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Texas Mandates Panic Buttons In All Classrooms In Response To Mass Shootings

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/texas-mandates-school-panic-buttons_n_648a068fe4b04ee51a98e1b4

“Seconds really matter," said the mother of Alyssa Alhadeff, whose school shooting death in Parkland, Florida, inspired the measure.

Texas Mandates Panic Buttons In All Classrooms In Response To Mass Shootings

This is a response. I guess it's something you can do. But it doesn't seem like it's going to help much - it will have so many false positives cause kids, but not really be accessible in an emergency.

28 comments

macarthur_park

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A summary of ideas commonly proposed by Republican politicians in response to school shootings:

Harden schools against intruders by locking doors and installing bullet proof glass
Reduce the number of entrances and exits to further harden schools against external attackers
Install metal detectors to prevent students or visitors from bringing guns onto school property undetected
Eliminate backpacks/ require clear backpacks to prevent students from concealed carrying weapons
Arm teachers so they can kill school shooters
Hire more armed peace officers/school police to respond more quickly to school shooters
Require panic buttons to more quickly alert police to the presence of a school shooter

Notice that all of these ideas are reactive, and that none of these proposed solutions extend beyond the bounds of school property. It is assumed that there are people with guns who will try to kill schoolchildren, and they aren’t going to even try to solve that problem. They just take the existence of school shooters for granted, as a though it’s an innate part of society or a naturally occurring phenomenon like earthquakes.

That position would be a lot more defensible if the US wasn’t an outlier among developed nations for gun violence, and in particular school shootings.

aeternum

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"No way to prevent this from happening" says the only country in the world where this happens regularly

macarthur_park

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I was very tempted to end my post with a link to the most recent version of that classic onion article

veloxization

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It seriously feels like elsewhere in the developed world, a school shooting is a great tragedy, and in the US it's just another Monday.

TheDefiant604

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Because it is just another Monday. They proclaim, "thoughts and prayers," then go right back to owning the Libs by boycotting everything they love, while voting against their own best interests. Children are nothing more than sacrificial pawns to them.

Kempeth

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Because none of them want to solve the problem, until it's their kids getting shot up. Like "thoughts and prayers" it's a way to tell the victims to get fucked without being on record telling them to get fucked.

FizzyD

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I'm a teacher and a gun owner. I will tell off any administrator who tells me that I'll be issued a firearm for my classroom and that part of my job is to eliminate an intruder.

Ironically, the last district I taught at specifically told us to think about ourselves first and get to safety. We were told to run, even if that meant leaving the kids behind.

balerion

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why? so the police can get there and stand around staring at the punisher logos on their phones?

i'm not against this, i guess, but it's just... less than the bare minimum.

Animoscity

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If only there was some type of way this could be resolved. Maybe some type of regulations or laws. Who am I kidding that's just crazy talk

KahunaDaKine

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That's great and all, but presupposes that whoever’s on the other end of that panic button will actually respond and do so effectively or in time. Uvalde and Parkland both had cops make it on site in a reasonable amount of time, but they were basically useless in both cases.

psysok

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When you don't want to actually solve a problem, but you want to look like you care.

VoxAdActa

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Plot Twist: The panic button alerts the nearest police station to stay the fuck away from the school, cuz they might get shot there!

icy_mal

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It also triggers a tweet asking for thoughts and prayers. Everyone talks about how useless it is when people send their thoughts and prayers after a school shooting. This way, we'll get thoughts and prayers during the shootings!

taladar

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It also auto-updates the Onion article about school shootings automatically to the current date.

timbuck2themoon

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If they put as much effort into gun violence as they do banning drag shows and the like they might actually do something worthwhile.

BoxesOfPepe

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I guess it's better than the "guns for teachers" bullshit, but fuck... Surely we can do better

doctortofu

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I do genuinely hope no teacher ever goes postal with a gun issued due to that rule, but I do wonder what the reaction would be to a tragedy like that - a new rule to issue guns to all students when they enter the school so that they can defend themselves? The mind boggles...

sin_free_for_00_days

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I guess they'll be able to say,"See! We care about the issue!" Without taking one meaningful step. It just gives deplorables an out to vote Republican.

DevCat

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How many videos will we see of kids filming their friends hitting the button just for likes?

baascus

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Like seems like a feel good measure. I guess it’s happening anyway so hopefully it helps.

ActuallyASeal

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I'm wonder how much this would actually reduce response times. Panic button in a room full of teenagers will lead to a ton of false alarms. Police departments will pobably still need to be called by someone before they roll the entire department towards a school.

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And it’ll play a message saying “Thank you for your service, We hope you make it. Thoughts and prayers!!”

CynAq

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It feels terrible to joke about this but...

I think they should incentivize the tech industry to leverage the power of machine learning for utilizing a cybersecurity mesh based on metaverse training data to control AR-capable machine gun turrets powered by AI.

That should be more effective.

taladar

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I mean replacing the physical schools with schools in a virtual world would certainly fix the school shooting problem.

DABDA

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ED(ucation)-209 says, "You now have 5 seconds to comply!"

guyman

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Whew. Save the wannabe-comedy for the old site.

You're not as funny as you think you are <3

Raphael

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Or just ban guns.