If you live in Seattle or Arizona, then definitely take an interview at Axon. The founder is like a hard-core sci-fi fan, so their offices are done up in this super gloss white plastic finish. In the Seattle office, at least, you exit the elevator into a spaceship complete with a working, mandatory airlock with face scanning to get into the office. Absolutely hilarious.
Productwise, they have some interesting challenges like storing all of the police body cam video, making it searchable, and preparing it for court.
I felt like I was watching a bunch of 12 year olds having fun building the security/surveillance state. But now I understand how they came up with the taser drone idea.
I worked at Axon for several years. Frankly, I liked the company culture.
Rick's been pretty consistent over the years that he believes that technology can solve societal issues and that he sees things like Sci-Fi as something we need to invent. Rick's a Star Wars fan and there were several Star Wars oriented things in the past.
The engineering culture within the company itself is pretty open and a lot of things are debated quite openly. Perhaps too openly for some; not that it's something to complain about. The bigger challenge they face isn't new hardware ideas. It's their software offering that need to do well. They pivoted from TASERs to Bodycams and now are investing heavily in software. If they get that right, then it's going to be a bigger impact on policing quality/consistency/standards than just the Hardware.
Overall, I can say that it's been a good place to work. While not perfect (no company is), it's definitely pretty open to ideas and change.
They sound a bit like Iain M. Banks' "slap drones", flying robots tasked with following around known criminals and preventing them from reoffending.
This proposal seems awfully dystopian, but US schools apparently conduct surprise active shooter drills with simulated gunshots, so it feels like a choice between evils at this point.
Proper ethical oversight would needed though, and I'm worried that mission creep is inevitable (remember e.g. tasers themselves were originally intended as "less lethal" and an alternative to a firearm, but are now used routinely to simply get compliance.)
> US schools apparently conduct surprise active shooter drills with simulated gunshots
I thought this must be hyperbole, but holy crap. There's a story of an Oregon teacher who sued her school district when she was "shot" in 2013 in a surprise drill [1]. In 2021, Texas introduced but failed to pass a law requiring advance notice of simulated shooting drills [2].
That's craaaaaaazy to me. If the "arm the teachers" faction gets their way, do they stop doing these drills, or just accept a few more dead people from drills gone wrong?
A lot of people exist in bubbles and don't seem to know what is it like for the average worker in the US. There's a ton of shit like this going on that the average high and middle income earner has no idea about.
> US schools apparently conduct surprise active shooter drills with simulated gunshots
I didn't know that. It reminds me of this joke / supposition from the late comedian Trevor Moore:
"What if governments learned from the MKUltra experiments in the 50's that trauma allows you to control people, so they purposely orchestrate disastrous events to keep their citizens afraid + dependent on them, and that's one of the reasons that mental illness has been rising? lol"
Before I became the "respectable pillar of professional society" I am today, I was a smart-mouthed kid with a major anti-authority streak (that I retain to a lesser extent to this day). I think it was an essential part of my personal development. I shudder to think about how similar kids will be treated today, since they're definitely going to turn these on unruly students if deployed. Will they effectively stop mass shooters? I have my doubts, but they'll certainly make kids terrified to fuck up at school.
They will turn into exactly what they have to be turned into. A generation of people who obediently listen to authority without question, one used to being surveilled at all times, controlled at all times, getting directions rather than setting them. And that's the important part for the current generation of leaders.
And it's not that such a drone would literally be effective against unruly students but because it will normalize the idea of pervasive surveillance, the students will internalize that it's absolutely normal and inescapable to be controlled and have all rules enforced on them at all times.
They will get the occasional "bread and circus", they will be sold the illusion that they have freedoms, democracy, rights, and when those are routinely taken away from some people, none of the others will object because of all the points above.
I actually disagree. I was the same kind of kid as OP, very punk rock and anti-authority. Kids do, in my experience, get that way for a reason. Usually it's seeing systemic abuse from a source a kid has, when you grow up it seems insignificant in retrospect, but at the time it likely looked like most major authorities do when you're an adult.
That said, continuing to expose myself to systems and situations like that can easily diverge the path of becoming a "well adjusted adult". It is possible they could be broken and made subservient, but I think it's more likely you'll see even further rejection of the system, and rejection of it's future influence.
