At least 17 dead in Florida school shooting, law enforcement says

[techbeck]

Quote

I don't care why people are doing this,

 

That is a problem.  People not caring why people are doing this.   Don't figure out the why, then banning something will only help so much.   All you are doing is masking ht problem until some other major issue/crisis/problem arises.

22 minutes ago, Rippleman said:

humans are flawed and you will never find out way and you will never be able to prevent it. They only way to do it is to take away what they use.

I disagree.  Something has changed with this generation and it is not the access to weapons.  Laws are stricter now than when I Was growing up.  Didnt have this problem.  Then again, we didnt have people eating tide pods as well.

 

And I agree, humans are flawed.  But why is it only the males?  Why are not females going out and shooting/killing bunches of people?   I forgot, you don't care.  Never mind.

[techbeck]

1 hour ago, DocM said:

Correct, and the most direct path is to address those doing most of the shooting;  mentally ill males. And we should not conflate them with terrorist incidents like San Bernardino. Two different critters.

 

Focussed solutions, not scatterbrained solutions.

Mental health is something people do not care about.  Been an issue for alooong time now and a lot of problems because of it.

[FloatingFatMan]

12 minutes ago, techbeck said:

But why is it only the males?  Why are not females going out and shooting/killing bunches of people?   I forgot, you don't care.  Never mind.

Testosterone.

[sc302 Veteran]

43 minutes ago, FloatingFatMan said:

Testosterone.

pretty much, same reason why statistically they are high insurance risks at young ages.  

 

Being in a teenage mind where they either want to kill themselves or kill others is an "interesting" place to be...I see it as it can go either way and it is a fine line between.  Peer pressure, peer acceptance, hormonal rage, and a lot of other factors are all contributors to a ticking time bomb in the teenage psyche.  The "right" person to accept and notice may be the only thing that keeps them from going over the edge.  This isn't a gun control issue, this is a psychological issue....if the guns are taken away, other avenues can and will be found that could be more destructive/deadly.  The lack of imagination/knowledge is the only thing really stopping them, if a more destructive way is publicized they will figure out how to do it or, at the very least, attempt it.

[ATLien_0]

Instead of arguing about the 2nd Amendment or why people need to carry or about banning guns can we discuss real sensible things that can be done to prevent these attacks? 

We as a country are so quick to make changes after Radical Islamic terrorist attacks, but yet there isn't one single thing we can do to prevent these mass shootings. 

Is it greater background checks? More checks and Balances between law enforcement and the gun sellers? Is it making the 2nd Amendment more like car ownership? Or more armed guards at schools (I don't believe in arming teachers as we barely pay them enough nor give them enough of a budget). The least we can do is let the CDC study this, which we don't . 

 

Another good article 

https://agingmillennialengineer.com/2018/02/15/######-i-like-guns-2/

 

 

[sc302 Veteran]

31 minutes ago, wv@gt said:

 

Is it greater background checks? More checks and Balances between law enforcement and the gun sellers? Is it making the 2nd Amendment more like car ownership? Or more armed guards at schools (I don't believe in arming teachers as we barely pay them enough nor give them enough of a budget). The least we can do is let the CDC study this, which we don't . 

 

Another good article 

https://agingmillennialengineer.com/2018/02/15/######-i-like-guns-2/

 

 

When I was in high school, I could have purchased a gun that was unregistered and unserialized.  I don't think that has changed....if this was possible then, what makes it any different now?  They might as well had a scrolling marquee.  Laws were still in place where there was no carry in my state.  Laws were in place where it was hard, if not difficult, to get a hand gun.  You think people are going to follow the laws when they are going to do something bad?  Tell that to all of the people who steal or rape that it is wrong and against the law to do so...see if more people stop and follow the rules and laws that have already been set out.  It is already years and the cost of a car to own an automatic weapon, do you think that they aren't in the wild and in the wrong hands right now?  

