Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire WHY do school shootings happen?

To me it seems a failure of public education. I have not been in grade school for decades, but what I remember was I hated it. It felt like I was a prisoner. I did not have a choice in anything. I was told what to learn, when to exercise, when to eat, and how to think according to the curriculum. I was forced to hang around people I did not like. It was a helpless feeling. I remember feeling stressed out all the time.

I wish someone had told me, "Life will be better after you are finished school".

I do remember a time on the bus in middle school which would have been in the 80's. One of my friends told me about some of the high school kids picking on him. He was scared and afraid of what they might do to him. He unzipped his book bag and showed me a loaded revolver. When I saw it I knew it was real and this was a bad situation. I told him that wasn't the answer. I told him to talk to one of the teachers, the bus driver, a parent, but don't pull a gun on these jerks. Luckily, he did not shoot anyone, but I don't know what changed his mind. He never shared what he did, or who he talked to. I am glad no one got hurt or worse. I think one of the main problems, is most kids don't know where to turn when things get out of hand. The peer pressure was strong to not snitch on someone and many of the adults in the system were not approachable or trusted. I am not saying all the teachers were bad. There were a couple who said and did the things for me at a time when it truly meant the world. I think the institution didn't reach each kid and unfortunately some kids needed it more than others. Plus parents have a hand in this too. Not everyone had Ward and June Cleaver for parents. I guess my whole point of posting this was to say, I think this has been coming for decades, although it appears to be a recent thing.

Yep.

Most of these school shooters are mad at the world. Most don't have a girl friend. Most suffer some form of social alienation.

Interesting. Thanks.

Handheld devices are programming these kids heads.....even the developers know that.

Again, these shootings started before handheld devises were ubiquitous.

Yep.

All those darn I-phones in the 1600's pushing up their murder rate:

Interesting fact...or not.

My son's high school has roughly 2000 students grades 9-12. There have been 7 suicides in the past 3 years.

I went to the same high school graduating 36 years ago. We had 1500 or so students grades 10-12 and 0 suicides during my 3 years there.

Currently, suicide's a much bigger problem than school shooters. In reality, they are just two sides of the same coin, where one decide to take as many other with him as possible. The other huge related problem are the suicides by opiates. Of those who commit suicide, it's estimated 90% has other underlying mental health issues, primary depression.

Once again, this all tracks back to mental health.

My wife and I have talked about this on and off for the past few years.

I went back to school a few years ago (at nearly 50) and got to experience college students first hand. Virtually everyone has their head down staring at their latest and greatest smart phone as they walk between classes. I personally witnessed a kid crash his bicycle because he was texting while he was riding (that was hilarious BTW). While texting and updating their social media pages they walked by hundreds of people every day and never even noticed them.

It seems that virtually all of these teenaged shooters are socially retarded, thanks in large part to many of the replies above (the internet, social media, etc). They have never had a need to actually interact with others in person and are not equipped to do so. Couple that with the desensitization of violence thanks to Hollywood and video games and this becomes a volatile combination.

Now let's talk about the parents. How does a kid build pipe bombs in the family garage and NOT draw attention from mom and dad (Columbine)? How does a mother that knows her son has mental issues give him the combination to the gunsafe (Sandy Hook)? Absentee parenting is common nowadays, and has been for a while now. While chasing that almighty dollar some things will slip through the cracks...but your kids?! Most of these kids had a history of being "different", acting a little odd, but mom and dad didn't notice? No parent wants to think the worst of their child, but most of them knew. In my opinion, the parents of these kids need to be held accountable for the actions of their offspring. If junior is convicted of a crime (juvenile or not), mom and dad need to pay the price. This is the only way to get the parents' attention and make them take responsibility for their childrens actions.

I echo the sentiment above stating that society is on a downward spiral and I fear for the future. I only hope that my family's next generation makes it through the tough times ahead.

We are not on a down ward spiral:

To get attention and be SOMEBODY. When it happens it's all over the news. There are kids out there that have no self worth and this is a way for them to be noticed...to be famous. If it wasn't sensationalized by the media I don't think there would be any school shootings.

You're outa your freaking mind. Here in the USA we murder millions of innocent, defenseless, unborn babies annually and nobody cares. Give me a freaking break.

Assume for a moment that parents are held responsible for their children's actions. In practical terms what does that mean? If the parent realizes the child is not controllable and tries to commit the child to the care of the state does that exempt the parent from liability? If the state refuses to assume liability for the child, then who is responsible? I'm trying not to be an a-hole, just asking the questions that arise from your assertion.

You mean those significantly declining abortion rates?

The fact that there's any at all means there's a lot of people like you.....

Off topic: You will note the higher rate of black abortions. Some blacks have argued that the current abortion policy is a racist attempt to reduce the proportion of black population in the U. S.

So I'm your proxy measure for a world in a down ward spiral?

Losers like you, and this.........


Any of us who receive e-mail from large numbers of Americans can attest to the deteriorating education — including among those who attended college — in written English. In sophisticated commentary on websites as well as in e-mail, one encounters the most basic errors: “it’s” instead of “its”; “their” instead of “there”; “then” instead of “than”; etc.

Most universities have become secular seminaries for the dissemination of leftism. Moreover, aside from indoctrination, students usually learn little. One can earn a B.A. in English at UCLA, for example, without having read a single Shakespeare play.

