The wisdom and foresight of Tomfurbs and Trish here on H.A.

[muhmuh]

Then why are they such a modern occurrence in our society?

are they really?
and what would you expect to happen if you put 2 million people who like in houston are still stuck in the wild west into a space a tight as a modern city

Why do societies with more guns per capital lack the school shooting stats that we have?

hard to say but the only one i really know a bit about is switzerland which has excellent social security low unemployment rates and is in many parts made up of small communities where people know each other far too well to be afraid of their neighbours

[SarahG]

Then why are they such a modern occurrence in our society?

are they really?
and what would you expect to happen if you put 2 million people who like in houston are still stuck in the wild west into a space a tight as a modern city

Most of our school shootings were not in urban environments. Columbine sure as hell isn't.

hard to say but the only one i really know a bit about is switzerland which has excellent social security low unemployment rates and is in many parts made up of small communities where people know each other far too well to be afraid of their neighbours

Swiss aren't even the only ones in Europe to have more citizens with guns. (Edited for clarification).

But like you said, these countries have greatly smaller problems in terms of crime, urban poverty, and the other things I mentioned... kinda strengthens my argument as to what is causing America's gun violence.

Added: Since we're talking about violent crime rates it is worth pointing out that the homicide rates do not seem to be related globally to gun distribution, America is known for its gun violence problem but if we ignore what implement is employed our murder rates aren't that bad on a global scale... the worst nations for violent crime are overwhelmingly undeveloped ones (3rd world) again linking poverty & quality of life to violence problems.... Europe tends to have a low murder rate across the board but that is probably at least partially a reflection on fairly stable economies, societies, governments etc... I would hope most people here would expect homicides to be more of a problem in, say, Haiti than Scotland (which is what the stats show).

[muhmuh]

Most of our school shootings were not in urban environments. Columbine sure as hell isn't.

from looking at a map littleton is very much part of the denver metro area which has over 2 million people living in it

Swiss aren't even the only ones in Europe to have more guns per capita.

wiki seems to disagree there
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_o..._gun_ownership
so that leaves only finland which incidentially had a school shooting recently

But like you said, these countries have greatly smaller problems in terms of crime, urban poverty, and the other things I mentioned... kinda strengthens my argument as to what is causing America's gun violence.

i never tried to imply that it doesnt cause the gun violence i just think that the reason for the rubbish social security in the us which causes the poverty and likely the crime rates is a result of the same attitude that makes the us so obsessed with guns

[SarahG]

from looking at a map littleton is very much part of the denver metro area which has over 2 million people living in it

According to this site Columbine has a mere 24,000 people to it.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Columbine-Colorado.html

I've lived in suburbs with a denser population. I wouldn't call it a tight urban environment, not in the sense (as example) NYC is.

i just think that the reason for the rubbish social security in the us which causes the poverty and likely the crime rates is a result of the same attitude that makes the us so obsessed with guns

I am kinda confused by what you mean with this BUT i have a migraine so help me out here.

I will look at that wiki article and respond to that part later.

[SarahG]

Ok I just looked at your wiki article, - that's far from a comprehensive list so I find it troubling to use it in deciding which countries have more or less gun owners than others.

It also fails to break it up based on gun ownership prevalence. I could have 10 bolt action rifles but I can only ever use one at a time, so it would kinda skew the statistics.

[muhmuh]

Added: Since we're talking about violent crime rates it is worth pointing out that the homicide rates do not seem to be related globally to gun distribution, America is known for its gun violence problem but if we ignore what implement is employed our murder rates aren't that bad on a global scale... the worst nations for violent crime are overwhelmingly undeveloped ones (3rd world) again linking poverty & quality of life to violence problems....

thats like saying america is the safest of the undeveloped contries or i may be ugly but i can still pull a lot more than quasimodo or ill shoot meself in that leg because ill still be better off than the paraplegic down the road

It also fails to break it up based on gun ownership prevalence. I could have 10 bolt action rifles but I can only ever use one at a time, so it would kinda skew the statistics.

its guns per capita which was the original argument

According to this site Columbine has a mere 24,000 people to it.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Columbine-Colorado.html

not that it matters, but the school is in littleton, which has 40000 inhabitants. more importantly though, its part of a large metropolitan area with lots of smaller cities merged into one.
even more importantly, according to that site the columbine high school has ~1700 students, which is bloody gigantic by european standards, especially considering it only houses grades 9-12.