 

You are right in your original sentence, a intelligent discussion must be had in attempting to prevent these attacks.  Prevention can occur at home as well as in school but that would require actual monitoring and discussion....somethings of which many parents and teachers do not want to do or feel that they shouldn't do.  Be actual guardians for your children, guard and guide them, help them, talk to them.  

 

Edit: another thing that probably should occur, at least a once a year psychological evaluation of each student...I would probably probably go with twice a year.  Know your students.

[Andre S. Veteran]

4 hours ago, DocM said:

Correct, and the most direct path is to address those doing most of the shooting;  mentally ill males.

That seems at odds with what the medical profession, including psychiatry, is saying.

Quote

 

Today, our organizations call on the President and the United States Congress to help prevent gun violence in the following ways:

1. Label this violence caused by the use of guns a national public health epidemic.
2. Fund appropriate research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as part of the FY 2018 omnibus spending package.
3. Establish constitutionally appropriate restrictions on the manufacturing and sale, for civilian use, of large-capacity magazines and firearms with features designed to increase their rapid and extended killing capacity.

A music concert, shopping mall, church or school, should be places that children and adults can continue to attend without threat or fear of a mass shooting. While these mass shootings command our attention, far too many Americans remain at risk daily for suicide, homicide, and unintentional injury because of the current policy regarding access to guns in the United States.

 

https://www.aafp.org/media-center/releases-statements/all/2018/americas-frontline-physicians-call-on-government-to-act-on-the-public-health-epidemic-of-gun-violence.html

Also in recent news:

Quote

“The concept that mental illness is a precursor to violent behavior is nonsense," said Dr. Louis Kraus, forensic psychiatry chief at Chicago's Rush University Medical College. "The vast majority of gun violence is not attributable to mental illness."

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/doctors-blast-trumps-mental-illness-focus-fight-violence-53199960

 

[Emn1ty]

31 minutes ago, Andre S. said:

That seems at odds with what the medical profession, including psychiatry, is saying.

Also in recent news:

 

Except the vast majority of mass shootings might be attributable to it, however we've almost never recovered a shooter alive. Yes, the majority of gun violence is actually criminal, but we're not talking about all gun violence here. We're talking about mass shootings.

[LOC Veteran]

I've said time and time again - if we as a country did nothing (note: NOTHING) after Sandy Hook happened, why should we be surprised when this happens over and over and over again? And that nothing gets done yet again? I mean, its sad, but true. With the gridlock in D.C. over almost anything and everything these days - you'd think a law to help protect CHILDREN, let alone adults from these mass shootings would be a no brainer. But I guess we've run out of brains in this country in our leadership. Because they sure as hell aren't leading much.

 

I'm super proud of all the teens (and adults) doing what they are doing now. Maybe, MAYBE this time things might change for the better. Hell, even Trump came out today and said he supports stricter background checks.

 

DO SOMETHING ALREADY.

[sc302 Veteran]

I would say anger more than mental illness. I want you dead or I am going to kill myself kind of anger. Mix that with a hormonal cocktail and you just might have a recipie of a mass shooting or a suicide. 

[sc302 Veteran]

4 minutes ago, LOC said:

I've said time and time again - if we as a country did nothing (note: NOTHING) after Sandy Hook happened, why should we be surprised when this happens over and over and over again? And that nothing gets done yet again? I mean, its sad, but true. With the gridlock in D.C. over almost anything and everything these days - you'd think a law to help protect CHILDREN, let alone adults from these mass shootings would be a no brainer. But I guess we've run out of brains in this country in our leadership. Because they sure as hell aren't leading much.

 

I'm super proud of all the teens (and adults) doing what they are doing now. Maybe, MAYBE this time things might change for the better. Hell, even Trump came out today and said he supports stricter background checks.

 

DO SOMETHING ALREADY.

I agree do something. Laws affect law abiding people. Laws don’t affect people looking to not follow them or don’t care about them.   Laws aren’t enough. Do something about it...it isn’t for the law to follow through with doing something. Parents and schools need to do something.....it is called getting involved in your kids life. 

