April 12, 2000

12:41 PM

Who stands to benefitfrom the growing hysteria over school violence -- especially since school violence is actually dropping? That's the question posed by the USA Today story, spotted originally by Brennan at Considered Harmful. I think it's an excellent example of the general principle: always question their motives.
posted by baylink (6 comments total)

In answer to who stands to benefit from the hysteria, I think you'll find a scary trend in the spiking of the stock price of the Saf-T-Lock company which correlates with gun publicized violence in the US, which makes trigger locks for guns. The spike in March of the year was right around the fast food shooting.
posted by plinth at 2:42 PM on April 12, 2000

I'm sometimes kind of scared; there's some pretty scary people at my school that I could really see snapping and shooting people. Especially this year: Someone's already been shot in the face with a shotgun(one of my best friends), three kids got shot in their car (one died), someone purposely ran over this one girl in their car. So yes, it scares me.
posted by premiumpolar at 6:46 PM on April 12, 2000

School House Hype: Two Years Later also describes how the perception of school violence has changed in the past two years --for the worse-- while crime rates and incidents of school violence have been dropping.
posted by hitch at 8:00 PM on April 12, 2000

omg, hitch is such a geek! xoxo
posted by palegirl at 8:12 PM on April 12, 2000

And that was about... *what*, Rebekah?
posted by baylink at 8:21 AM on April 13, 2000

Jon Katz is back from his meeting with the Pinkertons.

The point was, there was a market for school-safety programs like this, and if Pinkerton didn't pursue them, somebody else would. The corporatist ethic doesn't allow for relinquihing potentially lucrative markets to competitors, any more than it does for conventional notions of right or wrong. In that sense, the meeting was exhausting and, probably, largely pointless. If there was leverage, it was in the fact that Pinkerton clearly wanted to go forward with its program in the least controversial way -- another corporatist hallmark.

It's Jon Katz, so of course it's biased as all hell, but it still raises a number of points.
posted by harmful at 8:58 AM on April 13, 2000