"A state investigative report... lays out a long trail of missed signals prior to the massacre but notes these clues were known only to 'private individuals' and not reported to authorities.... The report traces the descent of a shy, quiet boy once thought by a teacher as a 'wonderful student' with a 'positive attitude' into a mass murderer.... A former girlfriend told the FBI that she believed [the killer, Salvador] Ramos had been sexually assaulted by one of his mother’s boyfriends at an early age, the report said, but when Ramos told his mother at the time, she didn’t believe him.... Family members told investigators how Ramos had been bullied as a fourth-grader in one of the same linked classrooms where he carried out the attack. They said he faced ridicule over his stutter, short hair and for wearing the same clothing nearly every day. At one point, the report said, a fellow student tied his shoelaces together and Ramos fell on his face, injuring himself. The report noted that Ramos was flagged by school officials as 'at risk,' but never received any special education services.... In March 2022, two months before the shooting, a student on Instagram told him that 'people at school talk (expletive) about you and call you school shooter.' The next month Ramos asked in a direct message on Instagram, 'Are you still gonna remember me in 50 something days?' After the answer — 'probably not' — Ramos replied, 'Hmm alright we’ll see in may.'"
ADDED: Here's a hypothetical to ask any schoolchild: Let's say at some point in the future — a year from now — one of the kids in your class becomes a school shooter: Which kid do you think it is?
Don't you think the kids already know who the potential school shooters are?
Here's some advice that we ought to convey to schoolkids, perhaps not in exactly these words: If you ever find yourself inclined to be cruel to another student, stop and think that you may be part of what turns him into the next school shooter.
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78 comments:
The useless and corrupt(D) FBI did nothing.
Good guy with a gun takes out mass shooter at a mall in Indiana.
In Texas - the good guys with guns - did nothing.
This is so sad. From start to finish one of the most depressing stories in my lifetime. How many of these young shooters are made by society? Governor Abbott had it right when he said that 50 years ago we had guns in schools and no shootings. It’s not the guns. It’s societal values as a whole. Or lack of values. .
Before our left leaning commentators take general umbrage at that, I feel the same was about the random violence and murders committed by blacks out of random rage. From the driver in Kenosha to the 3 girl teens last week who beat ( maybe to death) a 57 year old white woman because they “hate whites”., there is a segment of society, white and black, that is almost destined for disaster from the day they were born. Society and family ambivalence, crappy dysfunctional schools, manipulative political messaging and a media that idolizes conflict are all to blame.
How do we rebuild the following broken institutions; education, family, media and religion/values? Has that ever been done? That’s a real question.
Humans have a strong ability for turning a blind eye, whistling past graveyards, and refusing to get involved with trouble. If you are going to be upset with this, why not the urban messes of Chicago's south side, Detroit, and Baltimore? You should have done something THERE TOO and LONG AGO.
But then, humans did the same thing with Nazi Germany, the USSR, Mao's China, Pol Pot, Rwanda's genocide, young Saddam Hussein, etc. If the bully is tough and fearless, just avoid him and maybe you'll escape or he'll go away. We routinely tell ourselves.
I'm not sure that there is a solution, but it may be mitigated by more structured family life and setting higher standards for helping others (e.g., old school "Do unto others").
Oh, he was bullied. Well then those kids deserved what they got, and they don’t deserve anyone looking at their pasts.
The FBI knew about a lot of our mass murderers and did nothing. But don't worry. They are still searching for people who trespassed in the Capitol after getting ushered in by the Capitol police on 1/6/21. That is the most important job they do lately. It's a joke. We are being ruled by clowns.
"How do we rebuild the following broken institutions; education, family, media and religion/values? Has that ever been done? That’s a real question."
Won't happen until the Democrats acknowledge that the institutions are broken, which probably won't happen until they are soundly defeated over at least a 10-20 year period.
Governor Abbott had it right when he said that 50 years ago we had guns in schools and no shootings. It’s not the guns. It’s societal values as a whole. Or lack of values.
The UT tower shootings were in 1966, so I don't know what the hell Abbott, or you, are talking about.
There are some very obvious common threads in all of these school shooting (or mall shooting or theater shooting) incidents. Bad parenting for one. Bad oblivious parents who are not only neglectful, but often the cause of the psychosis in these killers. The other common thread are the scores of adults tasked with overseeing and protecting these kids who do neither and are, instead, much like the bad parents: oblivious to the problems with an inability to act even if they do see it.
I use the phrase, Who's going to protect us from our protectors? usually when referring to our Federal Government or Global Health organizations. But it applies here as well.
And I think of the young man in Indiana just the other night, who stopped a potential massive mall slaughter because he was carrying (legally) and proceeded to take action, shooting and killing a young man with a rifle shooting up a food court in that mall. This one young man prevented further deaths, injury, and mayhem. He saved dozens of people's lives. In Uvalde- the entire police and sherriff's forces, armed to the teeth, trained for this situation, stood around like baby boys, shuffling their feet, sanitizing their hands, and doing nothing, while children were being butchered.
Just an idea. Instead of hiring bodies for police work, hire men and women of action. This can be gleaned through hiring processes that give a shit for the types of people hired to secure your citizens.
This is the first I’ve heard about the stutter and no treatment. Don’t the schools get extra federal money for that?
