Tim Walz has said he’s “sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers” following the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, which left four dead.
Walz, who was named as Kamala Harris’ running mate in the race for the White House in August, spoke about the Wednesday (4 September) shooting at a campaign rally at the Highmark Amphitheater in Erie, Pennsylvania on Thursday.
He told his supporters: “We believe in the freedom to send our kids to school without being shot dead in the hall.”
“The news cycle moves on within a day,” he commented of the incident, adding that kids had returned to school feeling excited and “now we have four dead”.
I used to be lukewarm on the issue of gun control, ya know… “Yes, it’s a tragedy… but, we’ve got a second amendment, just increase security in schools or something.”
But… eventually it got to the point where I realized I felt nothing hearing about the dead kids and the constant shootings. I was just completely numb to it, and that’s when I realized “Oh shit…”
When I found that the death of children wasn’t something that even made me flinch anymore, I realized… That even if we have to destroy every gun in the West, something has to be done.
“They’ll just use knives”
And when you can kill as many people with a knife in as short of a time as an AR-15, that’s when I’ll give a shit about knives.
PS: I totally call it the Assault Rifle 15. I know it’s the “Arma Rite 15” or whatever, but it pisses conservatives off when I get it wrong intentionally.
I’m torn on this issue. I want the sort of gun control that you’re describing, but I really don’t know if it would be constitutional, and defying the constitution is a slippery slope that could cause more harm than even gun violence. The problem in my view is the second amendment itself - it’s vague, outdated, and in desperate need of clarification. The fact that it deals with possession of technology but hasn’t been updated in 250 years is insane.
I’m with anyone calling for gun control, but we really ought to be demanding constitutional revision to address this issue.
Knives are easier to defend. That’s why the gun was made. If it didn’t make warfare cheaper and quicker, they would have stayed with knives and swords.
It’s really fun to call it an “assault weapon”. That pops them off to an astonishing degree.
we’ve got a second amendment
Which very clearly states itself as being relevant to citizen militias, and somehow says nothing about a fundamental right to murder children in large numbers.
One thing that really made it hit for me was when Australia had a mass knifing so bad the fucking pope commented on it and the numbers felt low for it to be such a tragedy of violence. It felt like it wouldn’t hit the state level news in America with a gun.
There is literally no way to do less… Than hopes and prayers
It is a total abdication of responsibility for fixing a problem
Look how far you’ve let this charade go, republicans… You know you have quiet moments where you are fully aware that you’re just trapped in this irrational hate machine. This is literally a child named after a gun shooting other children to death. And you still just sit there, hiding in your full cowardice and not admitting outwardly that you chose the wrong path. You’re a fucking disgrace.
We now go live to the official reaction of the American Fascist Party:
That’s a real good image. Bravo to the artist
mtg seems to be really lovin this part. Are we sure she’s not like 3% demon from hell?
Wow, come on, who would really think that?
3% is far too low.
This shooting in particular shows major society-level failures. The parents were victims of the opiate crisis. Society failed to treat that problem at an appropriate level when it first cropped up and they failed to claw back the profits pharmaceutical companies made off creating addicts. We failed to fund school mental health services that could have helped a child who everyone knew was struggling. Society failed to recognize and address the domestic violence situation, failed to intervene when the child was being raised by addicts, and failed to remove guns from such a volatile situation. There are so many levels on which any significant intervention could have prevented this chain of events.
This kid was already reported for threatening a school school shooting last year and the investigation stopped after they asked him if he did that and he said no. It’s a fucking joke.
If they did literally ANYTHING after that it would have Infringed on his Second Amendment Rights! Your ONLY allowed to take someone’s Guns away AFTER they’ve killed people! Or they’re
NigBlack!Or they’re Black!
Hey, you can’t just take away Black people’s guns like that! You shoot them for having a gun, because you “feared for your safety” because they were exercising their Second Amendment Rights!
He should have been institutionalized. I’m of the opinion that if you’re too dangerous to possess a gun, you’re too dangerous to be loose in society.
Exactly, people with serious problems need to be off of the streets.
Why do all the law-abiding sane people have to give away their rights when we already have ways to remove dangerous people from society.
