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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Whether the mass shooting was stopped or not is impossible to say.

What is a fact here is that the "106 people from 59 organizations" spent several weeks to stop or at least significantly decrease the level of bullying against one student. One can only wonder why stopping bullying is that hard and expensive (100 state and federal employees at the minimum cost of $1K/employee/week). And why that "school resource officer" hadn't been doing his job?

And why other adults can't get involved and stop bullying before it reaches the level when government has to get involved? These days adults don't "correct" teenagers anymore like it was done in the past and like say adult dogs do to badly behaving puppies.

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Suspending the bullies and expelling the manipulative and dangerous girl would certainly have helped.

We've lost a lot of ability, societally speaking, to maintain order and discipline bad behavior. People are volatile and the youth have very little respect for their elders. Just read testimonials from teachers about the environment in public schools. They're structurally prohibited from addressing problem behavior, from kids not turning in work and being given a million chances to "make it up" or just being given a 50% for not doing ANYTHING and then being "socially promoted", to not being able to remove problem kids from their classrooms, to the gutting of the para role, etc.

And this is just a microcosm of the wider society. Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun. We're also living in larger and larger polities and individuals are far more anonymous. That means the grapevine and social shame are night impossible to enact.

But this is the atomized, individualist, omni-competition that we keep being told is great for society and the economy.

> Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun.

There are more guns than people in the US. Whole states have open and concealed carry laws. You'd have to live like a hermit.

The solution is blindingly obvious: make gun possession and ownership illegal. Yet we can't stop indoctrinating kids from a young age that guns are a human right, no matter the cost.

And to your point, a lot of the time people will say it's just a gun county it's hard to disentangle from that. And in a sense, I agree: gun culture is the problem, and identifying it as such and dismantling it needs to be part of the program, not just laws.

Though it's often intended as a defense, I think it's most appropriately interpreted as a policy recommendation.

All this does is keep people alive. Certainly important and might solve the final "acute" symptom but doesn't address a single other thing in the parent comment. All which is very much true if you are paying attention to the way society has gone just in the past 50 years.

Civil engagement is down across the board. Standards are slipping at best for nearly everything, and societal enforcement of the rules has become more and more nonexistent if not outright punished. And I don't mean policing.

It's like a workplace. If you are dealing with problems in your workplace by telling everyone to go to HR you've already lost. You cannot have mommy and daddy solve everything and remain functional. If society as a whole cannot react daily to maintain order for mundane social interactions and everything needs to escalate to a legal or policing situation you've already lost and the "guns" part is almost irrelevant.

> Yet we can't stop indoctrinating kids from a young age that guns are a human right, no matter the cost.

It turns out that the only way to stop an indoctrinator is with a bad guy with a gun.

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