Stop school shootings...

On the other hand I believe that some quirks and idiotisyncrosies that can be normal childhood behavior, like a rambunctious or hyperactive child are considered defective behavior and then these kids are drugged into a more desirable model. Then the drugs have a negative long term effect on the mental status of the individual.

If I were a child these days, I'm affraid I would have been placed on a cocktail of drugs. I was a hyper kid, I grew out of it
 
Who had the problem? The nut, or Society?
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Frankly? A little bit of both. We are all a product of society.

The "nut" had issues with society.
The reprehensible way he chose to deal with those is solely on his shoulders.

However, let's look at some of the messages society sends out regularly.

At school if you're not good at sports you're a loser.
If you're not in the "in" crowd you're a geek.
Later in life if you're not a success, you're a failure.
You're single and in your late 20's? Oh dear: well, I'm sure something will come along. Surely there's someone out there for you...
If you're with someone for more than a year or two and you haven't tied the knot you're not committed.
Live with your parents? You're a waster.
Don't have an iPhone 12? You're uncool.

Exaggerations? Perhaps? Stereotypes? To a point.
All I'm saying is that these social attitudes and judgements are not new and I think these kinds of societal expectations do hang heavy on some. And a percentage of those develop major self-worth complexes and some of those then lash out. Lashing out is not justified. But are those societal expectations? Do they really bring anything to the table? That is what I mean by the issue conformity.

I'm not however defending their actions.
Feel belittled, disrespected? Go to a self-help course. Do something to bolster your self esteem. Realise and understand that other people's opinions don't matter in the slightest!
There are a hundred more productive ways to deal with angst than shooting people in a pathetic attempt to garner some sort of respect or awe.
 
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PJP is correct...
People are told that we must fit this mold.
These molds or models of how people must conform to have many sources. It places undue pressure on individualism.

These "nuts" do not deal with this in a normal fashion.
 
PJP is usually correct. But once you cross that line you become a true loser and coward. IMHO this is an ego issue more than a mental health issue.
 
People like to blame everything.

Blame the mentally ill - despite the fact that they're more likely to be victims of crime

Blame violent media - despite violent video games rapidly increasing in popularity as school shootings continue to decrease for decades

Blame Single Parent Households/Birth out of wedlock - because somehow that's related to the issue at hand

Blame religion

Blame lack of religion

Blame Guns

Blame the President for not doing enough to stop it

Blame the President for supporting legislation that didn't allow a good person to stop it.

I don't know if any of us know what will stop it. Does America have more acts of spree killing unrelated to ideological extremism than other modernized countries? Sure seems like it. With 300 million people, is that the case? I don't know.
 
Until the politics come into play. Remember Wayne LaPierre's "good guy with a gun" quote? Every time there's a public shooting like this, the opposition mockingly chimes, "where was the good guy with the gun?" They see the lack of effective armed response as a rebuttal to LaPierre's statement.
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The good guy's gun was at home because the school was a Gun Free Zone which somehow didn't keep the shooter from bringing his. Again.
 
Honestly, the death tolls from school shootings are so small as to be almost statistically irrelevant. More people are killed by police in a single year than have ever been killed in school shootings. It's simply a non-issue, in reality.

However, because of the emotionally charged nature of the act of killing children, it has been made an issue by politicians and media, for the express purpose of pushing a political agenda.

That agenda, as we all know, is to strengthen the state and weaken the citizenry. The right to own a firearm is a right to the possibility of exercising force, and through that possibility, exercise political force.

Mao Tse-Tung knew what he was talking about when he said "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun." If you have a monopoly on the use of force, then you have supreme political authority that is very difficult for a disarmed or poorly armed citizenry to overcome.

This agenda doesn't have anything to do with protecting children. It has to do with strengthening and further entrenching the existing political, economic, and social structures of the United States.
 
Terrorism is a statistical irrelevance by your standards. Yet since 9/11 we have reshaped individual rights and geopolitics in an attempt to feel safe.
 
Lots of good ideas and suggestions, but I would look at root cause. Fatherlessness, broken families, moral relativism, blatant hypocrisy. ..All of these and more continually suck our sanity away.