This is the real takeaway. The Republicans want to do nothing, and the dems want a quick fix in gun control. Neither addresses the root of the problem. The world as a whole needs to invest more in social services, education, and public health. It should be where the majority of money goes really.
One would think it would be a bipartisan idea that a kid with two parents who are addicts should receive some sort of government intervention.
We don’t have bipartisan ideas anymore. Both sides run on hate for their opponent. So they can’t be seen as working with them.
Not really. One side runs on hate. The other side is willing to cross the aisle but won’t compromise to the extreme level the other side demands. Look at the border bill. It was a fair bipartisan compromise, but it wasn’t far enough for the right.
Most democrats run on not being trump. I consider that running on hate. But I could understand if others don’t. As for the border bill… they only floated that because 1… they were pretty sure the Republicans wouldn’t want to give them a win. And 2… they were trying to woo conservative voters to vote for Biden. It was a win win stunt that they wouldn’t have done if the election wasn’t close.
You do realize there is a difference between hating Trump because he’s a fraudulent criminal and hating everyone who isn’t a white Christian, right?
You do realize there is a similarity between “hating Trump because he’s a fraudulent criminal and hating everyone who isn’t a white Christian” right? It’s hate. And more importantly it is a way to rally people to your side without having to promise to accomplish anything that would move the country forward.
I’ve heard plenty of arguments from Dems for mental health care at various levels. Those things need to be funded, and who do you think keeps trying to defund government agencies and services for social/mental health issues? Usually not the Dems. The Dems have plenty of faults, including their lack of spines (in at least some cases), but the lack of funding for social services is not usually one of them.
They talk about it sometimes. But never do anything. And more importantly, it doesn’t even make Americans top ten. I don’t have much faith in politicians doing anything about it until it is in the top 5. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642887/inflation-immigration-rank-among-top-issue-concerns.aspx
What about these ones?
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/838/text
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/46/text
- https://www.bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/3/bennet-wyden-introduce-bill-to-increase-access-to-mental-and-behavioral-health-care-for-kids-seniors-and-low-income-americans
- https://mn.gov/governor/newsroom/press-releases/?id=1055-529893
This took 2 minutes of Googling, and I know that many bills have been proposed at the State level in many different states (including the last link, signed into law by Tim Walz), largely championed by Dems.
I’m sorry, I consider “introducing” a bill nothing more than talk. And I should have specified at the federal level. State level dems and even Republicans do sometimes accomplish things for the greater good.
Yes. We need full societal fixes. But gun control is part of that.
14 year olds have no business having unsupervised access to weapons. We need better storage laws. We need better red flag laws, national licensing laws so that everyone with a gun has to take a basic safety course, and we need universal background checks where ALL branches of law enforcement share info with each other.
Start there and you will significantly cut gun violence while we spin up the mental health infrastructure to deal with the rest. Which is going to take time. And money. Neither of which the current government wants to spend.
While I think all of those laws make good sense. I don’t think they will actually reduce gun violence much. Most of them people will just ignore like they do the advice to store guns better. The law will only punish people after the fact. And everyone else will always think that it will never happen to them.
And the system fails to protect people with straight up restraining orders against others. It won’t be able to do much with all the other things you mention. So focusing on those, and of course never achieving them, is just the carrot on a stick the dems use to get the voters out. If they weren’t a political focus they would actually have a better chance of happening.
On the other hand some of those “quick fixes” are actually modernizing our gun laws to be like other countries that allow gun ownership. We should put all the work in but calling Universal Background Check and Red Flag quick fixes is like calling a highway lane expansion a quick fix. Yes we need a bus system, but the 2 lane road built in the 1950’s isn’t cutting it anymore either way.
I agree they should still be done. I just want some progress on the root of the problem.
I don’t want to argue against mental health services, i think mental health services could be helpful. However, i do want to point something out here: saying this is a mental health problem really doesn’t make sense. You know a group that has mental health problems? Women. You know who else? Black people. You know who barely do any mass shootings? Either of those groups. We’re not (just) talking mental health issues, we’re talking about people who view “shooting up a school” as an appropriate way to resolve their social grievances. You can help that with mental health services, you can take their power away by blocking easy access to guns, but that’s a pretty big component here as well.