I've lived in suburbs with a denser population. I wouldn't call it a tight urban environment, not in the sense (as example) NYC is.

well most places pale in comparison to the population density of nyc. still the density of littleton is easily high enough to not know anybody around you, very much unlike the swiss or finnish back country.

I am kinda confused by what you mean with this BUT i have a migraine so help me out here.

ill be needlessly placative here, mostly because i enjoy that particular style of writing.
the point is, that the idea of heroism, that you get when you look at what makes it across the pond, is a loner with a revolver riding his horse (more recently his hummer) walking over everybody else, while smelling of hummer aftershave, which comes in a big jerrcan of repressed homosexuality.
to be a bit more serious: the idea of being on your own, while surrounded by 300million others, seems to manifest itself in lots of ways, ranging from the way you like to handle the economy, which has led to ceos making more than 500 times as much as anybody else. furthermore theres the american idea of social security, which can be summed up more or less as "if you cant make it bugger off", and lastly there is of course the justified fear that those who make 500 times less than you will be pissed off and plot to shoot at you.

to bring the point home, its very much social darwinism, which has been conclusively shown not to work and is as far removed from a society as it gets, which by reflection on the root of the word requires a certain degree of social security and socialism (GASP), to exist in the first place.
and without a functioning society what you end up with is a lot of really pissed people, with nowhere else but crime to turn to, and a lot of wannabe john waynes looking to protect, what they have thanks to somehow ending up on the good side of the widening social divide

we have a prime example of that kind right here. the guy with the ridiculous cock centric avatar whos afraid that obama (who he always spells wrong, because he thinks it makes him look smart and witty, when in reality all it does is make him look like a tosser), whos petrified of the idea that obama might take some of his money to give it to losers. id guess, that what he could save by not buying an arsenal large enough to invade iran and by not having to pay psychiatrists to treat his paranoia of black males with shotguns, would more than make up for the loss.

[SarahG]

thats like saying america is the safest of the undeveloped contries...

I don't believe it is, but I can see how you could take it that way. My point is that violence is not a universal constant, and is influenced by variables such as disillusionment, and wealth distribution among other things (however I feel on these points we somewhat agree).

its guns per capita which was the original argument

One of the arguments, correct. But it has been very hard to find meaningful comprehensive data on this, so I am willing to propose that I could have been wrong here (happens), but it is hard for me to see one way or another given just how hard it is to find recent global stats on this.

the columbine high school has ~1700 students, which is bloody gigantic by european standards, especially considering it only houses grades 9-12.

But that's the thing... in America the gov doesn't take public schooling seriously. Fuck IDK if anyone does, and here our poorly funded, poorly run, even poorly taught schools really tend not to care about education, class sizes, performance, or any of those (important) issues.

The high school I graduated from was bigger than that and it was a wealthy suburb, I almost never had a class with less than 40 students in it (45 was typical) unless it was some very specialized elective.

One of the reasons why I link our public schooling disaster to our society's violent crime problems is because it helps perpetuate the urban poverty, crime, and disillusionment that I have mentioned with frequency. Our cities regularly have 50-75+ % drop out rates which is a complete national disgrace. I don't know, but I HOPE it is different in this regard in Europe. In some states the politicians have made the situation worse by encouraging people to drop out, I wouldn't go so far as to say that's intentional- but it appears that in America the assumption is if you're "gonna stick with it to graduation" you're college bound, and if you're not- you should probably drop out and start working a min wage (NOT living wage) fast food job. Yet at the same time, you're not gonna get an employer to take you seriously without a high school diploma, everyone knocks fast food employment but even they care about having finished k-12. These "drop outs" that everyone seems to ignore have to end up supporting themselves some how... and it certainly isn't going to be min wage employment, or failed social welfare programs.