I'm sorry but I feel like you not only missed my point entirely but made new points that have major weaknesses.
You stated a problem but failed to show how a taser drone is the only solution or even a solution. You also didn't say which part you actually disagree with. Because you didn't understand that what I'm saying is that the taser drone lurks over the shoulder of every child, it buries itself deep in all of their subconsciouses. Even the best and the brightest. It forces all of them to internalize the idea that they're always going to be kept under surveillance and threat of extreme punishment.
You blame "systemic abuse from a source a kid" for becoming a certain way but completely ignore that this would be dwarfed by the fantastically traumatizing thought that a dystopian robot will come after you if you do something wrong.
I find it absolutely baffling that anyone could have any words for this that aren't an absolute rejection of the idea. This is obviously a cash grab by the company proposing this, a boon for the country's leaders who get to shape a new "obedient" generation, and something traumatizing on an inconceivable scale for any child.
If you want to solve school shootings and genuinely think that this is the only or best way to do it then you were failed by every support system that should have been there for you ever, and now you're doing the same to the next generation. You can't replace education and proper human support systems with explosive collars which will eliminate threats as they occur at the low cost of some blood spray.
I think you got hung up on the "I disagree" part, I could've expanded on it more directly. I disagree that it'd only create subservience; I think it'd also cause a lot of revolution and violence - which is not what you want in a school setting or learned as life lessons either.
I don't think this is a useful tool for stopping school shootings and I wasn't endorsing the idea.
That’s great for you. How about all of the lost education of your classmates from teachers having to spend time and energy dealing with your pernicious individualism?
The US has been “the most armed” pretty much for its whole history. The fraction of households that own guns has been going down for decades, to the point where today it’s similar to where France was in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet school shootings are pretty much a phenomenon that began in the 1990s with the kids of boomers entering high school.
It absolutely did not start in the 90s, and only ratcheted up significantly after 2008. People often underestimate the damage that the economic crisis did to American social cohesion. There are other variables that are obviously at play here: the continuing rise in childhood poverty, the influence of social media, increasingly long and arbitrary hours worked by parents and caregivers, access to powerful firearms, etc.
Chalking it up to "now the boomers are having kids" is weak social analysis. Not only is the rise in school violence probably a confluence of all those factors, the moral fiber of their parents or whatever specious argument you're making here is likely a small or even negligible factor.
Whether you peg it at 1995 or 2008, you’re talking about a phenomenon that’s just a couple of decades old. That dramatically limits what the explanation could be.
Blaming the 2008 recession is odd, because other indicators of crime continued to decrease during that time. Homicides also decreased from 1929-1939 as the Great Depression wore on, so there is no basis for the theory that recessions cause violence.
It’s also probably not guns. Since 1975, the share of households with a gun has fallen from half to about a third. Childhood poverty has fallen dramatically over that time as well when you account for social safety net transfers. America was a less violent place in the 1950s, before the social safety net and when many more households had a gun.
People really don’t want to believe that culture matters. But blaming poverty instead is just inconsistent with the facts. Many poor countries don’t have the social dysfunction America has. And it’s not the combination of guns and poverty either. Countries like Pakistan and Yemen have many guns and homicide rates lower than the US, despite being very poor.
> Whether you peg it at 1995 or 2008, you’re talking about a phenomenon that’s just a couple of decades old. That dramatically limits what the explanation could be.
School shootings started in earnest in the 70s and really got going the 80s. Look it up.
> Blaming the 2008 recession is odd, because other indicators of crime continued to decrease during that time.
I didn't blame it, I named it as a factor. There are other factors at play. I also didn't just blame poverty - there's clearly something happening in the United States that isn't occurring in other societies and its likely a confluence of many factors. But to just say "oh, it's a cultural thing" is extraordinarily reductionist and shallow.
And you would be wrong. This massacre was seminal in the US consciousness, but the majority of school shootings, before and since, remain targeted attacks.
Other countries with cultures of gun ownership don't have the same problems that the US does with gun violence. That is either because those countries have greater restrictions on guns, or because Americans are simply more violent and incapable of living within the norms of civil society, with or without guns, since if the guns weren't a factor (and thus gun control wasn't a factor) one would expect mass violence to me more or less equivalent in all societies.