NYC native and talk radio show host Buck Sexton had a speech issue as a child and the NYC public schools fixed it.
“How do we rebuild the following broken institutions; education, family, media and religion/values? Has that ever been done? That’s a real question.”
It has to come from the top and there has to be the will to change. Very few even talk about it. Trump said he wanted to make America great again, but he just attacked the media who then tried to destroy him.
"a long trail of missed signals"
As the story makes clear, the signals weren't missed. But nobody dared to act on them.
Known wolf strikes again. Truth is even with the foreknowledge there still wouldn't have been much anyone could've done to preempt him.
That's why hardening targets is so necessary. You must stop people like this at the critical moment in the 'kill-chain' when they are actually committing their crimes. Good guy with a gun yadda yadda, but it is really the only way. Extreme violence MUST be met with Extreme violence.
Obviously we as a people haven't been doing a good enough job screening gun purchases. With fanstastic rights come great responsibility.
"was flagged by school officials as 'at risk,'"
That would be much more informative if they would've said how many kids were flagged in total for the school district, county, and state.
Reminds me of the meme/joke:
Professor X: what’s your super power?
Me: hindsight
Professor X: that’s not going to help us
Me: yes I see that now
There's certainly a lot of cases where people were known to law enforcement beforehand, but I don't have a sense of how many false positives we would get if we took everyone who sent up these flags and restricted their rights or subjected them to close monitoring of some sort (perhaps itself an invasion of their right against unreasonable searches and seizures). Frankly, without better visibility into the false positive rate, it's hard for me to calibrate what the appropriate response is. Maybe we just don't know until some jurisdiction tries.
"How do we rebuild the following broken institutions; education, family, media and religion/values? Has that ever been done? That’s a real question."
Sure! it's been done Often, and ALL OVER THE WORLD
education => Madrasa
family => Marrying your 11 year old niece
media => Al Jazeera
religion/values => Sharia
I'm pretty firmly convinced; that the entire point of the woke agenda, is to make us okay with the upcoming islamic takeover.
"Sure, Sharia is pretty severe and the Jizyah is pretty high.. But at least they got rid of that Green Nude Eel shit, and that trannie crap"
Hunter Biden's tax payer funded Hooker said...
In Texas - the good guys with guns - did nothing.
They Did Something; sent out for donuts, and threatened to arrest anyone that tried to stop the shooting
The Ds spend a half century destroying the best culture the world has ever known (as determined by people voting with their feet) and then blame the tragic consequences on inanimate hunks of metal and plastic.
Guns, like abortion, are not a problem to be solved for Democrats. They are the foundations of fund raising and power building.
It's important to look into what makes these shooters. But the answer can't be "bullying". They tried that in the 90s and started the "no bullying" and zero tolerance campaigns that left us with the wokesters.
We have to look at what the "bullying" is doing to people, but I suspect the answer is in the home. The kids who don't have support to get past life's trials. Everyone has unhappy moments and times when people are mean. Few turn into shooters. What is that difference that makes that happen?
Why do officials and the media take seriously these claims of bullying? (The shoelace tied together story seems particularly fanciful.) Violent actors from Hitler to the Columbine killers are forever constructing narratives of bullying or other injustices to justify their planned violence as "revenge." Like the publicity the MSM gives them, repeating uncritically these (mostly made up) tales of bullying or abuse just primes the next shooter.
It was a veritable red-flag convention and nobody came...
I'm pretty firmly convinced; that the entire point of the woke agenda, is to make us okay with the upcoming islamic takeover.
Muslims make up just over 1% of the U.S. population. You are paranoid in the extreme.
Besides, the idea that "the woke agenda" is advocating repressive religious practices is just stupid.
There is apparently a very short, maybe invisible distance between knowing about someone with psychological problems, and immediately placing them under arrest for fear they may turn into a violent psychopaths. There sure seem to be a lot of people coming down hard on Law Enforcement for not yanking these people off the street pre-emptively. But wait! Law Enforcement. Which laws need enforcing? Are all these people secretly lusting after Red Flag Laws from safely inside the closet?
If we're going to arrest every one of them before they do anything, we'll need more jail space. So: How many are there? We'll need to let out some more hardened felons to make space.
Howard- screening gun purchases would not have prevented the 3 black high school girls from beating the 50+ year old white woman to death here in Philly because she was white and they didn't like the way she talked. Before you respond reflexively, pause and imagine what it's like being taunted and beaten to death. It also would not have prevented the Kenosha guy who killed multiple with his car, ad infinitum.
The left's obsession with guns is hiding the actual problem- the problem is a growing alienation among certain societal groups- blacks taught to hate whites by media and politicians, young males taught that they are the problem by schools, lack of family structure in both white and black communities, etc.
MayBee- the no bully campaigns were the useless equivalent of "just say no" to drugs. Home is of course, the problem but how about the kids, like most shooters and troubled blacks, who have no relevant home structure. That used to be balanced out by better schools and external organizations like religion, etc. There is now a vacuum where there used to be a "values safety net" for those with no home or family. There have always been bad homes. Yes, there are more now, but we did have solutions in the past.
