If you think this comic was hard to read, believe me, it was much harder to draw.
— Tom the Dancing Bug, by Ruben Bolling (@RubenBolling) May 31, 2022
My God, the teacher was on the phone with 911 when she closed the door. https://t.co/zpT91Kbej4 pic.twitter.com/dTVKK7LMGs
— Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) June 1, 2022
“The Bronze Cross is awarded for saving or attempting to save life at the risk of the Girl Scout’s own life.”
Heartbroken that we are a country awarding posthumous decorations of valor to ten year olds trying to save their friends and teachers at school. https://t.co/XO7ac3RKOE
— Kathleen J. McInnis ?? (@kjmcinnis1) June 1, 2022
Guns are what keep the government from becoming tyrannical but also the government should raise a 400,000 strong paramilitary force from among educators we regularly accuse of being communist pedophiles.
Conservatism is such a rich, coherent ideology. https://t.co/WiXNVkUEIb
— zeddy (@Zeddary) May 31, 2022
Open Thread
JPL
Republicans don’t care. The Tulsa shooting today killed 5 not counting the shooter, and it won’t be mentioned tomorrow.
We are the nation with the most common shootings.
different-church-lady
Aw crap… In my drunken state I saw the first cartoon and immediately thought, “Yay! New Ruben Bolling!” and then I saw it was about our shitty fucking reality and got immediately depressed and ashamed.
phdesmond
italy 0-3 argentina
WaterGirl
Great cartoon. Sad state of affairs.
different-church-lady
Shit, now I’m reading the thing and it’s breaking my heart…
WaterGirl
LOVE that the pro-gun governor is a pig.
pat
A mass shooting in a HOSPITAL in Tulsa OK.
What’s next? Church, grocery store, school….
Watching Chris Hayes and a story about the caskets that are made special for the innocent victims. And the fact that the Texas officials will blame everything EXCEPT THE GUN. A teacher left a door propped open! OMG THAT’S what is responsible.. (not even true) I detest these people.
And Ted Cruz is a sociopath.
eta: Hey I can still do this copy/paste from the last thread!
JPL
@different-church-lady: Ozark and I commented on it a day or so ago and he mentioned acceptable losses and mine was thoughts and prayers.
Although I try not to turn to the dark side like they do, if I can be honest, I hate them. I’m tired of sugar coating it.
sab
About five years ago our local paper wrote up a sort of retrospective about the five or so mass shootings in our area. I was shocked, because I had only remembered one of them. That one involved people we knew. The other ones I remembered I had read about at the time and then forgot.
It is amazing how normal this has become.
phdesmond
oh, this was elsewhere:
editorial
so, thousands of dead are a sort of tax on the right to bear arms.
WaterGirl
@phdesmond: The tree of liberty and all that….
JPL
This is us
Text ACT to 644-33
@shannonrwatts
·
1h
Shootings unfolding simultaneously right now in America: At a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma; a Walmart in Pittson, Pennsylvania; and a high school in Los Angeles, California.
JPL
My biggest fear is when a maniac discovers daycares are soft targets. We won’t see those pics either, because… fill in the blanks.
phdesmond
@JPL:
if we had eleven time zones, like the USSR (maybe Russia still), the shooting would never stop.
different-church-lady
@phdesmond:
How about if we try a fix that ISN’T MAGIC, you FUCKFACES?
Gin & Tonic
@phdesmond: Maybe I can’t read, but I thought it was a foundational collective right, not individual.
Sure Lurkalot
@phdesmond: If 99% of them are law abiding citizens, then they can abide by laws that ban assault weapons. Oh, I probably used the wrong nomenclature. Nevermind.
Shalimar
@phdesmond: There are consistently about twice as many gun suicide deaths as gun homicide deaths. The biggest tax for the right is on the people who keep guns in their households. And they don’t even realize they’re paying it, because you don’t notice when someone else’s kid commits suicide.
different-church-lady
@WaterGirl: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of schoolchildren.” –Warped Sociopath Republican Thomas Jefferson
phdesmond
@Gin & Tonic:
some militia will sell membership cards as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Suzanne
I literally had a meeting about hospital lockdown procedures and active shooter protocols yesterday. And now, I am going to have another one tomorrow.