There's no other country that comes close to the American culture of gun ownership though. Wikipedia's stats say that there's an estimated 120.5 firearms per 100 persons in the US, when the second place in the list, Falkland Islands, comes at 62.1 firearms/100 persons. Even Canada, which is culturally very close to the US, has like 30% the gun ownership of the US.
The stats on Wikipedia are from 2017, so they might be a bit out of date. AFAIK, Americans rush out to buy more guns whenever there's a big mass shooting and since 2017, there's been Stoneman Douglas, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh synagogue, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, El Paso, Boulder, Buffalo and Uvalde.
In most cases, one can not use more than two guns at one time, and usually only one, so after reaching a 100fa/100ppl average further gun purchases are moot. It’s not the number of guns, it’s the number of emotionally-stunted crazy people.
Number of households with guns is a more sensible measure. A household with 100 guns is probably not 100x the risk.
> There's no other country that comes close to the American culture of gun ownership though.
Yes and no. In the 1960s, over 60% of American households owned a gun. Today, less than a third of households own a gun. Back when America was more rural, it was much more common for kids to have access to a gun because they were more widely owned. But mass shootings were rare to non-existent back when more households had a gun.
The trend of decreasing gun ownership is international. Our percentage of households with a gun today in the US is similar to what it was in Canada, France, or Norway in the mid to late 20th century. But homicide rates in the U.S. are still vastly higher than what they were in those countries decades ago. In fact, homicide rates in the U.S. have always been vastly higher than those in Western Europe, since long before the advent of modern gun laws.
This is the kind of assertion people love to make but hate to back up, or think deeply about. It makes more sense to address core issues like poverty and abuse than it does to drone strike these kids'
It doesn’t require much backup. Spend a few days walking around Japan and just look around. Or compare American kids to kids in other countries, including countries that are a lot poorer, like Bangladesh where I’m from.
Raising red herrings about “core issues” is a refusal to engage with the problem. It’s not “poverty” that causes these behavioral problems, because many poor countries manage to control their kids. You’ve actually got it backward. Misbehaved kids and tolerance for classroom disruption deprives poor kids of a good education and perpetuates poverty.
I'm an immigrant, so I have a vantage point here others may not. I remember being bewildered at how belligerent fellow troubled kids were with their elders (especially teachers and their parents*), to the point where it was often impossible for the teacher to carry on with her lesson plan for that day because most of the time was spent with cops/security guards or the teacher crying in a corner.
I'm surprised at the resistance rayiner is getting. I'm thinking it is likely due to folks here having been brought up in suburban bubbles and being completely ignorant of how bad the situation is in a lot of inner city schools.
*edit: I suspect folks here will interpret the term "troubled kid" in their own cute ways, like not following directions on how to do a math problem because the little Euler-streaked student found a *better* way and he'll not listen to the authority on how to do the problem the conventional way, don't you suppress his creativity! No, I'm talking about students like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpDFBxKcOXY where in the back of your mind the calculation taking place is 'is he going to hit me? If I hit him first, can I get away without being physically hurt? I have a PhD in physics, what am I doing here babysitting these hellspawn clowns? But if I hit first, what kind of administrative bullshit fallout do I have to deal with?'
> I'm an immigrant, so I have a vantage point here others may not. I remember being bewildered at how belligerent fellow mates were with their elders (especially teachers and their parents*),
Same story here. Indeed, I was raised in a pretty westernized way (my dad worked for US companies even back in Bangladesh, and read the Dr. Spock book that was the rage back in the 1980s). And frankly I was a little shit compared to my cousins who were raised in a more traditional Bangladeshi way.
Most of my behavioral issues were outside of class and focused on the administrators and cops. I wasn't really a class disruptor. The kids that were, though, shouldn't have been tased for it. There are better approaches, obviously.
Ethics aside. I find it difficult to comprehend how a drone could compete with the agility of a person inside the confines of a building. Add the chaos of a shooting event… i don’t see how this will ever get off the ground.
> “If the politicians fix the gun problem, I'll shelve this thing, and we'll move on and do other stuff,” Smith said. “But I have fairly low confidence they're gonna fix the problem. And so this is something that's within my control. That's something I can do that I think could make a big difference and is better than the status quo.”
