Stopping shooters before they shoot

Quote from a bookstore owner:

"This also illuminates the critical importance of seeing and stopping bullying, even in the earliest grades. In Picoult's 19 Minutes it is a young man who has been bullied continually since his first day of kindergarten who finally decides that he cannot take one more day of harassment. His parents, his teachers and the other students were all aware of this bullying to some extent, and yet it continued.


I find it hard to believe that bullying is behind all these school shootings. There was far worse bullying in my parents' times (early 1900s) and school shootings didn't occur, although I am sure there are many other reasons for that.

It may be a contributor to certain behaviors, but I don't think it is a sole cause. Otherwise I would have snapped long ago and turned my now former classmates into bloody mist. As it is, I am not psychotic or sociopathic by nature and therefore the bullying didn't do anything except make my life hell for most of my childhood.

Message 2: Bookmarque-- I'm with you. I would have been Carrie in Stephen King's story except I wasn't invited to the prom. Actually, I think suffering from bullies as a child makes one more resilient. The bullies I knew grew up to be nonbodies. The bullied fared much better.

Time to whip out one of my favorite statistics ... anyone here familiar with Martha Stout and her book The sociopath next door? ... she's a clinical psychologist who believes a full 4 percent of the U.S. population is made up of complete sociopaths (in her view, essentially the same as psychopaths) ... no conscience, no real feelings toward their fellow man/woman, etc. ... that's a lot of people ...

And regarding the "being bullied makes you resilient" argument, while that may be the case for some, I would rather my children learn their resilience through some other means than being terrorized by a bully.

I think that there is a certain "hundredth monkey" (ala Rupert Sheldrake's theory of "morphogenetic fields" in A New Science of Life) dynamic happening in these situations, as there are now very clear NLP-like "models" out in the collective cultural consciousness which disaffected youths can latch onto to plan their own personal revenge scenarios ... models which would have been almost unthinkable before (although I have to admit to having had some rather vivid violent fantasies about "getting back at" my highschool some 30+ years ago!).

A really remarkable piece discussing the reality of how bad things are for "unusual" kids in school is Dan Savage's Fear The Geek, which he penned in the weeks following the Columbine attack. A choice quote from which is:

Watching SWAT teams inch their way toward Columbine High, I wasn't shocked that something like this could happen in a high school. I was shocked that something like this hadn't happened at any of mine.

Now, admittedly, it seems that the V.T. killer was way more screwed up than Klebold & Harris, but I think that Savage's point should be especially noted: it's a miracle this doesn't happen every week!

Message 5: KromesTomes -- I would make a distinction between "being bullied" and "being terrorized by a bully". Just about everyone has been bullied at one time or another, some more than others, but actually being terrorized rather than "just" being humiliated, ashamed, wanting to cry are two different things. My parents were not very sympathetic to my complaints about bullies but if I had been terrorized, they definitely would have called in the police -- and this would have been back in the 50s when no one much cared about the psyches of children.

Message 6: BTRIPP -- I think that there is a certain "hundredth monkey" (ala Rupert Sheldrake's theory of "morphogenetic fields" in A New Science of Life) dynamic happening in these situations, as there are now very clear NLP-like "models" out in the collective cultural consciousness. =

Huh?

I read the article you linked to and even more important is what Dan Savage says here:

Harris left a suicide note, discovered by police and reprinted in one of Denver's daily papers, The Rocky Mountain News. I haven't seen the note printed anywhere else, which strikes me as odd.

The note reads: "By now, it's over. If you are reading this, my mission is complete.... Your children who have ridiculed me, who have chosen not to accept me, who have treated me like I am not worth their time are dead. THEY ARE FUCKING DEAD....

"Surely you will try to blame it on the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, or the way I choose to present myself, but no. Do not hide behind my choices. You need to face the fact that this comes as a result of YOUR CHOICES.

"Parents and teachers, you fucked up. You have taught these kids to not accept what is different. YOU ARE IN THE WRONG. I have taken their lives and my own--but it was your doing. Teachers, parents, LET THIS MASSACRE BE ON YOUR SHOULDERS UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE."

What Harris said isn't far from the truth. Parents are responsible for their children's behavior when they are young and the sort of intolerance and clique behavior Harris references can be stopped and prevented by parents and teachers. But they say this is just how kids are, or what they grew up with, and no one does anything about it.

#8: "Huh?"

Rupert Sheldrake has posited what he calls "morphogenetic fields" to explain a wide range of phenomena, largely reducible to saying "when things are easier to do once they have initially been done".