RSA
@WaterGirl: Ruben Bolling did an AMAZING job with that cartoon.
Richard Scarry’s books were part of growing up for a few generations of Americans, I think. Bolling is telling every one of us who read those books, “If you want today’s children to have a good childhood, you need to do something.”
Anne Laurie
That’s happened before — certainly here in blue-state Massachusetts, presumably also in Oklahoma. (Hell, it’s been a plotline on more than one tv hospital drama I can remember.)
People die in hospitals, and sometimes their loved ones think the hospitals are to blame. Off the top of my failing memory, I remember at least a few news reports of pandemic-related threats to shoot up hospitals, although I can’t remember any actual ‘mass shootings’.
People with mental-health challenges are temporarily incarcerated when they intersect with hospitals, and blame the hospital rather than any other circumstances. When they’re released, it’s too easy for them to acquire a gun and come back for the revenge to which they believe they’re entitled.
And then there are (many, too many) domestic-violence hospital shootings, where a ‘disgruntled’ partner comes looking for the nurse / doctor / therapist / janitor / patient who’s mistreated them, and any other bystanders (including, literally, bystanders, such as other patients and the take-out guy making a delivery, in one Boston case) are just collateral damage.
There’s just too many guns, and it’s too easy for people who can’t responsibly use guns to acquire them.
YY_Sima Qian
It’s getting harder & harder to convince my wife & in-laws that taking our daughter to the US for junior high or high school is a good idea. Rising anti-Chinese/anti-East Asian sentiments (which is actually more concerning to me) do not help, either.
Kelly
On Memorial Day take a quiet moment to thank all those children that died to defend your right carry a rifle anywhere you want to.
debbie
@phdesmond:
Huh, no such hesitation to limit voting rights.
different-church-lady
@RSA:
That’s some Pulizer shit right there. Seriously, we should try to make it happen.
JPL
@Anne Laurie: THIS
We need to tax the heck out of ammo so they can sleep with their guns but not do harm.
JPL
@RSA: 3 yr old imp loves them.
RSA
@different-church-lady: I don’t know anything about the nomination procedure except (checking online) for a $75 fee, but count me in for a contribution.
trollhattan
@phdesmond:
Lemme stop you right there.
National Review, striving for relevance for
seventyjust once.Suzanne
@Anne Laurie: There have been lots of shootings in medical facilities. (One of my clients had one.) Most of the dangerous behavior is actually domestic violence against nurses (and doctors) by their boyfriends/husbands. There are also multiple documented cases of people going to attack a doctor or nurse after they had a bad outcome, or a loved one dies. There’s have also been attempted gang-related shootings….someone tries to kill someone else, doesn’t succeed, and so they go to the hospital to finish the job. There’s also a fair amount of violence in behavioral health hospitals, and emergency departments, also.
But domestic violence is a surprisingly large share of it.
Kelly
Thread: How many school shootings?
https://twitter.com/johnpavlovitz/status/1532082355824885761
raven
@Suzanne: We live two blocks from our main hospital and there are so many disoriented folks walking and driving in the area.
Redshift
@phdesmond:
Ah, yes, abortion rights can be discarded because they aren’t “deeply rooted” in the country’s history, but the Second Amendment guarantee of individual gun ownership that didn’t exist until well after Roe v Wade is just an indisputable fact.
I feel like conservatives were less annoying when they pretended to have rationales, even in support of heinous beliefs. “We’ll just make up contradictory reasons why we get what we want and you don’t” is even more depressing.
different-church-lady
@RSA: Yeah, I’m pretty sure we have the means here at balloon-juice to hit a $75 fundraising goal.
Raoul Paste
It’s very hard to read about the 10 year old Girl Scout. The AR 15 producers are no different than the tobacco industry execs. And I bet some of them have children
YY_Sima Qian
@Anne Laurie: Violent rage at medical staff is a common problem in China, too. However, due to the lack of guns, would be assailants have to make do w/ cleavers. Every once in a while one would read on the news of an attack where a doctor was hacked to death, or a hand or fingers chopped off. Casualty counts are much lower, though, due to lack of guns.