Technology does not solve problems, it transforms problems. What this drone would do is transform the problem of police response time into a problem of financing.
My prediction is that this technology will end up in richer school districts first, then trickle down into less wealthy districts. When it arrives there it will be used more commonly as a tool to control students more than anything else.
Did you know how much it cost a simple white noise generator, powerful enough to cut most wireless comms (i.e. all doable on small devices who can't use kW LF emissions)?
That's even more important than moral considerations and irony on what future we heading to...
You're right, I was thinking from the perspective of people protesting the paranoia-state by jamming these drones, not shooters jamming drones. I don't expect these sort of drones to be effective and doubt they'll factor into the planning of shooters. But people fed up with authorities telling them to live in fear might want to strike out against these drones.
Why require RF at all? An attacker could give the drone a location they know their target will be at and let the drone autonomously guide itself to the target.
[This dramatization][^1] focuses on full autonomy, but I'd argue it applies just as much to the steps leading up to it. All the more reason to take this threat seriously now.
Since the actual state of objects automatic recognition the drone might autonomously fly to a location, perhaps following shooting noise, but once arrived can't easy decide who to hit and can't hit anyone. At the same location drone itself is an easy target to shot down.
Proliferation of small, weaponized drones is an extremely dangerous path to go down. What stops you from swapping out a taser for another small weapon?
The development of the gun made it so that you could strike your enemy from a safer distance, but you'd still need to be within line of sight. A small, weaponized drone removes that last requirement. You could be miles away.
I'm not saying that making them illegal will prevent someone with the right skills from building one on their own. Indeed, we will likely see the first high-profile assassination using a small weaponized drone in our lifetime. However, mass production of that technology would mean anyone can kill without risk.
They think that a noisy, fragile, clumsy vehicle armed with a limited range weapon will be at all helpful? They must know that this is a terrible use case.
Forget the drone, just install taser deployment pods in the walls/ceilings of the classrooms that can only be activated if the school has entered an 'active shooter' mode. The designated authoritative figure (police, principal, anyone available) could then aim and fire without needing to know how to pilot a drone or wait for the drone to get on site. /s
Did you know how a pair of scissors works on cables? Or a white noise generator from some online giant can effectively cut wireless coms? No need to be IT pro for such actions.
What in the world is this in response to? My sarcastic device would easily be secured in having cabling run through conduit in open spaces or through walls where applicable (if not also in conduit). What would wireless coms be involved other than another on a long list of reasons the proposed drone is just not viable.
Sure, but the endpoint is itself strong enough to sustain a direct attack?
Would a kill-chip in the neck (cfr Nikita and something other series) be better then?
Or even better (cfr Hanna TV series) with the exceptional profiling and overpopulation directly hit all potential shooters following minority report, sorry, the hyper-score?
Having a pretty good statistical significance comparing both buckets, school security and police armament for sure does not seem to have a positive relation with a reduction of shootings.
Nobody wants to hear the solution, but it's pretty clear: If you want to reduce the number of gun fatalities in schools, you need to stop sending people there.
Or.. just reclassify what constitutes a school, or school shooting. How would people feel about "learning related accident" or "minor-on-minor violence"?
“Listening to the debate, I remembered Sandy Hook. And what happens after these things, there's anger, there's outburst. And then a month later, nothing happens.”
This problem won't end until you repeal or reinterpret the 2nd or amend the constitution. Everything else is a band aid.
The second amendment is really short. The current interpretation taken to its final conclusion (which will probably happen) is no limits at all. Open carry a loaded m16 in the middle of NYC? That's your right.
The other way of reading it is that this is about well regulated militias, that the government cannot stop organized shooting practise. Anything beyond that is up to state or federal law.
The final way of looking at it is that with standing armies of the US this is no longer needed, and perhaps slave owners from before 1800 perhaps did not have all the answers.
> and perhaps slave owners from before 1800 perhaps did not have all the answers.
Until Americans realise that fetishising and religiously following the words of slaveowners from the 18th century isn't necessarily the best idea, nothing will change. It's weird how the "Constitution" is taken as the words of a deity that cannot be touched and cannot be wrong by some.
Especially a bad and extremely ambiguous constitution like the American one, where the Supreme court has decided tons of things based on weird interpretations, instead of, you know, actually enacting laws and amending the constitution to add those things.
