School shooting du jour

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Beestie

Gotcha.

You got squat.

The two different stories share some details, are both sad but for very different reasons. The previous story was about an 18 year old high school student who wrote in his journal and was arrested on TERRORISM CHARGES as a result. This is sad because writing in your journal is not illegal. I mean, damn. How much of the incindiary dialogue on this forum should qualify as reasonable cause to have the police come knocking at your door and arrest the author? Thinking, writing talking is waaaay different than acting. Big, big difference.

This story is sad for other reasons that are obvious.

But the two of them together demonstrate the saddest fact of all, that despite our best intentions, a determined kid can carry out this kind of horrible rampage. Did the earlier case prevent a tragedy? Impossible to say. Did the other case itself represent a tragedy. Most certainly.

These sad, terrible events can NOT be prevented. Reduced, minimized, isolated, ok, I'll buy that. But if the price is to arrest every student or child author who puts pen to paper, and says something threatening, I vote no. If the price is to squash expressions of independent thought, what would be taught in schools? Why is dissent so dangerous? I am no anarchist, but I say too much conformity is even more dangerous, more insidious. Witness the slowly boiled frog.

Originally Posted by Beestie

I call bullshit back. When parents do not "stay in touch" with their kids, the signs leading up to events such as this go unnoticed. In many if not most instances, the desire, intent, planning and preparation for these killings is patently obvious in retrospect.

I have no quarrel with this. But it is misleadingly shallow. The shooter's father killed himself four years ago. His mother has been in a nursing home for some time after suffering a brain injury as the result of a car accident. Who was in loco parentis? The grandfather. The first victim. The former chief of police, someone you could reasonably expect to "stay in touch" with his "kid". He was killed first, and then the guns and the bulletproof vest went with the kid in the squad car to the school where more death followed. Where is the blame here Beestie?

Originally Posted by Beestie

OC's point is that when obvious signs are ignored or overlooked then a preventable incident can occur.

OC's point in the earlier thread was that she felt there was a right for her to be aware of all that happens in her home, despite the fact that her kid was 18 or older. And on that point we agree.

What OC said in this post, however, was way past that. Go read it. I paraphrase: Parents read journals and cops arrest kids or people die in schools. Whoa... not just disturbing, but so freakin wrong, factually wrong that I called bullshit. It seemed like a knee jerk reaction--"That shooter, damn shame his parents didn't have him arrested and save us all this tragedy." Sure. Arrest them all, and then the schools will be free of death. It will have moved to the prisons.

Originally Posted by Beestie

I guess you are saying that if little johhny's parents find a graphic description in his room of little Johnny levelling a shotgun and blowing off his classmate's heads with rivers of blood running down the hall, they should just have a chuckle and say: "that's my boy!"

Riiiiiight.

More non-seriousness, non-funnyness, non-helpfulness. I strain to imagine any parent behaving that way. Maybe on tv... Do you seriously contend that this example reflects any kind of reality, or desired reality? Get back to me on that, willya?