In the early to mid-aughts there was a series of attacks by deranged persons against kindergarten & grade school kids (4 or 5 incidents), using cleavers. So now every kindergarten & school in China has an office at the entrance where a police officer and/or security guard is posted. (Probably an overreaction, given the very rare occurrences of such incidents, certainly compared to school shootings in the US, but Chinese parents are paranoid about safety of their children.) They are not equipped w/ firearms, but shields, batons, staffs & other equipment designed to ward off an attacker w/ knives or cleavers. No knife attack drills in Chinese schools.
At some point, if things in the US keep devolving, the rest of the world may feel they have more in common w/ each other than the American polity. There is no sensical explanation (let alone excuses) for what has been happening, for decades.
Redshift
@phdesmond:
Well, they do a lot of illegal things, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work. Back when the Second was recognized as a collective right, just putting “militia” in the name of your armed gang didn’t give it constitutional status. “Well-regulated” or GTFO.
Suzanne
@raven: Yes.
People are also really, REALLY stressed out in hospitals. Even the most mentally healthy, neurotypical, intelligent people are usually at a hospital under some degree of emotional stress. I remember seeing a presentation given by the head of one of the two leading accrediting agencies for hospitals in the country. He related a story from his past, when his daughter was undergoing treatment for leukemia. And he was leaving one day, after being there many, many days in a row, and he couldn’t remember where he parked his car. And he lost his shit and had an emotional breakdown and apparently screamed at someone.
So this is why there should never, never be guns at a hospital.
Anne Laurie
Yeah, and I have gotten the impression — maybe it’s just reading the news in a blue-state market — that a good percentage of those domestic-violence mass shootings are half-conscious ‘suicide by cop’.
Guy slaps his b*tch around a bit, she runs off to a hospital and gives them a sob story, the local law enforcement tells him they’ll be showing up in 24/48/72 hours to confiscate his weaponry. A fate worse than death, for sure! Only way not to be a p*ssy, at that point, is to go down in a blaze of Scarface-style glory, amirite?
raven
@Suzanne: Not even “security”?
Another Scott
@YY_Sima Qian: Not to minimize the horror of these shootings, but violent crime in the USA has been trending down for decades. If you believe Kevin Drum (and I think he makes a good case) a lot of it can be credited to drop in lead levels in our blood.
The news is horrible. But don’t let it make you learn incorrect lessons.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
opiejeanne
The Girl Scout award, the Bronze Cross, made me cry again. I didn’t even know about that award until today and it makes the loss of these children and adults seem even more tragic, if that’s possible.
raven
@Anne Laurie: I don’t think there is much “half-conscious ‘suicide by cop”. Suicide by cop? Hell yes but half-conscious I’d be surprised.
Suzanne
@raven: Most hospital security guards, in my view, shouldn’t have guns. Most of them just want to sit there in their little panopticon and write reports and watch people.
SeattleDem
@different-church-lady: The Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has a piece showing how the voters in the state of Washington have helped stop teenagers with assault rifles.
Suzanne
@Anne Laurie: Usually it’s more that they are actively trying to shoot their girlfriend at work.
debbie
@Suzanne:
I was at a hospital today and was surprised there was no security or metal detectors.
TS
@phdesmond:
Millions are impacted. Every parent and every child in American schools are the tax on the “right to bear arms”. Every day the parent wonders if the child will make it safely home and every day the child has active shooter drills to put the emotion of fear into their brains.
Seems the GOP desire is to have an uneducated population as school becomes too dangerous for children to attend.
Wonder if removing all the protections & security from the RW members of the SCOTUS and their families would impact any of their decision making.
Suzanne
@debbie: Some hospital systems believe that metal detectors, bag searches, visible security, etc, are antithetical to creating a welcoming environment. It’s a balance. Every hospital does it differently.
raven
@TS: And just who is going to “remove” that?
Early Riser
This is a good point and one wonders why children are subjected to this repeated trauma again and again, year after year given that far more people are struck by lightning in the US each year than are killed in school shootings.
phdesmond
@Shalimar:
@TS:
the tax is getting bigger and bigger. i thought repubs were against taxes!
RSA
@Early Riser:
What a stupid and offensive false equivalence.