Chief of police for Uvalde’s schools. I’m sure the chief of the police for the city is sweating bullets right now by all the people making the above mistake in wording.
What happens when some kid breaks the end off a mechanical pencil, attaches a gum band, tapes that sucker up, and starts shooting BBs into the thing like they used to and it crashes onto some teacher's head and kills them[1]?
I don't know if making literal zip guns during recess was a 90s Catholic school thing, but maybe don't do this.
(Especially since I can remember when the teacher's union would shit the bed about sharp scissors or a single non lock blade less than 3 inch Swiss Army knife.)
If you're that scared of your children, maybe you should rethink whether an arms race is the correct solution, especially since traumatized teens end up being anxious adults unsuited to be caregivers.
When I was in public school, lots of people made those including me. I wouldn't call them zip-guns though, they're a form of improvised sling shot (or spear gun, if you use those sandwich toothpicks with the plastic frills on one end.)
They're basically harmless, I don't see what the trouble is except for the 'distracted from class' angle. I don't think you could even shoot somebody's eye out with one, they're about as powerful as throwing a pebble by hand. I don't think you could crash a drone with one either.
Just to be clear, we're talking about combining a mechanical pencil and a rubber band to launch BBs, tooth picks, etc? These are "weapons" in the sense that nerf guns are, maybe enough to trigger hysterical zero tolerance rules but certainly not enough to actually threaten anybody with sense. They only have as much power as a rubber band. You can (and we did) get better results using just the rubber band stretched between your thumb and index finger. You can launch a pencil clear across the room like that.. but you could also just throw the pencil.
Treating these as real weapons, let alone zip-guns, is an absolute farce. Zero tolerance means zero thought.
>Treating these as real weapons, let alone zip-guns, is an absolute farce. Zero tolerance means zero thought.
Agreed, but unfortunately no one ever gave me a stable job where I could post stuff like that from. I've bounced from precarious role to precarious role for over a decade.
While I generally agree with the points you make, I have to disagree that there's zero difference between "throwing a pebble [toothpick, pencil, etc]" and making an improvised device to launch a projectile. Sure, you could put out an eye either way, but only one of those methods is designed specifically with the goal of accurate, repeatable assault. You could very well define such a device as a weapon, whereas defining someone's arms as weapons is trickier based on their use cases and legal precedent. If I throw a pencil and it sticks in someone's eye it was a freak accident and I'm only liable up to that standard. If I shoot a person in the eye with an improvised device, then it's much easier to argue that I meant to do it.
>If I throw a pencil and it sticks in someone's eye it was a freak accident and I'm only liable up to that standard.
That's a folk belief. If you throw a pencil like that in my left eye, I might use the right one to aim the shot that kills you, and in Pennsylvania I'd be legally in the right under stand your ground, as well as several other states.
Please don't confuse your opinions about ethics with very well tested facts about how the world works, you could get yourself killed, and if I didn't care about that I'd let you continue on your dangerous path of thinking.
No one is obligated to tolerate violence, and I worry that those who refuse to understand that are a danger to themselves AND others via the chaos they induce.
What you are describing is not a zip gun. A zip gun is an improvised firearm that typically, but not always, fires pistol cartridges (rifle or shotgun cartridge zip guns can and have been made, but they can be more sketchy to use and control). Zip guns are cobbled together from a pipe and some basic form of firing mechanism, etc.
Thanks, you're correct, I apologize for being imprecise in my language.
It's an improvised weapon... a zip gun like they taught us about in middle school English class would be more like if I used a mousetrap to trigger a .22 magnum shell down a short shaped piece of pipe into someone's skull from a range of under five yards, since the unrifled barrel causes whatever comes out to tumble and thus not fly straight very long.
A taser-drone looks like an expensive remedy designed to be a money-sucker than an actual solution.
Instead of making schools safer, pretty soon we'll just have a bunch of defense companies lined up to sell snake-oil bandaid solutions to schools for millions of dollars, and meanwhile nothing will change.
I just wonder if a football body armor and a somewhat "better" helmet of any type will be enough to defend those drones. Maybe thick clothing is enough? Motorcycle protective gear?
Does anybody know how well tasers handle such material?