I guess to be clear. If other kids are calling him "school shooter", then they are wrong. If for no other reason, teasing him that he is reinforces in him that he is, will be, or should be. My problem is that he apparently wanted to be remembered, so he shot up a school and the AP dutifully remembers him as the kid that was bullied. The kids killed at the school had aspirations as well. They weren't bullied, they were murdered, yet they don't get national coverage by AP. We already know school shooters often do it for the fame, which they still get.
Meh. This is Joe Bidens America. https://redstate.com/alexparker/2022/07/19/state-of-the-union-cops-get-shot-at-by-an-arrested-mans-family-member-whos-four-n597541
The solution is not top down. We can pass legislation to control behavior, but morality comes from within. All the legislation in the world cannot stop someone to whom laws mean nothing. We need a resurgence of the strong family with strong values and a huge dose of shame. Nothing shame-worthy is shameful anymore.
“Don’t you think the kids already know who the potential school shooters are?”
I agree with you, Anne, that our response to that question ought to revolve around, “do what we can to prevent that kid from becoming a school shooter, or at the least, don’t do things that make that person more likely to become a school shooter.” For instance, don’t be cruel to that person. And that’s a net positive regardless if the person would have become a school shooter or not because we are adding more kindness to the world. There are no false positives here, all upside.
But I’m more skeptical of the major implication from articles like these and many of the commenters above. That is, it’s obvious who the school shooters are and there are simple mechanisms in place to prevent them from becoming school shooters. For instance, just tell the FBI and then they wave their “monitor” magic wand and, voilà , no more school shootings.
There would likely be an extremely high false positive rate here. Why is this my intuition?
I work in fraud detection at a large company and other groups are always coming to my team with instances of missed fraud that are “so obvious” so we just need to put a new fraud control in place to prevent this.
Well, these tips can only go 1 of 3 ways: 1) great tip, the example of missed fraud was part of a larger fraud pattern, just the tip of the iceberg, a new fraud control is needed or 2) meh, the missed fraud was a unique pattern, but it just didn’t happen that much, we could put a new control in, but it’s not terribly important or 3) the exact same pattern of events that happened and led to missed fraud a handful of times also happened 1000 times where it was not fraud, ie unacceptable false positive rate for a new fraud control.
Well, with tips to my team from outside groups, scenario #1 rarely happens, scenario #2 happens every once in a while, and scenario #3 nearly all the time.
What’s the impact of the likely high false positive rate of this new FBI monitoring? Or what other mechanisms are people proposing to monitor these people?
Several years ago, I took a dozen high school students on a field trip to an engineering competition. Parents were responsible for transportation to the venue. Shortly after I arrived, a school counselor called to inform me that one troubled student had been posting photos of guns and making vague statements on social media. I was told to keep an eye on him and look for any indication that he had a firearm.
The student hadn't yet arrived to the university arena where the event was held. Imagine what's going through my head. The administration didn't want to notify the police because they knew that campus police would evacuate the arena, disrupt the event and our school would get bad press.
When the student did arrive, I looked for an imprint of a gun, but he was wearing a light jacket. I gave him a team t-shirt to get him to take off his jacket. For the rest of the day, I tried to be inconspicuous as I stood near him with a Crescent wrench or metal stock to bludgeon him.
Nothing happened. The student didn't do anything threatening and no administrator or parent came back me up. Beyond passing the buck to me, nobody in authority was serious about the threat.
So they knew he was nutso.... they still had to protect his rights... and they want to protect them soooo much.... by taking away YOUR rights...
BTW in Indiana a 20 year old man with his girlfriend see this nutjob at a mall firing (actually his girlfriend saw the nut first and pointed him out.) And the young man engaged the nut with a Glock 9mm at 49 yards..first round hit! Hit him several times to!
Technically the good guy was breaking the law as the Mall was a 'gun free zone'.
Maybe the guy should have phoned someone to ask permission to shoot like at Uvalde.. oh wait, he did!
He asked his girlfriend and she said, "Go for it."
Freder Frederson said...
Governor Abbott had it right when he said that 50 years ago we had guns in schools and no shootings. It’s not the guns. It’s societal values as a whole. Or lack of values.
The UT tower shootings were in 1966, so I don't know what the hell Abbott, or you, are talking about.
He had a brain tumor. Teachers and students went to their cars and got their guns and kept the shooter occupied until law enforcement could take him out.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Freder Frederson said...
Governor Abbott had it right when he said that 50 years ago we had guns in schools and no shootings. It’s not the guns. It’s societal values as a whole. Or lack of values.
The UT tower shootings were in 1966, so I don't know what the hell Abbott, or you, are talking about.
He had a brain tumor. Teachers and students went to their cars and got their guns and kept the shooter occupied until law enforcement could take him out.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Gospel of Matthew (7:12) from the Sermon on the Mount: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. . . .”
Generation X turned parenthood into a competition. Social media created the “look how wonderful we are” family. Who your kids played with became locally political. Our boys were on Ritalin by eight-years-old, and our daughters on anti-depressants.
My Daughter was horribly bullied, and fat shamed by my friends’ kids in grade school and Jr. High. This led to six years of her fighting bulimia through high school and after, cutting, and three suicide attempts; in and outpatient stints at mental health facilities. She’s 22 now. Damaged. No self-esteem or sense of worth.
