Hoping to see news that the US government has finally decided to stop the economy from melting down.

I keep being disappointed…

Aren’t you supposed to be sword fighting on an office chair?

First, despite there being multiple school shootings this year, school shootings are a tiny fraction of the overall homicides in the US

Which are also often committed with guns…

which are, in turn, dwarfed by the number of suicides committed with firearms.

I’m not talking about suicide.

Second, looking at your link you provided, you see a lot of things like, “A gun was fired during a fight near a basketball game at Appoquinimink High School. No injuries were reported”, and “Bullets struck two windows of classrooms at PS 78 in the Stapleton neighborhood of Staten Island. One classroom was occupied by ten adults, but no bullets entered the classrooms” being counted as "school shootings:, which you then compare to Columbine. You are intentionally, and in bad faith, conflating entirely different things, and placing them all under the heading of, “firearms near schools”.

I did nothing of the sort. There are multiple bona fide school shootings in that list, such as the Michigan State shooting and the Covenant shooting.

It is relevant, because it has different causes, and is thus addressed differently.

That’s not a meaningful answer. Let’s have some details.

Are you willing to engage in good faith, or have you already decided that the only solution is banning firearms?

Are you willing to engage in good faith? So far, you’ve argued based on false premises (namely that school shootings are rare, and that there are no bona fide school shootings in the previously linked Wikipedia list) and evasive non-answers (namely that targeted violence at school is to be “addressed differently”, with no explanation of how). Doesn’t seem like good faith to me.

I’d start by admitting that school shootings are, despite being extremely sensationalized, also extremely rare.

There have been multiple school shootings this year alone. Your statement would have been reasonable had you made it in the wake of the Columbine shooting, but to say it today is frankly absurd.

In scare quotes, because the people that commit random acts of violence in schools—versus targeted violence–are so uncommon that it’s hard to draw definite conclusions about risk factors.

That is not relevant. Targeted violence in school isn’t tolerable either.

Almost all of them ‘leak’ information in the days or weeks prior to murders; I do think that there needs to be a way to seriously investigate things like that, but I don’t know how you could do that in a way that doesn’t infringe on other, equally fundamental rights.

Indeed, so we’re going to have to solve this problem in whichever way minimizes harmful side effects. Unfortunately, that may involve inconveniencing gun owners, but it’s better than depriving everyone of privacy and going full Minority Report.

When you get right down to it, a lot of it is an issue of culture, where people feel like violence is a reasonable way to express feelings.

Mass shootings in particular are usually committed by someone who has no intention of still being alive afterward, and they do indeed almost always end in the shooter’s death. That’s not merely a “way to express feelings”.

the UK and Australia both have combined rates of violent crime–battery, forcible rape, robbery, murder–comparable to the US, and, in the case of rape in Australia, likely rather higher.

You’re contradicting yourself. How can American culture be uniquely violent if those other countries have similar rates of violence?

The US does have a sharply higher murder rate though; our violence is more lethal.

Because we have guns.

The unfortunate truth is that you can’t have rights without someone misusing those rights to hurt other people.

Yes, and we preserve those rights despite that because the alternative is worse.

The alternative we’re discussing right now is gun control. Is that worse than the status quo? If so, why?

If people can drive, sooner or later someone is going to drive a rental van into a crowd, just because they want to kill people and that’s the way they can do it.

This equivalence is questionable for two reasons:

1. Unless I’m mistaken, that doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as shootings do.
2. Cars have a purpose other than killing. Guns don’t.

Windows is malware.

Would you happen to have some idea what to do about all the school shootings?

de-escalation with China

You’re probably not going to get your wish on that one. The Chinese government is…well, not nice, as the Uyghurs can attest. Maybe let’s let them dial back the oppression first, then make friends with them?

This guy for president 2024!

This apartment complex has a parking garage for cars, and cars are not trivial to steal.

From what I’ve heard, portable angle grinders can easily and quickly cut through any bike lock, including expensive ones.

High enough that there should be full-on riots, and yet…nothing. Depressing silence. Everyone is just lying down and allowing themselves to be robbed.

Apple and Microsoft support aren’t exactly awesome, either, unless you’re a big business with deep pockets. At least with Linux, the system is open, so if there is a way to solve my problem, someone has almost certainly found it already and added it to Arch Wiki or Stack Overflow or something.

True, I could solve that problem. I have another problem, though: I live in a small apartment, I’m not allowed to store anything on the patio, and bikes are trivial to steal, so…where would I put it? And if I ride it someplace and go inside, where will I leave the bike?

That would require me to have lots of money to invest.

Pedophiles ruin everything.

Pornography starring Scout’s mother.

I’m talking about when the government wants an excuse for shutting down public discourse. Obviously it isn’t going to prosecute itself.

Fascist shutdown of public discourse, step by step:

1. Find out where public discourse is.
2. Post child porn on an obscure corner of it.
3. Take screenshots of the posted porn.
4. Send law enforcement to seize all the things.

None, because their boards would sue my pants off for what I’d do with them.

A better question would be what I’d do with controlling ownership of three companies.

the cattle now tell themselves they don’t want to be free because their rancher told them about fictional wolves that conveniently exist everywhere past the imaginary line that serves as a fence.

The Chinese who took over Hong Kong don’t seem very fictional.

Option 2. If innocent people die, it won’t be by my hand.