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadProductwise, they have some interesting challenges like storing all of the police body cam video, making it searchable, and preparing it for court.
I felt like I was watching a bunch of 12 year olds having fun building the security/surveillance state. But now I understand how they came up with the taser drone idea.
Not surprising, his company was originally named after an old science fiction story Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle; which he initialized to Taser.
Rick's been pretty consistent over the years that he believes that technology can solve societal issues and that he sees things like Sci-Fi as something we need to invent. Rick's a Star Wars fan and there were several Star Wars oriented things in the past.
The engineering culture within the company itself is pretty open and a lot of things are debated quite openly. Perhaps too openly for some; not that it's something to complain about. The bigger challenge they face isn't new hardware ideas. It's their software offering that need to do well. They pivoted from TASERs to Bodycams and now are investing heavily in software. If they get that right, then it's going to be a bigger impact on policing quality/consistency/standards than just the Hardware.
Overall, I can say that it's been a good place to work. While not perfect (no company is), it's definitely pretty open to ideas and change.
This proposal seems awfully dystopian, but US schools apparently conduct surprise active shooter drills with simulated gunshots, so it feels like a choice between evils at this point.
Proper ethical oversight would needed though, and I'm worried that mission creep is inevitable (remember e.g. tasers themselves were originally intended as "less lethal" and an alternative to a firearm, but are now used routinely to simply get compliance.)
I thought this must be hyperbole, but holy crap. There's a story of an Oregon teacher who sued her school district when she was "shot" in 2013 in a surprise drill [1]. In 2021, Texas introduced but failed to pass a law requiring advance notice of simulated shooting drills [2].
That's craaaaaaazy to me. If the "arm the teachers" faction gets their way, do they stop doing these drills, or just accept a few more dead people from drills gone wrong?
[1]: https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2015/04/te...
[2]: https://legiscan.com/TX/drafts/HB1016/2021
I didn't know that. It reminds me of this joke / supposition from the late comedian Trevor Moore:
"What if governments learned from the MKUltra experiments in the 50's that trauma allows you to control people, so they purposely orchestrate disastrous events to keep their citizens afraid + dependent on them, and that's one of the reasons that mental illness has been rising? lol"
https://twitter.com/itrevormoore/status/1400158963748917249
And it's not that such a drone would literally be effective against unruly students but because it will normalize the idea of pervasive surveillance, the students will internalize that it's absolutely normal and inescapable to be controlled and have all rules enforced on them at all times.
They will get the occasional "bread and circus", they will be sold the illusion that they have freedoms, democracy, rights, and when those are routinely taken away from some people, none of the others will object because of all the points above.
That said, continuing to expose myself to systems and situations like that can easily diverge the path of becoming a "well adjusted adult". It is possible they could be broken and made subservient, but I think it's more likely you'll see even further rejection of the system, and rejection of it's future influence.
You stated a problem but failed to show how a taser drone is the only solution or even a solution. You also didn't say which part you actually disagree with. Because you didn't understand that what I'm saying is that the taser drone lurks over the shoulder of every child, it buries itself deep in all of their subconsciouses. Even the best and the brightest. It forces all of them to internalize the idea that they're always going to be kept under surveillance and threat of extreme punishment.
You blame "systemic abuse from a source a kid" for becoming a certain way but completely ignore that this would be dwarfed by the fantastically traumatizing thought that a dystopian robot will come after you if you do something wrong.
I find it absolutely baffling that anyone could have any words for this that aren't an absolute rejection of the idea. This is obviously a cash grab by the company proposing this, a boon for the country's leaders who get to shape a new "obedient" generation, and something traumatizing on an inconceivable scale for any child.
If you want to solve school shootings and genuinely think that this is the only or best way to do it then you were failed by every support system that should have been there for you ever, and now you're doing the same to the next generation. You can't replace education and proper human support systems with explosive collars which will eliminate threats as they occur at the low cost of some blood spray.
I don't think this is a useful tool for stopping school shootings and I wasn't endorsing the idea.
On what metric?
Chalking it up to "now the boomers are having kids" is weak social analysis. Not only is the rise in school violence probably a confluence of all those factors, the moral fiber of their parents or whatever specious argument you're making here is likely a small or even negligible factor.