My son is an isolated 20-year-old. Part of that on-line Mario and Luigi / Anime transgender community. He started sexual identity struggling when he was 16. My guess is it has more to do with him wanting to be anything else but what he is, rather than actual transgender-ism. He's also somewhere on the Autism spectrum. I would bet this has a lot do with the spike in LGBT identification in Generation Z, reported at 20%.
Nether has a malicious bone in their body. Both just afraid of the world. I know I failed the test.
Althouse is correct. Kids know who the outsiders are. The ones who are ostracized. Bullied. Excluded. Combine that school experience with isolation outside of school, and some constant social media harassment on top, and you’re gonna get a few who snap and seek "revenge".
There seems to be an assumption here that homicidal maniacs can be defused by being nice to them. That notion is unproven, at best.
It may seem like there are "all of these school shootings," but the reality is that they are vanishingly rare. According to a list of school shootings at Wikipedia, since 2000, the number of deaths annually from school shootings appears to be around 15-20. There were 16 last year. With the 22 deaths in Uvalde, this year's total so far is 31. So, since there are something like 15.3 million school-age children in the U.S., it looks like roughly one in a million students can be expected to die each year in a school shooting.
It seems to me that it is VERY difficult to take a one-in-a-million risk and reduce it to, say, one in ten million. The problem is practically anything you try to reduce the risk carries its own, possibly unforeseen risk of a bad outcome. For example, the idea of encouraging teachers to bring guns into schools to be available to respond to a school shooting is not unreasonable on its face, but are we really sure that THAT measure doesn't carry at least a one-in-a-million chance of going catastrophically wrong?
The purported "no bullying" movement is actually multicult sludge that teaches minorities that they are helplessly and completely oppressed by whites and teaches whites that they are innately evil. Much like its predecessor propaganda -- "root theories of crime" -- it actively contributes to weaponizing youths to act out both in-group and out-group violence. Not to let the parents off the hook, especially the absent ones. You tell some people they can't help being violent and tell others they are evil pieces of shit no matter how they behave, and we get school shooters and urban bloodbaths.
It keeps being said and perhaps this discussion is a place where it will be useful.
In 1964, having switched to NATO ammunition and associated weapons, the military dumped 240,000 M1 carbines onto the market. It's a small rifle, semi-auto, firing reduced power ammo. Took a thirty-round mag (some technical objections to this from the rivet counters if anybody's OCD enough to be interested).
First weapon which could be called an assault weapon--stupid term--available for peanuts, or first available in large quantities.
Familiar to a large number of the fifteen million guys who'd been in WW II and the millions since.
NOTHING HAPPENED. NOTHING FREAKING HAPPENED.
He had a brain tumor. Teachers and students went to their cars and got their guns and kept the shooter occupied until law enforcement could take him out.
Regardless, he went on a shooting spree and killed 16 people (and yes I know that his first two victims were stabbed) and injuring 31. The good guys with guns were not very effective.
Don't you think the kids already know who the potential school shooters are?
As a teacher, I can tell you they do. The teachers and school officials do too. In California at least, it's almost impossible to expel kids from school, and during the process the kid is usually determined to be "special ed (educationally handicapped)" or "special needs (emotionally and behaviorally handicapped)" which makes it even harder. I've sat in on expulsion hearings where a kid brought an 8-inch blade to school and threatened to use it, and despite being a "zero tolerance district", all we did was transfer him to a different middle school, and promise to get him expensive emotional counselling.
School shooting are yet another result of rampant fatherlessness.
Freder Frederson said...
I don't know what the hell Abbott, or you, are talking about.
Have you noticed, that this is the CLASSIC Freder post? You lead a Blissful life, Freder
"was flagged by school officials as 'at risk,'"
In edu-speak, that doesn't mean "a risk", it means he probably wasn't going to graduate.
The exclusion and isolation is almost worse than the aggressive bullying.
When my kids were in K to 3rd grade, if we had a birthday party, I insisted that every girl or boy in the class got invited. If they wanted to invite one kid from another class, every one got an invitation. Cost me $10 to $15 a head. Big deal. I remember one mom dropping her daughter off at my house and thanking us profusely because it was the first invitation her daughter had received.
By 4th grade you start getting dominant girls and boys who decide who is in, and who is out for everyone else. They decide which kid is now “on the outs”. It even goes so far that they dictate and influence who gets invited to someone else’s birthday party, or who is in the “trick-or-treat” group. It’s worse with the girls than the boys. That was public school suburbia. Elmhurst, Il early 2000’s.
Generation X parents knew this was how it worked. Most were just thankful their kid wasn’t on the outs.
I learned in family therapy sessions with my daughter that when she would go to her friend’s grandparent’s condo to swim, they were unsupervised. The dominant girl who was hosting, would match the fat girls up and make them fight. The grandpa was a local gym teacher and track coach. While I thought she was swimming, she was in fight club. I’d known that family twenty years.
I confess. I was hanging out with some toxic people back then. People who returned to Elmhurst after college was over. I’ll never forgive myself.
Fredder, 50 years ago in flyover country at the beginning of deer season many high school boys would stash their guns in lockers so they could go hunting as soon as they could ditch school. Or so I've heard. Do you figure that's what Abbott was remembering?
As Kinky put it--"There was a rumor about a tumor."
Freder Frederson said...
Besides, the idea that "the woke agenda" is advocating repressive religious practices is just stupid.
