*sigh*... another school shooting

[Weird Harold]

One thing that I think we do wrong is that we always look to affix blame somewhere other than the person that committed the crime. I don't think we have bad intentions when we do it, it's just part of our nature and societal conditioning.

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We need to start accepting that there are some people that are just bad. They are born with something wrong.....wires crossed if you will. Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and many others are prime examples.

Isn't this just "another place to place the blame?"

We need to understand incidents like this so we can prevent them if possible. There seem to have been ample "warning signs" in this case, so there is plenty of "blame" to go around for letting it come this end -- a lot of "if only" and "What if" thinking going on.

In an absolute sense, this could have been prevented by some draconian intervention like locking the kid in padded cell and feeding him drugs.

However I'm not sure I would want to live in society where preventing this and incidents like it from happening with 100% certainty because the necessary measures to prevent bad things from happening pretty much exclude good things from happening too.

 

[Subo97]

As a teacher, I sit and wonder. Where would I find the time to psychologically analyze the teenagers I teach. I get 158 kids every day, six periods of 50 minutes each. Some of their stories will break your heart, but mostly, they're adept at hiding their stories. Act out they may often do, but reveal themselves, they rarely do.

Twice last year, I saw kids taken out of school in handcuffs for bringing a gun to school. Thankfully they were taken care of before anything happened. Don't kid yourself. If your local school goes a whole year without a weapons violation, count yourself lucky.

I just teach them to the best of my ability. I tell them I care, tht they're important to me. I tell them that I love them. Mostly, they say I'm corny, sometimes they smile back, sometimes they confide. Believe me, if you came from some of the environments that they do, you'd be filled with rage as well.

I have no answers, other than loving them, and calling for professional help if I'm lucky enough to identify a problem.

 

[shereads]

Columbine dominated the news for weeks. This barely moves the meter. We've become complacent about American children shooting each other.

You have to wonder whether the kids are more violent than they were a few decades ago, or just better armed.

 

[Weird Harold]

Columbine dominated the news for weeks. This barely moves the meter. We've become complacent about American children shooting each other.

You have to wonder whether the kids are more violent than they were a few decades ago, or just better armed.

I have to wonder if the location and ethnics of this situation have anything to do with the lack of outrage?

Perhaps it is the lack of detailed pre-meditation and planning as compared to Columbine that generates the lack of outrage.

In this incident, the perpetrator was less well-armed than I or almost any of my classmates in the 1950s and '60s could easily have been. Every morning of my school life, I had to pass an unlocked gun rack containing more (and more lethal) weapons than were involved in this incident.

I'd have to say that if "better armed" and "more violent" are the only choices, it would have to be more violent -- thankfully, those aren't the only two choices. IMHO. The question isn't even close to that black and white.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

I have to wonder if the location and ethnics of this situation have anything to do with the lack of outrage?

Perhaps it is the lack of detailed pre-meditation and planning as compared to Columbine that generates the lack of outrage.

In this incident, the perpetrator was less well-armed than I or almost any of my classmates in the 1950s and '60s could easily have been. Every morning of my school life, I had to pass an unlocked gun rack containing more (and more lethal) weapons than were involved in this incident.

I'd have to say that if "better armed" and "more violent" are the only choices, it would have to be more violent -- thankfully, those aren't the only two choices. IMHO. The question isn't even close to that black and white.

That was my point at the beginning. All adolescents tend to be rebellious and this guy seems to have had real bad problems.

It wouldn't have been 'wrapping him in cotton wool' to make sure the guns were locked away and he didn't have the key.

That's just sensible preventitive measures.

 

[rgraham666]

Columbine dominated the news for weeks. This barely moves the meter. We've become complacent about American children shooting each other.

You have to wonder whether the kids are more violent than they were a few decades ago, or just better armed.

It's neither in my opinion.

It's media.

Even fifty years ago, the speed of transmission of information was slower and there were fewer outlets of it. This caused news to often be much more local than it is now. If it didn't happen locally, you often didn't hear about it.

Also, there were unwritten rules about what made the news. I remember reading about a man who worked in a Major L.A. paper in the late '50s. One unwritten rule was 'No niggers can die after 9:00 PM, 7:00 PM on Saturdays.' This was because blacks weren't important enough to upset the printing schedule. Also any traffic accident involving a white fatality got reported. At least three blacks had to die in order to be reported.

