, etc.

This. And you don't even necessarily realize you're doing it, because I'm pretty sure it's a coping mechanism in the face of how awful school shootings and mass shootings are - if it could happen in your community, you'd probably be a little bit more fearful just living your life.

I'm from Orlando. I've been to Pulse a few times, but I'd moved to Minnesota before the shooting. A friend of mine was supposed to go that night, but one of her friends was running late so the whole group decided to reschedule. I wasn't close to anyone who died. But events like these feel different when it's your community, when it's places you've been, rather than just another horrifying tragedy playing out on the news.

Considering how rare school shootings are, they are damn near always "not here." Doesn't mean they can't be there and that you shouldn't take steps to prevent them, just that they are unlikely even if you do nothing.

My niece described to her grandmother (my mother) the stress of school-shooting-drills. That she even had to do that is horrible. The change over the last twenty years should make everyone sick. If it doesn't, I don't know what the fuck is wrong with people, but it's awful. That's what I meant to represent with my comment.

Absolutely. Active shooter drills are a focus on litigation instead of prevention. Prevention would mean stopping bullying and also providing proper mental health services. The anti bullying campaigns that have been popular over the last couple of decades are little more than for show. Many zero tolerance policies conflict with anti bullying and ends up punishing the one being bullied. Mental health issues are just pushed off onto the parents who often do not have the resources to help or are a major source for the issues in the first place. Combine those with easy access to guns and you have high rates of school shootings. Treating those causes will do a hell of a lot more and have benefits outside of simply avoiding shootings than jusy doing active shooter drills. Active shooter drills treat a symptom that is very unlikely to occur rather than treating the cause which cures a lot of symptoms in the end.

The jailing of parents who provide access to guns is perhaps the only bright spot I see. We're otherwise failing so hard.

We can afford to solve these problems. We just decided not to ever since Reagan and probably before.

Rare...?

In the grand scheme of things, yes. Despite the number one cause of death for children being gunshots, school shootings only make up a very small amount of those. There are a fuckton of schools and the probability that your local school having a shooting is pretty damn small.

Don't get me wrong, there are way more than there should be and certainly more than damn near any other country per capita but that does not mean they are common. We should still work to prevent them though because what is needed to prevent them has many other benefits.

The United States leads globally in school shootings, with 288 incidents from 2009 to 2018

Over the same time period, Mexico suffered the second highest number of school shooting incidents with a total of 6.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-shootings-by-country

So, the USA had 48x more incidents than Mexico, the country with the second highest.

Hum, gee, I wonder what modern data looks like...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/971473/number-k-12-school-shootings-us/

America number one bay-bee!

It's like a fatal car accident. You know it happens, but almost always in the news about another place.

Yes, they shouldn't happen but they are very rare. The majority of them that are called shootings aren't like Columbine, they're usually gang or beefs between drug deals and just shit people acting like shit around a school.

Or maybe it means she had heard about that elsewhere, but not where she lived. Why do you feel the need to make her seem like a villain in some way? She's just a poor a woman who was fearing for her child's life.