Tim Walz has said he’s “sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers” following the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, which left four dead.
Walz, who was named as Kamala Harris’ running mate in the race for the White House in August, spoke about the Wednesday (4 September) shooting at a campaign rally at the Highmark Amphitheater in Erie, Pennsylvania on Thursday.
He told his supporters: “We believe in the freedom to send our kids to school without being shot dead in the hall.”
“The news cycle moves on within a day,” he commented of the incident, adding that kids had returned to school feeling excited and “now we have four dead”.
Gray, 14, used a riffle to kill the victims in the hallway outside his algebra class. He will be tried as an adult. His [sic]
I hate the terrible proofreading/editing of online articles.
Are you saying he didn’t use a riffle?
I’d say it’s highly unlikely, at best. I’ll be damned if I can figure out how he managed to riffle in a deadly fashion.
You are supposed to put the sic directly after the misspelling
Gray, 14, used a riffle [sic] to kill
Oh, I was using it to indicate that the “His” was just left floating there in space, with no punctuation or anything. Thanks, though!
Oh lol, I didn’t even notice that, but you’re right!
Riffles have ridges
There is literally no way to do less… Than hopes and prayers
It is a total abdication of responsibility for fixing a problem
In the meantime, Trump is shrieking to his MAGA idiots about the completely fake “danger” of letting your kids go to school and returning home with a sex change operation
I have relatives that I shit you not fear this and believe it is 100% real. It’s so extremely fucking stupid
I had a ER doctor tell me about litter boxes in schools last week. She was dead serious.
Any sane parent would worry about their kid getting killed a lot more than about them transitioning to another gender even if both of those were real things that actually happen.
They would rather tier kids have a good clean Christian death (being shot by someone mentally ill while attending school) than live a corrupted life (of not using the pronouns we gave them).
“Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?”
My family’s local religious leader fortunately took my parents aside one day to ask them exactly that. It was the start of a major turn around in my relationship with them, and I’ll never not be grateful that he did that.
God, if only that’s how it worked when I was a kid.
I was totally that guy who was “just kidding” and “just thinking aloud” about what it’d be like to be a girl… but… like “Not really, cause I’m totally a straight dude. I just wanna grab my own tiddies.”
Now I’m a woman, and I just grabbed my own tiddies for fun.
Enjoy those head earned tiddies!
this is certainly either one of the more fascinating typos, or one of the weirder things i’m not picking up on.
anyway, head titties is an interesting implication.
See: little Nicky
People are tired of thoughts and prayers for school bombings too Timmy
Are those happening weekly as well?
Hell, I’m all in favour of restricting access to bombs, can we restrict access to guns to match?
They happen daily.
These sicko republicans, they have no idea what the second amendment means, which means they are messing this up for all of us. I’ve always believed in a strong 2nd amendment which means I want a legal tank with ammo in a secure location in my back yard. These republifucker weirdos don’t even know what the second amendment means. If I have to park my tank downtown so be it, but I want to have a tank with ammo in a secure location, same should go for these assault rifles, etc. we need a well regulated militia which means we don’t get to keep weapons unlocked in our homes willy nilly
The term ‘arms’ also refers to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Where’s my McNuke, McAnthrax, McSarin?
I don’t know if anyone needed a harmless (slightly dark) laugh on the subject, but I recently played an indie PnC game called “3 Minutes to Midnight” with a joke around this. You open a wall medical kit, and there are sheets of paper inside, which read “Thoughts and prayers”.
I’m sure Fox News is already spinning it out of context as “Tim Walz is sick and tired of prayer and is planning on banning public & private prayer!”
This shooting in particular shows major society-level failures. The parents were victims of the opiate crisis. Society failed to treat that problem at an appropriate level when it first cropped up and they failed to claw back the profits pharmaceutical companies made off creating addicts. We failed to fund school mental health services that could have helped a child who everyone knew was struggling. Society failed to recognize and address the domestic violence situation, failed to intervene when the child was being raised by addicts, and failed to remove guns from such a volatile situation. There are so many levels on which any significant intervention could have prevented this chain of events.
This kid was already reported for threatening a school school shooting last year and the investigation stopped after they asked him if he did that and he said no. It’s a fucking joke.
Country that insists we have a “mental health crisis” providing absolutely zero mental health care to people who are clearly showing all the symptoms of said crisis.
Country that says “nothing can be done to stop this” did nothing to try to stop this.
If they did literally ANYTHING after that it would have Infringed on his Second Amendment Rights! Your ONLY allowed to take someone’s Guns away AFTER they’ve killed people! Or they’re
NigBlack!He should have been institutionalized. I’m of the opinion that if you’re too dangerous to possess a gun, you’re too dangerous to be loose in society.
Exactly, people with serious problems need to be off of the streets.
Why do all the law-abiding sane people have to give away their rights when we already have ways to remove dangerous people from society.
Or they’re Black!
