And frickin’ laser beams …
One might ask why a logical solution to an existing problem is considered insane simply because you don’t agree with it.
What part of teachers and staff did you miss?
How the hell did you come up with that moonbeam notion? The problem is insane people who want to hurt other people. How does that problem get solved? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure one step in the right direction is for law enforcement to not ignore warnings about insane people from the public.
Do these parents and grandparents not also fail their daughters and granddaughters? That seems unlikely.
It would be interesting to see what they include as diagnoses, which wasn’t something I could find despite following a trail of links for a while. If it’s anything that’s in the DSM-5, that includes all people who have neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD and dyslexia, people who stutter, people with down syndrome and other disorders that cause intellectual disability, insomnia and restless leg syndrome, and people who are dependent on pot.
The reason I’m curious is there were similar numbers posted 3 or 4 years ago about the number of US school children with disabilities, and that particular study did in fact include all children with ADHD and dyslexia to get such high numbers.
It’s like saying what is the cause of housefires? Is it that houses contain so many flamable items? Well, there’s that but also the fact that there’s so much oxygen everywhere.
Ever hear of Lizzie Borden? Jack the Ripper?
The reason we hear more of mass shootings today is that there are more of them.
When I was in college you could walk right onto an airplane with no security checks worth mentioning. Then people started hijacking planes to Cuba, and started hijacking planes for terrorism.
What had changed? Were people suddenly into Cuba? No, it was copycat - just like the mass killings today.
Now one way of dealing with the hijacking problem could have been more money for better intelligence, messaging, public service messages and the like. Air marshals too. No doubt it would have helped some. But what was done was to keep the weapons off the planes. Luckily the NRA of the day didn’t claim that the 2nd Amendment allowed guns on planes.
The only way you are going to stop copycat killers is to keep rapid fire weapons out of their hands. There is no other way. And it probably means something like keeping these weapons in firing ranges where they can be enjoyed without making them available to the dangerous among us.
When compared with other first world nations, the USA stands out for its gun death rate List of countries by firearm-related death rate - Wikipedia and its gun ownership rate Estimated number of civilian guns per capita by country - Wikipedia . Just as thoughts and prayers are a diversion from the core issue, mental health is also a diversion from the core issue. The core issue is that you are awash with guns, which results in an insanely high gun death rate when compared to the rest of the first world.
Improving mental health is a worthy cause, but if you want to deal with gun deaths, you will have to take the 2nd amendment bull by the horns and put first world gun control in place. Anything less will only be a band-aid pretending to be a tourniquet.
Look to other first world nations. Identify what makes the USA so tremendously different from them, and you will find your answer: gun ownership per capita.
It’s really weird watching Americans the mental gymnastics required to dismiss the most obvious solution, which has proven to be effective in other comparable countries. At the end of the day it’s up to America if it wants guns and the answer it seems is, yes it does want guns, and it is prepared to bear the negative consequences, but the self-deceit is frustrating to behold.
I really doubt that the people you’ve mentioned did it for the attention.
This is very hardened. Teenagers having a hard time is not news, whether it’s caused by their upbringing, bullying, the way they look, etc.
What does make the news is when that teenager becomes alienated, disconnected, and HE doesn’t have access to mental health counseling but does have access to firearms.
Teens going through troubled times are not “insane”.
I sometimes wonder if the issue isn’t guns but a lack of societal compassion.
The point was that old mass murderers got plenty of press. Lizzie Borden, if she did it, didn’t do it for attention. Given the coverage of the Ripper killings, I wouldn’t doubt that he did. In any case the killers who kill themselves might have had other motives, since they didn’t stick around to get the attention. This most recent one seems to have had issues with the school among other things.
I like this thought.
Meme version: Blaming everything but guns for gun violence is like blaming oxygen for housefires.
And publishing statistics about Skittles cavities and calling Skittles “the oxygen of Skittles cavities” is not meme-tastic?
Why is “gun violence” a metric beyond hoplophobia?
Teenagers can have a tough time all over the world, and there are a number of other first-world countries where they potentially have access to firearms (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand for example) but don’t decide to use them to shoot up a school.
Mental health is a huge issue when it comes to mass shootings because sane people don’t shoot other people because voices in their head tell them to, or they’ll show everyone who laughed at them, or whatever.
Part of it is also that guns are generally seen as tools or sporting goods in places like Australia and NZ (and, I understand, Canada) - they’re not owned for self-defence or because a 200 year old parchment says they can.
The other thing is mental health treatment is free (to varying extents) in countries with Universal Health Care - which means people can get help before they get to the going off the deep end part. Then you’ve got the inequality thing too - I don’t think there’s many other 1st world countries where so many people’s lives can just suck so spectacularly that there’s no way out, no help, and no prospect of things getting better because the deck is stacked agains them - all while living right next door to people who live the sort of lives you see on TV sitcoms all the time.
It would be interesting if the US Federal Government said “Anything that looks like a modern-era assault rifle is banned” - so no AR-15 or AK-47 appearance rifles, but Ruger Mini-14s and M1 Garands and SKS rifles are A-OK.
Would mass shooters suddenly start switching to the “non-banned” rifles, or would there be a reduction? I mean, no-one has any idea what to do at this point so regardless of whether the plan works it would provide some useful data for the next step (even if the next step is “Hey, it worked. OK, let’s leave it alone now.”)
Not just “self defense”. For many Americans, there is a strong association between guns and “freedom”. They like to think that a gun allows them to not have to depend on the government for protection, or will even provide protection from a tyrannical government. IMHO, it’s part of a larger American attitude of “fuck everyone else”, which is part of the problem.
Mass shooters could conceivably switch to hunting rifles or pistols. It would still save lives though as even semi-auto hunting rifles are more unwieldy than AR-15s at close range and pistol rounds are less destructive than rifle rounds and have less range and accuracy.
How many millions of Americans are diagnosed with some mental illness? Many of those wouldn’t be a danger even if armed with a gun. Was Nikolas Cruz ever diagnosed with mental illness? Some people are just assholes. (Is “asshole-ism” even a category in DSM-5?) But there were many people who knew that Nikolas Cruz, regardless of any psychiatric report, should not be allowed to handle loaded guns. In some states, e.g. California, his mother would have had the right to petition a judge to deny him his “2nd Amendment right.” But Florida is not one of those states …
During the “Golden Age of the American Gun”, gun control was MUCH stricter than it is today!
The carrying of firearms was strictly prohibited in Dodge City..
I think there’s much truth to this. America has this idea that we’re soooo independent and we don’t need anyone else. From the Declaration of Independence to the stereotypical idea of “lifting yourself by your own bootstraps,” we have to do it on our own, even if that means forsaking “common sense” (whatever that means).
In fact, this is an idea I’m kicking around, trying to put it in a cohesive pattern–that given our history and culture, I’m not really sure if there is a good solution other than time. America is considered a young country (compared to most of Europe or China), that we haven’t had a chance to “mature” out of the idea of violence solving everything.
No, that would make a terrible meme. It doesn’t make any sense, and unlike guns being involved in every act of gun violence, skittles are not involved in all cavities.
Because you don’t have to be a hoplophobe in order to prefer that fewer people killed killed by guns. The idea of labeling anyone who would like to see less gun violence a hoplophobe is a useful, if very disingenuous tactic of the right. It ranks right up there with the mind reading skills.