I read that he was taking Luvox at the time, and it was found in his system, which means he wasn’t off his meds.
No, you mean you agree with his and not with mine.
Then, Scumpup, could you please highlight the passage where Czarcasm suggests that all points are equally valid?
If I know someone won the lottery, and I know you bought a ticket, I would keep both options on the table, that you won, or that you did not win. But these are not equally likely propositions.
That doesn’t match what I remember, but I haven’t done any reading about it for a few years, so I wouldn’t be surprised if my memory was faulty. Of course, the issue with increased aggression associated with certain medications is “compared to what?” and while certainly the Columbine incident was an act of aggression, I believe that when people mean that certain meds are associated with increased aggression, they mean impulsive aggression and not a planned-out massacre.
I’ve never known a school shooter, but I have known more than a handful of families with adolescents who’ve attempted suicide – and unfortunately, a couple who have succeeded.
I can tell you there’s not one damn thing in common they all share. Some of these kids came from stable, middle-class two family homes, others from single parent households. Some were spotted for trouble almost since birth, others seemed to give no warning at all. Some of them were quiet loners, others were popular, seemingly happy kids.
Strangely, none of the siblings of any of these young people seemed to have the levels of troubles these young people had – not just depression, but drinking/drug problems, run-ins with the law, academic problems, etc.
I honestly don’t think there’s any predictor for someone snapping.
I don’t think this kid snapped though. Reports are that he had been talking about this on Facebook and via Twitter for weeks beforehand. There is one “Die scum” - type post on Facebook from December.
And certainly, I wouldn’t describe most inner-city and rural violent criminals as having “snapped”.
It is common for someone to say “Where are this kid’s parents?” for things as minor as vandalism. Society expects parents to raise their children to not be felons, so when they turn out to be felons, should we be looking at the parents? Should we perhaps expand the definition of “neglect” beyond things like food and safety?
The trouble is some kids are very good actors-they will behave one way around parents, and a completely different way when with their peers. It’s kind of unfair to blame parents for what others see if Junior makes it a point never to show that side to them.
Parents are responsible for raising their kids, yes, but I don’t think that means parents are accountable for everything their kids do.
The problem is simple: How on earth can you enforce something like that? Sometimes kids wind up as bad apples because they don’t have anyone overseeing them. Perhaps it’s because there’s too much control and they fight back. Maybe they’re just bored. It could also be an unchecked psychological disorder. Sometimes a kid will hide the truth from their parents, actively.
How do you enforce something that has a massive variety of possible causes that are only obvious in hindsight?
If there’s no real accurate, reasonable way to predict who commits a shooting or who commits suicide, etc, why should we punish people for randomness or unforeseeable consequences? Yes, a shooting is tragic. But that doesn’t mean the parent is always to blame for it.
I can think of at least two dozen people who knew me better than my parents when I was 15. Many of them were my peers, but even a few of my teachers would be in that category.
I never took a gun to school, but I did have something of a meltdown in high school, and it was my peers who alerted school authorities that I might be a danger to myself, and the school authorities who called my mother. My poor father was literally the last to know.
I never considered blaming my parents for not knowing what I was going through. How could I, when I spent so much time and energy hiding what I was going through from them?
How many of you, as teenagers, shared your innermost thoughts and feelings with your parents? How many talked with them about your fears, trials and tribulations. How many really talked with them about your sexual preferences or activities? Your tastes for dope, or violence?
I don’t know about any of you, but my folks were in the dark. Mom knows me pretty well now, but would have been shocked back in the day.
I think as a general rule kids hide a lot from their parents, for a lot of different reasons. They may feel they will get in trouble, be a disappointment, be an embarassment, or they may feel that the parents could not help even if they could find the words to talk about it.
I talk about this (Columbine and other similar events) in some of my classes, and the traditional-age students are all on board with this idea. They all are willing to talk about how much they did, thought, said, or felt without their parents ever knowing.
The parent-aged students in the classes all vehemently deny that they would be unaware of anything their children would do or think or feel. Then, when the traditional-age students start to talk, the parent-age students get really quiet.
I think that we all want to believe that if we look long enough and hard enough, place enough controls and checks on teenagers’ behaviors and activities, we’ll be able to pick out the shooters from the non-shooters. But there’s just not enough data. As horrific as these incidences are, they are still so rare in the grand scheme of American high school and college life that we can’t figure an algorithm for predicting this kind of violence. As Charlie on Numb3rs would have said, the data set is too small.