To the extent that American history is taught, beginning in high school and often earlier, American history is presented as the history of an immoral nation characterized by slavery, racism, colonialism, imperialism, economic exploitation, and militarism — not of a country that, more than any other, has been the beacon of freedom to mankind, and the country that has spent more treasure and spilled more blood to liberate other peoples than any other nation.

The End of Male and Female: Whatever one’s position on same-sex marriage, one must acknowledge that at the core of the argument for this redefinition of marriage is that gender doesn’t matter. Marriage is marriage and gender means nothing, the argument goes. So, too, whether children are raised by mother and father or two mothers or two fathers doesn’t matter. A father has nothing unique to offer a child that a mother can’t provide and vice versa.

Why? Because — for the first time in recorded history — gender is regarded as meaningless. Indeed, increasingly gender doesn’t even exist; it’s merely a social construct imposed on children by parents and society based on the biological happenstance of their genitalia. When signing up for Facebook, one is offered nearly 60 options under “gender.” In various high schools across the country, boys are elected homecoming queen. A woman was recently kicked out of Planet Fitness for objecting to a man in the women’s locker room. She was accused of intolerance because the man said he felt that he was a woman.

The End of Right and Wrong: At least two generations of American young people have been taught that moral categories are nothing more than personal (or societal) preferences. Recently, an incredulous professor of philosophy wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts.” In it he noted, “Without fail, every value claim is labeled an opinion” (italics in original). This extends to assessing the most glaring of evils. Since the Nazis thought killing Jews was right, there is no way to know for sure whether it was wrong; it’s the Nazis’ opinion against that of the Jews and anyone else who objects. I have heard this sentiment from American high-school students — including many Jewish ones — for 30 years.

The End of Religion: There are no moral truths because there is no longer a religious basis for morality. More than the Enlightenment, it was the Bible — especially the Hebrew Bible (which was one reason America’s Christians were different from most European Christians) that guided the Founders’ and other Americans’ values. Not any more. Instead of being guided by a code higher than themselves, Americans are taught to rely on their feelings to determine how to behave. Instead of being given moral guidance, children are asked, “How do you feel about it?”

The End of Beauty: Just as morality is subjective, so are beauty and excellence. There is no good or bad art or literature. You like Beethoven; I like rap. You like Shakespeare; I like Batman. “Street art” (a.k.a graffiti) is worthy of museum exhibition; paint thrown by an “artist” from atop a ladder onto a canvas is considered high art and fetches over $100 million; and a giant sculpture of a dog with lifted leg urinating adorns the front of the Orange County Museum of Art in California.
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If you acknowledge that American society is in decay, it is your obligation to fight to undo it. If you can’t acknowledge that American society is in decay, you are providing proof that it is.

So Barm the following quote from you concerns me..

"To me it seems a failure of public education. I have not been in grade school for decades, but what I remember was I hated it. It felt like I was a prisoner. I did not have a choice in anything. I was told what to learn, when to exercise, when to eat, and how to think according to the curriculum. I was forced to hang around people I did not like. It was a helpless feeling. I remember feeling stressed out all the time.

I wish someone had told me, "Life will be better after you are finished school".

I do remember a time on the bus in middle school which would have been in the 80's. One of my friends told me about some of the high school kids picking on him. He was scared and afraid of what they might do to him. He unzipped his book bag and showed me a loaded revolver. When I saw it I knew it was real and this was a bad situation. I told him that wasn't the answer. I told him to talk to one of the teachers, the bus driver, a parent, but don't pull a gun on these jerks. Luckily, he did not shoot anyone, but I don't know what changed his mind. He never shared what he did, or who he talked to. I am glad no one got hurt or worse. I think one of the main problems, is most kids don't know where to turn when things get out of hand. The peer pressure was strong to not snitch on someone and many of the adults in the system were not approachable or trusted. I am not saying all the teachers were bad. There were a couple who said and did the things for me at a time when it truly meant the world. I think the institution didn't reach each kid and unfortunately some kids needed it more than others. Plus parents have a hand in this too. Not everyone had Ward and June Cleaver for parents. I guess my whole point of posting this was to say, I think this has been coming for decades, although it appears to be a recent thing. "


barm, It's obvious you've been away from schools for quite some time if you think it's the schools that "are just asking for it". So let me catch you up a bit. Schools are expected to pick kids up and drop them off literally at their doorstep or the doorstep of whoever is watching them because often it's not a parent. Then the school provides a wide variety of social services from mandated healthcare screening, mandated child abuse reporters, drug & alcohol intervention, transportation and supplemental services for homeless and foster children, individualized special education services including emotional support, free and reduced lunch for low income student (and sadly many schools, including one I volunteer at, pack and send home food for kids on weekends because there isn't enough food for them at home), clothing if needed, and I could go on. In the '80's schools were expected to act in loco parentis...in place of the parents...while kids were at school. Now, in many cases, schools have become the parents. Students and parents have more rights and fewer responsibilities than ever. And schools are spending millions of dollars on security and services just to protect kids so they can get an education. So please don't try to make the case that any school, or any child, had this terrorism coming. That couldn't be further from the truth and no one should die in a school...no one!

Yeah, it is hard to get knocked up over an Iphone or the internet. I don't believe kids are screwing near as much these days as they were 40 and 50 years ago.