The fact that you don't recognize the fundamentally religious nature of the "Woke" movement just shows how stupid you are.
The Holy Office of the Inquisition wasn't supposed to be an example to follow.
The Field Marshall is ignorant again:
The UT tower shootings were in 1966, so I don't know what the hell Abbott, or you, are talking about.
One of the people who ended Whitman's outrage was the proverbial Good guy with a gun.
The incident ended when two policemen and a civilian reached Whitman and shot him dead.
You idiot.
By the way, an off duty cop stopped a mass shooting in Houston this weekend.
Difference from Uvalde?
"I had in my mind (that) I was going to get shot. I just had to bear the pain. I knew it was going to hurt, and I was like, 'Whatever I do, I cannot let go of this rifle.'"
Balfegor said...
There's certainly a lot of cases where people were known to law enforcement beforehand, but I don't have a sense of how many false positives we would get if we took everyone who sent up these flags and restricted their rights or subjected them to close monitoring of some sort (perhaps itself an invasion of their right against unreasonable searches and seizures). Frankly, without better visibility into the false positive rate, it's hard for me to calibrate what the appropriate response is. Maybe we just don't know until some jurisdiction tries.
The goal would be to actually pay attention to them and get them extra help. Kids like this need to be in church and they need healthy support groups.
Unfortunately our education establishment is full of lazy shiftless moralizing leftists who would rather bash white/asian males all day.
And today the extra attention someone like this would get from the education establishment would just be more grooming/abuse behavior and puberty blockers.
Took a thirty-round mag (some technical objections to this from the rivet counters if anybody's OCD enough to be interested).
The M1 had an 8 round clip. See, I do know the difference between a clip and a magazine.
In 1964, having switched to NATO ammunition and associated weapons, the military dumped 240,000 M1 carbines onto the market.
Up until the early 1930's you could buy fully automatic, military submachine guns (Tommy guns) through the mail from a newspaper ad.
"Don't you think the kids already know who the potential school shooters are?"
Half of the band would probably get fingered.
And all of the Latin Club.
The redhead in the short skirt, maybe.
Fredder, 50 years ago in flyover country at the beginning of deer season many high school boys would stash their guns in lockers so they could go hunting as soon as they could ditch school.
And I bet most, if not all, of them were bolt or lever action rifles with no more than a five round clip. Not weapons designed specifically to kill people.
You turned the schools into anarchic hellholes where the inmates run the asylum, and you wonder why they produce sociopaths?
Analyze, carefully, the environmental cues that the Uvalde shooter got. What did his environment teach him? What behaviors were rewarded? Which were punished?
The problem with much of modern society is that the idiots running the place think that what they say, all by itself, is all that counts: Have classes and seminars against bullying, but model bullying as an ignored reality of these kid's lives.
You want to actually fix these things, you need to go out and actually examine what these kids experience on the daily. What things are actually cued by the environment they experience, what do they see in it, versus what you say you want?
There's a split, a dichotomy across most of modern life: We say one thing, and do entirely another... Expecting that the words alone will influence.
Analyze the world that the Uvalde shooter experienced, not the one you say you wanted him to live in: What were the rewarded behaviors? What got punished? What was ignored? Then, examine what he witnessed and experienced, going through that succession of Skinner Boxes.
The system failed because it did not properly set the environmental cues properly, to elicit the desired behavioral outcomes.
What you do today is a reflection of a lifetime of environmental influences, successive modules of behavioral modification imposed on you by your environment. Some of that is self-willed and self-directed, but the thing here is to consider how that self-driven component got started in the first place. I'd wager that nothing in the Uvalde shooter's life ever pushed him towards self-examination and awareness, and he perhaps wasn't ever even capable of that in the first place, being a human strictly driven by externalities.
I came across a quote, one that speaks to entire social structures and not just men:
“One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.”
Unexpected source, being Klaus Kinski. I had not ever considered him to be someone with any real depth.
The thing here, though? You shouldn't judge societies on what they say, but what they demonstrate. If you're the average kid in a lot of schools across the breadth of our civilization, what are you actually exposed to? What are your actual behavioral cues, versus the sweet bullshit they say they want to model for you? You run schools as though they're renditions of the Lord of the Flies, maybe you shouldn't be too surprised when things like the Uvalde shooter happens. I think it's damn significant that he shot up the same classrooms he was subject to abuse in, and we should expect that he wasn't shooting at the kids actually in those classrooms, but his long-departed tormentors.
Doesn't excuse anything at all, but it does offer an explanation. The kids who teased him bear some onus for all of this that has happened.
I am not so keen on these "who do you think is . . ." thought-questions. In sixth grade, I was voted "most likely to be a space alien." The teacher asked the class to consider that a "space alien" might be the most "normal" kid in the class, but they voted for me anyway. (In that class I was the literal "alien," having moved to that school at the end of fifth grade.)
Re: Maybee:
It's important to look into what makes these shooters. But the answer can't be "bullying". They tried that in the 90s and started the "no bullying" and zero tolerance campaigns that left us with the wokesters.
I'm open to the idea that bullying is a piece of the story -- maybe it results in alienation from society which in turn can make the decision to engage in mass murder more likely. But bullying can't be sufficient. After all the overwhelming majority of children who are bullied do not then turn into mass murderers. And I suspect that the overwhelming majority of children who are bullied and have easy access to guns don't turn into mass murderers. My subjective impression is that bullying is also more severe and more widespread in other countries (primarily Korea and Japan), but that in neither Korea nor Japan does it result in mass murder.