Redshift
@Another Scott: Yeah, it’s so weird. We are living in arguably the safest time in the history of civilization, but there are still these random threats that we shouldn’t have to live with.
Bill Arnold
@RSA:
Ruben Bolling has always had a good eye. This morality table from 1991 Human Morality Made Simple is depressingly true for the bulk of humanity.
Ohio Mom
I can’t help but imagine that when the Girl Scouts created that award they were thinking mainly of things like capsized canoes or snake bites. Near misses mostly.
I was reading up on Ohio’s grand new idea to allow teachers to be armed; someone pointed out that will make every teacher the first target for shooters since obviously the shooter can’t know if that particular teacher is armed or not, best to assume she is and shoot her before she is able to get her gun out.
Elsewhere someone pointed out that the young men most likely to shoot up schools have participated in active shooter drills themselves, and that can give them an idea of how to plan their attack. Really, what else is there to do while cowering in a corner but play out different scenarios?
Another Scott
@Redshift: +1
Indeed. Things could objectively be so much better for everyone – even the MotUs! – with just a few different people in positions of authority. 2 more decent Senators, 6 decent SCOTUS justices, etc.
Even these gun manufacturers probably don’t like the fact that their stuff is being used to murder children. They could be using their skills to make things to make life better…
We have to keep moving forward.
Cheers,
Scott.
Eunicecycle
We almost had an active shooter at the hospital I worked in. A doctor who did surgery in several local hospitals was gunned down at a different hospital. Apparently the gunman was looking for the doctor and had hunted him at my hospital earlier in the day, according to security tapes. It was over a woman if I recall correctly.
Wag
@Early Riser
bullshit. An average of 43 deaths from lightning per year. We’ve suffered through that many deaths from mass shootings in the past month.
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds
JanieM
@RSA:
In more ways than one, since it elides the difference between deaths and injuries. Fewer people are *killed* by lightning each year than were killed in Uvalde last week:
From https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims
So glad we have the pie filter.
Feathers
@RSA: Nope. We could have teachers talk about what to do if there is a shooter, like they do for fires or other dangers.
These drills that cop consultants run where a fake shooter comes into the school and there are blanks fired and SWAT teams running around — they must end. They have no proven efficacy over simple teacher led letting children know what to do and we know that they traumatize many of the children involved.
They are just letting sickos play out their hero fantasies. And as we saw in Texas, they are no guarantee that the cops will be ready and prepared.
i worked for a civil engineering firm and one of the rules was that for projects over a certain size, you have to do design/build. One firm designs, another builds. We don’t do that with policing and we need to. Police get to decide the technology, the tactics, how much overtime all the cops will be working, etc. it’s a huge conflict of interest and there is no oversight to see if any of this works. They just make shit up. Like police dogs finding drugs. There needs to be a barrier of civilian control.
Nelle
I called Chuck Grassley’s office today, thanked the woman who answered and said I had a question for her to personally answer and to pass on to Grassley to answer. She said sure. I asked, “Was that a well-regulated militia that attacked the Uvalde?” Instead of hemming and hawing as usual, she immediately said “No, that wasn’t. ” I asked, why is the senator apparently comfortable ignoring that part of the vaunted Second Amendment, especially when the cost is so high?
debbie
@Ohio Mom:
At least so far, teachers can’t be forced to carry, so there’s that. That wizened gnome has said he’ll sign the bill.
patrick II
@Ohio Mom:
I can’t imagine teachers actually carrying a sidearm while teaching class. But that may be part of the reason it is so often proposed by NRA types. It would be a good advertisement for future sales to have such a trusted member of the community packing in front of their students.
Ohio Mom
@debbie: Yes, a teacher can’t be forced to carry, and some school boards will decline to allow guns on their teachers.
I wonder if this could end up being one of those questions certain types ask when choosing where to buy a home: what are the average SAT scores, what are the sports like, and do the teachers carry.
I’d be disinclined to buy a house in a school district where teachers are armed if I had a school-aged kid but I suppose others would find that attractive.
