*sigh*... another school shooting

[elsol]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7259823/

Sincerely,
ElSol

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Yes, tragic like Colombine.

Before this heads off on a general gun control debate, answer me one thing.

Why is the government more concerned that an under-18 doesn't read a lit story than keeping them away from guns?

 

[angelicminx]

*CLAPPING*

Bravo, Bravo!

I want to know the same thing!

 

[elsol]

Why is the government more concerned that an under-18 doesn't read a lit story than keeping them away from guns?

I have a better one for you... why does the government think Major League Baseball Steroid use is more important than an under-18 doesn't read a lit story.

There are visible, no 'loss' issues.

Who gives a shit about Steroid use in baseball really?

But guns... there are faithful, and vocal supporters on both sides with sharp knives waiting to attack whichever way you go.

Of course, the fact that this was one FUCKED up kid is going to be buried under the politics.

Did you read his history?

Father committed suicide, mother is in a nursing home to do brain damage in a car...

The gun issue might be somewhat moot though; they're saying his grandfather was a longtime police officer and that's where he got the guns.

I have a sick feeling in my stomach that this one isn't going to anywhere near the attention of Columbine.

I guess, we'll see.


Sincerely,
ElSol

 

[elfin_odalisque]

No, more's the pity. Agree with you on steroids.


Can there be anyone out there who doesn't back the same kind of controls like we have for porn and alcohol to protect kids. ESPECIALLY the mixed-up ones like this guy seems to have been.

 

[minsue]

 

[R. Richard]

Let me ask a question that I have not seen here yet.

A school is supposed to be training young people to go out into the world and do something of value. If the people running the school could not tell this looneytunes was a ticking time bomb, then they are all totally incompetent.

If the people running the school are totally incompetent, then what will the school board do?

The answer: NOTHING!

 

[cloudy]

*sigh*

Don't y'all see that children like this are just a symptom?

No, I guess you don't.

 

[Dar~]

*sigh*Don't y'all see that children like this are just a symptom? No, I guess you don't.

ITA Cloudy.
What kind of school system lets this boy through the cracks. He obviously needed some kind of moral and psychological help just due to the fact that his life was one tragedy after another. He probably blamed the white race for not helping his family. I certainly would have. He was obviously hurting. In a school that small, someone should have recognized his pain.

 

[logophile]

*sigh*

Don't y'all see that children like this are just a symptom?

No, I guess you don't.

I'm with you Cloudy.
Completely.

for everyone involved.
Tragic.
All of it.

 

[Op_Cit]

Laws don't prevent issues like this, they make them more likely. Setting up some agency to handle the problem will only make it worse.

In Arizona, every year drownings go up, so everybody starts jumping on the band wagon for laws requiring fences around pools. (In addition to the fence you are required to have around your back yard.) Guess what? Kids still drowning with the fences. Why? Because safety devices make you less safe. Putting a fence around the pool makes parents less likely to worry where their kid is at any given time.

Just last week a family with a brand new pool, fence, and alarm on the back door: within two days the kid drowns. How? The three year old crawled through the doggy door, and pulled a chair over to climb the fence. Why? Parents were relying on the door alarm.

Traffic fatalities remain high even with increases in airbags, anti-lock brakes, etc. Any traffic safety expert will tell you: because people drive faster/more careless knowing they have some new safety feature.

Every policy and procedure a school board creates to handle situations like this will only create more problems. And the biggest problem is the lessening of the attention the parents put on their kids by thinking that the policy/board/school/teacher/etc. will handle things.

Cloudy's got it right saying these kids are a symptom. A symptom of cultural/social failings that will inevitably be misconstrued as just not enough laws on the books.

 

[cloudy]

Got this in my email first thing this morning from the Leonard Peltier organization, just in case anyone is interested (it's a very poor reservation, as are most of them):

He`Everyone,

I Have Spoken to the Treasurer of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. She informed me that any care packages or donations for the victims families would be very appreciated.

That she and the rest of The Red Lake Nation, give their thanks for everyone's concern and prayers.

All donations & care packages should be sent to:

Red Lake Tribal Council
C/O Leah Perkins
P.O.Box 574
Red Lake, MN 56671

Sincerely,

Thomas Greywolf

You may also contact her or The Crisis Center personally
to verify this Information if you wish at:
Crisis Center- 1-218-679-4285
or
Leah Perkins at 1-218-679-3341

 

[cantdog]

. If the people running the school could not tell this looneytunes was a ticking time bomb, then they are all totally incompetent.

You try it.

