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Several US schools to install pepper-spraying drones to respond to school shootings
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Anything but regulate guns, making mental health ressources more accessible or punish bullying.
This normalizes policing by machines, controlled by faceless people who will be shielded against consequences just like cops are shielded now. Drones don't have a face, a name or an personell number. If something happens (and it will), you can't even point your finger on the guilty party anymore. It also shields those controllers from any social backlash they would get if they would hurt someone in person.
Schools are the obvious places to test/enact these types of changes too.
Kids don't know to speak out against remote policing via robotics, and normalising it now gets them used to it's wider use in society later.
It's much easier to raise a generation under a new set of standards, than it is to make an existing generation accept a new normal.
Like most American "solutions" it's a very good idea from a technical point of view but a terrible societal choice
Yeahhhhh I'm not super stoked about the government regulating guns. Like I'm absolutely not a "guns in schools" kinda guy, but governments regulating guns just makes the proletariat and individual workers easier to oppress.
Bullying should absolutely not be tolerated but IMO the emphasis should be on restoration and justice instead of punishment IMO.
Sure you can: whoever controlled the drone. If it's autonomous, whoever owns the drone. If the operator or owner is being hidden, it is whoever or whatever system is enabling the hiding.
The US has guns and they're being oppressed just fine.
Because there's no political or popular will to do anything about it. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink; that doesn't mean water is useless.
Seems to me that it does in fact mean that that excuse for gun proliferation is pretty useless.
Well that's one hell of a non-sequitur. To make a sweeping generalization, it's not the guns' fault that Americans are cowards.
A majority of US gun owners like what the government is doing, how does that make them cowards?
I'm talking about Americans that don't like what the government is doing (there's a lot to criticise the American right for, but unwilling to act they are not). There's plenty of gun ownership among American liberals.
So they are supposed to kill the majority of Americans who have guns that like what the government is doing?
The majority of Americans do not like what the government is doing, as seen from its approval rating, but also armed revolution usually doesn't happen by killing away everyone who disagrees with you.
The majority of Americans with guns do like what the government is doing though. Gun ownership is well over double for Republicans and they currently strongly support ICE and many other abusive domestic policies.
Please point out an armed revolution that wasn't just wealthy people using humans as pawns in their struggle for control. I can name only one and that was Haiti.
Uh... therefore?
I'm not sure how that's relevant here. Most revolutions tend to be about wealthy people using humans as pawns in their struggle for control, but also: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Russia, China, Mexico, Ireland*2, decolonization in general. There's also two Frances (1830, 1848) but those are more iffy.
I was just restating what I said already for clarification since that is what we were discussing.
When people talk armed revolution the track record is pretty much shit for human rights. Mythological thinking that an armed rebellion is going to solve our problem is problematic to say the least.
So then it's not the guns that make resistance possible it's popular will.
I mean obviously, but with popular will you'll want everything to give your cause an edge—hence the guns. It's possible to have popular will and still fail, so factors that give the rebellion (or just plain old resistance, see: Black Panthers) an edge are going to be necessary. In recent history, the Houthis definitely benefited from having guns when they rebelled against the then-government.
There's something very wrong with your water. It's killing a lot of children.
So just like regular water then.
Exactly! Thats is a perfect comparison. Even water can kill when unrestrained and unregulated.
The people with the guns, in general, like what the government is doing.
To be fair, several people have tried to shoot Trump.
Yeah because the vast majority of the proletariat here are white people who tolerate capitalism because it uses white supremacy and its white privilege to buy their complicity. Same is true for various other bigotries. If we nipped that shit in the bud and developed class consciousness, a revolution would take like three seconds.
Like having a heavily armed populace is literally the only good thing about
What is that heavily armed populace doing? They're not resisting a government that has entered the information warfare age, where every police station has SWAT gear and tanks and helicopters. The guns aren't saving you from the government, they're not saving me from the government, they're not saving Cletus on 10 acre compound if Uncle Sam decides to pay a visit with flashbangs and riot gear.
All the guns are doing is terrifying minorities, who actually can be controlled by them.
Guess how I know.
the gop fully "hypnotized" the 2a loving republicans, the thing that Rs love is authority/hiearchy, someone telling them what to do.
Except heavily armed populaces have resisted SWAT gear and tanks and helicopters before, but also: Even just forcing escalation to such methods is a win for the rebels/resistance/etc. There's a reason even oppressive governments don't jump straight to tanks and helicopters when they have a revolution that hasn't quite devolved into civil war. Besides, there's no guarantee the people manning the tanks and helicopters are going to be willing to fire into crowds. In a revolutionary scenario the government's grip on its armed forces tends to be shaky at best, and doing things like whipping out tanks to put down rebellion tends to alienate people who might've supported it otherwise. Hell, sometimes governments just give up instead of going through all this. Obviously armed revolution (which doesn't necessarily mean civil war) isn't foolproof, but the hurdle to winning isn't as big as people around here seem to think, since the very fact that such a thing is happening means there's a sympathetic cause that will make some fraction of the army/police/etc not want to fight.