JanieM
@debbie:
I wonder how many teachers would simply leave the profession if school boards tried to require it.
ian
@Redshift:
For a lot of them, it is the ‘we’ve always been at war with Eurasia’ that Fox news repeats to them over and over again. For the more informed, It’s part of what drive them, part of ‘owning the libs’ by inventing new rules to be enforced or flaunted as they see fit. Rules for thee, power for me. It’s part of how they could deny Garland a seat on the SC (plus the whole Obama isn’t legitimate so he can’t place picks thing), then turn around 180 degrees four years later. I’ve met conservatives who literally chuckle and giggle when that is pointed out to them, its their kicks.
debbie
@JanieM:
They’ve said as much.
I’m so tired of these god-awful stupid ideas. Why do the rest of us have to pretzel ourselves into stupid habits and practices to accommodate these pathetic losers? Why aren’t they accommodating the rights of the rest of us?
Another Scott
@patrick II: We’ve been there before. E.g. OregonLive (from May 2018):
Moar gunz are not the answer to any sensible question about violence in America.
Cheers,
Scott.
jl
” I’m so tired of these god-awful stupid ideas. ”
Stupid ideas? It’s so simple. One door schools, one door doctor offices, one door dentists, pharmacies, stores, hospitals, museums, parks, amusement parks, theaters…. concert halls…. seaside attractions…. roadside attractions… community centers… funeral homes….. Sand bags. Staff in body armor and armed… side arm and semi. Simple as pie. We’ll finally have a polite society.
Gvg
@pat: hey guns don’t make themselves or shoot themselves. It’s the fault of people who chose gun worship over neighbor caring. It’s the fault of Republican loony politicians and dam fool fanatic voters. Let’s name names. NRA, governors, judges, police (this one puzzles me, wouldn’t it be better for them if the cops had most of the guns?)
satby
@patrick II: knew a nutbag teacher who used to insist on her concealed carry permit as her ID to cash checks at the store I worked at (which didn’t work, the verification systems require a driver’s license number). She’d get pretty nasty about it when we insisted on other ID. Always thought she must have sucked as a teacher.
Happy ending though, she shot herself to death putting her pistol into her bra holster.
jl
@Another Scott: if the sixth grader has taken a gun course, that would have been no problem.
Sorry, bitter and snarky today.
opiejeanne
@Ohio Mom: It’s a recipe for disaster. I know how incredibly nasty some jr high kids can be, and my 8th grade math teacher had a nervous breakdown thanks to some of the little bastards I was in school with. Imagining him with a gun makes me shudder.
Calouste
@Another Scott: The US doesn’t have many highly trained police officers. A lot have less than a year of training.
Jay
@Wag:
thank you.
debbie
@satby:
Peale
99% of gun owners are law abiding. That gives us only 800,000 in not law abiding gun owners. That’s comforting.
Delk
Illinois Masonic hospital in Chicago is off of Halsted St. “Dr Halsted” is the hospital’s code for Chicago Police Officer. They can discreetly tell the police where to go over the intercom. Dr Halsted report to the third floor, etc.
satby
@debbie: made international news
prostratedragon
@Suzanne: Mercy Hospital in Chicago, 2018. Fit that domestic violence pattern exactly, but not in some databases because only 3 beside the shooter were killed — a police officer trying to intervene, a staff member who simply got off an elevator at the wrong time, and the doctor who had earlier ordered the shooter to get his evil and anti-productive self out of her life.
debbie
@satby:
Oy. A bra seems a little high up on the torso to be really optimal for whipping out a gun, but what do I know? ♀️
Another Scott
@Calouste: Good point, but I’d argue it’s worse than that. People get distracted. They make mistakes. It’s too easy for a mistake with a gun to be deadly.
My Life Member of the NRA uncle was cleaning his rifles one day, got to one and the brush didn’t go in as far as it should, so he pushed more and BANG. The bullet grazed his index finger and gave him a permanent scar… He had all kinds of training, knew all the rules about always clearing a gun before transporting it or doing anything with it, etc., etc. And he made a mistake that almost killed him. More training probably wouldn’t have helped him; being more vigilant and careful would have, but it only takes one slip-up and people aren’t machines.
There are ways to make guns that can only be fired when the person really, really, is sure they want to fire it (“smart guns”). We could mandate such technologies, but a phase-in would take years or decades. So that would reduce accidents, but wouldn’t directly address the mass slaughter situation… :-(
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
mrmoshpotato
Rest In Power, Amerie Jo Garza.
sdhays
@Calouste: And the “training” is highly suspect. We know, for example, that the “training” materials used by the Kentucky State Police heavily reference Nazi SS resources.