Hey, you can’t just take away Black people’s guns like that! You shoot them for having a gun, because you “feared for your safety” because they were exercising their Second Amendment Rights!
This is the real takeaway. The Republicans want to do nothing, and the dems want a quick fix in gun control. Neither addresses the root of the problem. The world as a whole needs to invest more in social services, education, and public health. It should be where the majority of money goes really.
On the other hand some of those “quick fixes” are actually modernizing our gun laws to be like other countries that allow gun ownership. We should put all the work in but calling Universal Background Check and Red Flag quick fixes is like calling a highway lane expansion a quick fix. Yes we need a bus system, but the 2 lane road built in the 1950’s isn’t cutting it anymore either way.
I agree they should still be done. I just want some progress on the root of the problem.
Yes. We need full societal fixes. But gun control is part of that.
14 year olds have no business having unsupervised access to weapons. We need better storage laws. We need better red flag laws, national licensing laws so that everyone with a gun has to take a basic safety course, and we need universal background checks where ALL branches of law enforcement share info with each other.
Start there and you will significantly cut gun violence while we spin up the mental health infrastructure to deal with the rest. Which is going to take time. And money. Neither of which the current government wants to spend.
One would think it would be a bipartisan idea that a kid with two parents who are addicts should receive some sort of government intervention.
Conservatives hear “sins of the father” and assume it means that children MUST suffer for what their parents did wrong
And yes, I’ve legitimately heard multiple CHRISTIAN conservatives use that line in that manner and it amazes me they didn’t realize they had it fucking backwards
We don’t have bipartisan ideas anymore. Both sides run on hate for their opponent. So they can’t be seen as working with them.
Not really. One side runs on hate. The other side is willing to cross the aisle but won’t compromise to the extreme level the other side demands. Look at the border bill. It was a fair bipartisan compromise, but it wasn’t far enough for the right.
Most democrats run on not being trump. I consider that running on hate. But I could understand if others don’t. As for the border bill… they only floated that because 1… they were pretty sure the Republicans wouldn’t want to give them a win. And 2… they were trying to woo conservative voters to vote for Biden. It was a win win stunt that they wouldn’t have done if the election wasn’t close.
You do realize there is a difference between hating Trump because he’s a fraudulent criminal and hating everyone who isn’t a white Christian, right?
You do realize there is a similarity between “hating Trump because he’s a fraudulent criminal and hating everyone who isn’t a white Christian” right? It’s hate. And more importantly it is a way to rally people to your side without having to promise to accomplish anything that would move the country forward.
I’ve heard plenty of arguments from Dems for mental health care at various levels. Those things need to be funded, and who do you think keeps trying to defund government agencies and services for social/mental health issues? Usually not the Dems. The Dems have plenty of faults, including their lack of spines (in at least some cases), but the lack of funding for social services is not usually one of them.
They talk about it sometimes. But never do anything. And more importantly, it doesn’t even make Americans top ten. I don’t have much faith in politicians doing anything about it until it is in the top 5. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642887/inflation-immigration-rank-among-top-issue-concerns.aspx
What about these ones?
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/838/text
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/46/text
- https://www.bennet.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/3/bennet-wyden-introduce-bill-to-increase-access-to-mental-and-behavioral-health-care-for-kids-seniors-and-low-income-americans
- https://mn.gov/governor/newsroom/press-releases/?id=1055-529893
This took 2 minutes of Googling, and I know that many bills have been proposed at the State level in many different states (including the last link, signed into law by Tim Walz), largely championed by Dems.
I’m sorry, I consider “introducing” a bill nothing more than talk. And I should have specified at the federal level. State level dems and even Republicans do sometimes accomplish things for the greater good.
I don’t want to argue against mental health services, i think mental health services could be helpful. However, i do want to point something out here: saying this is a mental health problem really doesn’t make sense. You know a group that has mental health problems? Women. You know who else? Black people. You know who barely do any mass shootings? Either of those groups. We’re not (just) talking mental health issues, we’re talking about people who view “shooting up a school” as an appropriate way to resolve their social grievances. You can help that with mental health services, you can take their power away by blocking easy access to guns, but that’s a pretty big component here as well.
The expression of mental health problems varies widely based on the cause. Societal and cultural pressures are vastly different for different groups. Men in general are 4 times more likely to commit suicide than women for example. Women are twice as likely as men to suffer major depression.hormones also impact the expression of mental illness. Men experiencing depression are more likely to exhibit irritability, sudden anger, increased loss of control, risk-taking, and aggression. Men are also more likely to feel social pressure to deal with their problems alone and are more likely to turn to drugs or alcohol.
This may be the first coherent analysis I’ve ever seen on Lemmy. Every other take on shootings are always 100% asinine comments about guns.
Oh Tim, there’s nothing that can be done!