[DevTech]

2 minutes ago, sc302 said:

I would say anger more than mental illness. I want you dead or I am going to kill myself kind of anger. Mix that with a hormonal cocktail and you just might have a recipie of a mass shooting or a suicide. 

Perhaps take a step back and really consider and consider yourself full of anger and hormones walking down a school hallway with a rifle. No matter how angry you feel, you are not going to starting killing everyone around you over and over again.

 

By definition, a mass shooter is not living in the same reality as we are. If he doesn't fit some standard manual classification of personality disorder, then make a new one.

 

It is simply not a sane act.

 

[ATLien_0]

5 minutes ago, LOC said:

I've said time and time again - if we as a country did nothing (note: NOTHING) after Sandy Hook happened, why should we be surprised when this happens over and over and over again? And that nothing gets done yet again? I mean, its sad, but true. With the gridlock in D.C. over almost anything and everything these days - you'd think a law to help protect CHILDREN, let alone adults from these mass shootings would be a no brainer. But I guess we've run out of brains in this country in our leadership. Because they sure as hell aren't leading much.

 

I'm super proud of all the teens (and adults) doing what they are doing now. Maybe, MAYBE this time things might change for the better. Hell, even Trump came out today and said he supports stricter background checks.

 

DO SOMETHING ALREADY.

Exactly, what I saw today was teens begging for the Adults in Washington to do something. Unfortunately I dont think anyone knows what will solve it. The right wants more guns and left wants less, but neither will give an inch. 

[Andre S. Veteran]

On 2018-02-15 at 7:40 PM, Emn1ty said:

 

I have a feeling that if we take away guns in these scenarios, we might just see more cars and more bombs as an alternative weapon. The problem here isn't the guns, it's the fact that we're so complacent with these kinds of people we can't do anything about it until they've already done their damage. Whether or not we can solve that is another issue. The attacker being apprehended alive is a step in the direction of hopefully understanding what goes through these people's minds.

You cannot really drive a car inside a school and achieving such a death toll with an explosive requires way more planning with a higher risk of failure, or getting caught while planning. You're not making crime impossible, but you do make it harder, and that's the whole point of all security measures. It seems absurd to suggest that the availability of something that makes mass killing very easy and effective is not a significant factor. Besides, other countries have just as much mental illness, cars and explosives, and experience basically no mass murders.

[ATLien_0]

9 minutes ago, sc302 said:

I agree do something. Laws affect law abiding people. Laws don’t affect people looking to not follow them or don’t care about them.   Laws aren’t enough. Do something about it...it isn’t for the law to follow through with doing something. Parents and schools need to do something.....it is called getting involved in your kids life. 

What about the Las Vegas shooter? 

The argument that new laws dont work is way over used. So can we move past that and come up with real ideas? 

All of these mass killings happen with a very specific gun, not a car, not a knife, not a bomb, not a grenade. I wonder why

[sc302 Veteran]

7 minutes ago, DevTech said:

Perhaps take a step back and really consider and consider yourself full of anger and hormones walking down a school hallway with a rifle. No matter how angry you feel, you are not going to starting killing everyone around you over and over again.

 

By definition, a mass shooter is not living in the same reality as we are. If he doesn't fit some standard manual classification of personality disorder, then make a new one.

 

It is simply not a sane act.

 

I probably would have to be honest. I lacked the funding required to pull it off as well as creative means. 

 

If you think you understand, you really don’t. 

[LOC Veteran]

6 minutes ago, sc302 said:

I agree do something. Laws affect law abiding people. Laws don’t affect people looking to not follow them or don’t care about them.   Laws aren’t enough. Do something about it...it isn’t for the law to follow through with doing something. Parents and schools need to do something.....it is called getting involved in your kids life. 