That's such a limpwristed response to bullying. The average bully doesn't care about restoration and justice, that's why they're bullies. No amount of righteous indignation or high horsing is going to make them care.
The proper response to bullying is the same as the proper response to tyranny. Not appeasement and pandering, but an uncompromising commitment to putting them in their place.
I didn't say to appease or pander to the bully's sensibilities. And putting them in their place might be part of the bully's restoration.
This was specifically about bullying in schools, i.e. they're children. Some of them might grow up to be bullies, but my view is that most childhood bullies have not yet developed empathy for their peers. I.e., people can change, especially children.
You said not to punish them. How do you intend to teach them empathy if all they learn is that they can get away with doing what they want?
I was a child once. I got bullied by other children. Some of them grew up, some of them didn't. But you know what never helped? The adults who focused their ire on me anytime in stood up for myself, instead of having my back or telling the bullies to knock it off. No, they just told me I'm supposed to be better than them, so I'd get in just as much if not more trouble than they did, because "held to a higher standard" or some shit.
All they did was create a feeble, traumatized, spineless adult who lets others walk all over him because he's too afraid to stand up for himself, not because he's intimidated by bullies, but because he fears the authorities and feels he doesn't deserve the ground beneath his feet. An adult who bottled up all his emotions, because there was nowhere else for them to go, until years later when he couldn't hold in the pressure anymore and his psyche started rupturing into mental breakdowns and became entirely unable to participate in society.
Except no on ever says "it's okay, it's understandable, he has trauma." No, people say "That guy's crazy, stay away, he's mentally unstable, ew." They say "stop blaming your childhood, you're not a victim, trauma isn't real, you're clearly choosing to have mental breakdowns because you want attention and it makes you feel powerful" which is entirely counterfactual.
So no, don't let bullies off the hook because you think "punishment" is a naughty word. All you're gonna do is enable them to push their victims over the edge, with no recourse but to feel backed into a corner and have to fight their way out.
I've never shot anybody, because that's not something I would do. But I can definitely understand how enduring years of that kind of treatment can make someone feel like they have no other option besides seeking vengeance, making others feel the pain that those others had made them feel. And to an unbalanced psyche in that sort of state, everyone who minimized and dismissed and ignored their pain when they cried out for help might seem like valid targets. That doesn't make it right, but from a psychological point of view, it's easy to see the direct line of cause-and-effect, if you take a moment to remove those socialized glasses of admitting the facts only when they're comfortable.
A large proportion of school shooters were victims of bullying. That doesn't mean we should stigmatizing the victims and ostracize them further, although that's probably the response most "normies" would jump to. But that would exacerbate the problem. No, the problem is to reduce the prevalence of bullying, and give victims sufficient avenues for redress and support, so that they don't feel like they have to fend for themselves while backed into a corner with their hands tied behind their back and pushed daily beyond the reasonable limits of what a human psyche can take until they can't take anymore and finally snap.
Because punishment shouldn't be the focus. It shouldn't be "you did bad thing therefore bad thing happens to you". I'm not saying it has to be a totally positive experience for the bully, bully might even have to get their teeth rearranged for them, but what I take issue with is the institutional, top-down, carceral mentality of punishment. The focus should be on making the victim whole and making sure the bully doesn't bully again, not that the bully gets some requisite amount of pain and suffering.
Yeah I'm absolutely not saying that. If you beat the shit out of someone bullying you, you are generically in the right as far as I'm concerned.
Again, that's absolutely not what I am advocating. Quite the opposite, actually. I am advocating that we treat bullies like people capable of change. Hold them accountable for their actions. And if that process is painful the bully, so be it, but inflicting pain and suffering on the bully should not be the primary goal. When we do this, the bully simply learns to pick better targets.
It seems like you're assuming I have a retributive approach to justice, and I think that's where this disagreement is coming from. I don't though. I don't think bullies should be punished just for the sake of punishing them. That wouldn't be effective.
Sure, the focus should be on making the victim whole and making the bully stop being a bully. The first part of that I think is beyond the scope of this discussion. I assume we would agree that it would take some research-based approach likely involving counseling and social support. But I'm not here to hash out those details because it's not my expertise.
As far as making the bullying stop bullying though, that requires either extrinsic interventions, which would be reactive and circumstantial at best, or giving the bully an intrinsic motivation to stop bullying. Most people are motivated by the desire to be a good person and treat others with kindness. Those people aren't bullies in the first place. Bullies don't have that motive.
So what could motivate a bully to stop bullying? Well, you wouldn't bribe them with nice rewards for good behavior. That would be unfair to people who were never bullies in the first place, and to the bully's victims.
Psychologically speaking, extrinsic motivators fall into two broad categories: rewards and punishments.
So how is that not bringing us full circle? Because the punishment here isn't strictly retributive. The point isn't to get back at them because "fair's fair." The point is to force them to stop bullying by making it more painful to them to continue bullying than they find worth the intrinsic reward they feel from bullying.
Maybe it sounds crass to say we need to cognitively/behaviorally condition bullies to stop bullying, but what else can you do besides asking them nicely to stop? What do you do when they refuse?