Texas School shooting 19 children and 2 adults murdered

Never going to happen.

Its ludicrous that an 18 year old was able to go into a gun shop and buy 2 AR-15 rifles without question.Even if they had a system where such a purchase required having to have it approved by the local police who would be entitled to ask the 18 year old what he was planning to do with the guns.

You'd think so. But the gun nuts in the US fight hard to make even that illegal. Cops in Texas are not entitled to ask anyone why they have weapons. You can walk down the street with the gun on your belt and cops cannot legally challenge you about it.

And the political system has become so polarised, that the gun nuts will resist any attempt to regulate access to guns (especially if you're a white christian), no matter how small or simple. That's how far beyond saving they are.

Leaving aside the fact that the idea that police need to patrol schools should ring alarm bells in any sane person's brain that you're going the wrong way, ultimately the issue here is money. Everything in the US is about the shakedown, local police forces rely on revenue-generating activities to maintain their powers. Actual police officers in schools would require a payment from the school to the local police force. And public schools in the US are badly underfunded and being continuously defunded, so they don't have the money for this without taking it from kids' educations.

In this small town, the police force will make a big show for a couple of weeks about keeping the schools secure before they eventually get redeployed to activities that generate revenue. Everything about the US system is a dystopian mess. We're only a couple of years from police forces being sponsored by the biggest business in town and putting their logo over all the police equipment.

A quote from an article about the massacre. Lest we forget, the Border Patrol Tactical force are an elite SWAT team.

Big, tough, trained SWAT team can't open a door.

So, remind me how the Social Studies teacher with her semi-automatic pistol is to hold off someone armed with military-grade hardware? Supposedly the local police stood around outside while the shooting was ongoing until this SWAT team arrived. Perhaps for as long as 40 minutes.

Trying to pose the question 'why these happen' is utter nonsense when it comes to mass shootings in the US. The reason they happen at a rate far higher rate in the US than anywhere else in the developed world is due of the availability of guns. To try start from any other point is just not living in reality - whether it will ever be politically possible to change that is a complete different discussion.

As for arming teachers or spending more money cops, it is again a complete distraction for any wild solution that isn't facing down the true cause and tougher solutions to really help with the problem. In this situation there were three trained law enforcement officers onsite in a town that spends 40% of their budget on the police. An untrained 18 year old managed to get through them and kill all these kids. The dozens of well trained and armed to the teeth 'hero' cops who arrived then just stood outside for nearly and hour while the shooter was in the school actively killing children, ignoring pleas from parents to go in to save them and holding parents down who were trying to go in themselves unarmed because the cops were too scared to do their job.

The well trained and armed cops couldn't stop the shooter but you think giving a handgun to Suzie the Home Economics teacher is going to make a real difference? Living in a complete fantasy world.

Exactly. The Republican solution to gun violence is to arm everyone. Their way of thinking is that if everyone has a gun, nobody will misuse them for fear of being killed themselves. So their solution to the gun problem is simply "more guns".

This has hit my wife hard. She's American and moved to Ireland about 7 years ago to become a teacher here. She told me on our first date that one of the reasons she left the US was that she was very conscious of the fact that someone could pull out a gun in her class if she was teaching over there.

So the cops stood around and even found time to taser a parent as the active shooter slaughtered kids.

But but but but more guns.

Because as we can see from this thread, gun nuts would rather propose zero-effort solutions that don't work rather than medium-effort solutions that are very likely to work. Because they don't want the latter to potentially infringe on them. It's all about the mé féin, fvck everyone else.

And now the police are being criticised for not allowing parents into the school and getting shot too. Obviously they couldn’t let anyone in and risk even more casualties.

Reading up on the killer it is little surprising that it had to come to a violent end.

I'd argue that attempts that were made to solve the problem while avoiding facing the root cause due to groveling to the gun lobby has probably made things worse rather than better.

Practically every kid in the US consistently is subjected to school shooting drills right from an extremely early age (many offices do too when kids leave school). This can then build a school shooting as an option for those who are twisted enough to become shooters and the easy access guns makes the whole thing straight forward