The recent slaughter by an aspiring pagan-wiccan was enabled by a culture that has inspired people to follow their feelings. Well, this guy did exactly that.
 
I guarantee that someone is plotting another incident.

As far as the pagan-Wiccan goes, this behavior is not within that belief set. The Wiccan religion is a firmly "no harm" religion. Let's not let ignorant bias assume that any religion guided this individual, that would be playing right into the media's hand.
The region that this occurred has a strong Wiccan population.
 
I really don't think moral relativism has anything to do with school shootings. Moral relativism has existed as long as meta-cognitive ethical processes have been recorded. There aren't too many schools of thought beyond divine command theory that don't equate some level of moral relativism.

Equally so with your comparison about a pagan-Wiccan sacrifice. A misguided attempt at a ritual honoring a religion thousands of years old and repopularized by Aleister Crowley some time around the turn of the 20th century has nothing to do with school shootings today - which frankly have dropped in the past decades, not become more of a problem.
 
natman said:
The good guy's gun was at home because the school was a Gun Free Zone which somehow didn't keep the shooter from bringing his. Again.
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In the case of the UCC shooting, that's not an entirely accurate statement.
 
At school if you're not good at sports you're a loser.
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You are only a loser if you do not take advantage of the opportunities afforded to you..... our local HS football team has had one winning season in the last decade ...... sports and all the other extracurricular activities are about far more than winning, or even being "good" ..... it's about effort, and teamwork, discipline, dedication, time management..... all things to be gained by honest participation in a common effort ... you are only a "loser" if you fail to take advantage of the opportunities.... and it's your loss if you do not ..... if your peers think less of you because you chose not to try..... this their fault? They are making a sound value judgement...... YES: "Discriminating".... the alternatative IS Moral Relativism- being "Indiscriminate": everybody gets a trophy, regardless of effort ..... and that is Wrong. It is not the way the real world works, and when these overinflated egos find that out.... their bubble bursts, and they can not handle it.
 
You are only a loser if you do not take advantage of the opportunities afforded to you..... our local HS football team has had one winning season in the last decade ...... sports and all the other extracurricular activities are about far more than winning, or even being "good" ..... it's about effort, and teamwork, discipline, dedication, time management..... all things to be gained by honest participation in a common effort ... you are only a "loser" if you fail to take advantage of the opportunities.... and it's your loss if you do not ..... if your peers think less of you because you chose not to try..... this their fault? They are making a sound value judgement...... YES: "Discriminating".... the alternatative IS Moral Relativism- being "Indiscriminate": everybody gets a trophy, regardless of effort ..... and that is Wrong. It is not the way the real world works, and when these overinflated egos find that out.... their bubble bursts, and they can not handle it.
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No. No. No.

Why on earth should people feel entitled to make one person feel bad for not taking up sports even for the reasons you described?!
It's none of their damn business!

They just might not be interested in sports. Some people find sports boring. Some prefer to undertake activities they do alone or more cerebral pursuits in a library, but then they're a nerd. Some people do not enjoy the "teamwork", the "competitiveness". So what?

There is nothing wrong with that. Some people don't like team sports. Period.

And what you've described above essentially confirmed the very same judgmental attitudes I described in my earlier post.
And people get that from all angles on all sorts of issues, often most in the years when they are trying to find their place in the world: school years.

I fail to see why people feel it is OK to do that.
Seems to me that some facets of society take solace from the perceived failure of others. If not they would not focus on it so much.

YES: "Discriminating".... the alternatative IS Moral Relativism- being "Indiscriminate": everybody gets a trophy, regardless of effort ..... and that is Wrong. It is not the way the real world works, and when these overinflated egos find that out.... their bubble bursts, and they can not handle it.
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Absolutely the contrary. Most people don't crave trophies. Most people just want to left alone to live their lives how they see fit.

In my experience, be it school, through different jobs and careers is that the over-inflated egos that I have seen are the ones usually feeling the right to pass judgment on others.
I suspect there is no bubble that burst in these disturbed individuals, but rather a coiled spring that finally snapped.

Be careful of the attitude you are advocating. "You don't like sports so you are a loser", is not a world away from "You like guns so therefore you must be a paranoid nut."

Sound familiar? Should do: it's the same mindset on different issues.
 