In this case, the father and mother have both been charged, in different years, with violence in the home. The kid was actually living with a grandparent. The gun was stolen from an uncle.
It might give someone a sense of closure to be able to charge a parental unit, (which one?), with neglect, but it hardly seems useful. Charge the (apparently) dysfunctional parents? Charge the grandfather who might have taken the kid in desperation to keep him off the streets? Charge the operators of Facebook for not reporting every angst-laden screed on their website? (And, of course, there will be several smart-assed kids in the next few months who will post similar messages just to get a rise out of people, and smacking them down will not do anything to stop any violence, but will cause people to lower their guards at the number of “false alarms” to which they have to respond.)
Given that the kid apparently had Tweeted the intent to bring a gun to school, it might be useful to encourage more kids to reports such Tweets in the future. However, that will not be a guarantee to stop this sort of thing. His Tweets were, apparently, several days old. An immediate intervention based on them in the days when he had not yet brought the gun would have simply alerted him to postpone his actions until people were no longer watching him. Eric Harris was a master at portraying himself as a confused kid who was now getting his act together–persuading several consellors that his past troubles had simply been unfortunate blips from which he had recovered.
When something like this happens, it is natural to ask how it happened, but most efforts to prevent it–particularly those efforts that focus on punishing third parties–are pretty much doomed to fail.
Reading his Facebook screed, I was struck by the similarity to some of the stuff that Harris wrote, picturing himself as some sort of superior being or god. Is this sort of thing common among some high school kids? Might it be possible that this could be a marker? I have no real idea whether that is true. If 5% (or 1%) of kids have those sort of fantasies, it would be a pretty useless marker, given the miniscule fraction of kids that engage in this sort of violence.
Any psych people know whether this has been examined?
I have a couple cousins in my generation with parents like this, who actually had guns in the home, and they never shot up their schools (or anybody at all). If we start charging people for shitty parenting, there won’t be enough room in the prison systems to incarcerate them (or enough foster homes for the kids involved). Both of my cousins are fairly fucked-up mentally, but one of them is managing to live as a reasonably responsible adult (the other had 3 kids before her 18th birthday and is in jail for identity theft and drug abuse, no weapons though).
Now, logistics and prison-space aside, maybe some people think we *should *charge them all. But there’s still no guarantee (or even a correlation) that neglectful parenting will cause a kid to become a school shooter. The result cannot be used to prove the postulate, that’s fallacious reasoning.
(I’m not arguing with you, tomndebb. We agree. I’m just expounding on the point you made with an anecdote, hope that’s ok!)
Nobody ever blames the NRA.
Nobody everblames the gun makers.
Nobody ever blames gun culture.
Yep. Strawmen.
Even more important, there’s no guarantee that good (or even exceptional) parenting will prevent a kid from becoming a school shooter. The OP’s premise is fallacious, as it assumes a degree of parental knowledge and control over adolescent behavior that simply isn’t possible to achieve. Hard though it may be to believe, adolescents are independent people who are fully capable of hiding their true thoughts and feelings from their parents, and parents aren’t mind readers.
Why don’t you go over to those sites and trade blows with them?
:rolleyes:
I’m not understanding the OP’s idea fully.
Would you want to be held accountable for every stupid thing your teenager does? That’s kind of unworkable to my mind.
You want to drag Social Services into this, why? Because they have proven so effective in the past? Is anyone angrier than kids in foster homes? Subject to more bullying? I can’t see how this will help, even if there was a way to afford it.
What’s that leave? Forcing the bad parents, that produced this angry child, to be more participatory? This is going to help how, exactly?
You say, how could they not have an inkling? Have you been around teenagers at all? They are oceans of unvoiced issues. If they were sensitive parents perhaps this child wouldn’t be so angry, but they clearly are not great parents. Doesn’t that explain how they had no idea?
Do you seriously, not see, how easy it is, for parents, to overlook, what’s right in front of them, concerning their own children? You can’t shake a stick without hitting a parent who thinks their misbehaving brat is an angel, heaven sent.
I’m tempted to ask what colour the sky is in your world.
Try to imagine the backlash if Social Services did get involved to that extent-some of the same people that are now complaining that “someone” didn’t do “something” to stop these catastrophes would be screaming about government intrusion of the parental rights.
That’s sad and not surprising, and I see the school was actually for kids with problems like this. Neither parent was charged with abusing the son - the father has been arrested a bunch of times for violence against women and the mother was once charged with domestic violence against the father. But even if nobody hit him, that’s a profoundly screwed up home life.
I tend to think of it as that the author has schizophrenia or something similar.