The expression of mental health problems varies widely based on the cause. Societal and cultural pressures are vastly different for different groups. Men in general are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than women for example. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer major depression.hormones also impact the expression of mental illness. Men experiencing depression are more likely to exhibit irritability, sudden anger, increased loss of control, risk-taking, and aggression. Men are also more likely to feel social pressure to deal with their problems alone and are more likely to turn to drugs or alcohol.
I don’t know if anyone needed a harmless (slightly dark) laugh on the subject, but I recently played an indie PnC game called “3 Minutes to Midnight” with a joke around this. You open a wall medical kit, and there are sheets of paper inside, which read “Thoughts and prayers”.
no better indicator that prayer doesn’t work then the fact that there’s a new school shooting almost every day after republicans do a new thoughts and prayers.
I don’t think they believe it works.
I think they just believe that shootings are bound to happen, because why else would they be happening on such a regular basis?
It’s the constant deflection of responsibility, from our choices as a society, to some indeterminate outside force.
Poverty and increasing cost of living? It’s all those darn immigrants.
Your job not paying you enough? Must be overseas industry.
They don’t think their prayers will prevent a school shooting, they just don’t think there’s other options to prevent it that will actually work without “taking away their freedom” (-to own a gun that’s more likely to harm them than protect them)
It’s just so evil, do they think we are dumb and can’t just look up how other countries with better gun control are doing? What do they say when they are asked about that?
do they think we are dumb and can’t just look up how other countries with better gun control are doing?
They think we are lazy and won’t do that. And they’re largely right.
Survivor bias. Republicans think “thoughts and prayers” are protecting their own kids. They don’t give a shit about other kids they don’t know.
No see, if we have bible studies in school, that would turn all the bad students good because teenagers are known for being very receptive to religion. Just ask Reddit!
(I’m being sarcastic as fuck)
somebody pray for this man.
/s for the fellow tone deaf people out there.
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Whoa buddy, too soon. Now is not the time to talk policy. Trans kids are playing soccer.
It’s those damned books fault. Better ban them all to be safe
I have an idea… shoots books
Problem solved.
In the meantime, Trump is shrieking to his MAGA idiots about the completely fake “danger” of letting your kids go to school and returning home with a sex change operation
I have relatives that I shit you not fear this and believe it is 100% real. It’s so extremely fucking stupid
I had a ER doctor tell me about litter boxes in schools last week. She was dead serious.
Any sane parent would worry about their kid getting killed a lot more than about them suddenly transitioning to another gender even if both of those were real things that actually happen.
“Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?”
My family’s local religious leader fortunately took my parents aside one day to ask them exactly that. It was the start of a major turn around in my relationship with them, and I’ll never not be grateful that he did that.
A true man of God.
God, if only that’s how it worked when I was a kid.
I was totally that guy who was “just kidding” and “just thinking aloud” about what it’d be like to be a girl… but… like “Not really, cause I’m totally a straight dude. I just wanna grab my own tiddies.”
Now I’m a woman, and I just grabbed my own tiddies for fun.
Enjoy those
headhard earned tiddies!Ps: sorry, auto correct wants to end my life
this is certainly either one of the more fascinating typos, or one of the weirder things i’m not picking up on.
anyway, head titties is an interesting implication.
See: little Nicky
easy: strict gun control. look at Europe.
Germany wants to get tough on knife crime with stricter laws
shrug Definitely better than people being able to walk out of a 7/11 with a pair of 9mms, I suppose.
But at some level, this is a people problem, too. Social anxiety inflamed by fascist social media. A 24-hr news cycle that tells people they are being immiserated by evil foreigners. School bullying in buildings where you’ve got 40-60 student class sizes and teachers with barely more than a six-month certificate expected to manage the room. Rising rates of malnutrition, homelessness, and general poverty. And this endless deluge of people telling one another “The civil war is happening any day now”.
You’re going to have people freak out as a result. This is a pressure cooker of a social system and climate change is only going to make things worse. Whether its gun crime or knife crime or people just trying to bite one another in fits of rage, the volume of hate we’ve ingested combined with the commercialized scapegoating of anyone we’re told its okay not to like means… Violence. You’re going to get more violence.