That kind of training isn’t better than no training.
sdhays
@Peale: Even that statistic just means they don’t have a criminal record. These people aren’t the type of people the police get into confrontations over broken tail lights. I’ll bet a lot of them get away with a lot of things other people go to jail for.
Another Scott
Potentially relatedly … STATNews:
There’s still so much we don’t know about our brains and how and why we think and react the way we do. Imagine there were a pill to cure gunhumper’s disease…
Cheers,
Scott.
prostratedragon
@jl: Some reasons why that one in particular really provokes me: Iroquois Theater; Triangle Shirtwaist factory; Hamlet chicken plant; Our Lady of the Angels School.
Any one in the august position of a United States Senator should know of at least a random couple of these incidents well enough to have their memory pinged, and their mouth thereby closed.
Another Scott
@prostratedragon:
Of course it’s not about real solutions to problems, it’s about getting tribal memes repeated in the media.
Cheers,
Scott.
Captain C
@Ohio Mom: If teachers are forced or even allowed to carry, how long before a student or someone else overpowers on, takes their gun, and uses it.
Mai Naem mobile
I had a coworker who would not let her kids do sleepovers at any of their friends’ houses. The reason was a tragic accidental killing in her small town in NY where a kid shot another kid with the parents’ gun.
Early Riser
This is a good point and one wonders why children are subjected to this repeated trauma again and again, year after year given that far more people are struck by lightning in the US each year than are killed in school shootings.
The people above disputing this didn’t read what I wrote. I said people struck by lightning in the US each year. That avererages about 270 per year. https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds
That’s far more than die in school shootings.
Given how extraordinarily rare it is for children to die in school shootings, it really is unfortunate that they are subjected to drills that traumatize them.
It’s no different than running drills with your kid about what to do when they are abducted by strangers at the Wal-Mart. That, too, is extremely rare.
It’s time to rethink the imposing irrational fears on children and making them bear the price.
prostratedragon
@Another Scott: Well, the first newspaper article I ever read was a description of one of those fires, so he and his ilk can take their tribal memes and shove them.
prostratedragon
@Early Riser: More words aren’t helping you.
Paul in KY
Paul in KY
@satby: Ha!
Dopey-o
15 years ago i rushed my daughter to the ER at the local Children’s Hospital. Was amazed to see a metal detector and an armed guard at the entrance.
J R in WV
@Another Scott:
When I was still working, a co-worker was a delightful woman who managed staff using the data systems I was responsible for. So she frequently reported complex problems to me, and we would confer together to determine what went wrong so I could then inspect the system to determine how to eliminate the problems.
One winter day I noticed she was walking with a pronounced limp, and asked if she was alright. She told me about the time years before when her husband, an experienced city cop, was cleaning a pistol at their kitchen table and shot her with a .357 round which hit her thigh. Those are hugely powerful rounds and she nearly died.
20 years later when the weather changed she still had a limp. A trained experienced city cop, who pretty much lost it after the gun went off.
I was on a jury in a murder case and a ballistics witness was called to testify about the weapon in question and the events that night. When the gun went off it was in a holster, we know this because the victim was covered in bits of holster all around his wound.
One of the most informative lines of questioning of this witness went like this:
“How many police ready rooms (locker rooms where cops get ready to go on duty) have you been in you career as LEO?”
“At least hundreds.”
“How many of those ready rooms had signs of an unintentional discharge of a weapon?”
Long pause while the guy thinks, then… “I would say nearly all of them.”
So in a room where trained LEOs don their uniforms and weapons, there is nearly always a mark where a gun was accidentally fired. In fact, in the courtroom where this case was tried there were bullet holes in the walls where a woman brought a pistol to court to take care of her unfinished business with a witness. She was a terrible shot, no one was seriously harmed.
After that purses weren’t allowed in the court room. And eventually someone was hired to fix the bullet holes in the nice wood paneling in the courtroom. Guns are as dangerous as fuck for everyone!!!
J R in WV
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