Maybe we should start with not marginalizing kids. Yeah, I know, everyone was a nerd or a geek in school because they wore glasses or whatever, but I mean the people who were really marginalized. There is no reason for the type of extreme bullying that some kids experience. Maybe we should stop bullying, instead of continuing to bully and just not give bullied kids access to guns.
SMH, no it isn’t. The mentally ill are disproportionately victims of violent crimes, but not disproportionately the perpetrators. About 1 in every 6 Americans has some form of mental illness. It’s not like all mentally ill people are unstable ticking timebomb powderkeg whatevers. Mental illness is just a convenient and sexy explanation that people use to deflect attention, and that the media uses to get more clicks. If the perpetrator is mentally ill, the media will scream it from the rooftops. If they aren’t mentally ill, the media will still speculate that they are and scream their speculation from the rooftops.
i should’ve been more specific with what i meant by mental health. I wasn’t saying that people who have mental illnesses are violent, i’m saying that bullying, or living circumstances that cause extreme anguish in a kid will create an unstable person. And bringing appropriate help for their mental well being is just as important, or more so, than removing guns from the equation.
Definitely well done, but all I could think about after the reveal was “oh yeah, this is like that count the number of basketball passes video from years ago.”
I think we’re all on board with trying to fix that problem, but that’s not the problem that makes the United States uniquely prone to these gun massacres. The rest of the developed world hasn’t managed to eliminate the “some kids are bullied and/or marginalized” problem either, but they have managed to avoid the “…and a subset of those kids regularly commit mass murder” bit.
Creating a violent society creates a violent society. Yes.
I’m not in favor of simply limiting access to guns, or teaching bullied kids to cope better with being bullied. We need to address the source of the problem and go after the bullies harder.
I liked the film, but I ended up feeling sort of helpless. I mean, I can’t be responsible for not paying attention to the things I’m not paying attention to.
At least we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that Alex Jones became a social pariah after spreading such horrible lies about the Sandy Hook families and no one takes him seriously anym—
It’s hard to stop the bullying. I’ve realized over the last 5 years or so, dwelling back on my middle/high school years in Venezuela, that me and my friends bullied a classmate. It wasn’t malicious in intent, but we were assholes to him without a doubt. It wasn’t as bad as the bullying you see here in the US but that doesn’t excuse what was done. Thankfully that person has gone on to have a loving family and good life but it is a memory that weighs on me.
I honestly couldn’t tell someone what the best way to avoid bullying is, or how to correct it. The best i can do is work every day on not being an asshole you’d figure i would know not to be one by now, but even the best intentioned people can be oblivious and/or cruel i suppose.
Whether the would-be mass shooter is a bullying victim, a mentally ill person, a narcissist seeking media attention or a straight-up psychopath the common denominator that makes them more likely to commit an act of mass murder in the U.S. than in any other developed country is “relatively easy access to dangerous firearms.”
We should obviously deal with the underlying causes that make people want to commit mass murder, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also deal with the problem that our would-be murderers are uniquely well equipped for the task.
I think this is interesting, because there was no one to see something/say something about Adam Lanza, the actual Sandy Hook shooter. His mother withdrew him from school and allowed his mental health issues to compound themselves unchecked in near total isolation. I suspect that she suffered from her own mental illnesses, which were also allowed to go unchecked. Our society is not equipped to deal with the issues happening in that house, from beginning to end. If someone had reported Adam Lanza, could he have been involuntarily, indefinitely institutionalized? Could the firearms have been removed from that house? Could his mother’s custody of Lanza be terminated?
That’s one of the things I don’t get from the Second Amendment enthusiasts who say the solution should have been to lock him up before the shooting. They think that depriving someone of their freedom before they commit any crime is A-OK, but depriving that same person of their firearms is a draconian violation of basic human rights.
Yeah, but that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Nancy Lanza was protecting Adam from a system she didn’t trust, but in so doing utterly failed to protect herself or the rest of us from Adam. And the upshot is that he murdered 27 people. How do we weigh the rights of an individual with mental illness against the rights and safety of the public at large?
That’s fine. I’m not advocating that or any other inhumane treatment. I’m asking what the heck can be done in a situation like Adam Lanza’s. We certainly don’t have a working healthcare system, nor do we have a path to one, and we have a society that is very fixated on certain aspects of individual freedom and self-determination, to the detriment of all else.
I don’t have an answer, and it feels as if the US society is stuck in a dead end without a clear way out. One cannot have absolute individual freedom and individual personal security/safety at the same time (though maybe I’m completely wrong, I was socialised in a country without analogues to your first and second amendment).
It’s easier to look at the big picture after the fact. But as others have said, you can lock someone up for a thought crime and take away their freedoms and rights. Unfortunately the issue is rather complex and there is no one single solution. I don’t think it’d solve anything locking people up the second someone thinks they might snap.
you’d figure i would know not to be one by now, but even the best intentioned people can be oblivious and/or cruel i suppose.