Now where did I put my AR-14 tie pin so I can stand in solidarity with the real victims…
Walz’s response to this is in very stark contrast to his rival Vance here. Vance gave a shockingly tone-deaf, “It’s a fact of life” response that spits in the face of the victims and their families. It shows a fundamental lack of empathy that borders on cruelty (which might be the point).
Thots 'n Pears can only go so far, in this case not far at all.
Feels like that bulletproof glass is infringing on my 2nd Amendment Rights.
Rich weird guy which I bet has his kids in private schools.
What this says to me is “I am rich enough to deal with the reality of mass shootings. Get fucked plebs. This is your problem, not mine.”
Look how far you’ve let this charade go, republicans… You know you have quiet moments where you are fully aware that you’re just trapped in this irrational hate machine. This is literally a child named after a gun shooting other children to death. And you still just sit there, hiding in your full cowardice and not admitting outwardly that you chose the wrong path. You’re a fucking disgrace.
So they want to ban handguns, right?
I think everyone sick of being in this time loop of the same result happening over and over. Action is the only solution.
But the action is “ban guns” and the American populace does not want that.
Majority in U.S. Continues to Favor Stricter Gun Laws - Gallup.com
- Fifty-six percent of U.S. adults say gun laws should be stricter, while 31% believe they should be kept as they are now and 12% favor less strict gun laws. (2023)
- Overall, 64% say they favor stricter gun control laws, with 36% opposed, little changed since a survey taken last summer in the wake of a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. (2023)
Polls show a solid majority of Americans want gun control | Vox
- Nearly three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem, according to a survey last year by Pew Research Center. And a majority of Americans think that the epidemic of school shootings could be stopped with drastic changes in legislation, according to a poll this week by YouGov. (2022)
Most Americans support these 4 types of gun legislation, poll says
Would be a lot more helpful to name politicians who are against gun control than the 'American Populace" who continues to be shot everyday.
TBF, American gun manufacturers don’t want it because that would slow sales and line might not go up
I also think this. But now that I’ve thought it, what’s the next step?
Restrictive gun laws and ban shit. Fuck 2A and all the assholes screaming about them. If people are consistently proving they are not responsible enough for what the constitution affords them, fuck the constitution. It needs revising.
Restrictive gun laws and ban shit.
I don’t have the power to do this. Only the politicians owned and operated by the gun lobby have this power, and they’ve been moving us in reverse.
Fuck 2A and all the assholes screaming about them.
I don’t think shoving my dick through a hole in the 2nd Amendment is going to do anything to reduce gun crime. I certainly don’t think trying to shove my dick into a guy screaming about 2A rights is going to fix things.
fuck the constitution. It needs revising.
It is very difficult to redefine the Constitution via legal channels. Especially if you’re just some angry internet guy. You’d need enormous sums of money, a willing media, and a political class that responds to social pressure.
And even when guys like Mike Bloomberg enjoyed most of that, they failed to achieve more than local reforms thanks to the aggressive partisan pushback from conservatives in his old party.
Until a politician grows a pair nothing is going to change. I hear what you’re saying outside of the tongue in cheek and it’s such a mess. America has systemic issues which are by and large a result of what the system was designed to do.
Until a politician grows a pair nothing is going to change.
Trump took a bullet wound to the ear and he’s still saying the same old stupid bullshit.
I don’t think this is a question of growing a pair. The economic and social incentives to stay the course are simply overwhelming.
America has systemic issues which are by and large a result of what the system was designed to do.
And systems like this are resilient, intransigent, and self-perpetuating.
The slavish devotion to our gun policy is like a contagious mental illness.
somebody pray for this man.
/s for the fellow tone deaf people out there.
🙏🙏🙏
thank god, he might be ok now.
no better indicator that prayer doesn’t work then the fact that there’s a new school shooting almost every day after republicans do a new thoughts and prayers.
Survivor bias. Republicans think “thoughts and prayers” are protecting their own kids. They don’t give a shit about other kids they don’t know.
Worse, they don’t actually think it works. They just care about the NRA’s blood money more than the lives of your children. THEIR children are in private schools with procedures in place to prevent this from happening.
No see, if we have bible studies in school, that would turn all the bad students good because teenagers are known for being very receptive to religion. Just ask Reddit!
(I’m being sarcastic as fuck)
I don’t think they believe it works.
I think they just believe that shootings are bound to happen, because why else would they be happening on such a regular basis?
It’s the constant deflection of responsibility, from our choices as a society, to some indeterminate outside force.
Poverty and increasing cost of living? It’s all those darn immigrants.
Your job not paying you enough? Must be overseas industry.
They don’t think their prayers will prevent a school shooting, they just don’t think there’s other options to prevent it that will actually work without “taking away their freedom” (-to own a gun that’s more likely to harm them than protect them)
It’s just so evil, do they think we are dumb and can’t just look up how other countries with better gun control are doing? What do they say when they are asked about that?
do they think we are dumb and can’t just look up how other countries with better gun control are doing?
They think we are lazy and won’t do that. And they’re largely right.