Blaming the 2008 recession is odd, because other indicators of crime continued to decrease during that time. Homicides also decreased from 1929-1939 as the Great Depression wore on, so there is no basis for the theory that recessions cause violence.
It’s also probably not guns. Since 1975, the share of households with a gun has fallen from half to about a third. Childhood poverty has fallen dramatically over that time as well when you account for social safety net transfers. America was a less violent place in the 1950s, before the social safety net and when many more households had a gun.
People really don’t want to believe that culture matters. But blaming poverty instead is just inconsistent with the facts. Many poor countries don’t have the social dysfunction America has. And it’s not the combination of guns and poverty either. Countries like Pakistan and Yemen have many guns and homicide rates lower than the US, despite being very poor.
School shootings started in earnest in the 70s and really got going the 80s. Look it up.
> Blaming the 2008 recession is odd, because other indicators of crime continued to decrease during that time.
I didn't blame it, I named it as a factor. There are other factors at play. I also didn't just blame poverty - there's clearly something happening in the United States that isn't occurring in other societies and its likely a confluence of many factors. But to just say "oh, it's a cultural thing" is extraordinarily reductionist and shallow.
The stats on Wikipedia are from 2017, so they might be a bit out of date. AFAIK, Americans rush out to buy more guns whenever there's a big mass shooting and since 2017, there's been Stoneman Douglas, Santa Fe, Pittsburgh synagogue, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, El Paso, Boulder, Buffalo and Uvalde.
Number of households with guns is a more sensible measure. A household with 100 guns is probably not 100x the risk.
Yes and no. In the 1960s, over 60% of American households owned a gun. Today, less than a third of households own a gun. Back when America was more rural, it was much more common for kids to have access to a gun because they were more widely owned. But mass shootings were rare to non-existent back when more households had a gun.
The trend of decreasing gun ownership is international. Our percentage of households with a gun today in the US is similar to what it was in Canada, France, or Norway in the mid to late 20th century. But homicide rates in the U.S. are still vastly higher than what they were in those countries decades ago. In fact, homicide rates in the U.S. have always been vastly higher than those in Western Europe, since long before the advent of modern gun laws.
Raising red herrings about “core issues” is a refusal to engage with the problem. It’s not “poverty” that causes these behavioral problems, because many poor countries manage to control their kids. You’ve actually got it backward. Misbehaved kids and tolerance for classroom disruption deprives poor kids of a good education and perpetuates poverty.
I'm surprised at the resistance rayiner is getting. I'm thinking it is likely due to folks here having been brought up in suburban bubbles and being completely ignorant of how bad the situation is in a lot of inner city schools.
*edit: I suspect folks here will interpret the term "troubled kid" in their own cute ways, like not following directions on how to do a math problem because the little Euler-streaked student found a *better* way and he'll not listen to the authority on how to do the problem the conventional way, don't you suppress his creativity! No, I'm talking about students like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpDFBxKcOXY where in the back of your mind the calculation taking place is 'is he going to hit me? If I hit him first, can I get away without being physically hurt? I have a PhD in physics, what am I doing here babysitting these hellspawn clowns? But if I hit first, what kind of administrative bullshit fallout do I have to deal with?'
Same story here. Indeed, I was raised in a pretty westernized way (my dad worked for US companies even back in Bangladesh, and read the Dr. Spock book that was the rage back in the 1980s). And frankly I was a little shit compared to my cousins who were raised in a more traditional Bangladeshi way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ZbipO8vxM
Technology does not solve problems, it transforms problems. What this drone would do is transform the problem of police response time into a problem of financing.
My prediction is that this technology will end up in richer school districts first, then trickle down into less wealthy districts. When it arrives there it will be used more commonly as a tool to control students more than anything else.
Why limit it to a taser? They could start killing people with robots.
That's even more important than moral considerations and irony on what future we heading to...
Transmitting a signal before you’re ready to act is a rookie mistake and will just get you caught.
[This dramatization][^1] focuses on full autonomy, but I'd argue it applies just as much to the steps leading up to it. All the more reason to take this threat seriously now.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
The development of the gun made it so that you could strike your enemy from a safer distance, but you'd still need to be within line of sight. A small, weaponized drone removes that last requirement. You could be miles away.
