Western Standard - May 25, 2022


CORY'S RANT： How can the USA stop school shootings？

Topics
school shootings in usa
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Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

184.72

Word count

1,118

Sentence count

100

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Another mass shooting in the United States, this time in an elementary school in Texas. 19 children and 2 adults were killed, and the death toll could have been much higher. What is the cause of these mass shootings, and what can we do to stop them?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Another mass shooting in the United States in a school, in an elementary school.
00:00:04.320 Everybody's seen the news on it now, and it's just awful.
00:00:08.100 Look, we can't deny it. We just can't deny it.
00:00:11.720 The USA is being plagued by school shootings in a way like no other country on earth.
00:00:16.180 So, I mean, yesterday's slaughter, and that's what it was,
00:00:18.140 slaughter of 19 children and two adults, at least to date.
00:00:20.940 It seems like every time I turn on the TV, there's another one gone.
00:00:24.420 It was the 27th American school shooting this year in the United States, just this year.
00:00:31.700 And nobody can look at those numbers and pretend there isn't a problem.
00:00:35.800 And I mean, think about this. Despite even 21 people being killed, 19 of them children,
00:00:40.600 that shooting yesterday was still only the second most deadly of American school shootings.
00:00:47.200 So, outside of schools, the USA has had 212 mass shootings just in 2022 alone.
00:00:54.120 These are shootings where four or more people are shot.
00:00:58.920 I mean, and there's been, what, 20-some school shootings this year, just in the last six months.
00:01:05.520 27 of them.
00:01:07.540 Something's wrong, guys. We can't deny this. We can't look the other way.
00:01:11.080 And there's no magic bullet. There's no simple solution. There's no quick one.
00:01:15.540 But the Americans need to seriously start seeking one.
00:01:19.400 I mean, the post-shooting knee-jerk reactions from politicos is already typical.
00:01:24.800 You know, the fact that there's typical reactions to these tragedies is indicative in itself, though,
00:01:28.840 and how common they're becoming.
00:01:30.760 I mean, there's calls for outright bans of firearms.
00:01:33.220 Those come immediately.
00:01:34.120 And that's not realistic.
00:01:35.660 And it's simplistic.
00:01:37.500 But at the same time, there's room to look at things.
00:01:40.560 There's room to talk about how free the access to firearms is.
00:01:44.380 I mean, come on. We've got to start looking at stuff here.
00:01:46.360 Something's wrong.
00:01:47.560 Waiting periods. Background checks, perhaps.
00:01:49.200 Because some Second Amendment people don't even think there should be a background check. 0.97
00:01:51.660 So we've got to examine what's going on there.
00:01:55.780 I mean, those are far from foolproof.
00:01:57.820 But they might start working towards mitigating some of this carnage.
00:02:01.140 Maybe those measures would be useless.
00:02:02.620 But let's have a rational discussion.
00:02:04.140 That's what we have to have on this.
00:02:05.360 And it's hard to be rational with something so emotional.
00:02:08.280 Left, right, or center.
00:02:09.300 No society, no people ever want to see children murdered like that.
00:02:12.480 It's awful.
00:02:13.940 I mean, there's some others who are claiming that loosening the firearms laws up would help
00:02:17.440 with the notion that people openly carrying firearms would act as a preventative measure.
00:02:21.840 You know, I'm not so bad on open carry, but I don't know if it would stop that.
00:02:24.740 I can't see it.
00:02:25.300 Texas is an open carry state, and there aren't many examples to indicate it helped.
00:02:28.960 It certainly didn't yesterday.
00:02:30.660 Now we've got to look at some of the numbers.
00:02:32.460 I mean, Americans have the most civilian guns per capita than any other country on the planet.
00:02:36.940 They have 120 guns for every 100 people.
00:02:39.460 They have more civilian firearms than actual civilians.
00:02:43.920 So the next closest country is the Falkland Islands with 62 per 100.
00:02:48.900 I mean, Americans have more than twice as much as the next country after that.
00:02:52.960 I mean, I'm not talking about moving towards disarming all citizens,
00:02:55.240 but we've got to look at that as a contributing factor.
00:02:57.320 Obviously, the number of people who have these firearms is contributing to this somehow.
00:03:03.360 I mean, Canada, though, is among the top nations, actually, believe it or not, with firearms per capita at 13th, with 34.7 per 100.
00:03:11.040 But that's still a quarter of the number that Americans have.
00:03:16.380 Now, is Canada experiencing a quarter of the mass shootings and school shootings, though?
00:03:22.460 No, not even close.
00:03:23.800 The Nova Scotia Rampage of 2020 demonstrated we're not immune to mass shootings.
00:03:27.000 But thankfully, certainly comparatively with the United States, we have far, far fewer of them,
00:03:32.800 even when factored in with the smaller population and the smaller amount of guns.
00:03:36.600 So it's not just a matter of large population.
00:03:39.200 It's not a matter of the large guns alone.
00:03:41.240 That means the shooting trans-south the border as some sort of cultural underpinnings.
00:03:46.000 That makes it all the more complex, but it makes it all the more important to study and try and understand what's causing all this.
00:03:50.600 It isn't happening in other countries.
00:03:52.840 It isn't.
00:03:54.200 So we need to understand why.
00:03:56.780 These things didn't happen with such frequency in years gone by, either.
00:03:59.960 I mean, there have been mass shootings since the invention of the gun, but they've been escalating.
00:04:03.860 In the 60s and 70s, it was common to see rifles in the back windows of pickup trucks in school parking lots
00:04:08.640 in both Canada and the USA, or at least in smaller towns.
00:04:11.740 There was no rash of shootings due to that.
00:04:13.840 So what changed?
00:04:15.220 What happened?
00:04:16.320 I have more questions today than answers.
00:04:17.980 Usually I'm full of answers.
00:04:19.860 I'm full of opinion.
00:04:20.460 I'm full of thoughts.
00:04:21.840 I still have a lot of that in me.
00:04:23.060 But with this issue, I don't have the answers, but I've got a lot of questions.
00:04:25.840 We've got to start asking these questions right now.
00:04:28.260 The only thing I can say conclusively, though, is that things have to change.
00:04:32.380 We have to admit there's a problem, or at least the Americans do.
00:04:34.600 I understand we are related to the states, and we have a lot of friends and family down there.
00:04:39.140 Many reactions over the next few days are going to be heated and without thought.
00:04:42.680 But when things cool down, let's hope a serious discussion on this issue begins.
00:04:47.200 I love my American neighbors.
00:04:48.360 I just returned from a visit south of the border last Monday.
00:04:51.380 I know Americans aren't some bunch of violent thugs who shrug off the murder of their children.
00:04:56.180 Their nation is mourning the senseless deaths of 19 children right now, and I'm mourning the waste of those young lives from afar.
00:05:02.620 We have to look away for a change, and it's hard for us, especially as political types.
00:05:07.080 We've got to look away from the political and ideological lines we've drawn in the sand and look to real solutions to this terrible and growing problem with mass shootings in the USA.
00:05:16.400 It's real.
00:05:17.320 Until activists and politicians are capable, though, of setting aside that ideology and drawing those lines, I fear we're going to be seeing more shootings in the years to come.
00:05:25.860 So let's look at this, look at it carefully, guys, and try to have a rational conversation.
00:05:33.160 Thank you very much.