> Is a red herring and justification for helicopter parents to normalize their micromanaging.
We live in Plano, TX, just a few minutes south of the Allen Outlet massacre.
Yesterday my son texted me at noon "Shooting threat at school" and "It’s a rumor though but a lot of people are leaving anyway".
You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
The reality of schools and public life in the USA today means my family not being without a way to contact each other immediately, in real time, is a no-go.
It actually would have been better if neither your son nor you knew about nearby shooting.
It had nothing to do with the school your son was attending. That you responded in a panic is due to a common pattern of miscommunication during an emergency. The least effective response to an emergency is everyone panicking and operating independently of each other and ignorant of the ground truth.
How did the rumor of the school shooting begin? Probably from another student responding to some quick take on their socials? What if they didn’t have their phone? Would this even have caused a false panic in the first place?
Everyone take the time to look up the road death statistics to remind yourself what you really need to worry about. Always use your turn signal, even for your driveway. Slow down, but not too much… drive with the flow of traffic. Don’t change lanes in an intersection. Don’t swerve out of the way of a white-tailed dear, just try and punt the thing with the front of your car and count the hang time. Yield to the right at a 4-way intersection. Again, always use your turn signal, even for your driveway… why the drive way? Force the good habit!
I live in Texas. My wife is a public schoolteacher. We are coming for your son’s phone and we will convince enough people to agree with us.
Speak of the devil... I just checked my messages and saw this from my wife an hour ago: "ACC north ridge has an armed person on campus. Don’t go out"
I checked the news just now and found this out: "AUSTIN (KXAN) — A shelter-in-place order was lifted for the Austin Community College Northridge Campus.
The campus issued the order at 8:50 a.m. amid reports of a possible armed person nearby. Police investigated the reports and issued an all-clear.
The shelter-in-place was lifted at 10:20 a.m., and the campus returned to normal operations."
So literally by just spending my time being nerd sniped on the internet and tweaking a Dockerfile I missed the entirety of this nothingness.
To me, this is the "past generations" litmus test I measure any of my personal preferences against.
If people were able to handle not-it in 1920, it's probably a "nice to have" rather than a "must have."
Which, we can all feel very strongly about things that are nice to have, but people were also doing just fine before constant connectivity was a thing.
> You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
"Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1–54"[0]
I wonder if you speeding in your car increased the likely hood of death for someone more than collecting your son from a rumored school shooting. Not saying you were wrong to do that, obviously this is something that comes to the front of your mind when something is wrong at a school. The disconnect between risks we find acceptable, and those we don't is interesting though.
Some enterprising individual should figure up how many highway miles driven with a kid in the car it takes to exceed the annual risk from school shootings. I bet it's not many, but nobody thinks a thing of driving their kids around.
USDOT says 1.34 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Assuming 32mph average speed[1] that's 1 death per 2,332,089 hours driven.
There were 40 students killed in school shootings in 2022 [2]. Assuming 50M students and 2K hours/year in school that equates to 1 death per 2,500,000,000 hours spent in the classroom.
The difference is a factor of 1,072 meaning that if you drive with your kid for 2 hours, you have exposed them to a higher risk of dying in a traffic accident than an entire year of risk from school shootings.
I'm a parent of two school aged kids, one of whom attends school 10 minutes away. In a state that's had multiple school shootings as well.
I still accept that if something happens, it's going to play out before I rambo in and fix things.
I have firearms in the house and am trained in their use, but I'm not a professional. In a chaotic, lethal situation, even my presence as a transporter is only going to increase confusion and delay professionals doing their job.
What's going to save lives (including my kids') in a crisis is their knowing (1) how to handle themselves, (2) stay present and think critically, and (3) follow good directions when they receive them.
Never going to happen in the US, because it's antithetical to the current interpretation of the Constitution and because half the country doesn't trust the government to define "crazy" (or uses distrust as an excuse because they actually don't care / NRA).
Sadly, I think statistically it would help a lot. Obviously wouldn't completely solve the problem, but you have to have something pretty wrong with you to want to murder a lot of people at your school. And that likely shows up in other behavior.
But then, to me, "temporarily take guns away from a small segment of the population who has demonstrated, serious mental health issues" doesn't seem like a slippery slope. So I guess I'm on the "other side" of the issue. :/
Of note, the current interpretation of gun rights (the individual right to own) is a relatively new construct largely created by the gun lobby (roughly 1977, when there was an internal rebellion in NRA leadership) and a conservative court (Heller, 2008).
And FWIW, I'm in the camp that we can't define "crazy" adequately. So, I'm all for limiting access to all semi-automatic firearms. Regulate them all similarly to automatics and other "NFA" weapons.
Yup, the US constitution, including all of the Bill of Rights, only started being incorporated after the 13th Amendment.
The 2nd wasn’t even incorporated until McDonald v Chicago in 2010.
I mean, Barron v Baltimore could not be more clear about this:
The third clause (of Section 9), for example, declares that "no bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed." No language can be more general; yet the demonstration is complete that it applies solely to the government of the United States.... the succeeding section, the avowed purpose of which is to restrain state legislation... declares that "no state shall pass any bill of attainder or ex post facto law.” This provision, then, of the ninth section, however comprehensive its language, contains no restriction on state legislation.