These include synthesizing crystals in a lab ... once it's been done one place, it appears to be FAR easier to replicate elsewhere ... and even things like various "sports milestones" which at one point seemed impossible to achieve, but are routinely bested by later generations.

The "hundredth monkey" name comes from the observations of a tribe of monkeys who were eating a particular fruit ... most of this ended up sitting in the sand, and it was not very pleasant to eat, a few monkeys took the fruit down to the water and washed it off, and some others saw this behavior and copied it, and by the time about 100 of the monkeys exhibited the behavior, it suddenly spread to the whole tribe ... and not just to that tribe, but to other tribes not in obvious contact with the original one.

So, the idea of actually shooting up one's school is akin to the washing off of the fruit ... once it has attained a level of reality it is no longer just an idle musing, but a possible plan.

This is also where NLP ... Neuro-Linguistic Programming/Psychology ... comes in. In NLP training you're subjected to either repeated descriptions or go through repeated visualizations of a particular pattern, or model. This could be a basketball player watching videos of Michael Jordan in his prime to a high-jumper repeating a previously unreachable height to himself over and over. Amazingly, these do appear to "teach the body" to be able to improve performance.

So, essentially what I'm saying is that once there are EXAMPLES of this sort of violence available to those who might be at a similar breaking point, it makes it MUCH easier for them to engage in similar actions. On one hand, they are no longer "unthinkable", and on the other, the more they do think about the actions, the "better" they'll be at them (for instance, the VT killer having set himself up with numerous clips of ammo, so that he could keep shooting for a long time before having to even consider re-loading ... this is likely a product of his having thought through scenarios like Littleton in detail over and over).

9>

I better not post my feelings about Sheldrake's morphogenetic theories or indeed NLP (or any other pseudo-scientific stuff) . It would open up another can of worms which I don't really want to spend time on.

According to Bob Herbert's editorial in the New York Times last week, quoting a Harvard School of Public Health study, Children in the states with the highest rates of gun ownership were 16 times as likely to die from an accidental gunshot wound, nearly 7 times as likely to commit suicide with a gun, and more than 3 times as likely to be murdered with a firearm.

Statistics 101 anyone?

#11 - which is why we have had so few shooters going berserk in England - there isn't enough access to guns.

It's that simple.

The gun lobby and people for guns say that "gun free" zones are responsible for not keeping people safe during these mass shootings. The idea is if the Virginia Tech campus allowed guns or if the security people had guns the shooter would not have done much damage. They say that shooters know that the areas they go into are "gun free" so they can shoot as many people as they like before they are stopped.

What do you guys think?

What is the rate in Switzerland?

I actually saw an interesting interview with Javier Bardem (the REALLY bad guy in No Country for Old Men--really bad guy).
He has done some ehem...sexy movies in Spain. He says that he never minded doing sex scenes and sexy movies, but he was uncomfortable being violent. He said that in Spain Violence is the taboo. In filming they take violence very seriously and if they can make the same statement without using violence they do. US movies and media is very casual about violence. We have issues about sex and sexuality, but we are completely cool with shooting, blowing things up, suicides, murders... you name it.
Maybe movies and media really are the problem!

FACT: The average American child will have watched 100,000 acts of televised violence, including 8000 depictions of murder, by the time he or she finishes sixth grade (approximately 13 years old).

#14, januaryw:
"The gun lobby and people for guns say that "gun free" zones are responsible for not keeping people safe during these mass shootings.(...)They say that shooters know that the areas they go into are "gun free" so they can shoot as many people as they like before they are stopped.
What do you guys think?"

Not likely, I'd think. One of the worst school shootings outside the USA happened in my home town (Germany) in 2002, with 17 dead. The police was there within minutes (2?) of the 110 call. The shooter took aim and shot dead one police officer (POs are armed in Germany). Then he carried on. When back-up arrived (police and ERT/"SWAT" from nearby barracks), the deed had been done (12 minutes, start to finish). Like most, the shooter took his own life.

This is a situation which to deal with, would require special training. I don't think that security guards with a few days or weeks of training would generally be fit to deal with a hostage situation or someone walking into an auditorium/cafeteria and starting to shoot.

My school is considering having all applicants and students disclose mental health histories before they enter the school. Another thing they are kicking around is mental health evaluations for any perspective student who has had mental health problems.
Statistically, a mentally ill person is FAR more likely to hurt themselves before they hurt anyone else. So, mental health really isn't the problem.
Only one of the mass shootings here in the US involved someone with documented mental health problems.