school shootings: Could they be prevented?
 

These school shootings have become a bit more frequent in the past couple years since columbine. It seems that Columbine has set a precedent for bullied, chastized, and out cast youths to pick up a gun and retaliate against those that have done them wrong. Do you guys think situations like these can have warning signs? can they be stopped? what do you guys think?




I know this is gonna sound extremely morbid and heartless but i really think these kinda things were necessary. Bullies now-a-days are the target and theyve only themselves to blame. I was targeted by bullies all throughout elementry and middle school and freshman year, highschool. Situations like this should be not be taken with a grain of salt by other bullies, cause the next nerd, geek, dweeb might just end up burying a .357 in their face!

I'm not at all sure if your last paragraph is serious or not. If it's not, then I'm pretty shocked. As someone who was bullied, I have no great love of them, but it is in no way acceptable to BLAME them for someone else running around a school shooting people in the face.

I wish people would take responsibility for their own actions. Music, tv, movies, parents, bullies and video games are not responsible for what people CHOOSE to do. The person who does the action is the only person responsible because that person had the ability to choose NOT to do it.

Killing another person, except in pure self defense, is unconscionable in my book, especially for something as transient and stupid as "bullying."

If you were baiting, then so baited, but jeez...

I don't know if they could necessarily be prevented, but maybe if the media stopped over publicizing each one, they could. Schools are still a VERY safe place to be, it's just the media treats school shootings like they happen every other day.

I'm just sick of the news making people afraid.

My understanding is that overall, school shootings have declined drastically. Sure, we have had more high-profile incidents, like columbine, but less of the more common kind where one person gets shot over a fight or drugs.

im just sayin that those situations there are warnings of peoples limits, now personally i would\'nt go out, buy a piece, and shoot up the school. the thing is that people will only be pushed so far, and when you push the wrong person, shit happends. I dont condone or support the actions of columbine, much less virginia tech, and among other incidents, but people cant just hold up their hands and say \'well we saw it... we didnt know what to do or what to say\' only to pass the buck onto the teachers and its those parents that dont teach their kids to respect everyone.

So much less gun crime in school in the UK... Then again, GUNS ARE ILLEGAL! *hint hint*
Thinking about, you're allowed a gun, but the rules are MUCH stricter in the UK.

There's really not a whole lot to be said here I think, but my take: I think they probably can be averted, but not by trying to stop bullying. It is human to pick on the weak, and short of lobotomizing people you can't do much about it. The focus should be on paying attention to children who can't socialize or don't know how to cope with bullying. Teachers, classmates, parents and siblings should all once in a while look away from their tv screens or what have you and notice the people around them. Helping them make friends, and giving them guidance and help in times of crisis is the solution.

I think your second paragraph oversimplifies things quite a bit. It skips a step. It's not quite just cause and effect. People who plan to kill other people aren't acting out of passion. Even if I make fun of someone relentlessly it is illogical to expect for that person to kill me, or assume it could be justified because in general people don't behave that way. There is a big difference between someone who is goaded until his temper explodes and someone who goes home and plans out his revenge; they have crossed the line into rationalized murder. A thing which is best left in the hands of governments.

Then why do you have a higher crime rate?

Random stats...

People kill other people.




Get over it.

There's also roughly 80 million people enrolled in education in the US. How does the UK compare?

HAHAHAHA!

That almost sounded like: "Anal sex hurts. Get over it."

TRUE, but oh... the venom.

And London has a higher violent crime rate than New York City last time I checked.

Please, spare me your nanny state foibles.

As long as we have gun-free zones without armed guards everywhere, those gun-free zones will be target-rich areas for massacres.
UK gun crime has increased 40% since the 1997 gun ban. Every time guns are restricted, violent crime goes up. The good guys having guns is not the problem, it's when they can't defend themselves that it becomes an issue.

Back to school shootings:

Any environment that prevents any sort of violence is an environment that also prevents any sort of education.

Freedom to learn also means freedom to get your ass kicked.

"It's a hard knock life for us."

I was bullied in school, then I kicked the ever-loving shit out of the guy that was the worst, and guess what? That's right! I was STILL bullied. If I had a gun I wouldn't have brought it into school and used it, but god damn it if I had a sword...

But swords are more dangerous than guns.

http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/page40.asp

In the last year for which full stats are available, England and Wales (not Scotland) counted 765 homicides. This includes 52 people killed by terrorism in the tube and bus bombings that year. So 765 out of 53,000,000 people.

London itself has trended between 150-200 murders each year for the last several years out of a population of 7.5 million.

New York City, in 2006, had 580 homicides in the 5 boroughs (a rise of 10 per cent over 2005, I believe) out of a population of 8.2 million.

England sounds safer to me!

When it comes to more generalized "violent" crime you need to understand several factors - notably that A) some cultures are more likely to report crime than others, and B) classification of what is "violent" crime differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

yeah- so I have a better chance of being shot in new york, where I cannot legally have a concealed firearm, or beaten to shit and robbed in london, where I cannot have anything to defend myself- I choose option three, a legal handgun and a location that will let me legally defend myself........ sorry, preventing me, a law abiding citizen from having a weapon, does not make me any safer......nor does it make the students who could have had guns at Virginia Tech any safer.....

Or, you could live in Toronto - relatively little violent crime (90% of which does exist is criminal on criminal) and you don't need to carry a gun!

It's paradise, my American friends.

There are ONLY three options for preventing school shootings.

1) build a fenced and razor wired wall around said school. Place roving armed patrols to walk fence perimeter. Install secured entryways and have armed guards at each entry to scan and wand all entering students. Have an armed guard inside each classroom. In other words, it has to look and feel like a prison.

2) Arm the teachers

3) dissolve the public school system altogether.

anything less than that and it's a waste of time.

Arm the teachers!

I wanna see a tough old librarian with a M60.

the simple fact of the matter is this, you can NOT prevent these things from happening. when someone takes it into his/her mind to do something, there is no law, no school policy, no anything, short of imprisonment or death, that is going to prevent them from doing it (whatever "it" is). the best we can hope to do is foster an environment in which people are less likely to want to do these things. an environment such as what we have here at the TFP is a good start, but human nature being what it is (i.e. all people are imperfect, many are weak, and most are corruptible) there's not much reason to believe that we'll see any change in human behavior in our, or our children's, lifetimes.

such is the price of freedom.

Don't let your kid get away with being a known bully. That'll cut down on a vast majority of school shootings.