re: #75 Dopamine Fish

I’ve kinda seen two different schools of thought on this. One is the usual line of thought I’ve seen here and lots of places, as in your post, that fortifying schools is a ridiculous idea on its face because for God’s sake, why should we have to turn our schools into fortresses?

The other comes from people like @AkivaMCohen, who says, “Yes, limits on doors - BUT rather than saying, ‘This, and only this,’ as the Republicans are, we need to say, ‘This, AND ALSO sensible limits on gun control - oh, and since this was your idea, you better pay for AT LEAST this.” In other words, moving the debate from, “Is it a good idea to fortify our schools against mass shooters” - since, in the current climate of “guns for all,” it is a good idea - to, “We agree that fortifying schools is necessary in the current climate, but should we change that climate so that schools no longer need to be fortified in the future?”

To be truthful, I see merits to both arguments. The thing is, yes, we shouldn’t HAVE to fortify our schools, but we DO. If we don’t fortify our schools, we’re leaving our children at risk. It is a ridiculous idea, but it is a ridiculous idea only in an ideal world where an 18-year-old man can’t walk into a gun store, buy two weapons specifically designed to kill people in the most efficient way possible, then turn around and walk into a school and do exactly that. In a ridiculous world where that is not only possible but probable, it actually makes a perverse amount of sense to fortify our schools, EVEN AS we work to make the world a less ridiculous place. I dunno. I’m kinda on the fence about the whole thing, to be honest.

The thing is, the Republicans proposing this won’t vote to raise taxes by a single penny to pay for it, so it would have to come out of the school budget for everything else, turning our schools into little more than prisons.