Twitter knows my long standing position on #CreativeCommerceDisruption; oligarchs only care about losing money or influence. We need to stop thinking elections are our only leverage.
Imagine the cost if #MarchForOurLives activists were to encourage false alarms across America. In weeks, it could shut down the schools until Congress bans assault weapons, high cap magazines, and other serious gun reforms.
Or we could sit on our asses and wait for more people to die.
@shoq That's... a terrible plan.
These false reports put real people in danger.
Trying to get innocent people shot by the police really undermines your "guns are bad" position.
@LouisIngenthron I strongly disagree. Civil disobedience always carries an element of risk. The whole idea is to swamp the system and shut it down. When schools are too unsafe for education to happen, parents will force Congress to either act, or nod at the chaos and await voter wrath. It's time stop this limp resistance to fascism that has kept us in this inert and ineffectual stasis for 40 years. Only action begats action.
@shoq Putting innocent lives in danger to advance your agenda isn't "civil disobedience". It's terrorism.
@LouisIngenthron Must disagree again,. I've been studying CD fo 3 decades and that is simply incorrect, Neither Gene Sharp or Erica Chenoweth would agree with you. The mission is not to hurt anyone. The mission is to disrupt the status quo and raise the cost of enabling inaction. When an outgunned society has no leverage, it has to create some. Name me an alternative action plan. "Voting" doesn't count. If it worked. we wouldn't need disruption.
@shoq It doesn't matter if your "mission is not to hurt anyone" if you're knowingly taking reckless action that is incredibly likely to hurt someone.
SWATting is a very serious offense and has caused numerous deaths. It is *not* a nonviolent protest method.
You're literally advocating dialing up the violence to draw attention to your pet issue. That's what terrorists do!
@LouisIngenthron You're missing the point. They would be known to be false almost from day one, They can be done cleverly without risking anyone. But once they are in play, schools have no choice but to shut down because of that minimal risk. THat's the whole point. Once they have, the national conversation and battle is joined by multiple stakeholders. Name me one single alternative. I've pondered them for years.
@shoq Couple things about that:
1) If they're known to be false, schools will stop locking down.
2) Maybe they'll even stop locking down for real threats because of boy-who-called-wolf syndrome, making the next real mass shooting far deadlier than it otherwise would be.
3) If a school is locking down, whether they believe the threat or not, that means armed cops with twitchy trigger fingers will need to clear the school before it stops being locked down. How well do you trust their professionalism with guns? Especially in schools with higher minority populations?
If you really believed guns were as dangerous as you claim, you wouldn't sent a bunch of men armed with them into schools full of children as a means of achieving your goals.
@LouisIngenthron The minute the tactic is known, cops will NOT respond with force, without hard evidence of real incident. They can even be told in advance of the tactic. Most cops already take those precautions. But school systems will fear liability and simply close up, There will be public backlash for that, but that's why it becomes a national conversation: Instantly..
@ML2 @LouisIngenthron
I respect your opinions. I 've heard them dozens of times. What you may not know is someone is already doing it. And amplifying it would have better outcomes than squelching it because it creates an undeniable chaos and public safety crisis that can be leveraged for the public good. Nothing else has or will work in your lifetime, and I am tired of the drip drip drip of innocent blood. It's time for some utilitarian tactics for a greater good. There's always a cost.
@LouisIngenthron @shoq I agree with Louis. Mass false reporting of active shooter reports at schools is not going to work and could get a lot of people killed in a very short period of time. In fact, I’d suggest not falsely calling in active shooters, period, for the same reasons Louis has outlined.
Encouraging people to pull the fire handle en masse at schools and colleges would probably be more in line with what shoq intended. I still don’t think it’s that good an idea as there is still some risk to students involved and it diverts responders from more important tasks, but while it would be very disruptive and could also shut down schools for weeks or months, you would not have SWAT teams being the first first responders to arrive and you would not be desensitizing people to reports of gun violence.
OTOH, if you really want to avoid the risk of desensitizing people to gun violence or fire alarms filing false fire reports against gun factories/stores would be a better idea, though one that still runs the considerable risk of diverting emergency services from actual emergencies.