No, JD Vance, School Shootings Are Not Normal
They aren't "inevitable" and they aren't "a fact of life."
For years now, the satirical news site The Onion has been re-running this headline when there’s a mass shooting.
Sree’s newsletter is produced with Zach Peterson (@zachprague). Digimentors Tech Tip from Robert S. Anthony (@newyorkbob). Our sponsorship kit.
🗞 @Sree’s #NYTReadalong: Our guest this week: Indian-Irish author and journalist Cauvery Madhavan. Here’s the recording. You’ll find four years’ worth of archives at this link (we’ve been reading newspapers aloud on social for 8.5 years now). The Readalong is sponsored by Muck Rack. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@digimentors.group and neil@digimentors.group.
JLF USA Lit Fest Comes to Five US Cities
The spirit of what Tina Brown called “the greatest literary show on Earth” comes to five American cities this month, starting with Houston this weekend. The JLF USA Lit Fest, based on the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, is also in NYC, Boulder, Seattle and Raleigh-Chapel Hill. I’ll be onstage at both JLF New York and JLF North Carolina. Learn more at JLFlitfest.org | And see what I wrote about JLF USA last week.
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J.D. VANCE THINKS SCHOOL SHOOTINGS ARE “A FACT OF LIFE.” How is this even remotely acceptable?
The school year is a few days old and already tragedy has struck a middle school in Georgia. A 14-year-old boy brought an assault rifle to school, shot and killed two fellow students and two teachers, and was then arrested. He’s facing about 200 years’ worth of charges, and his father has been charged with several counts as well, including second degree murder.
According to the Washington Post, nearly 400,000 U.S. students have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine shooting in 1999. Normally in a case like this, we would look for some sort of federal statistics, but the U.S. government does not track mass shootings at all, not even the ones that target children. Of course, journalistic entities are well-placed to track things like this, but there have been more than 400 school shootings over the last 25 years—including in elementary schools—and the government’s lack of focus here is the pinnacle of moral failure.
As an aside, please spare me the comments and emails about whether an AR-15 is an “assault rifle” or not. It is a gun with no practical function for the vast majority of civilians. It is not a hunting rifle—it was designed and built to kill people, full stop.
One of the particularly striking things from the Washington Post database is how many gun-related incidents there are at schools that national audiences hear little-to-nothing about. In May, a student grazed by a bullet shot through a window in Washington, D.C. In March, a teenager pulled a gun on another student in the bathroom at a high school in Missouri. There are countless examples like these, and some that involve adults committing violence against other adults who work at a school.
Every single one of these incidents strikes fear into every single student, school employee and parent at that school, and probably countless others in neighboring areas.
There are more school shootings than ever, and non-white students are disproportionately affected. Yet, we’re told that this is just a fact of life—and, to a depressing degree, we have, as a society, largely accepted it as such.
The parents of school shooters have usually not faced any charges for their children’s actions, but that seems to be changing, albeit very very slowly. Perhaps that will encourage parents to intervene when their children need help—as the shooter in Georgia reportedly “begged for” in the months and years leading up to his horrific actions. But, given the trend and general political atmosphere around gun ownership, I feel skeptical that any meaningful national gun control measure will come to pass, even if Kamala Harris wins the election.
It’s too bad, because, despite the fact that Americans generally support the right to own a gun, 61% of people think it’s too easy to get one.
This is fertile ground, especially given the high share of urban and suburban residents who think it should be more difficult to get and own a gun legally. As a candidate in 2019, Harris vowed to take sweeping action if elected. Here’s what she said at a CNN town hall discussion in April 2019:
"Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws and if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action and specifically what I would do is put in a requirement for anyone who sells more than five guns a year, they are required to do background checks when they sell those guns. I will require for any gun dealer that breaks the law, the ATF take their license."
As CBS News reported, the plan called for:
“[E]xecutive action to implement ‘near-universal’ background checks, close loopholes to prevent those convicted of domestic violence from obtaining firearms and revoke licenses from gun manufacturers and dealers who break the law.”
Urban and suburban voters have the power to decide elections, and I hope the Harris campaign will talk about school shootings and the measures they view appropriate to at least try to reduce them. And I’d like to hear more about how a President Harris administration would make it extremely difficult for a 14-year-old kid to have easy access to an AR-15.