Yes, parents and schools must be involved in this also. But they are liable to be more involved way faster than anyone in Washington will be, that's for sure. Laws are never enough, since enforcement can vary from area to area. I mean look, I'm not against the 2nd amendment or wanting to take away everyone's guns. That's insane. Its in the constitution after all. But Jesus, AR-15 style weapons shouldn't be sold to the public. I'm sorry for the people who think its fine, and I'm sure there are plenty of gun owners who are quite responsible and all that. But come on, we all know why an AR-15 style weapon is made - it isn't for freaking hunting.

 

Ugh, I don't wanna go down this rabbit hole. Let's just say, I used to be a gun collector myself - so I know this whole thing on both sides quite well already. I am NOT anti-gun, but I am pro-gun control (and not super duper invasive gun control, SENSIBLE gun control).

[DevTech]

As if the horribleness of the shooting wasn't enough, the Russian propaganda machine has latched onto it, promoting extreme viewpoints at both ends of the political spectrum and then finally claiming this thing we are discussing never happened.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html

 

"One hour after news broke about the school shootingin Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate. The researchers said they had watched as the bots began posting about the Parkland shooting shortly after it happened.

 

 “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”  the messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter. The bots are “going to find any contentious issue, and instead of making it an opportunity for compromise and negotiation, they turn it into an unsolvable issue bubbling with frustration,”

 

The researchers said they had watched as the bots began posting about the Parkland shooting shortly after it happened. When the Russian bots jumped on the hashtag #Parklandshooting — initially created to spread news of the shooting — they quickly stoked tensions. Exploiting the issue of mental illness in the gun control debate, they propagated the notion that Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman, was a mentally ill “lone killer.” They also claimed that he had searched for Arabic phrases on Google before the shooting. Simultaneously, the bots started other hashtags, like #ar15, for the semiautomatic rifle used in the shooting, and #NRA.

 

By Friday morning, the bots that pushed the original tweets around the Parkland shooting had moved on to the hashtag #falseflag — a term used by conspiracy theorists to refer to a secret government operation that is carried out to look like something else — with a conspiracy theory that the shooting had never happened.

 

By Monday, the bots had new targets: the Daytona 500 auto race in Daytona Beach, Fla., and news about William Holleeder, a man facing trial in the Netherlands for his suspected role in six gangland killings. It is unclear why."

 

[Andre S. Veteran]

1 hour ago, Emn1ty said:

Except the vast majority of mass shootings might be attributable to it, however we've almost never recovered a shooter alive. Yes, the majority of gun violence is actually criminal, but we're not talking about all gun violence here. We're talking about mass shootings.

We're talking about mass shootings because that's the latest and most spectacular, horrifying manifestation of gun violence in the US; it's still a minority of gun violence, most of which is just as tragic and goes unreported. Why should we only address the tip of iceberg? 

 

Furthermore targeting mental illness will likely lead nowhere because it's a poor predictor of violent behavior.

[DocM]

1 hour ago, Andre S. said:

That seems at odds with what the medical profession, including psychiatry, is saying.

Also in recent news:

 

When you read their sites you see the number of mentally ill spree/mass killers  compared to general murders + suicides, which minimized their impact. Not accidental since these  people are from the school of thought which destroyed our ability to involuntarily treat dangerous people. 

 

A better comparison would their percentage of spree and mass killers in general. Apples to apples.

 

What's really happened is they went from being institutionalized to the street where they typically refuse treatment even where provided. Then they self-medicate with drugs, commit crimes including murder, then end up institutionalised but this time in prison. About half of today's population.  And, of course, some of these become killers. Some are young killers because our intervention toolkit is so weak.

 

We need to cut out the BS to save lives.

Edited February 20, 2018 by DocM

[DevTech]

5 minutes ago, Andre S. said:

We're talking about mass shootings because that's the latest and most spectacular, horrifying manifestation of gun violence in the US; it's still a minority of gun violence, most of which is just as tragic and goes unreported. Why should we only address the tip of iceberg? 

 

Furthermore targeting mental illness will likely lead nowhere because it's a poor predictor of violent behavior.

The U.S. has a problem with mass shootings.

