Should we require teachers to sacrifice themselves for their students? Private security guards? Public police officers?

What if we spend so much resources securing our schools that crime goes up elsewhere? What's the net gain in overall safety for a kid who lives in a crack house or with an abusive father?

How much teaching time across 1,000,000 schools would we sacrifice to ensure the safety at 1?

These are not questions with easy answers. I think that student safety should be a high priority, but I recognize there are other high priorities.

If a kid has a 1/1,000,000 chance of getting shot at school and a 1/1,000 chance of getting hit by a car crossing the street in front of the school, then magically banning cars is going to do 1,000x as much as magically banning guns.

Put another way, let me pose another complicated question: is the goal to make people safer, or to feel safer? It would be great to have a solution that did both and arguably we're in a situation where we have neither, but if you had two proposals - one that would make people feel safe (but wouldn't actually make them safer) and one that would make people safer (but they wouldn't recognize it), which one would be better? I don't know the answer.

It's better if people are safe.

Is actually better if people feel unsafe, as they will be more vigilant.

I agree that arming teachers isn't the solution.

I think it's a problem that needs to be solved with more adults being at schools. Would probably take a tax override to pay them, but volunteers should, imo, be welcomed to show a presence on school grounds in the interest of child safety, after a background and reference check of course.

I can think of at least a few townies that would be perfect for the job.

yup. At the moment? The kids are a soft target. They shouldn't be. We pay tons of dollars to keep our hard targets difficult to hit. So let me ask how many assassinations have we seen in our time? How many children have died to gun violence alone at school in our time? I think there's quite the difference.

The latter and I don't think it's close.

Aaron mentioned kidnapping, which is just disgusting to me. It's a problem that people seemingly only discuss in very private circles, so I'm glad he brought it up. If this topic makes you mad, which I think it should, then good. If you don't want to talk about it, please skip this spoiled message:

You're free to be pissed off about it and continue ranting. You're free to think that this should be a place where people can individually advertise themselves for whatever they do and promote their own goods/services/ideas at no cost. And you can believe that links to an external blog when there are 2+2 blogs that could be linked to is a good idea for business. You can believe whatever you want.

You can even post your complaints in ATF. But you won't get very far. You're literally just whining about not being able to promote yourself for free.

I don’t get paid anything for my blog. People here enjoy it. I know others would too.

What are they selling here exactly?

I didn’t even know there was a signature option. Seemed like a good way to post a blog link without being accused of spamming, but I guess not. Shrug.

I’m not getting nutrition advice here but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some experts on the topic in a nutrition forum here.

They have a forum here that hosts blogs and they sell advertising that readers see while viewing the blogs. They would prefer you have your blog here on the site than on an outside host.

Can we take the gun control / school safety / political debate to another forum?

I thought we were doing a good job of keeping it non political. I see it as a social problem and as such it should be solved by social interaction.

It's far from a debate. Seems like a friendly discussion to me.

Just because you're not getting paid, it doesn't mean that nobody is getting paid.

I don't disagree. But that doesn't mean it's good business to let you do that.

Advertising. From a business perspective, they get to sell advertising links, so there's a financial incentive for every single click they can get.

I remember a long time ago there was a debate about it. I think it was ultimately decided simply to not allow signatures. Some people still signed their posts, but if it's anything more than just their name, I think they got dinged.

Other sites do things differently. The ones who own the forum get to make the rules.

Sure, just as there are experts in all sorts of things here. But again, it doesn't mean that the company has an interest in letting everyone advertise everything they do here for free.

And it's not like you can *never* post a link to your blog, if there's some sort of reason to post it. But if it's gratuitously there, it looks spammy.

I disagree, but since you post a lot of poker related content, fine.

Yeah, arming teachers wouldn't work in most situations imo.

And if we are raising taxes for your reasons Bob, I would rather have a metal detector at every school entrance. And...makes much more sense to have only ONE entrance/exit (therefore one machine expense) that is closely monitored. To me, all the access points need to be addressed before anything else.

Why stop at the metal detector? I think you’re right about the access points, but why stop there? Money? Start a “keep the kids safe at school foundation “ and do the best we can with what we got. I would happily volunteer for that if they would let me get involved despite not having kids of my own.

I guess I’m trying to say that we gotta do something as a community.

Only one exit point is bad. For virtually every single emergency maneuver (fire, earthquake, gas leak...), it's a deadly choke point.

Not to mention the fact that a lot of schools aren't single-building structures, so there's going to be exterior exposure anyway.

I continue to maintain that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so talking about things in broad terms is not going to lead to a successful or productive conversation.

Take all former military strategic personnel, assign them to schools. Have them design the best solution from a defensive position. ????. Profit.

That's because most people don't want to politard up the forum and are expecting someone with a hammer to show up soon.

You realize that people only need to scroll back like 2 pages to remember you taking a gratuitous swipe at vegans?

Vegans deserve everything they get.

Been wondering about this in regards to taxes and whether it is ethical or not. I’ve always tipped servers and paid for massages out of my pocket rather than off my chip stack because I don’t want those expenses diminishing my win rate. However, I’m wondering if it’s better to just pay off my stack but I honestly don’t know if that would be frowned upon or not.

'I didn't win that money bec I spent it on a massage.' Do everyone on 2p2 a favor, give that a try, and report back

I start with $2000. I give masseuse and servers $40 off my stack. I cash out $2400. When I log my results this looks like +$400, when it’s really +$440.

In reality it doesn’t affect my win rate. On paper and in my app tracker, it would. Unless I subtract it as an expense, which is basically what I do now when I pay out of my pocket. But AFAIK, massages and server tips can’t be written off.

It's really irrelevant unless someone at the cage is keeping track of your wins and reporting it to the government, which I can't imagine is happening. You're on the honor system anyway.

. IMR, you have to ask? The only thing that can be written off, which would be difficult to defend if you get a real ass-hat IRS auditor, is the 'built in' tip.

IRS: 'How much did you tip that year?'
TDK: '$8,000.'
IRS: 'Did you pay from your pocket, was it automatically taken out of the pot, or did you remove money from the pot to do it?'
TDK: 'Everybody takes it out of the pot.'
IRS: 'You owe taxes on that money you spent voluntarily plus penalties. Be more careful going forward.'

It's not a tip, it's a gift.

I'm not planning on doing anything unless people ask me to do so. While I'm not personally much into talking politics in social settings, everyone seems to be being nice to most everyone else. If people want me to contain the discussion in its own thread, it is a few button clicks. In the old micros, MrWookie ruled against politics in the NC with an iron fist. Would be happy to assume that persona if people want, but my inclination is to only get involved (beyond posting) when people get mad at each other.

I'll just agree with Bob, about the discussion. It is heartening to have people disagree with mutual respect.
However, buttons are easy to click. BBB and I are a PM away.