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Chief AI Officer Summit and CDAO Summit Come to DC on Oct. 1 & 2
Join me for two of this year’s most exciting — and timely — tech summits, hosted by my friend of two decades, David Mathison.
Tue October 1, 2024: The 11th CDAO Summit on Digital Transformation, Data, & Analytics: Meet fellow Chief Digital and Data Officers, Chief Analytics Officers, CDAOs, Chief Experience, Innovation, Strategy, Technology, & Transformation Officers, and Chief Compliance, Governance, Privacy, & Risk Officers.
Wed October 2, 2024: The 2nd CAIO Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Enterprise Gen AI: This is our second annual Chief AI Officer Summit.
A Chance In Life’s 79th Annual Gala Honors 5 (including at least one you know)
A Chance In Life empowers at-risk young people around the world with education and leadership development. This year, A Chance In Life will serve 5,235 children and youth in 12 countries across 5 continents, as well as its first U.S.-based program, A Chance In Life – The Village on Staten Island. Learn more about the gala and join us by buying a ticket or making a donation. Thank you!
DIGIMENTORS TECH TIP | AI for Kids? It’s a Snap with myFirst Camera 50
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob on Twitter and check out his 1.1 million followers on Pinterest!
Say the words “generative artificial intelligence” and “children” in front of a roomful of parents and you’re likely to generate plenty of raised and knitted eyebrows. How do you safely and confidently use generative AI with children when popular platforms like ChatGPT themselves are in their infancies?
One company, myFirst, which has been manufacturing tech devices for children since 2017, thinks that it has hit a safe balance with myFirst Camera 50, a kid-friendly camera which uses AI to help children get creative with the photos and videos they record.
The camera, which lists for $129.90, doesn’t use facial recognition or save personal data, has no cell-phone-like communications capabilities, limits sharing to a parent-controlled myFirst Circle sharing platform and uses the company’s own proprietary CamOS operating system.
The child-size myFirst Camera 50 resembles a small point-and-shoot camera and offers simple controls, including a shutter button which always makes an audible shutter sound. The shutter button focuses the lens, takes a photo or shoots a video depending on whether it’s half-pressed, fully pressed or pressed and held, respectively. The unit also offers a handy virtual shutter button on its 4-inch IPS display.
Once photos and videos are taken, the user can select which images or video clips to work with and then record a short voice note like “Here’s my birthday video.” The camera’s AI technology, which supports 80 languages, listens to the voice note, analyzes the content and then searches for and suggests music that matches what the AI heard and saw and enhances the project, according to the company.
“The AI model in Camera 50 identifies the objects, the environment and the scenario that can be used for content creation,” according to a myFirst representative in a video introducing the new camera. The photo/video project can be enhanced with stickers, filters and a voice-over and the user can also draw doodles on the touchscreen with a finger.
The camera’s AI technology aims only to assist a child’s creativity, according to company founder G-Jay Yong. “It’s a catalyst for unlocking your child’s potential,” he said in the product-launch video.
The myFirst Camera 50 has a 16MP selfie camera with a three-level selfie light bar which wraps around half the back of the camera and a 20MP main camera on the front with macro capabilities. The 5.3-ounce unit has 16GB of internal storage and accepts microSD cards with capacities of up to 128GB.
The company rates the camera’s internal 2,000mAh battery for up to 4 hours of continuous use and up to 10 days on standby. The unit also has an MP3 player which can play music and audiobooks and a pin-protected MyDiary area for private photo and video storage.
The company also makes myFirst CareBuds ($49.90), a set of volume-limited, wireless, noise-canceling Bluetooth earbuds which automatically switches into “transparency” mode to allow outside noises in if the wearer is moving around. The myFirst Camera 50 is now available for preorder.
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I wrote years ago in the NYT on American gun violence after an anguishing attack at a community college in Oregon where my mother was attending a course on how to navigate retirement. She was badly shaken. So was I. I can't imagine sending my children to school today in the United States. But, like other hard-dried American policies involving inutterable violence perpetrated on helpless civilians, including children, powerful lobbying groups prevent the evident and urgent humanitarian and moral step back from the senseless brink.