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Pond said:
Why on earth should people feel entitled to make one person feel bad for not taking up sports even for the reasons you described?!
It's none of their damn business!

They just might not be interested in sports. Some people find sports boring. Some prefer to undertake activities they do alone or more cerebral pursuits in a library, but then they're a nerd. Some people do not enjoy the "teamwork", the "competitiveness". So what?

There is nothing wrong with that. Some people don't like team sports. Period.
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Beyond that -- not everyone makes the team, even if they try out.

My high school was just around 1,000 students when I attended. At roughly 50/50, that's 500 male students. A varsity football team typically carries maybe 30, no higher than 40, players on the roster. A varsity soccer team carries about 25 (or mine did). JV football was another 25 -- we didn't have JV soccer. Cross country was maybe ten. So out of 500 male students, there were slots for just about 100 kids on all the teams available. That went down considerably in winter -- basketball carried 15 on the varsity and 12 on the junior varsity, and there were maybe a dozen on the swim team. Hockey was about 20. Spring? Baseball, track and tennis -- probably not more than 50 to 75 combined.

In my school, if you didn't play football, hockey, basketball and/or baseball you were NOT one of the "in crowd." Swimming, soccer, tennis and track didn't count as "real" sports.

Life is tough and kids are cruel. That's just the way it is, and today's artificial "everyone's a star" educational environment does nothing to prepare kids for the real world. I know -- my daughter is now 20, and having a VERY difficult time adjusting to the fact that she's not as outstanding as she was led to believe she was in high school.
 
Life is tough and kids are cruel. That's just the way it is, and today's artificial "everyone's a star" educational environment does nothing to prepare kids for the real world. I know -- my daughter is now 20, and having a VERY difficult time adjusting to the fact that she's not as outstanding as she was led to believe she was in high school.
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I agree about kids and life. And I can see how the situation you describe might not be very helpful for someone later in life.

There are some differences though.

Your daughter's experience is perhaps summarised as excessive praise for something not especially praise-worthy. It probably originates from the teachers in relation to answers or assignments.
It comes from a misguidedly altruistic attempt to do good.

What I'm describing is derision for something not especially worth deriding. It comes mostly from one's peers. It can cover anything from appearance, clothes, physical prowess or build to lifestyle and relationship choices.
It comes from a sense of superiority on the part of the derider: I've never heard any such remarks made with the recipient's well-being in mind.

Neither a positive action and there is no real reason why either should be employed, but the latter for me is the more detrimental to people's self-worth of the two.

I don't know if my explanation makes sense.
 
many schools have SROs on campus and yhey are armed. However a few well armed staff and faculty would be able to stop trouble even before the SRO got there.
 
With regard to "teachers": Why would Elementary School/Middle/High School "Teachers" be any less capable than a College Professor?
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You missed my point about parents having there little ones in the element discussed.(how many folks are anti-gun) I didn't say the faculty was less capable its the parents having their child in that environment. Higher education is voluntary, grade school is not unless the parents are willing to do home schooling.

It's not cheap to meet the Fire Codes we build schools to these days ..... but we DO that ..... why should Security be any different?
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Apples and oranges in comparison.
Again this is my opinion, neither right nor wrong
 
They're going to try. But think about it. First, to repeal the 2nd A, 2/3 of both the House & Senate have to pass it, then 3/4 of the states have to ratify it. Personally, I don't see it happening, at least in my lifetime.
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You are assuming they will try to do it properly and Constitutionally. The last several major changes to the Constitution were simply declarations by 5 justices who simply "found" things in it that nobody had ever seen in there since it's birth, and arguably would have been changed by it's authors had they known they "put it in there" as discoverd by the US Supreme Court.
 
However a few well armed staff and faculty would be able to stop trouble even before the SRO got there.
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We have one SRO employed by the PD, but paid by the school, who covers 3 buildings at 3 locations. When school personnel need to get ahold of him they have to call the dispatcher at the local PD. In the case of an active shooter, there is a 33% chance he will actually be in the same building. They have one teacher who is a part time officer whom they allow to carry concealed. The school board will not authorize any other staff to arm. Security is not only expensive, but useless in the way its deployed.
 
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