You might say, well, that's because guns are banned in both Korea and Japan, except that every Korean man has to serve in the army and has ample opportunity to gun down other Koreans if he wants to take a bunch of other people down with him while committing suicide. And Japan is full of "soft" targets for anyone who wants to kill a lot of people. See, e.g. the Sagamihara massacre of 2016 in which a man killed 19 people at a disabled care facility and injured 26 more, all with a knife, or the Kyoto Animation massacre of 2019 in which a man killed 36 people and injured 33 more by exploding a couple barrels of gasoline at their studio (he apparently had knives prepared too, but didn't use them). If people want to commit mass murder, at least in Japan, it seems like it's not that hard.
Rather, I think there's a strong cultural element to the response to bullying -- in the US, people who feel wronged by the world have a model to follow where they go out and commit spectacular murders. In Korea and Japan, they typically withdraw from society and become hikikomori or commit suicide (Japan's suicide rate is quite high, compared to the US, and Korea's is somehow even higher). Breaking that model is why one occasionally sees people pressuring the media (in vain) to stop publicising the names and faces of mass murderers, etc. But I think more is needed than that. I don't know what.
"How many of these young shooters are made by society?"
I would guess most of them.
"Oh, he was bullied. Well then those kids deserved what they got, and they don’t deserve anyone looking at their pasts."
An astonishingly obtuse misinterpretation of any mention or discussion of the traumas that create most or all mass shooters, particularly of young shooters.
Balfegor said:
"I'm open to the idea that bullying is a piece of the story -- maybe it results in alienation from society which in turn can make the decision to engage in mass murder more likely. But bullying can't be sufficient. After all the overwhelming majority of children who are bullied do not then turn into mass murderers. And I suspect that the overwhelming majority of children who are bullied and have easy access to guns don't turn into mass murderers. My subjective impression is that bullying is also more severe and more widespread in other countries (primarily Korea and Japan), but that in neither Korea nor Japan does it result in mass murder."
The thought occurs to me that the bullying might, just might, be a result of the children around the embryonic "mass shooter" responding to something they sense as being "off" with them, in the first place.
Which is not to excuse the bullying.
It is, however, worth considering: Why do select individuals get "picked on"? What triggers their identification by their peers as being "other"?
I had a young man working for me in the Army. He got put under my authority because he "didn't fit in" in another element inside our unit, and I was told to "fix him". No input from higher as to what the issue was, and they likely didn't know either, but they did identify that he was having problems. So, there I am with this guy, stuck trying to socialize him as a soldier.
Sweet babblin' baby Jesus... After about a week, it became apparent why he'd been turned into the goat for his previous platoon. Socially inept, unable to filter anything he said or did, and just a total disaster as a young man trying to fit into a man's world in the Army. He sent all the wrong signals, and set everyone's teeth on edge. Despite everyone in my squad's best efforts, he was again a social outcast within days of assignment to us, to the point where people would hurriedly get up and leave when they saw him coming out of the serving line in the mess hall. He just... grated. I did my best not to join in, and got rewarded by having him latch on to me in the most annoying way possible, never giving me a moment's peace on or off duty.
There wasn't anything really identifiably wrong with him, at first. But, he gave off all the wrong signals in that environment. Eventually, this all came to a crescendo one morning when we were coming back from an exercise, and the "older and wiser" types in the squad were discussing what they planned on doing once we were back in civilization and off duty. Which, you can imagine, pretty much amounted to large-scale debauchery. Discussion then segued into discussing the merits of various young ladies known to the group, followed by reminisces of the guy's first sexual experiences, with an aspect of "...can you top this..." built in. Not at all the sort of thing you'd want to hold up as exemplary, but... Young men, foreign country... You get the idea.
Mr. Socially Inept doesn't say anything, at first, and then he pipes up with a description of his first experience: With his sister.
I'm just sitting there as an observer to all of this, not a participant. I think you can imagine my jaw as it hit the bed of the truck, and everyone else edging well away from our instantly ostracized idjit-with-no-social-filter.
Looking back, I think the flock picked him out as the one set to go at the bottom of the pecking order for good reason. Dude was just "not right", and it was instantly apparent to a lot of the guys, even though they couldn't quite specify why. Well, at least, until that truck ride which ended in silence.
Sometimes, there are reasons these weirdos get "othered". Good ones.
"I'm pretty firmly convinced; that the entire point of the woke agenda, is to make us okay with the upcoming islamic takeover."
Idiocy two times:
1. If there is a "woke" agenda, it is certainly not to "make us okay with the upcoming islamic takeover."
2. There is no upcoming Islamic takeover.
Freder AGAIN shows his ignorance, when he says...
bolt or lever action rifles with no more than a five round clip. Not weapons designed specifically to kill people.
You DON'T think bolt or lever action rifles with 5 round clips AREN'T specifically designed to kill people? Can you Actually BE, That Stupid?
M1903 Springfield Rifle
The Henry repeating rifle
Gettysburg was the first major battle of the war where Spencer rifles were used, as they had recently been issued to the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves. They were used at the Battle of Chickamauga and had become fairly widespread in the Western armies by 1864. Repeater rifles for comparison were rare in the Army of the Potomac.
