The conversation that needs to happen.

a reply to: SlapMonkey

You are right, it is a mental issue. Why is it more prevalent nowadays? Perhaps, in the past, parents were more observant, catching on much earlier. They were not advised to just toss some drugs at the situation and hope it goes away. Instead of allowing others the responsibility, They actually took the time to discover why someone they loved was going off the rails and focused on correcting the real issue and not simply the symptoms.

This is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed.

a reply to: DBCowboy

They have been coddled and trophied since birth so when they encounter the harsh realities of the real world or run into issues that are hard, they react disproportionately.

Somehow I don't think this is a thing — kids shooting up their schools because they're "coddled and trophied." I'd rank the "coddled and trophied" hypothesis slightly below "violent video games" and "rock music."

This school shooter was adopted along with his biological brother. The adoptive father died when he was young and his adoptive mother died a year ago. I'm wondering about the circumstances that led to the adoption in the first place.

a reply to: theantediluvian

The shooter (obviously) had no coping mechanisms to deal with life's difficulties.

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: theantediluvian

The shooter (obviously) had no coping mechanisms to deal with life's difficulties.

You're right.

Maybe if we stop giving kids trophies we won't have to hear about the eighteenth school shooting in 2018.

The coddled and participation trophy stuff is BS. No one actually cares or thinks about those things outside of the people who use those terms to attack politics they don't agree with.

Shootings like this are just an example of the current culture of the U.S. The "I got mine so screw you" attitude that seems to be in vogue.

Zero empathy for anyone.

Everyone knows the problem, let's start pointing out solutions.
....
My kids or yours could be next...

a reply to: network dude
America's unique in that regard. Why can a place with tons of firearms like Switzerland (so often pointed to) be so peaceful but not America?

Fact is its America's culture. You grow up with violence being everywhere on tv while sex is abhorrent. Combine with a completely selfish societal culture and an unhealthy gun obsession... guns being made to look cool in propaganda and basically a status symbol. Thus people default to guns being the answer. Most often people have no where to turn to (friends, psychologists, doctors) and problems fester, until the person snaps. But also regular people can snap - get cheated on, lose job, anything can do it.

It's not a freaking "lack of god" because religious people were massacreing innocents LONG before atheism became fashionable. More so its a lack of purpose in life, lack of access to proper help, lack of care by society who want to blame the poor for everything, and lack of parental supervision. You're not going to like hearing this but universal health care (psychologists included) would help immensely. Many people go untreated because they can't afford it. Not to mention with this, many parents could work less hours and spend more time nurturing their damn kids.

By the way I own 2 rifles so don't accuse me of being "anti-gun".

a reply to: network dude

Heres the thing.

A citizen SHOULD have BOTH the right to defend themselves from the government, from their fellow man, AND the right to possess such tools are necessary to achieve that end.

BUT...

If you are going to accept that this is a necessary right to have (which it is), then you also have to accept that certain other things, have to be in place in order to make that society function without these sorts of events, or at least, with many fewer of them than you are seeing at the moment.

There have been very, VERY few mass shootings, that did not turn out to be the work of some crazed lunatic, who should not have been allowed out on their own in the first place. Under a system which demands the citizen have the right to defend themselves, there must also be a STRICT policy that people who appear to be a danger to themselves or others, owing to failures of their psychological integrity, MUST be under institutional care, at secured facilities, NOT left to their families or their own devices, wherein they could readily get their hands on firearms, or for that matter, kitchen knives, hammers, axes, the chemicals necessary to build an explosive, corrosive, or in other ways dangerous device.

You cannot keep a person who has lost their compass, from doing something dangerous to human life if you insist that they retain their liberty. But you sure as hell CAN keep a person who has lost their compass, from accessing a victim pool.

There used to be better provision for this sort of mental healthcare, this hands on approach, but it was not popular, because to do it correctly, meant spending lots of money, very often on people who were not going to be contributing even a slightest little bit of anything, to economies either local or national. And none the less, that is the very sort of care that needs providing, IF America's citizenry are to continue to have access to the rights they should have, while remaining far less likely to be shot by a person whose mind has collapsed through illness.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: strongfp


Mass shootings weren't really a thing until one technology became mainstream.