 

The U.S. is the only civilized western democracy without FREE Universal Health Care.

 

The same western democracies make it standard procedure for citizens to own rifles.

 

So instead of pondering the one real significant different, people say "mental illness" is not the problem, it must be access to guns.

 

Yet, other countries have access to guns, and other countries have access to Health Care.

 

Nobody ever wants to discuss mental illness because it leads directly to insanely expensive Universal Health Care which has been even more of a failure than Gun Control.

 

So, if you are not a parent in the 1% and your kid is a bit troubled, you tell yourself that all teenagers go through that and you make your mortgage payment instead of seeing a psychologist.

 

Under Universal Free Health Care, you schedule an appointment and find out your kid is just going through the normal teenage stuff, except that in a small percentage, it's different and your kid gets therapy and moves on with his life. It is caught early and it is addressed. That is what should be meant by the issue of "mental illness", not the absurd idea of not treating anyone and then trying to use it as a predictor of mass shootings!

 

In every civilized country, except the U.S., children get treated. Hence NO crazy mass shootings. 

 

 

[sc302 Veteran]

Let’s just say I don’t own a gun and never will.  I see both sides but won’t blame the gun for the action that is being willed to happen. I believe if there is a will, there is a way. 

 

I believe there is far worse than even a fully auto being unloaded in a few classrooms which exists in schools today, the lack of imagination and having knowledge of such destructive things is the limiting factor.  

[DevTech]

2 minutes ago, sc302 said:

Let’s just say I don’t own a gun and never will.  I see both sides but won’t blame the gun for the action that is being willed to happen. I believe if there is a will, there is a way. 

 

I believe there is far worse than even a fully auto being unloaded in a few classrooms which exists in schools today, the lack of imagination and having knowledge of such destructive things is the limiting factor.  

Yes. Schools are a horrible, brutal, uncaring vehicle of psychological warfare that are organized and run like prisons. Most schools look like prisons. The Declaration of Independence is studied but not followed within school walls.  All the time children are trapped inside this horrible Kafkaesque environment of cruelty to young brains, the administrators and teachers use a language of caring and future potential while draining all hope in an example of doublespeak the kids instantly realize is the soul draining mode of our culture.

 

Tear down all schools and build something better could justifiably be added to our solution matrix...

 

[sc302 Veteran]

13 minutes ago, DevTech said:

Yes. Schools are a horrible, brutal, uncaring vehicle of psychological warfare that are organized and run like prisons. Most schools look like prisons. The Declaration of Independence is studied but not followed within school walls.  All the time children are trapped inside this horrible Kafkaesque environment of cruelty to young brains, the administrators and teachers use a language of caring and future potential while draining all hope in an example of doublespeak the kids instantly realize is the soul draining mode of our culture.

 

Tear down all schools and build something better could justifiably be added to our solution matrix...

 

Not at all what I was getting at.  

 

Lack of imagination at its finest here 

[DevTech]

47 minutes ago, Andre S. said:

We're talking about mass shootings because that's the latest and most spectacular, horrifying manifestation of gun violence in the US; it's still a minority of gun violence, most of which is just as tragic and goes unreported. Why should we only address the tip of iceberg? 

 

Furthermore targeting mental illness will likely lead nowhere because it's a poor predictor of violent behavior.

I offered my thoughts on the how mental health starts with children getting the therapy they need at an early stage and how that is possible everywhere except the U.S. which has even more problems making laws about health care than gun control.

 

Your other point speaks to a simple universal approach of "How can the collective will power of a country pull together to prevent as much as possible all the common causes of death and suffering"

 

For guns, that is gun accidents. Toddlers that kill family members are particularly heart breaking.

 

For the most preventable, that would be passing a law the requires all people in motor vehicles to wear Motorcycle Helmets. The main cause of death in auto accidents are head injuries. Every year, 30,000 human beings in the U.S. dies in car accidents. Maybe that is 10,000 children? 

 

Do 10,000 children every year deserve more attention than 17?