Notable early instances of use included the Battle of Hoover's Gap (where Colonel John T. Wilder's "Lightning Brigade" of mounted infantry effectively demonstrated the firepower of repeaters), and the Gettysburg Campaign, where two regiments of the Michigan Brigade (under Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer) carried them at the Battle of Hanover and at East Cavalry Field. As the war progressed, Spencers were carried by a number of Union cavalry and mounted infantry regiments and provided the Union army with a firepower advantage over their Confederate opponents. At the Battle of Nashville, 9,000 mounted infantrymen armed with the Spencer, under the command of Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson, chief of cavalry for the Military Division of the Mississippi, rode around Gen. Hood's left flank and attacked from the rear. President Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth was armed with a Spencer carbine at the time he was captured and killed.
Seriously Freder? ARE you THAT stupid?
"If you ever find yourself inclined to be cruel to another student, stop and think that you may be part of what turns him into the next school shooter."
I'm not sure it's a good idea to imply that being mistreated leads logically to mass murder.
I will point out, you can't make "school shooter" without "school". I well recall the feeling of sick dread I felt every morning at the hideous prospect of returning to that place of torture.
"If you ever find yourself inclined to be cruel to another student, stop and think that you may be part of what turns him into the next school shooter."
Or worse, get yourself on his list.
The UT tower shootings were in 1966, so I don't know what the hell Abbott, or you, are talking about.
If you have to go back to an isolated incident 56 years ago, maybe it's you who doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about.
School shootings weren't much of a thing when I was a kid. Not unheard of, but not at the same frequency as now it seems. Because of that, we didn't call anyone "school shooter". However, there was one guy that seemed troubled and if we had to bet on someone going off, it would be him. As it turns out, almost two decades later, we ended up working at the same company and he was surprisingly normal and a heck of a nice guy. His dad was a pretty well known rock musician. By his own account he didn't have a very normal childhood, which probably accounted for his demeanor at school. He likely had access to guns, since his dad later killed himself. Long story short, I suspect there would be a lot of false positives if every suspicious person was reported like Spike would have been.
"You turned the schools into anarchic hellholes where the inmates run the asylum, and you wonder why they produce sociopaths?"
The Prussians invented "school" to turn peasants into factory workers (and soldiers). The system was brutal, but it worked fairly well. The children were surrounded by other children, but they operated in a social environment controlled by adults. At some point in the last century, this fell apart, and children in schools were allowed to form their own status hierarchy, in which adult values are actively disparaged. The schools are now toxic hellholes. Any educational advantages they confer are outweighed by the emotional damage they inflict.
Does it ever seem as though our educational processes aren't... Working?
I don't recall developing much "love of learning" in school, nor do I remember it fostering much enjoyment of scholarship, let alone any real appreciation for it. All of that came outside school itself, and from life experiences entirely separate from formal schooling.
School did foster anomie, hatred of authority, and a general disrespect for my fellow man and what the rest of you monkeys are capable of getting up to.
Still, it never occurred to me to get back at my tormentors through mass murder. Looking back at it, it's possible that I might have gone down that path had I had sufficient impetus, but in those days it wasn't fashionable. Plus, I'd have disappointed my family members, soooo... That was off the table.
If I had to say something about it all, trying to be profound, I'd have to say that the shooters are a symptom, a manifestation of other problems in society. The people doing this are generally profoundly damaged, dysfunctional and twisted. They mostly got that way through poor parenting, possibly some genetic behavioral flaws, and the general influence of their peers as expressed via bullying and ostracism. I think that you could make a case that psychotropic medication, administered under essentially uncontrolled circumstances, have contributed to a few of these cases, if only because those medications enabled these loons being allowed out in public in the first place.
A lot of what we're doing in society is wrong. Children should not be raised or educated in the environments we're creating for them, and they certainly should not be allowed to be "self-raising" and "raised by their peers", which is exactly what a lot of people do. Having kids as an afterthought, and then not supervising or participating in their actual upbringing? Leaving it mostly in the hands of the state and it's hirelings? This is precisely what leads to these things happening.
What's the observation someone made, a few years back? You have to have a license to drive a car or buy high explosives, but nobody makes you get one to have kids. Nor do they really care what you do with them, until and unless they draw the attention of the community.
This might not be the smartest thing anyone has ever implemented, ya know?
It's always struck me as really, profoundly odd how things like this are almost always left unspoken and unaddressed. Sure, there are books out there detailing various child-rearing practices and techniques, but nobody really ever seems to think carefully about what they're doing, and it's entirely possible to just have a kid and go at it all without any guidance or oversight whatsoever. Never mind how much damage an abused kid can create, down the line, or how little parents notice or take action over Johnny or Susie going off the rails.
Strikes me that we might be better off with kids being raised by better and more engaged parents, but that's me. I have no idea how to go about making that happen, either.
Paul @ 9:18am,
A quick search of a compendium of Indiana firearms law shows no such thing. I.e. Indiana is like quite a few states, in which it is not illegal per se to carry a firearm onto property against the wishes of the property owner. What that means is if you're discovered armed where the owner doesn't want you, you cannot be charged directly with a crime. Instead what happens in these cases (and my own state is very similar) the owner will typically revoke your permission to be there (assuming it's something like a business that is generally understood to be open to the public) and then subsequently you could be charged with trespass if you re-entered.