The internet.

Just some food for thoought.

Ten of the worst occurred before the ubiquity of social media.

I didn't mean literally the internet itself.
Hence why I said since it became mainstream and mass shootings became the norm. The severity of how bad the shooting is or wasn't is not the issue, it's how common they are now.
And there seems to be a correlation between how ingrained social media has become over the years and school shootings, especially in the states.

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: network dude

Life is hard. Life is tough.

We have the ability to make life much easier for everyone. We jaust choose to continue to pit one against each other and that is what makes life hard and tough. All this advancement and all it has done is split humanity further and further apart from each other.

originally posted by: CynConcepts
a reply to: SlapMonkey

Why is it more prevalent nowadays? Perhaps, in the past, parents were more observant, catching on much earlier.

Yes.

They were not advised to just toss some drugs at the situation and hope it goes away.

Yes.

Instead of allowing others the responsibility, They actually took the time to discover why someone they loved was going off the rails and focused on correcting the real issue and not simply the symptoms.

Yes.

In my opinion, though, it's a combination of many factors, but I think that our food (high-calorie, low nutritional value) and the side effects of our medications that are pushed on and prescribed to us just simply affect some people in a horrible way.

Couple that with things said about our immediate-result society, and lack of critical-thinking skills and coping abilities (that are a side-effect, IMO, of over-worked parents and a lack of family cohesiveness in modern American society), and we have the result that we are looking at.

If guns weren't available, $5 machetes are always there at Harbor Freight, or golf clubs, or hammers, or axes, or literally anything. When the human minds loses its final grip on stability, nothing is off limits for people intent on harming others.

Has it been released how he got access to the AR-15 yet?

When I run an experiment, I document everything that is going on before I start, everything that happens after I start, and all conditions after the experiment. I then compare the results and try to understand what actually happened as a result of what I did.

Can we apply this to the school shootings?

The first nationally publicized mass school shooting was Columbine in 1999. Now, there have been a lot of explanations of what might have gone wrong, so let's start with examining the gun control debate. What has changed in the area of gun control? I am paraphrasing this list from Wikipedia:

• National Firearms Act of 1934 - taxed firearms and regulated certain types, such as fully automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns, etc. For the average person, this made little difference; few people actually need those types of weapons.
  
• Federal Firearms Act of 1938 - instituted the FFL license for arms dealers and restricted felons from possessing a firearm. Again, not much effect on the average person.
  
• Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 - Restricted interstate commerce of handguns. That affected a few people living close to state lines.
  
• Gun Control Act of 1968 - Restricted interstate commerce for firearms in general. Like the above, minimal impact on most people.
  
• Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 - changed the 1968 law, but also prohibited sale of new fully auto firearms. Minimal impact on the average person, and what impact there was, was mostly positive.
  
• Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 - made plastic guns illegal. Not many people have (or want, in my experience) a plastic gun.
  
• Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 - this one affected people, primarily school kids. As others have pointed out in other threads, there was a time before this that kids had gun racks in their vehicles in the parking lots... mostly so they could go straight to or come straight from a hunting trip... and yet there was no major gun violence.
  
• Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 - instituted background checks. This one affected all gun purchasers and was placed in effect due to the shooting of James Brady during an attempted assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981.
  
• Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 - Banned all assault-style weapons, but didn't really give a good definition of what an "assault weapon" was. Again, this affected everyone... my own hunting rifle was included. It was allowed to expire in 2004.
  
• Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005 - Protected firearms manufacturers from being held liable for acts committed with their guns. Little effect on most people.

So we have laws in 1934, 1938, and 2005 that affected almost no one, laws in 1968, 1986, and 1988 that affected a few gun owners, and laws in 1990, 1993, and 1994 that affected all gun owners. Considering the rash of school shootings started in 1999 and have ramped up since then, it seems patently obvious that gun control is not the answer... indeed, could be the problem.