This kid was identified, read the article. He was segregated at home away from the school, visited by a teacher to get his schooling. He wasn't just suspended, he was in a program which kept him out of the place. Treatment takes time, someone has to fill in a lot of papers and run the kid past evaluations by qualified people.

He killed his folks and took their weapon to the school to do this, then killed himself. That kind of shit is nearly impossible to prevent. He was obviously not walking around in that state of mind all the time, or they'd have committed him right off the bat. He certainly was identified as a creepy ass kid, deeply troubled, and unstable in social situations, hence the comments in the article and the Homebound program.

Ticking time bombs like him don't have red numbers on them telling you at what moment they are set to blow. Steps had been taken, but someone, including evidently the grandfather, thought the kid was salvageable. Maybe even he was, but not in time.

Nothing can prevent a round of recriminations, and the baying of the public for revenge and blame will ensure that plenty of recrimination goes down. But it does sound like people were doing their jobs, as well as a reasonable person could, given the clues. You don't pounce on every Goth and incarcerate them under sedation. Most of them go to school like everyone else, in fact. This kid was a special case and everyone knew it.

 

[cloudy]

Thank you, Cant...as usual, you see the nature of the beast.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

Thank you, Cant...as usual, you see the nature of the beast.

Cloudy, I'm with you 150% - we let this guy down by not protecting him. As a result, he harmed himself, his family and his friends and people who wanted to help him.

For the kid, for his grandparents, for his elderly teacher and all those who loved him, we must protect them better

 

[cloudy]

Cloudy, I'm with you 150% - we let this guy down by not protecting him. As a result, he harmed himself, his family and his friends and people who wanted to help him.

For the kid, for his grandparents, for his elderly teacher and all those who loved him, we must protect them better

I think you may have misunderstood me.

I don't think that "protection" is what's needed. To me, that's like closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.

We need to stop screaming about gun control, and why the schools didn't do something, and think about, for once, just why these kids feel the isolation, and the hopelessness that they so obviously feel.

I have my own ideas about this particular kid. I don't think he had a chance to begin with. But then, I look at some things from a different perspective than others.

Our society, as a whole, has a disease....and it scares me that I may be one of the few that see it.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Our society, as a whole, has a disease....and it scares me that I may be one of the few that see it.

No, you're absolutely right. The roots of these kinds of things run very deep. We'd like to think that these kids are aberrations who could have been "helped" if anyone had noticed, but that's just part of our whole "get help" culture. "Get help" means leave me alone and go bother someone else who's paid to handle you.

It's been a long time since I was a teenager, but I'm still very much aware of the feelings of rage, frustration, and despair that are behind things like this. They're feelings that are engendered by our culture and our way of life with its emphasis on competition, greed, and materialism, as corny as that sounds. These acts of violence are the expressions of desperate and enraged kids who know they're just not going to make it and have already lost hope. They want to make other people hurt just as much as they do.

No easy answers, I'm afraid. It's the flip side of the American Dream.

 

[Just-Legal]

No, you're absolutely right. The roots of these kinds of things run very deep. We'd like to think that these kids are aberrations who could have been "helped" if anyone had noticed, but that's just part of our whole "get help" culture. "Get help" means leave me alone and go bother someone else who's paid to handle you.

It's been a long time since I was a teenager, but I'm still very much aware of the feelings of rage, frustration, and despair that are behind things like this. They're feelings that are engendered by our culture and our way of life with its emphasis on competition, greed, and materialism, as corny as that sounds. These acts of violence are the expressions of desperate and enraged kids who know they're just not going to make it and have already lost hope. They want to make other people hurt just as much as they do.

No easy answers, I'm afraid. It's the flip side of the American Dream.

Its not just true of America though Mab, though we can't get at the guns, we can still get at knives... I mean, we've had really young kids stabbing each other in schools over here.

Teenagers have never felt understood across history I don't think, its just these days its more... I dunno? Known? Easily expressed? Noticeable?

Some people blame it on hormones. Or slap you on meds. Its not that easy, and it never will be.

I don't know the solution, heck, I don't think I even had a coginitive point in there but... I agree with Cloudy. This is just a symptom of a very ill society, not only the Native American (C - Slap me if you don't like that term, trying not to step on anyone's toes) one either.

 

[scheherazade_79]

Let me ask a question that I have not seen here yet.

A school is supposed to be training young people to go out into the world and do something of value. If the people running the school could not tell this looneytunes was a ticking time bomb, then they are all totally incompetent.

