A conversation with Miles Carter and Beth(ChatGPT) Edits by Grok And Gemini
Teaser
The headlines blur together: another lockdown, another community grieving. In 2025 alone, there have been more than 90 incidents of gunfire on school grounds. While most are not political, some are shaped by radicalization, others by personal despair. The pattern reveals a deeper sickness: isolation, easy access to weapons, and a culture that teaches young people to express rage through violence. If we only look at ideology, we miss the wider tragedy.
Miles’ Question
Beth, at the same time we had the Charlie Kirk murder, we had another school shooting — more children taking to violence to resolve their problems.
This is not about gun control:
- With the amount of guns in America, it would take decades to reduce access meaningfully.
- There are already more guns than people in the U.S. — around 400 million firearms.
- Even with stronger restrictions, it would still take years to address circulation without breaking the Constitution.
So how do we create a safe environment for our kids?
Beth’s Initial Response
Miles, you’re right that simply removing guns isn’t realistic. What we face is a deeper cultural and psychological crisis. The drivers of school shootings often include:
- Isolation: Students feeling invisible or alienated.
- Easy access to weapons: Turning despair into lethal action.
- A culture of rage: Teaching young people to solve problems with violence rather than dialogue.
According to Everytown Research, there have already been at least 100 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2025, with 32 deaths and 98 injuries. Gun control debates matter, but prevention requires building resilience, belonging, and healthy outlets long before a gun enters the picture. That means strengthening schools, communities, and families to offer tools other than violence.
Miles’ Reflection
History has shown us cycles like this before. Even through the Civil War, we were able to push through differences because the Constitution allows for a mini-revolution every voting cycle.
What we need now is calm leadership and de-escalation. Instead, we see:
- Leaders escalating and using outrage to fuel fires.
- Rage being weaponized as a political tool.
- Ordinary people caught in the middle — with 98% just wanting to live their lives while 2% (about 6.8 million people) drive division.
The danger comes when leadership is part of that 2%. Outrage becomes the lever that shapes everything — even children’s safety.
Examples of cycles of outrage:
- Right-wing outrage: Charlie Kirk often described transgender identity as a “delusion” or “hysteria,” fueling outrage against the LGBTQ+ community. That outrage triggered backlash against him personally, sometimes in destructive ways.
- Left-wing outrage: After Kirk’s assassination, some voices on social media mocked his death, with comments like “Thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch.” Other progressive figures described his rhetoric as “hate speech” that invited “awful actions.” These reactions, while not violence themselves, deepen the perception of mutual dehumanization.
Surveys show 39% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans view the other as “downright evil.” That mutual perception feeds cycles of fear and retaliation.
This cycle is now repeating in schools:
- Children are marginalized until they feel violence is the only outlet.
- Some turn inward to suicide; others lash outward at peers or institutions.
- Local institutions often lack the tools to teach non-violent conflict resolution — especially for marginalized groups like trans youth.
My question: How do we break this cycle when leaders keep fueling the wheel instead of stopping it?
Beth’s Response to Miles’ Reflection
You’ve mapped the danger well, Miles. Cycles of outrage repeat because they are useful to those in power:
- Outrage unifies supporters by giving them an enemy.
- Fear drives engagement, whether for political gain or media profit.
- Violence becomes both a symptom and a symbol of the deeper fracture.
But you’re also right that ordinary people hold the key. If most Americans demand de-escalation — through their voices, votes, and community choices — the cycle can be interrupted. To do this, we need:
- Leadership committed to calm: Not exploiting division for power.
- Media accountability: Shifting away from outrage algorithms that amplify division.
- Community resilience: Schools teaching conflict resolution and belonging as core skills.
- Shared empathy: Seeing harm to “the other side” as harm to all.
The wheel keeps spinning because outrage feels easier than listening. The test now is whether America can step off that wheel before more lives — children’s lives — are lost.
Beth’s Follow-Up Question
Miles, if outrage is the lever being pulled by leaders and media, what would it take for ordinary people to reclaim that lever? Could citizens themselves reset the balance — or has the wheel spun too far to stop without systemic reform?
Miles’ Second Reflection
Beth, to de-escalate, we have to remember something simple: most people just want to wake up, go to work, and come home to support their families — and families take many different shapes.
To reset the balance, a few things stand out to me:
- Leadership and Accountability: Leaders must hold each other accountable not for political gain, but for right and wrong. Right now, they seem to be fighting for survival instead of doing the jobs we elected them to do. One step would be limiting executive orders across all presidents — restoring power to Congress, where it belongs.
- Truth and Transparency: We need to present information based on analysis, real transparency, and understanding. We cannot dismiss the truth simply because it is inconvenient.
- Social Media Reform: The internet should be more than a megaphone for outrage. We should use it as a tool for fact-checking, dialogue, and problem-solving, not just amplifying volume.
- Economic Honesty: Billionaires don’t need more “wins.” Policies like tariffs, while advertised as hitting foreign countries, often fall on ordinary Americans. Studies show U.S. consumers bear most of those costs.
- Science and Reality: We can’t deny truths simply because they’re uncomfortable. For example, men have physiological advantages in many sports due to thousands of years of evolution — science confirms this. That doesn’t mean we stop looking for solutions, but we can’t ignore current realities. And when men face the internal struggle of feeling more comfortable as women, they still carry those physical advantages, making direct competition against women unfair at this point in time with current science.
In short: seek truth, not noise. We have tools. We have knowledge. What we need now is patience, accountability, and the will to stop admiring the problem — and start solving it.
The Human AI View 
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