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A teenager at a high school in Jacksboro, Tennessee shot three administrators before being arrested. One assistant principal died a he hospital.
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It terrifies me that you *can* introduce the topic the way you did, Derrell-- "another" school shooting. It's just... wow. How did we get here?
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If you haven't read about Harris and Klebold's final diagnosis, read this. For Columbine, at least, it answers the why question. I suspect it's similar here.
Posts: 73 | Registered: Oct 2005
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quote:In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a "psychopath." But in psychiatry, it's a very specific mental condition that rarely involves killing, or even psychosis. "Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders," writes Dr. Robert Hare, in Without Conscience, the seminal book on the condition. "Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised." Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that drove him to mass murder.
quote:Harris' pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points on Hare's Psychopathy Checklist and convinced Fuselier and the other leading psychiatrists close to the case that Harris was a psychopath.
It begins to explain Harris' unbelievably callous behavior: his ability to shoot his classmates, then stop to taunt them while they writhed in pain, then finish them off. Because psychopaths are guided by such a different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their behavior inexplicable. But they're actually much easier to predict than the rest of us once you understand them. Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. (The difference is so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse tactics if they think they're facing one. It's like flipping a switch between two alternate brain-mechanisms.)
None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn't grasp what they feel. The truly hard-core psychopath doesn't quite comprehend emotions like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.
It seems perhaps even crazier from a country without the gun culture that the US does. I know, I know there's lots of arguments as to gun control. I also know there are fervent supporters of the right to bear arms on this board.
But for me, when I hear something like this I am profoundly glad that I don't live in a country which gives its citizens the right to carry guns.
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I don't know how we got to this point. Stan, that's a good question. What drives these kids to the point where they do this? Posts: 4569 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Read that link about Columbine. It gives you a good idea why they did it (which is contrary seemingly to most people's beliefs). I can't say anything about this new shooting since I haven't heard much about it. It is a sad state of affairs though.
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It seems perhaps even crazier from a country without the gun culture that the US does. I know, I know there's lots of arguments as to gun control. I also know there are fervent supporters of the right to bear arms on this board.
But for me, when I hear something like this I am profoundly glad that I don't live in a country which gives its citizens the right to carry guns.
I was in Scotland when that crazy ex-scoutmaster / gun collector shot up a school gym in Dunblane. This is in a country with stricter gun laws and fewer guns per household than yours.
In other words, give me a break.
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This may end up sounding like a stupid argument because I'm referenceing a TV show, but anyway, in season 3 of Buffy, Xander says something like, "yeah, who hasn't thought of taking out thier school with a semiautomatic.
And this episode was originally scheduled to air about a week after Columbine. (they moved it, btw)
Buffy really gets it right in that high school is shown to be a war zone. There is a *lot* of confusion and stress and pain and humiliation and anger and abuse, which is often dismissed as just a bunch of hormone-crazy teenagers overreacting. I would argue that many, many students have thought of echoing the Columbine shootings--and then dismissed the idea more or less immediately. But the underlying sentiment doesn't dissapear just because, like most people, those students find the idea of killing a bunch of people repulsive and dispicable.
A quote: "If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid." - Paul Graham 2/03
Kids and teens can be the meanest people, everywhere, anywhere, and because their victims are often also young people, it is harder to understand the idea of people randomly lashing out (as in, the victim has nothing *wrong* with them) and it is harder to find resources to cope. Complaints are dismissed ("how bad could it be? They're just kids"), and usually young people are less confidant than adults, and therefore teasing will hit harder.
I'm not excusing all the kids who went out and took violent revenge on the place where they were hurt so badly, but I really don't think this is an issue of gun control. It's an issue of people being stupid and mean and scared, and how hard it is to find help as a teen.
Do I have a solution? No. I have no idea what could be done to make things easier, everywhere, for every teen. But it's a real problem, and school shootings are just the most obvious and painful symptom.
My $0.02 *shrug*
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School shootings have always been a part of our society. They are reported and sensationalized more, now, though, but the frequency and severity has not drastically changed over the last 100 years.
At least, as of about 18 months ago when I saw a statistic on it.
Posts: 4112 | Registered: May 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Princess Leah: A quote: "If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid." - Paul Graham 2/03
I read it in 8th grade, and I got the message. Love the quote, by the way.
quote:Do I have a solution? No. I have no idea what could be done to make things easier, everywhere, for every teen. But it's a real problem, and school shootings are just the most obvious and painful symptom.
The school system is horribly broken.
We want to teach kids how to properly interact with peers when they grow up. We also want them to succeed in a world that is - for the most part - merit-based. Public school teaches exactly the opposite.
When you get out into the real world, peers are people with a wide range of ages, abilities, and backgrounds. In public school, you're stuck with people your own age and told you have basically the same abilities (except for athletes, who are deified). Your family background differs from your peers', but your educational background is pretty much the same. I'll call that strike one. This society is false and forced, meaning it's nearly useless as training for the real world. It also puts pressure on kids to differentiate themselves, even as they try to fit in.
Strike two is that the hierarchy of a public school isn't merit-based at all. People tend to self-organize into hierarchies - it's well-studied - and children self-organize into hierarchies based on popularity and politics. All children being equal - of course they are, right? - that's all that's left: a shallow travesty of a success metric. If you spend time on it and get in the right group, you can rise to the top. If you don't, you get stepped on.
Strike three is that the children in public school largely learn social behaviors from each other. How many times have we heard parents say, "Oh, he must have picked that up at school?" Just as in Lord of the Flies, children just don't civilize each other. They're savages. They need grown-up examples to aspire to - lots of them. They don't get that in public school.
Forcing our children into large, uniform-age groups is one of the worst things we've ever done to them.
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quote:I was in Scotland when that crazy ex-scoutmaster / gun collector shot up a school gym in Dunblane. This is in a country with stricter gun laws and fewer guns per household than yours.
In other words, give me a break. [/QB]
Sure, lord trousers. And we had a student at a university in Melbourne take a gun to class two years back and wound some students.
But, I don't see the part in my post where I said, or even insinuated that this only happens in the US.
Rather, I was responding to the previous comments that this is becoming an all too common phenomonen in the US.
An example: a (I'm sure, non-definitive) listof school shootings & violent attacks since 1979 details 58 events.
Of those 58, 51 occured in the United States.
It's also interesting to note that while all 51 of the incidents in the US did involve guns, 2 of the 7 non-US incidents didn't (8 students stabbed to death in Osaka, Japan on 8th June 2001 and 67 students burnt to death in an arson fire in Kenya on 26th March 2001).
Posts: 4393 | Registered: Aug 2003
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Right. I'm very, very for gun control. I just fear that's all people look at. Or it'll just be an excuse for more angry people to attack the NRA. Not that the NRA doesn't need attacking (in a nonviolent sense ), IMHO, but if you take away the guns but don't fix the schools what you'll get is death by pipe bomb or stabbing, or maybe a bunch of vengeful gunless suicides...not to mention all the students who are suffering but don't make a big public FU gesture.
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A. Kids are killing other children in schools. We don't know the reason, but we know it needs to be addressed.
B. The method they are primarily choosing, in the US, is using legally obtained firearms (sometimes their own, most often their families) which have the capacity to hurt/kill a large number of people in a small time frame.
Why can't we address B as well as A?
Just because guns aren't the *reason* school shootings happen doesn't mean the ready access to them doesn't exacerbate the situation.
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), IMHO, but if you take away the guns but don't fix the schools what you'll get is death by pipe bomb or stabbing, or maybe a bunch of vengeful gunless suicides...not to mention all the students who are suffering but don't make a big public FU gesture.
