Former Washington Middle School teacher Kerstin Westcott resigned in front of the school board after detailing incidents of violence, abuse, and fear for the safety of students and staff.

Westcott goes on to detail the following incidents that happened during the 2016-2017 school year:

-"Student set 3 fires in the bathrooms-we were never evacuated"
-"[Redacted] was kicked in the face during a fight and his glasses were broken"
-"Drugs and cigarettes have been both sold and used in and around the school"
-"So many fights that students have started arming themselves with weapons (including brass knuckles, knives, a large stick, and a lock) with which to fight"
-"Student jumped and beaten to the ground and kicked in the head and stomach repeatedly while she was down"
-"Student approached a teacher personally and said he had a gun and was going to shoot that teacher"
-"Student told staff, 'I am going to kill the teacher. I am going to get a shotgun and find out where he lives. Watch me. I am not kidding.'"

During a fight, Westcott recalls an administrator telling a teacher, "We're numb to fights around here. Is it a real fight?"

The letter says 11 percent of Washington Middle School students were in the "red zone" for behavior, meaning they had committed at least six major offenses during the school year.

I'm not totally sold on the AR-15 to save the country line of reasoning either, but it's not entirely without merit.

flowers are beat by knives are beat by guns are beat by tanks are beat by airpower

Sure a population armed with AR-15s isn't going to prevent a guy like Bashar Al Assad who's willing to use helicopters to drop chemical weapons on you. At the same time, try resisting or overthrowing a guy like that WITHOUT AR-15s...

"it's the assault that makes it an assault weapon" LOL. Guess we should start banning assault hammers and assault knives then.

10 yr Assault weapon ban didn't affect gun violence at all.

AR-15s aren't weapons of war, they are used by police agencies across the country.

BTW, the parkland shooter used 10rnd low capacity magazines. Looks like banning 30rnds won't do much good at all, but that's just common sense.

This gun control hysteria is the Republicans' best shot of retaining control of the house and senate. Just look at '94 when they swept into power after the clinton assault weapon ban.


You can't really show any side when you limit each exchange to a 2-sentence sound byte. Pretty pointless.

Possible, yes. As easy, not at all. Most large outside events make it impossible to get near crowds with a car these days with barricades. Even where they aren't, vehicular murder takes far more effort than pulling a trigger.
Swords and knives, get real. You cannot be serious, so I'm walking away.

"There's no other legal tool available to the public capable of mass murders with so little effort."

I disagree. Petrol and cars/trucks. Both are legal and easily used to commit mass murder (and have been). I'll add swords (long knives) into this with a caveat - you need to be a highly trained swordsman to commit such an atrocity.

Cars are so dangerous that they have killed more people in the US in the last 50 years by accident than guns have on purpose. It took 50 years of concerted effort by subsequent US administrations to get the yearly death toll by cars lower than that of firearms (the curve for cars only recently dipped below that of firearms).

Knives can cause as much or more vascular damage than a typical firearm wound. The difference is that knives require the smallest interpersonal confrontation distance (it is hand to hand combat - people don't like this), and to consistently achieve high levels of vascular damage requires a higher degree of training.

The right of non-restricted people to own firearms has little affect on murder rates. E.g. Australia has a higher rate of firearm ownership now than before its lauded firearms laws came into effect in 1997. The majority of studies done on this topic conclude that the restrictions had no effect (or no measurable effect) on the continued reduction in firearm fatalities.

I think the greatest issue in the US is that some people see the use of firearms as a solution to some problems where it is not a good solution. I.e. it is a cultural issue.

It's not giving up the gun that might save lives, it's giving up the right to own them.
His gun probably wouldn't ever kill someone.
The right of any non restricted person to buy one is what leads to murderers having this tool often used to commit mass murder.
Would that stop all mass murders? Absolutely not, but it would stop SOME...probably most. Other methods people use are harder to assemble without being caught (bombs), are far less lethal (knives, arrows), and/or are harder to procure (tasteless poisons or gas). There's no other legal tool available to the public capable of mass murders with so little effort.

And yes, @BSR, this guy just made a sawed off AR15. He better post the video of him cutting it in half again if he doesn't want a visit from ATF. That gun almost certainly still fires, it's just incredibly more dangerous to the user now, and highly illegal. Not sure what you're saying in your snarky post, he didn't ever say a word otherwise.

Restricting access to this type of technology through laws and regulations is not the answer. If you try to prevent bad people from slaughtering their enemies en-masse using technologically advanced and highly efficient means, they're just going to do it another way. Will you outlaw knives or trucks next?

