@Bastethotep #161144
That led me to a horrific thought: What if there is another reason why the Republicans do not have much interest in precenting schoolshootings, besides exploiting gun nut hysteria - that they make people afraid of sending their children of school, thereby promoting homeschooling and thereby their ultimate agenda of patriarchal control (by way of indoctrinating children without counter and by yoking mothers with more domestic duties)?
I don’t think that was the plan… at least not originally. It was more about getting parents to pay for charter schools, and then dump the kids of the ones who were unwilling or unable to pay into crappy, severely underfunded public schools, creating a two-tier education system (well, really three, given that there already exist “elite academies” for the kids of the very wealthy) as well as privatizing the education system. School shootings were less common and weren’t a significant factor, even in the wake of Columbine (1999), and the occasional lip service given to homeschooling and “freedom to choose” (by which was usually meant “freedom to choose religious charter schools over secular ones”), plus the idea of vouchers, all seem (at least to me) aimed more at breaking the public school system than any genuine concern about parental control.
That being said, things have changed now. Mass shootings of all kinds, including school shootings are way up; LGBTQIA+ people, especially trans people, are living much more openly; Qanon is heavily promoting homeschooling, not because of school shootings, but to “protect” their kids from “liberal corruption”. I guarantee that some of them are at least rethinking their methods, and might also be rethinking their goals as well. It’s certainly possible that “winning the culture war” may now be a higher priority than greed, but either way, most of them will consider other people’s kids dying to be an “acceptable cost” if it helps break the public school system. If it doesn’t, oh well, there was no way to prevent this. [/Onion]