I'm not saying that making them illegal will prevent someone with the right skills from building one on their own. Indeed, we will likely see the first high-profile assassination using a small weaponized drone in our lifetime. However, mass production of that technology would mean anyone can kill without risk.
And that's a terrifying prospect.
https://www.engadget.com/robot-dog-gun-ghost-robotics-sword-...
This looks like a naked money grab.
Edit: forgot the important sarcasm symbol
Would a kill-chip in the neck (cfr Nikita and something other series) be better then?
Or even better (cfr Hanna TV series) with the exceptional profiling and overpopulation directly hit all potential shooters following minority report, sorry, the hyper-score?
USA: 933 * 10^-10
Rest of World: 7 * 10^-10
Having a pretty good statistical significance comparing both buckets, school security and police armament for sure does not seem to have a positive relation with a reduction of shootings.
Nobody wants to hear the solution, but it's pretty clear: If you want to reduce the number of gun fatalities in schools, you need to stop sending people there.
(/s)
This problem won't end until you repeal or reinterpret the 2nd or amend the constitution. Everything else is a band aid.
The other way of reading it is that this is about well regulated militias, that the government cannot stop organized shooting practise. Anything beyond that is up to state or federal law.
The final way of looking at it is that with standing armies of the US this is no longer needed, and perhaps slave owners from before 1800 perhaps did not have all the answers.
Until Americans realise that fetishising and religiously following the words of slaveowners from the 18th century isn't necessarily the best idea, nothing will change. It's weird how the "Constitution" is taken as the words of a deity that cannot be touched and cannot be wrong by some.
Especially a bad and extremely ambiguous constitution like the American one, where the Supreme court has decided tons of things based on weird interpretations, instead of, you know, actually enacting laws and amending the constitution to add those things.
Also probably beating their spouses, statistics on that are through the roof.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/04/1103066205/taser-armed-drones...
What happens when some kid breaks the end off a mechanical pencil, attaches a gum band, tapes that sucker up, and starts shooting BBs into the thing like they used to and it crashes onto some teacher's head and kills them[1]?
I don't know if making literal zip guns during recess was a 90s Catholic school thing, but maybe don't do this.
(Especially since I can remember when the teacher's union would shit the bed about sharp scissors or a single non lock blade less than 3 inch Swiss Army knife.)
If you're that scared of your children, maybe you should rethink whether an arms race is the correct solution, especially since traumatized teens end up being anxious adults unsuited to be caregivers.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/nyregion/remote-controlle...
They're basically harmless, I don't see what the trouble is except for the 'distracted from class' angle. I don't think you could even shoot somebody's eye out with one, they're about as powerful as throwing a pebble by hand. I don't think you could crash a drone with one either.
They got you expelled and sent to a place that would make you need stitches if you stayed on the computer too long where I grew up.
It's a weapon AND a tool, make no mistake.
Treating these as real weapons, let alone zip-guns, is an absolute farce. Zero tolerance means zero thought.
Agreed, but unfortunately no one ever gave me a stable job where I could post stuff like that from. I've bounced from precarious role to precarious role for over a decade.
That's a folk belief. If you throw a pencil like that in my left eye, I might use the right one to aim the shot that kills you, and in Pennsylvania I'd be legally in the right under stand your ground, as well as several other states.
Please don't confuse your opinions about ethics with very well tested facts about how the world works, you could get yourself killed, and if I didn't care about that I'd let you continue on your dangerous path of thinking.
No one is obligated to tolerate violence, and I worry that those who refuse to understand that are a danger to themselves AND others via the chaos they induce.
It's an improvised weapon... a zip gun like they taught us about in middle school English class would be more like if I used a mousetrap to trigger a .22 magnum shell down a short shaped piece of pipe into someone's skull from a range of under five yards, since the unrifled barrel causes whatever comes out to tumble and thus not fly straight very long.
> “proud” that the ethics advisory board disagreed with his decision to move ahead with the taser drone.
Heh, I guess they thought Minority Report was an instructional video. "Keep your hands raised at all times to avoid accidental tasing".
Instead of making schools safer, pretty soon we'll just have a bunch of defense companies lined up to sell snake-oil bandaid solutions to schools for millions of dollars, and meanwhile nothing will change.
Does anybody know how well tasers handle such material?