And if only the government has this weapon, then you have no means to fight back when they come to take your rights away. We have a constitutional right to arm ourselves against a hypothetical tyrannical government.

The only way to stop a bad guy with autonomous murder drones is a good guy with autonomous murder drones.

How many of those fact checking organisations would have flagged Judith Miller's Iraq pieces in the NYT as "deliberatly misleading content"? Or what about the 16 hit pieces on Sanders within 24h at Bezos' rag of a newspaper? And let's not even start about the reporting on the recent night of the long knives in Saudi Arabia ("reform", really? fuck off)...

Point is, the effort to curtail "fake news" regularly goes hand in hand with the suppression of non-establishment views while leaving the main sources of deliberate misinformation untouched. Remember PropOrNot and how Bezos' rag, amongst others, jumped on it? That list included prominent left wing/anti-war sites such as TruthOut, Counterpunch, TruthDig, ConsortiumNews, etc.

Want some examples of "misleading content" or "deliberate misinformation"? Just browse through the articles at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting for a few minutes.

Sorry, that's pretty culturally-ignorant thinking right there.

Japanese people are not "meek" or "inhibited" any more so than Americans are. There are different cultural rules about self-expression but there are most certainly loud, aggressive, and flamboyant people here. They just express themselves in different ways than your typically loud, aggressive, and flamboyant American would.

You might think socioeconomic factors were a reason for the lack of crime, but you'd be wrong there too. Japan has a higher poverty rate and lower median income than the U.S.

The low crime rates here can much better be attributed to cultural factors. Every Japanese person is raised with the belief that it is shameful cause problems to the people around them, whether that be family, schoolmates, or co-workers. Getting arrested is about the most shameful thing you could do here. Just being suspected of a crime will likely get you fired from your job, before you are even tried.

And let's not forget the role the justice system here plays. If you get arrested you are almost 100% going to get convicted because the odds are massively stacked against you in the court system. You are basically guilty until proven innocent. Read this for more info about it.

And people here know this. They also know that Japanese prison is hellish. You won't be raped or assaulted there like in the U.S. but you will know exactly what is like to have all of your freedom stripped completely away.

You add to all of this the low unemployment rate of Japan, the high regulation of all weapons (including knives), a robust social system for helping the unemployed (although unfortunately lately a lot of people seem to be falling through the cracks), a nationalized health insurance plan (I pay a $1 co-pay to take my daughter to the doctor and all prescribed medicines are free), a strong social stigma against drug use, and the ability as an island nation to strictly police the borders to prevent the influx of illegal goods (i.e. drugs/guns) and you get the low crime rates in Japan.

tl;dr

There is little incentive to commit crime in Japan because the both social and legal repercussions are extremely severe, and there is little need to resort to crime to survive (plentiful jobs and robust social security). Likewise the opportunity to commit crime is lessened because of the strict regulation of weapons, drugs, and borders.

EDIT: I will say that on more than one occasion I've thought that a career criminal in the U.S. who suddenly found himself in Japan would feel like a kid in a candy store. Because of the lack of crime, people here don't take precautions against it--some people leave doors and windows unlocked when leaving the house, you'll see laptops or iPads left in cars in plain view, and people carry ridiculous amounts of cash on them (I'm talking like on the order of $1000 or more in some cases). On the one hand it can be reassuring but on the other hand I seriously worry about these people when they travel overseas.

I don't disagree that weapons don't necessarily make anyone more free. I also can't say people are wrong to observe in a civil war level of unrest, a dissenting party armed with fully automatic weapons has more leverage than one armed with knives.

Freedom to practice religion is not 'fairly safe' without guns, unless you want to ignore attacks with cars, trucks, IEDs, and, historically, civilian airliners.

I am mostly pointing out that restricting laws on gun ownership to protect people is not so terribly different from limiting freedom to practice/express idealogies. It is readily demonstrable that BOTH those freedoms have directly contributed to civilian casualties.

The difference between say, banning automatic weapons, and the banning of affiliation with extremist groups like the KKK or ISIL is mostly divided along partisan lines, logically they are pretty much two sides of the same coin, with democrats and republicans each decrying one as necessary and the other as evil.

You still can't carry knives longer than 5.5 inches in schools? Just have to fall back on the AR15 then

Made me think of "..Arabs with knives at the foot of the bed..."

Those are some sharp knives...

Every one of those movies begins with people thinking the clown doll is no threat.

And then...knives.

I know little about cutlery, but I get the impression from this video that this here is the prison tattoo of knives.