This picture just came up in my Instagram feed. Completely forgot that they went with all white vehicles for the Peoplemover at some point. No wonder I only rode them 2 or 3x as a kid. Slow and boring to look at? Why did move away from the original color scheme? According to the caption the pic was taken at some point in the early 80s on which means I never saw colored People Mover vehicles in my lifetime.
View attachment 641602
They must have gone back to color before the ride was removed-Disneyland Fun, shot around 1990, clearly shows colored Peoplemover vehicles at one point. Fittingly, the lyric when the Peoplemover goes by is "everything is satisfactual."
Yea I read that story yesterday. Terrible. It’s time that every school has multiple armed guards. If we have 40 billion to send Ukraine we have the money for this.
I think we need all of this stuff too but as a last line of defense their should be well qualified and well paid security guards with rifles. Not one lame-o with a pistol. Don’t want to wait 1000 years for the mental health in this country to improve or for gun laws to actually do anything. Bad guys will still find a way to get guns, no matter what the laws are. We need to do something with immediate results in addition to stricter gun laws etc.
Can you guys suggest anything that would have better short term results ?
As a teacher, I get the desire to make things like this happen, but it's just not practical. Not because the schools don't care about the safety of their kids. Far from it. But inevitably that funding would have to come from school budgets that are already stretched to the breaking point in many places. In an ideal world, such funding would be in addition to existing budgets, but that's just not what tends to happen in most of this country. Any cost associated with this would come at the expense of materials, building updates and maintenance, social services, and so on, all of which are incredibly necessary. And, frankly, I'm not sure that it's realistic or cost effective to staff multiple armed guards at every school building in this country (and even if that worked, at what point would it cease to be a school and morph into a prison with better branding? But I digress).
Most schools already have cops/School Resource Officers in the building, including the very school where this shooting took place. However, it is not a given that SROs are definitively beneficial-there has been plenty of writing over the years showing that SRO being present makes it more likely that kids are sent to prisons at younger ages, particularly minority students (
https://www.aclu-wa.org/story/school-resource-officers-when-cure-worse-disease) and there was at least one school district in Illinois where SROs were literally ticketing misbehaving students for various behaviors, including things as relatively mild as talking loudly, littering, or breaking a soap dish:
https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-school-police-tickets-fines. Literally writing tickets and students going to court for things that could have been handled at the principal's office. As more research comes out, it's becoming clearer that putting SROs in buildings is more of an illusion than a genuine benefit. Putting even basic gun control laws in place nationwide would be a far cheaper and more effective long term solution.
You don't hear about massive shootings in other countries we regularly compare themselves to because they have effective gun control laws. As you said above, sure, we have a lot of diversity, etc. in cultures and so on, but so does Europe, and European countries are not the lily-white culturally homogeneous places that some people may imagine them to be. If they can do it, so can we.