Jupiter said:
"The Prussians invented "school" to turn peasants into factory workers (and soldiers). The system was brutal, but it worked fairly well. The children were surrounded by other children, but they operated in a social environment controlled by adults. At some point in the last century, this fell apart, and children in schools were allowed to form their own status hierarchy, in which adult values are actively disparaged. The schools are now toxic hellholes. Any educational advantages they confer are outweighed by the emotional damage they inflict."
Oh, dude... This is soooooo farcically incorrect that it's not even funny.
Entirely aside from the fact that we had "school" long, long before we even had "Prussia", there's the idiotic canard implying that the Prussians had this rigid lockstep schooling system.
Stop and think about it: D'ya think they'd have created the dynamic economy that was getting ready to swamp the entire British Empire, were they a nation of automatons fit only for the factory floor? Where do you think all those entrepreneurs came from? Their managers? The employees that had to demonstrate a high degree of both initiative and knowledge to succeed?
Do you think that the German military that took on the world in two major world wars, and managed to do all that damage came out of a culture and educational system full of unthinking and inflexible people, rigidly educated without any allowance made for independent thought?
Much of the caricature of "Prussian Education" we have comes to us via observers who went to Europe, saw what they wanted to see, and then returned here to the US describing their imaginary vision of "how things ought to be", rather than what was actually there. A quick review of the lives of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt would open a lot of eyes, particularly reading all the things Wilhelm did to set the stage for Prussian success via education. I would commend to you that you actually do some real reading on the background, before repeating entirely delusional stereotypes.
I've really got no idea at all where the hell this crap comes from, other than British propaganda dating back to before WWI. The German army, for example? It always had a much higher amount of "power down" and low-level initiative than the other Continental armies, and we'd have been a lot better off if we'd done more to copy them than our Allies. There were reasons the Germans generally did better at war than we did, and it stemmed from a highly educated and very initiative-friendly population that they'd created and encouraged through the supposedly rigid and hierarchical "Prussian System". Which wasn't what was presented by the propagandists, at all...
It takes a school to raise a shooter.
And I bet most, if not all, of them were bolt or lever action rifles with no more than a five round clip. Not weapons designed specifically to kill people.
Wow, Freder. I did not think you were this stupid. Oh, I did but try not to say so.
Do you understand that prior to 1915, there was no machine gun and the Civil War killed 600,000 ? Many died of disease but there were hundreds of thousands of gunshot wounds.
They said he faced ridicule over his stutter, short hair and for wearing the same clothing nearly every day.
You're a school shooter, Charlie Brown?
Here's some advice that we ought to convey to schoolkids, perhaps not in exactly these words: If you ever find yourself inclined to be cruel to another student, stop and think that you may be part of what turns him into the next school shooter.
True, and it would have made me a better person if somebody had told me this when I was that age, but when you're in high school, or worse, middle school, the biggest influence on you are the jerks and a-holes. It's hard for anybody else to get through to you.
Althouse, your advice completely misses the attitude young people often take towards other young people.
"You may be part of what turns him into the next school shooter," would result in some percentage of kids trying harder to see if you were right.
It has to come from the top and there has to be the will to change.
Once the emperor sincerely converts and amends his way of life, beginning to worship God rightly and rule justly, then we will make some progress toward a regeneration of our society.
Hindsight. Always 20/20.
"It seems to me that it is VERY difficult to take a one-in-a-million risk and reduce it to, say, one in ten million. The problem is practically anything you try to reduce the risk carries its own, possibly unforeseen risk of a bad outcome. For example, the idea of encouraging teachers to bring guns into schools to be available to respond to a school shooting is not unreasonable on its face, but are we really sure that THAT measure doesn't carry at least a one-in-a-million chance of going catastrophically wrong?"
Is the one-in-a-million chance of going catastrophically wrong the possibility that a teacher bent on mass homicide might not be dissuaded by a prohibition against guns? Because I'm fairly certain that risk exists now.
"degeneracy,noun: worsening, decline, corruption, decrease, decay, deterioration, degradation, decadence, depravity, immorality, debasement, turpitude, depravation, dissoluteness the moral degeneracy of society"
There's no cure for any of this. You'll just have to get used to it.
Boadbuilder said:
"Hindsight. Always 20/20."
It's always odd, though, that an awful lot of hindsight consists of looking back and saying "Yeah, we shoulda listened to that guy about the dude who did this..."
I can't think of too many actual "bolt from the blue" events from history, that came with no warnings at all. The usual syndrome is that some enlightened soul looks at a situation and says "Hey, bad things could happen here... We oughta do something...", and then they get pooh-poohed by the "authorities" that pat them on the head and say "Oh, that could never happen..."
Generally followed by exactly what the "visionary" warned about.
I think the real problem isn't that "hindsight is 20/20", but that all too many in authority possess not one whit of imagination or any amount of foresight. They're usually blind to consequence, and do what they want, despite warnings.
I have it on good authority that the Norwegians were warned by the Finns and others about the advisability of leasing their northernmost naval facility to a Russian company after finding it "excess to their needs". I wonder how that decision looks, today...
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