I understand your point of being able to react to situations faster.
The key word is "react". It's disappointing and shameful that there's an apparent need for kids to have phones because of prevalent school shootings. If you aren't advocating for gun reform yet I hope you and others jump on board soon so that we can squash that fear and move on to mitigating the damage these computers in our pockets are causing to children and teens.
There was a time where school shootings weren't a primary concern and it was in my lifetime. It is possible to get back to that. We need to fight for it because it's not fair to the students that are traversing the school system, their families, and the ever climbing numbers of dead or harmed babies, children, teens, young adults, adults, and elderly and all living relatives affected by gun violence.
I understand your concern towards the difficult situation and your immediate action to look out for your family.
However, your anecdotal experience is still a "false positive" (fortunately), which doesn't allow us to conclude that, in the case of an actual emergency such as a school shooting, children with phones are statistically safer than children without phones.
But I'm genuinely interested in such a study, and I believe data is already available for us to compare the differences in these kinds of occurrences before the emergence of smartphones in schools and after. That would provide a north for making decisions that truly improve security for us and our loved ones.
I feel like a drama queen, because we (my immediate family) have had two near misses in 3 days. We were at the Allen Outlets and left 5 minutes before the shooting happened. 2 days later there's a school shooting threat at my son's high school.
Nothing physical has happened to _us_. I can't stand up and say, "I lost a family member due to gun violence!". I still feel like things are spiraling out of control and there's nothing I can do about it. How do you stop going outside where other people are for fear of a shooting? How do you send your only child to school knowing what's going on?
I hope I can cope and hope that everything turns out OK.
I think the main challenge is that true a solution can only be reached if the society as a whole faces the issue together. Meanwhile families are left on their own to try their (suboptimal) best.
I recently saw this youtube piece that shares the Swiss perspective on the topic of Gun ownership, and apart from some intended sarcasm in it that can bother viewers with distinct political views, the content has been worth watching:
> You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
There are multiple layers of “bad” with this. If there is a threat, you’re hindering emergency response. Regardless, you’re putting everyone at risk by “speeding down the street.”
I know the general consensus is that I did a bad thing with my reaction. I get it.
I don't trust law enforcement to do the right thing. I don't trust that grown adults sworn to serve and protect would act quickly to neutralize a threat that's not against themselves or their loved ones.
I see Uvalde playing out more than once in the future.
jtreminio says:"I don't trust law enforcement to do the right thing. I don't trust that grown adults sworn to serve and protect would act quickly to neutralize a threat that's not against themselves or their loved ones."
Your decision, were it properly weighed, would have to also assume that you could do better somehow but that is impossible (even if you were John Wick or Jason Bourne).
The hubris you display is enormous! Imagine that the American embassy had dropped an Chinese-American citizen into the middle of the square during the Tiananmen Massacre and demanded that he rescue the man under the tank!
Emotions got the better of you - you're in denial. There are a few more steps before you'll admit that retrieving your child was a futile and risky act for you, him and everyone else.
How would you take down an armed assailant yourself? In this hypothetical scenario where you are rushing to the school, are you carrying a firearm as well?
There will be no emergency response. Just a clean up crew. If you get there first you might get in before they Block the entrance and wait for the situation to resolve.
You've computed, incorrectly but that's not relevant here, P(his kid dies in a school shooting).
What you should have computed is P(his kid dies in a school shooting|rumor of shooting threat at school that enough people believe that they are leaving the school).
We WERE at the Allen Outlets on Saturday. We left 5 minutes before the shooting began. If I had purchased one more item from a store we would have been right there.
Tell me again how I am being hysterical. This country is going down in flames and not everyone can see the fire.
A traumatic experience for sure. One might almost think that after such an experience, you'd overreact at the slightest hint of anything like that ever happening again.
You are being hysterical.
(I am sorry for sounding dismissive. I pray for the safety of your family.)
You are hysterical, possibly b/c your interpretation is pessimistic. But most people interpret such an occurrence as a sign they are lucky.
I recommend you adopt such an attitude b/c it is healthier and b/c, when your story is retold, people will often want to touch you (so that the "good luck" rubs off on them)!
Most shootings at schools are targeted (jilted lover type situations—often these target an adult, not a student; something related to other crime, like beef over drug dealing territory between students) or are coincidences (a shooting otherwise having nothing to do with the school happens to take place on the edge of the parking lot, or something like that). They're not what people usually mean by "school shooting"—though, I mean, obviously they're still not great.
However, even including those, a couple years back I ran the numbers on odds of a kid even being present (not hurt or killed) during any kind of shooting at a school, over a 13-year K-12 school career, and I don't remember the exact figure, but it was low enough that I concluded none of this was worth any real concern on my part at all. And that's assuming shootings at schools are evenly distributed, which I'm sure they're not.
> The reality of schools and public life in the USA today means my family not being without a way to contact each other immediately, in real time, is a no-go.
You have badly misread the statistics on this, if you're that worried about it.
We live in Plano, TX, just a few minutes south of the Allen Outlet massacre.
Yesterday my son texted me at noon "Shooting threat at school" and "It’s a rumor though but a lot of people are leaving anyway".
You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
The reality of schools and public life in the USA today means my family not being without a way to contact each other immediately, in real time, is a no-go.