Now, there are so many ways of gathering news and so many ways of spreading it that we're almost always going to hear about it.

I don't think the incidence of things like this is increasing per capita, we're just more likely to hear about it.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

It's neither in my opinion.

It's media.

Even fifty years ago, the speed of transmission of information was slower and there were fewer outlets of it. This caused news to often be much more local than it is now. If it didn't happen locally, you often didn't hear about it.

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I don't think the incidence of things like this is increasing per capita, we're just more likely to hear about it.

Just take this forum as an example - news, views and opininion from around the world constantly - and we're just a fun site.

Virtually every major national newspaper and TV news channel is available online.

It's not just national - news is now part of globalization.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I have to wonder if the location and ethnics of this situation have anything to do with the lack of outrage?

Perhaps it is the lack of detailed pre-meditation and planning as compared to Columbine that generates the lack of outrage.

No doubt.

Columbine was upper middle class. Those people knew how to rattle cages and demand asses. This is an impoverished Indian reservation. These people are used to no one giving a damn.

It seems strange to me that in the last few weeks so much violence has been coming out of the upper Midwest: Minnesota and Wisconsin before that.

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

rgraham has a point, but an unfinished one. The media still has the rules on this stuff and by the editorial standard of Columbine the only school violence story that's reported is gun violence and only for rampage style fatalities. I personally witnessed a kid having his brains smashed into a stone pillar by some sociopathic bully until he needed an EMT to cart him away. Did we hear in the paper or the school what happened to the kid? No, we didn't even hear if he lived through it. Did the sociopath get immediately dragged to the principals to be expelled? Nope, he walked away laughing, but perhaps his letterman's jacket was responsible for that.

When one of my friends was so tired of being bullied that she found violence to be the last resort, violence against self that is in the form of too many pills, did anyone beside me care? Did the school do anything about the bullies? Hah. That's not actionable school violence.

But when some loners in Colorado turned Columbine into an army compound of death, the school locked down tight and hired armed policemen (we had rich muffies along with the trash). The people after me had horror story after horror story of the school clamping down on every misfit and gamer bullying them about their individuality because surely such disrespect for the Keseyian dystopia was unhealthy. Did their sociopathic tormentors ever get scrutinized? Did the bloody beatings in the quad stop? Hell no, said the reports, because boys will be boys and girls will be girls apparently.

Were there no doubt incidents before hand of knifings, beatings until death, loner kids freaking out with a switchblade? Sure. The only thing now is that when the kid who thinks he has nothing left to lose decides to emulate his sociopathic societal betters in bloody rampage he brings the keyword gun and the media gobbles it up for national television as one more reason why your sociopathic popular kid must be protected by the evil loner introvert hordes. And thus school starts to suck worse and the cycle is perpetuated.

And the myth is perpetuated as well, because you don't hear about the loners who decide to forgo all violence and just roll with the hits and bullying (they're not interesting), you don't hear about the ones who turn to other escapes (the druggies, the dropouts, the gamers(most violent video games are an oulet for rage not a promoter)), or about those who internalize the violence and turn their rage upon themselves (the suicides). These people don't get the front page headlines and they outnumber the mad emulators by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.

Cloudy's right, it's a symptom and the cause comes out smelling like roses every time. In this case, no one will ever know the actions that drove him all the way to unstoppable rage, all the way to level 5 blackout of slaughter. Perhaps some ill comments of how if he was white and christian god would have loved him enough to save his parents or perhaps some random innocent bad shit to go with the monumental bad shit that had come before, a sort of one last straw to break the camel's back.

Yes, this means I disagree with Wildcard, it wasn't just an abberation. Sure, there were abberations there in the moral compass so that emulations of slaughter could ever be conceived "right". But it's still a product of sociopathism and like it or not, sociopathism is common. Sadism is common. There are seemingly a majority of people who wish harm to come to their fellow man and enjoy bestowing it personally. Who find no wrong in bullying or torture. Who enjoy war because its such a beautiful slaughterfest. Anyone who has stared up into the eyes of a bully or just a drunk in the bar who is willing to fight anyone for anything understands this. Sadism, sociopathy, the will for another to harm another, whatever you call it is common, institutionalized, and accepted in our culture. We only hear about the monsters who take that impulse to its final end whether they had it in the beginning or just copied it from their "betters" in fatigue.