Another oft-stated reason is pharmacueticals. The first psychoactive drug I personally remember is Ritalin. Ritalin was used to treat ADHD (or what it used to be called) way back in the 1960s, but it was not used extensively. It was a big debate in the 1970s, and slowly gained use in the 1980s. Its use increased dramatically in the 1990s. That fits the timeline; the widespread use of psychoactive drugs in children started the decade before the first major school shooting.

Yet another reason is violence in video games. The first really violent game I remember was Duke Nukem. It was released in 1991, 8 years prior to Columbine. That fits too. As a matter fact, the intensity of both school shootings and violence/realism in video games have risen since.

So we have a correlation between mass school shootings and gun control restrictions, video game violence, and psychoactive drug use in children. Now, as has been said many times, correlation does not imply causation... but I maintain that it does hint at such. I'll be posting more along this line as time goes on... but I just don't feel like writing a library right now.

We desperately need to have this conversation, without limits. Children are dying.

TheRedneck

This isn't a mystery.

This kid was known around his school as the butt of a joke revolving around how "he would be the school shooter."

He commented on things on the internet claiming "I will be a professional school shooter."

The writing was literally on his Facebook wall, but nothing was done.

And nothing ever will be done.

Politicians say to send thoughts and prayers.
Religious people say to force their God into public schools.
Conspiracy nuts claim no one died, it's a false flag, crisis actors, etc etc
People will politicize this, will saying it's not right for others to politicize this.
People will say "now is not the time."

And another shooting will happen. And then another shooting will happen. And then another shooting will happen.

And nothing will be done, because people don't want to acknowledge the reality of this, and most importantly - it's become clear that certain people and demographics don't want the issue of gun violence to be discussed whatsoever.

originally posted by: TrueBrit

There have been very, VERY few mass shootings, that did not turn out to be the work of some crazed lunatic, who should not have been allowed out on their own in the first place. Under a system which demands the citizen have the right to defend themselves, there must also be a STRICT policy that people who appear to be a danger to themselves or others, owing to failures of their psychological integrity, MUST be under institutional care, at secured facilities, NOT left to their families or their own devices, wherein they could readily get their hands on firearms, or for that matter, kitchen knives, hammers, axes, the chemicals necessary to build an explosive, corrosive, or in other ways dangerous device.

Consider this, though: What if the treatments and medications used by mental-health professionals are a main catalyst that make these people lose the grip on their sanity and become murderous in the first place? I'm certainly not blaming that and that alone, but it's like sending career criminals to prison for lengthy sentences, where they just learn to be better at their craft.

I fully believe that anti-psychotic medications have a detrimental effect of the sanity of some people, and I don't think that sending them to a facility that will pump them full of the same or similar drugs is the answer, especially against their will. I do, however, agree that in certain extreme cases, it might be worth considering that if a family takes on the responsibility of caring for a mentally-psychotic individual that they willingly agree not to have firearms in the home.

Not that they can't own them, just not be kept in the home. But then that would be difficult to enforce without some sort of health-and-welfare check by the state, and I don't think many people would agree to these things.

Regardless of all of the peripheries involved, I believe that more intensive study on the drugs that many, if not most, of the people committing these atrocities are on is absolutely in order and should be the priority.

a reply to: CynConcepts

You are quite correct! Good comment.

I'd add however that there's an additional problem that's aggravated this situation. As background, there's an article at the NYT wherein the author claims the problem is that US Americans don't fix this problem because they don't care if kids get shot at school. That's obviously not true, but it does point to something no one talks about.

Years ago, like in the early 1900's the US had an immigration policy that focused on rapidly integrating immigrants into the society. They were to learn english, etc.

My comment isn't about immigration problems, its about societal integration. As you point out, everyone's isolated; they're isolated to the point that they really aren't integrated into the society as a whole. They're practically alienated from the society as a whole and look only to themselves.

In the meantime, the fabric of US society has drastically altered as it moves to becoming a minority majority society wherein no one cultural group is a majority of the population and these individual cultural groupings, thanks to identity politics, are at each other's throats.

The real solution is to change the architecture of how schools are built. The US has become a very volatile society but at the same time, the US has continued to build these massive open school campuses. Anyone can walk in, walk on to the campus, enter the myriad buildings, and do whatever they want.