Why does it somehow always end up being the school's fault????
The average teacher isn't trained in psychology, social work, law enforcement, medical or spiritual matters, but yet they're expected to provide a first rate service in all of these fields.
The average teacher imparts knowledge to over 100 students a week - 25% of whom will have some kind of behavioural, emotional or medical disorder that requires differentiated work and a different approach towards teaching methods and disciplinary techniques.
People might think it's easy to spot a potential psychopath, but it isn't - especially at that age, when kids are on a hormonal rollercoaster.

Sorry, R. Richard, but if you want to blame anybody blame the parents, blame culture, blame the government and blame society in general - but don't blame teachers. Teachers weren't the ones who sold the bullets, who fucked up that kid's emotional development, or who filled his imagination with images of bloodshed. All school teachers are trying to do is their job - under increasingly difficult circumstances.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

I wonder what we're supposed to do about this that isn't already done/being done. I think the common reaction is "need better teachers", "need less guns", "need more parenting", "need to nurture/molly-coddle/love kids more", "need to 'see the signs'"... etc.

I'm not sure these are realistic solutions, and in the face of that it may be that we have no solution for this outside of expensive and drastic things like metal detectors in more schools (they worked in LA).

 

[matriarch]

I'm seeing politico discussions, ranting, .........I'm seeing very little compassion for the boy, for his family for his victims for his victim's families.

My heart goes out to them, and my prayers are for them all.

Discussions on why and how are of little value right at this moment. Support and compassion, understanding of their grief, are.

Take some time out to put yourselves in their places. Try and understand their pain and grief. The time for questions will come later.

 

[yui]

I'm not sure these are realistic solutions, and in the face of that it may be that we have no solution for this outside of expensive and drastic things like metal detectors in more schools (they worked in LA).

There were already metal detectors at this school.

Quote from here:
"Student Reggie Graves said he was watching a movie about Shakespeare when he heard Weise blast his way past the metal detector."



Edited to add: Mat is very right. Peace and a safe harbor to all the people touched by this sadness.

 

[Guest]

I'm seeing politico discussions, ranting, .........I'm seeing very little compassion for the boy, for his family for his victims for his victim's families.

My heart goes out to them, and my prayers are for them all.

Discussions on why and how are of little value right at this moment. Support and compassion, understanding of their grief, are.

Take some time out to put yourselves in their places. Try and understand their pain and grief. The time for questions will come later.

 

[Wildcard Ky]

One thing that I think we do wrong is that we always look to affix blame somewhere other than the person that committed the crime. I don't think we have bad intentions when we do it, it's just part of our nature and societal conditioning.

We don't want to think that a young boy did this simply because he chose to. There had to be something wrong. There has to be something to blame. Blame the guns, blame the childhood, blame the fathers suicide, blame the mothers condition. Surely it can't be the kid. There has to be something else.

That's where I think our first mistake is. We always immediately look for an excuse of why a person commits a crime rather than looking at the person and holding them accountable. People are already looking for excuses for this kid. Surely someone or something must have failed him. No one is considering that maybe the kid was just a bad seed.

By what I've read, the kid has a long history of hate and violent tendancies. Early fascination with Hitler. Racial supremist. The usual laundry list of people filled with hate.

We need to start accepting that there are some people that are just bad. They are born with something wrong.....wires crossed if you will. Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and many others are prime examples.

We need to quit always trying to find an excuse first. Look at the person and hold them accountable first. That's where it should start.

 

[cantdog]

You have a point, Wildcard. I mean it.

But the kid himself is no longer here, and people are always weirded out by this kind of stuff. The guy next door is Jeff Dahmer? Holy fuck, man! I mean, it's only human to want to try to make things so that the guy next door isn't Jeff Dahmer, ever again.

People get to that point in their thinking, and they see this wasn't a citizen, but a child. Parents gone, but still someone's charge. He breaks a window, they would come to the grandfather. "Who's paying for my window, man?" And that's legitimate. The kid is not yet an independent entity, but a child.

I see that people had few illusions about the kid, except that they weren't ready to give up on him. They'd gone a long way toward quarantining him. I bet the grandfather thought he could still reach the boy.

So they saw what they had, but not quite the extent of it. Or maybe he just turned a corner, got a lot worse one day.

So fine, people did what they could, they were using their best judgement. It still happened, and people want to make it less likely to happen, because it's scary, and because a lot of other lives were taken in the process. Kids, the grandfather, and so on. Clearly you can't afford to have this go on if there really is something to be done.

Maybe there is, too. Some idea might come out which would really make damage control on this kind of case easier.

In the meantime, people will cast around for something. But I agree, the place to lay the primary blame is still the person who did this monstrous thing. The next one coming up the pike should see that doing this did not turn the boy into an innocent and beloved victim. He is regarded as a monster. That should be clear. Shooting seven or ten people is not redemptive behavior.