As to density, I was just making a point. Obviously NYC is going to be towards the more extreme side but the stats I could find on Columbine just didn't show it to be that dense as far as America goes, at least not to the point of me considering it to be a dense urban environment.

But since we're talking about wealth distribution changes, and people resorting to violence 1- to protect what they have, 2- to get what they need/want but otherwise wouldn't have access to.... why do you think American wealth distribution is becoming more polar? What do you attribute to being the major causes?

Education (not schooling) is probably the more fundamental one that I can think of, then there is that consumer fanaticism, and the tendency of our government (presently or historically) to use tax dollars for advancing corporate special interests. Even before we got into social welfare programs like social security, big business came first to our "statesmen", and it really wouldn't be hard to show that for any era (ever read Warhogs btw?). Reaganomics, that Reagan himself failed to follow, is based on a failed concept of trickle down economics that has never been proven to even exist in practice... we did have a balanced budget in the last 20 years, it wasn't social welfare programs that "broke the bank"... but these are somewhat preliferal concerns when talking about wealth distribution when we have a population of people who can't even manage to graduate from K-12 in a world where their intelligence & education determines their market potential in a global world.

If we stop producing engineers, all that will happen is big American businesses will go to places like Europe, Japan, China and India to find them.

But I am side tracking this thread somewhat.

Since Europe has been mentioned so frequently in this thread, when have European societies had (in recent centuries) the most violence & social unrest? Usually when the people are disillusioned and impoverished. And that is when dealing with countries that at the time were considered developed (even if the standards on that have changed since). When France, Germany and the UK were considered major developed powers in the 19th century, they certainly had a lot of violence and terrorism to contend with.... and not because of the cultures they may have offended through Imperialism. The black hand was domestic terrorism, as was the Tsar's assassinations. How many attempts were there on the lives of British royalty in that century? And that's with a society that was somewhat ok with the argument that industrialization would create a utopia (crystal palace anyone?).

[muhmuh]

My point is that violence is not a universal constant, and is influenced by variables such as disillusionment, and wealth distribution among other things.

oh absolutely, but south africa is hardly a yardstick for the home of the brave (and i say that with as much sarcasm as i can muster at this early hour).

but it is hard for me to see one way or another given just how hard it is to find recent global stats on this.

either way any data you can find leads inevitably to:
1) theres a hell of a lot of guns in the us
2) guns arent what makes people want to kill each other
3) giving people an easy and relatively impersonal way of killing others isnt a good idea in a country, where the populations favourite pasttime is hunting human

Fuck IDK if anyone does

considering the us is a democracy the answer is probably no. either that, or the ruling in a democracy are as ignorant to the real issues, the average citizen faces, as monarchs used to be.

The high school I graduated from was bigger than that and it was a wealthy suburb, I almost never had a class with less than 40 students in it (45 was typical) unless it was some very specialized elective.

by comparison the gymnasium (yes i know it sounds funny to americans) i graduated from had ~800 students but covered 9 years from grade 5-13 (more recently 12) with the bulk being in the lower classes (10 year olds rarely do school shootings), where many turn out to be unsuitable for the highest tier in the educational system and drop down to lower level schools.
and we think we have a major school crisis, which gets discussed on tv a lot without politicians ever doing anything about it.

I don't know, but I HOPE it is different in this regard in Europe.

it is but its gradually and contiunously getting worse with examns becoming easier all the time and the lowest tier of schooling being turned into a place, where you might as well drop out of as graduation doesnt really offer and job opportunities anyway.

why do you think American wealth distribution is becoming more polar? What do you attribute to being the major causes?

hard to say really but one of the facts is that the gap in income between the employees on the lowest level in the pecking order and those at the top had widened dramatically. since its quite obvious that its impossible to run a business without employees at either end its hard to ignore greed as the most apparent possible driving force behind this.
personally i rather doubt its a good idea to employ ceos, who, unlike people that actually own a business themself, arent liable with their own assets, but instead, to add insult to injury, recieve large severance packets as an incentive to fail at what theyre paid to do. shift all accountability from the top to the bottom and youll end up with the mess were in.

ever read Warhogs btw?

cant say that i have but it sounds like something that might be worth reading

but these are somewhat preliferal concerns when talking about wealth distribution when we have a population of people who can't even manage to graduate from K-12 in a world where their intelligence & education determines their market potential in a global world.

although in all fairness as long as the drop out rate doesnt reach 100% the students are as responsible as is the failing of the school system.

