Academics & students who've visit always mention the obvious countermeasures to campus shootings. Far more security, sequestered academic offices, cameras.
While this proposal is radical... it's not unexpected.
At the risk of sounding heartlessly numerate: campus shootings are so rare that they should mostly be ignored. The danger level is very, very low. If you must worry, then worry about something boring but important like traffic accidents instead.
For terrorists, causalities are a means rather than an ends.
Trying to characterize terrorism in terms of body bags isn't going to work for many reasons. One is that terrorism works even with small numbers of total body bags. Another, perhaps more important, is that terrorists will increase their violence to match the population's threshold.
Anyways. I don't have any answers. But dismissing terrorism because it doesn't kill that many people kind of misses the point of terrorism in a lot of important ways.
I interpret "works" to mean that it accomplishes its goal. For instance, if somebody threatens to break your storefront windows unless you pay protection money, so you pay the money, then the threat worked. We used to use a different word than "terrorism" for that, but you get the idea.
But you rarely hear that grafitti works. Or that road rage works. They might accomplish some goal, but that goal may be difficult to discern. So we tend to qualify the success. "If the goal is..."
If the goal of running a marathon is to improve personal performance...
When the point is unclear to say the least, it is pointless to say it works without saying what it works to accomplish. It's like saying, "dying your hair works."
For example this modern misuse of the word terrorism is designed to strike fear into a population, but the point of that terrorism is not just to scare people, it is to coerce them into agreeing to give more power and money to the ruling class.
Hurting and scaring people just to hurt and scare people isn't terrorism, it's probably driven some kind of mental defect like psychopathy though.
Why are you focusing on "terrorists" as the only ones with agency, rather than the media that hypes up the event, makes it into a spectacle, and encourages the next mentally ill person to go for their own 15 days of fame? The ones that buy ink by the barrel never critically examine their own role, but we certainly can.
There's nothing in your post I particularly disagree with. I'm simply making factual statements about the social phenomena exploited by terrorists. Stop shooting at the messenger.
While you are making a factual statement, you're doing so while pushing a paradigm that absolves the media. The entire point of looking at numbers is to objectively judge the actual harm to people, rather than buying into the sensationalism. By the paradigm you're advocating, "the terrorists win".
It’s only “works” if you let it. And it doesn’t “work” on me. I don’t give a shit and won’t let it impact singe choice I make. So please don’t just declare how it “works”.
> I don’t give a shit and won’t let it impact singe choice I make. So please don’t just declare how it “works”.
You missed the point.
There will always be many people like you, who aren't personally convinced to shift their security/liberty tradeoff by exactly the current level of terrorism deemed acceptable or unpreventable. There will always be people at far extremes of that spectrum. Probably even some further to the liberty side of that spectrum than you are, believe it or not.
Terrorism doesn't work by targeting you in particular, or by targeting the tails of the distribution. That's not how terror functions. It functions by targeting the fat portion of the distribution. It targets societies, not individuals.
Anyways, if you want to prove me wrong it's easy. Get the TSA to be disbanded by letting lawmakers know about your personal risk tolerance. I'm sure it'll work ;-)
Terrorism works to... what? Sell xray machines? Decrease tourism? Convince Lithuanians to quit interfering in Kentucky? Fund the security industrial complex?
To attack. To hurt. To cause fear. To degrade a perceived enemy's sense of safety, order, civility, etc. To destroy social fabric. To cause maximum damage to that from which the terrorist feels alienated.
Real life isn't a Tom Clancy novel, and many terrorists are not agents of transnational militant organizations with specific and articulated geopolitical aims.
For many terrorists, the terror is the goal.
You can yell and scream and plead that we shouldn't be afraid. And look: I'm not here to disagree. Not at all. I'm just here to tell you that if your appeals started to work, future terrorists would switch to different tactics. And also that terrorists are likely choosing the tactics they are precisely because they think you're wrong about your ability to get the vast majority of people to not be afraid.
Again, no solutions here. But ignoring the fundamental goal of terrorism and mass violence probably isn't a good starting point.
In the US, terrorism is generally understood to be distinct from random violence specifically due to the political goal. So, this excludes most school shootings. Also, when we have a lone shooter with a manifesto or whatever, which could I guess arguably be seen as political, generally the media will skip it I think. Deter copycats and all that.
Are you sure you aren't thinking about high schools? My high school--which was always a bit closed as no one ever particularly wanted random people showing up and interacting with kids--went into a ridiculous lockdown after Columbine and never recovered with access restricted to a single entrance with a stationed guard, limited access to hallways... and it has only gotten worse over the years.
The college I'm at, however, has always been set up where, during the day, you can just wander into any building and go into any room and no one really cares. When I was a student I sometimes would just go explore random areas of campus to try to see what people were working on, and most of the doors everywhere are just open (not unlocked... open). If you want to crash a class, the question was really only whether the room was small enough that the professor would notice and simultaneously care to call you out ;P.
Other than COVID--which has led to weird incentive systems that might not go away soon :(--the only time I've seen people care much about having things locked or with limited access has been due to issues of theft, not due to shootings (which HAVE happened in my area--my college even got nationally famous due to one in 2014-ish--but like, that didn't even happen on campus anyway: all similar incidents I'm aware of happened in the college town next to campus).
The only effective countermeasure to campus and school shootings is to elect strong ethical leaders who resist and oppose and prosecute the deeply corrupt NRA's influence, propoganda, fraud, bribes, tax evasion, Russian influence, and mentally ill gun culture, that arms and encourages insane mass murderers, psychopathic right-wing gun nuts, and hateful racist MAGA incels, makes it quick and easy for them to get and use and fetishize guns, ammunition, high capacity magazines, automatic weapons, body armor, and military equipment, and relentlessly protects and defends gun manufacturers, sellers, owners, and mendacious mass shooting deniers like Alex Jones from all forms of liability, responsibility, and accountability.
Academics & students who've visit always mention the obvious countermeasures to campus shootings. Far more security, sequestered academic offices, cameras.
While this proposal is radical... it's not unexpected.