Europe also has things like universal healthcare and much less of an opioid crisis and whatnot. Without those, this wouldn’t have been prevented – the kid would’ve just used a knife or explosives or something instead.
i agree with specific point you’re making about the cause of shootings being lack of healthcare access in the US. You are also correct in my opinion that all three things are necessary for a healthy society. I think you might be missing your own point here with a typical assumption i see thrown out by the media, that asking for one of those 3 things precludes our ability to have the others. In other words, that we can’t advocate equally for all 3 at the same time!
The idea that it is impossible for the US govt to work on these things in tandem over DECADES (these issues are DECADES in the making) is pervasive, effective, and inhibits progress on any. So why does it persist?
Somehow while we know we should have them all, we are convinced to argue we cannot have one without the other first. Should not ask for one without the other more important issue first.
The thing i’m trying to say is, yes we can. The government is (yaknow, hypothetically) able to tackle multiple issues at once and anyone who gets tricked into arguing which one we should pick allows the big G to have an excuse for not working on ANY of them.
As you say, without all three the problems will not cease, they’ll just change shape. All the more reason to advocate for each, always, until they’re tackled, one by one.
Sadly that won’t happen because Americans are special - and I say ‘special’ in that Midwestern-US, ‘bless their heart’ way
The US government tries to pass (or enforce) any meaningful gun legislation, a third of the country stamps their feet and tells ‘NO!’ and the gov’t backs down. Rinse & repeat
Americans love prosecuting people, making new crimes is how we keep our prisons full. I fully expect a “reasonable lockup” law for gun crimes committed with unsecured firearms would play well.
You would think. But no. The line drawn by conservatives is to have no regulation at all.
shiiiii it doesnt even get to us s’more like 2/3 of the country asks for (x) regulation, the govt starts making noises about regulating (x), a bunch of political ads come out to convince public (x) regulation is bad, contributions come from the (x) companies to the politicians regulating (x), business (x) is added to the commitee deciding rules for (x), regulation is watered down or outright defeated.
at almost no point in the process is the public will treated as anything other than a problem to solve.
America has a gun culture though. While Europe doesn’t. In plenty of European countries you can get a gun license if you are willing to go trough the process and fill in the paperwork. It’s not super hard. Yet almost no one owns or wants a gun in those countries. And if they have one it’s usually a hunting rifle and not weapons for personal protection or target practice. If the US had the same gun rules as in Europe the demand for guns wouldn’t drop. Americans would still want a gun.
i was talking about serious restrictions and in-depth background check for everyone. nothing about gun culture. you can survive a little paperwork and a few months wait for a lethal tool.
Walz’s response to this is in very stark contrast to his rival Vance here. Vance gave a shockingly tone-deaf, “It’s a fact of life” response that spits in the face of the victims and their families. It shows a fundamental lack of empathy that borders on cruelty (which might be the point).
Thots 'n Pears can only go so far, in this case not far at all.
Feels like that bulletproof glass is infringing on my 2nd Amendment Rights.
People are tired of thoughts and prayers for school bombings too Timmy
Are those happening weekly as well?
Hell, I’m all in favour of restricting access to bombs, can we restrict access to guns to match?
They happen daily.
I think everyone sick of being in this time loop of the same result happening over and over. Action is the only solution.
But the action is “ban guns” and the American populace does not want that.
Majority in U.S. Continues to Favor Stricter Gun Laws - Gallup.com
- Fifty-six percent of U.S. adults say gun laws should be stricter, while 31% believe they should be kept as they are now and 12% favor less strict gun laws. (2023)
- Overall, 64% say they favor stricter gun control laws, with 36% opposed, little changed since a survey taken last summer in the wake of a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. (2023)
Polls show a solid majority of Americans want gun control | Vox
- Nearly three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem, according to a survey last year by Pew Research Center. And a majority of Americans think that the epidemic of school shootings could be stopped with drastic changes in legislation, according to a poll this week by YouGov. (2022)
Most Americans support these 4 types of gun legislation, poll says
Would be a lot more helpful to name politicians who are against gun control than the 'American Populace" who continues to be shot everyday.