In other countries which are equally volatile and crime is high, the schools are built like forts with one, or maybe two ways in! Entrants are scanned, screened, searched and armed guards protect the entrance points.

If you Americans want to put a real dent into these type events, you need to address these structural problems; demand safe campuses and demand that the campuses themselves are hardened.

The rich people know all this, they know that living as they do in a fractured, violent society, the only way to stay safe is to live in gated communities with armed guards. The rest of you should demand something like that for your kids schools..........otherwise you'ld better be prepare to home school.

Home schooling sounds nuts? On CNN yesterday, the reporter on the ground interviewed a woman who said that for the last 18 months or so, her daughter had been afraid of going to that school; afraid of being shot. She said her daughter was so anxious about it that she regularly begged her mom to let her home school. Think about how sad that is. Think how bad that mom would feel today if her kid was one of the dead.

I don't think that there's a simple answer. Let's list some of the proposed "causes" over the years and from this thread:

Violent movies and video games
Music
SSRIs
Mental health issues
Guns
Gun culture
"Toxic masculinity"
Politics
Religion
Participation trophies
Social media

In other countries, kids watch the same movies, listen to the same music and play the same video games. They have the same mental health issues, take the same drugs and use the same or similar social media platforms. Many countries have high availability of firearms.

The most common link among all of these mass shooters is gender. The second most common factor is probably age. There are outliers like the Vegas shooter but the bulk of these mass shootings seem to be committed by males in an age range of maybe 13-30. It's no coincidence that males in this age range also get sucked into violent radical movements and gangs and commit the bulk of violent crimes.

It also seems that many of them have behavioral issues and trouble "fitting in." When it comes to school shooters, it sure seems that a disproportionate number of them are sexually unsuccessful.

None of these are factors unique to America either of course. The world is full of disaffected young men who don't have many close friends and aren't getting laid. So what sets America apart in recent decades?

I think there's possibly an indication in the social media posting of this latest shooter. He flat out said that he wanted to be a "professional school shooter."

So my inexpert hypothesis is that it's a confluence of factors: young angry men with behavioral issues, desperate to vent rage at peers that they feel rejected by, with a recent history of high profile examples to draw from and access to the tools to carry out their attacks.

The upshot? Maybe every problem doesn't have a solution. I don't think there's anything we can legislate to "fix" anything and obsessing over it will likely do more harm than good.

a reply to: TheRedneck

Movies also have preceded the video game trend in realistic violence and amount of said violence per movie.

I believe that video games and movies are much less a cause of the actions, but I do think that they might play a background role in numbing the empathy in people who commit these acts of violence. Not everyone is apparently capable of separating fictional violence from real life, and I would argue that the overuse and over-dosing of medications in our youth exacerbate that inability to determine on-screen violence and real life.

I really, really want to see more studies on the direct effect of these drugs and these issues in people.

a reply to: SlapMonkey

There is not TIME for intensive studies into these drugs, because the problems being caused by the access insane people have to firearms, are existent NOW, and those experiments, trials and so on take an inordinate amount of time. Decades in some cases, are necessary to find out what the long term effects of a particular drug might be, and simply put, neither the pharma companies (who are literally a law unto themselves, and have the government over a barrel, because their business is something that the economy relies upon heavily), nor the government are going to be willing to spend that time or money on such a project, and it does not solve problems FAST.

Removing dangerous people to a place of safety for them, and security for others however, does solve those problems.

a reply to: network dude

Maybe start with Hollywood stop making all those super violent movies.

Their rightly fighting sexism, what about mass murderism?

And the pharmaceutical groups too

These two sacred cows of the almighty dollar get very quiet when these shootings take place

I think we know why

originally posted by: Thirty6BelowZero
a reply to: network dude

You don't have to hate to say it. We can go back to the good ole days without adopting all of the ways the good ole days were. But it starts with God. # didn't start hitting the fan like this until God was removed and doctors made ADHD up.

The heck? Doctors didn't make ADHD up. It's a real condition. Clearly you've never met anyone who has it. I have. The condition exists. Hell I have ADD and deal with on a daily basis.

But regardless, the shooter in Florida had depression not ADHD.