(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . More SS Agents Just Mean More Bragging Rights For White Males Who Think It's All A Video Game [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-09-16 US politicians are proving yet again that they just don’t have any idea what to do about gun violence. More Secret Service agents aren’t going to make any difference whatsoever. It’s just throwing more of our money down the drain, money that could be spent on useful ways to actually reduce gun violence in this country. Whether it’s schools, our public streets, our borders, drug dealers, or our political rallies, all of these proposals to flood the zone with more officers are just a diversion from useful solutions — a diversion leading us down a road that has only one end point: a police state led by authoritarians. We can no longer afford to be wasting time on these failed ideas. Beyond the over-policed threshold we already passed long ago, the only thing adding more officers to the mix will do (and has ever done) is make the problems worse. In our schools, those officers merely end up targeting misbehaving kids with abusive, aggressive police tactics and overly harsh legal punishments. They would cause more of the alienation and violent resentment that results in these shootings in the first place. They’d also present a more target rich environment to all of the young white men who view these shootings as an extension of their 1st person shooter video game obsessions. On our streets, “Broken Windows” policing only fueled resentment and locked people into a lifelong cycle of prison, drugs, and crime. We ended up actually creating unnecessary numbers of professional criminals and gang members with no other real options, people that could have been diverted to helpful programs that could have healed their lives. At our borders, more officers only lead migrants to ever more dangerous crossings and the smugglers to embrace ever more violent tactics, with ever more deadly weapons, while the overall immigration numbers remain unchanged. When it comes to drug dealers like those selling Fentanyl-laced substances, busting up those networks actually only leads to more American deaths, as our kids, our brothers and sisters, our friends turn to unknown sources in the vacuum left behind by over-policing. In politics, talking big about adding more Secret Service agents is only going to motivate all of the militia-curious conservative white men to carry out even more of these shootings to prove that the Feds are powerless to stop them. That’s a huge part of the thrill for these cretins. The whole point of being an American shooter is to prove you can overcome the challenge and tag the biggest kill or the largest kill count. That’s what gets them on TV and that’s literally all they care about. As with any video game, the more targets, the harder the targets, the more bragging rights. I fully expect that the more security agents that rightwing conservative men see surrounding our politicians, the more they will redouble their efforts to kill those politicians and become even more famous. Further enlarging our police state is never the answer if you care about effective results. It’s so disappointing to be constantly reminded how easy it is for conservatives like Lindsey Graham to pressure Democrats into following Republicans down the same road to failure every single damn time. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/16/2270818/-More-SS-Agents-Just-Mean-More-Bragging-Rights-For-White-Males-Who-Think-It-s-All-A-Video-Game?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/