If we stop producing engineers, all that will happen is big American businesses will go to places like Europe, Japan, China and India to find them.

its not like germany a country famous for engineering has a surplus of them. and its easy to see why when, like myself, youve seen a company such a siemens from the inside and experienced what its like to live life in a dilbert comic.
being an engineer is becoming increasingly unappealing in a corporate world run by lawyers and businessmen who from the engineers perspective are mostly seen as a fairly efficient way of wasting oxygen and producing green house gases.

[SarahG]

either way any data you can find leads inevitably to:
1) theres a hell of a lot of guns in the us
2) guns arent what makes people want to kill each other
3) giving people an easy and relatively impersonal way of killing others isnt a good idea in a country, where the populations favourite pasttime is hunting human

#2 was my main point (whether or not I expressed it well is another issue entirely), if we agree on that then our positions really aren't that different after all!

As to #3, I consider the bigger issue is this violent crime. To me our country's problem with violence and violent crime is far more troubling than how those crimes are being committed.

considering the us is a democracy the answer is probably no. either that, or the ruling in a democracy are as ignorant to the real issues, the average citizen faces, as monarchs used to be.

Why can't it be both?

and we think we have a major school crisis, which gets discussed on tv a lot without politicians ever doing anything about it.

No one does anything about it here other than making standardized tests. Out side of impoverished areas, it isn't really funding that is to blame. The games the suburbs are playing these days is, since Americans have this tax-phobia, is asking for whatever they want in the budget- and if the budget is passed (the local communities vote on budgets in most areas here), then that's what the funding is.

If the budget fails to pass the ballot however, then the school will usually do one of a few things. They may run off of a contingency budget (where they cut out a lot of stuff that barely costs anything like afterschool sports, causing kids to get all sad- hoping it will guilt trip the parents into approving the new budget "for the children"), they may just blanketly raise school taxes (say 25% increase in a year, stuff like that), or- and this is the new thing that's getting popular, the towns in the district will just magically over-appraise everyone's property.

School taxes here are done via a tax on the appraised value of your real estate. Say I buy a house for a dollar, I don't pay taxes on it as if it were worth a dollar- but what they will do is have a tax appraiser in each town whose sole job it is to "adjust" what the gov says your house is worth, and you pay a % based off of that. In the district I graduated from it was roughly 10% of your property value IIRC (which is on the high side). If the tax appraiser is taking some meth and thinks your beat to shit shack is worth $800,000, there are protocols to fight it which usually involve saying "all these other shacks that are like mine are appraised much lower so I should be paying as if it were worth $28,000, not $800,000"-> but you can't fight it this way if (and this is the new trick) EVERYONE is over appraised. Better yet, now since your house is "worth" more than real market value, now you can take out a 2nd or 3rd mortgage based on that appraisal and have more debt than your assets SHOULD allow (and we wonder why we're having a housing crisis!?).

Then the school's get money from the state (like the poverty/math illiteracy tax... I mean lotto), and the feds. A lot of the gov funding is dictated based on how many students the school has per day, which is why a school will get so bent out of shape when you skip a day.

But they spend like the gov, and no matter how well funded a school is its "never enough."

it is but its gradually and contiunously getting worse with examns becoming easier all the time and the lowest tier of schooling being turned into a place, where you might as well drop out of as graduation doesnt really offer and job opportunities anyway.

Why do you think that is? Complusitory education seems to be the easy issue to blame it on, with everyone going into college to "get an edge in their careers" suddenly a single college degree isn't so special and masters is more career decisive, but even that is fading away as not "being good enough"

In theory it would make it sound like, since you have to be college educated to have decent earning potential (yes I know there are exceptions), it would generate more college graduates... and it does, but it seems that the colleges are getting the same "diploma-mill" push'em threw syndromes that k-12s have. I'd say a quarter of my college courses have been abso-fuckinglutely a waste of time (like "how to use microsoft office" or "how to research in a library"). Fuck, if you don't know how to research in a library you shouldn't be in college! I'm sure you could find a school that would accept a random person off the street, no matter how dumb, uneducated, or clueless that person is. Again I am not sure this is a funding issue, Prop13 shows that taking a way funding can do a number on schools' performance, but at the same time having easy access to college via aid & loans has only shown that they'll lower their standards to make more money.

personally i rather doubt its a good idea to employ ceos, who, unlike people that actually own a business themself, arent liable with their own assets, but instead, to add insult to injury, recieve large severance packets as an incentive to fail at what theyre paid to do. shift all accountability from the top to the bottom and youll end up with the mess were in.

Guess that means you're not a big fan of the Dilbert Principle.

although in all fairness as long as the drop out rate doesnt reach 100% the students are as responsible as is the failing of the school system.

I disagree. Students don't just magically "stop learning", that comes from being raised in an environment that encourages it through indifference, incompetence, and other major institutional problems.

The authoritarian mindset our schools have developed isn't helping any. The reason why our standardized tests tell you to pick the "best" answer and not the "correct" answer is because its not about education, it is about schooling (saying what they want you to say). I actually had a state test pose a question to me on "why slavery was necessary to the success of Georgia [in its colonial history]?" Well the question is totally kaput, by selecting any answer I am stating that Georgia required slavery in order to be successful... the way I put it to Europeans is when the progressives wanted to give us institutional, compulsory, gov run, gov mandated/required schooling.... they decided to look to Europe and ended up picking the worst characteristics from every country they looked at, and the modern American schooling system was born.

its not like germany a country famous for engineering has a surplus of them. and its easy to see why when, like myself, youve seen a company such a siemens from the inside and experienced what its like to live life in a dilbert comic.
being an engineer is becoming increasingly unappealing in a corporate world run by lawyers and businessmen who from the engineers perspective are mostly seen as a fairly efficient way of wasting oxygen and producing green house gases.

Well yea, you have to think harder not smarter...

[muhmuh]

major bumpage

As to #3, I consider the bigger issue is this violent crime. To me our country's problem with violence and violent crime is far more troubling than how those crimes are being committed.

Certainly but what I was trying to get to is that killing someone with a gun is comparably unviolent. It's not quite the same as going in close sticking a knife in and having someone elses blood on your hands afterwards. IMHO it's easier to be detached from the reality of killing a person if there's a fair bit of air between both of you

Why can't it be both?

Good point.

Why do you think that is? Complusitory education seems to be the easy issue to blame it on, with everyone going into college to "get an edge in their careers" suddenly a single college degree isn't so special and masters is more career decisive, but even that is fading away as not "being good enough"

Hard to say really, probably the usual joint problem of pupils gradually getting more and more uninterested in schooling and businesses having unrealistic expectations (18 years old with a doctorate, 10 years work experience and willing to work for less than 3k a month).

I'd say a quarter of my college courses have been abso-fuckinglutely a waste of time (like "how to use microsoft office" or "how to research in a library").

Luckily those kind of courses are still voluntary round here (at lest at uni level), but I'm very pessimistic of what will happen to universities now that they have been degraded to the same level as FHs (technical colleges) and forced to graduate Bachelors instead of the prior Diplomas that were equivalent to Masters and the lowest degree you could achieve at universities.

but at the same time having easy access to college via aid & loans has only shown that they'll lower their standards to make more money.

One of the many reasons why I'm against the relatively recent introduction of tuition fees, that luckily are very low compared to the US.

Guess that means you're not a big fan of the Dilbert Principle.

Depends on your definition of fan i suppose.

The reason why our standardized tests tell you to pick the "best" answer and not the "correct" answer is because its not about education, it is about schooling (saying what they want you to say).

I suppose things are a little different across the pond but for me school has always been about learning and the correct answer as much as it has been about social engineering to find the right answers and presentation that will strike points with the teacher grading you (not that it ever worked for me during german classes but still).
Getting a peppermint patty type grade for correct answers but presented in a itemize fashion instead of as a small novel in a history exam somehow taught me more than the content of the exam ever could.