my sorrow to the conn school shootings

[AppleQueso]

I grew up in a pretty shady town, but High Schools in my area had metal detectors and armed officers at all times. The cop at my High School even had his own office. The doors were locked 24/7 and you had to buzz in to gain entrance to the building. It felt kinda weird I guess, but yeah, no one was walking in with a gun very easy.

We never had it go as far as metal detectors and locked doors, but our officer did have his own office.

[Jrecee]

At least two police officers in every school seems like it should be an absolute standard these days. Not just to limit shootings like this, but for other emergency situations. The ease of access to places that hold thousands of children is ridiculous.

Terrible, terrible people will continue to do terrible, terrible things with or without more gun regulations. Remember pipe bombs, 9/11, the anthrax scare, and the unibomber? You think these guys seek mental health care? Part of life, and a crappy part at that, is that crazy jerkwads exist and they'll continue to do jerkwady things.

So there shouldn't be any reaction? Yes the knee jerk easy solutions aren't the answer, but they are the start of a conversation we should be having. I don't accept that we should just say "well there's crazy people and they'll do crazy things, so why bother changing anything". We might not be able to anticipate and prevent every bad thing that occurs, but we should be trying to anticipate and prevent what we can.

[Luke]

So there shouldn't be any reaction?

That wasn't my point, and yes of course there should be reaction.

My point was people should treat this matter with respect and focus their energy on the families involved, not using this tragedy as a platform for their political views.

There are mothers, fathers, brothers, sister, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. who won't be able to see their kids open up their Christmas gifts from Santa. I believe keeping the focus on helping the families at this point is much more important than finger pointing. The "This would never had happened if..." talk irks me

[J T]

I don't accept that we should just say "well there's crazy people and they'll do crazy things, so why bother changing anything". We might not be able to anticipate and prevent every bad thing that occurs, but we should be trying to anticipate and prevent what we can.

The fact is that the field of psychology doesn't really understand what leads people to kill others. Actually, I want to clear up a few things in this thread.

1.) The word "insanity" is not used by psychologists other than in a legal/forensic context in which it is used specifically to mean that the person on trail had the mental faculties to understand the consequences of their actions at the time they were alledgedly committing the crime.

2.) Many people that commit murder do not have a mental disorder, at least not anything that is described in the DSM-IV.

3.) The majority of people with mental health problems are not a threat to other people. In fact, they often try to avoid other people and are more a threat to themselves (if anyone). Many mental health problems have isolation as a risk factor.

I always hate the after-effects of a major public bit of violence like this because all of the bias and prejudice that exists against mental illness flares up. Quite a lot of people have mental health problems. I'm sure you know someone in your family, a friend, a coworker, or yourself who has some sort of mental health problem. These aren't people that can just be lumped together as "crazies" or shoved into "insane asylums" so they don't bother society anymore.

School shootings are tragic and awful and disgusting. I agree. But they also occur incredibly infrequently when you account for the many ways people can die. I know we all get upset by the moral repugnance of these crimes, but as you try to come up with some solution, don't jump to something like "let's institutionalize all the crazy people" which plays to people's misunderstandings about mental illness and would have negative consequences for many many other people. Just because these cases of school shootings are high profile, does not mean they are the main thing we should be making drastic policy changes for. Take for example the number of shooting deaths vs number of homicides. Because the news focuses on homicide, it often surprises people to find out that there are usually twice as many deaths by suicide as there are by homicide. If we really care about saving human lives, we should invest more efforts into preventing suicide, which is actually something we already know we can change. And school shootings are a very rare type of homicide. One that occurs so infrequently, any attempt to predict another one happening is pure speculation. That's why whenever some school shooting happens we hear a million crackpot ideas about what led them to happen: marilyn manson, videogames, the presence or absence of gun laws, Twinkies, etc.

Of course we should still continue to try to understand why these school shootings happen, why there are serial killers, what pushes some people over the edge and into violence in a heated argument; and figuring out ways to prevent violent behavior. And forensic psychologists are busy trying to do that. But all of these ideas of indefinitely holding people in institutions, turning schools into a police state with armed law enforcement patrolling the halls, or arming every teacher with a colt-45 (seriously BoringSupreez? Seriously?!); these are ideas that have the potential for so many other negative consequences it's not even funny. I can practically guarantee they would all cause more problems than they would solve. I don't mean to put people down, I know when we see something awful like this we want to try to solve the problem immediately, but these proposed solutions are knee-jerk and not taking into account a clear understanding of what led to the violence, a certainty of whether the proposed solutions would even work, or a clear cost-benefit analysis of the proposed solutions.

Let's grieve, yes, but we're not going to solve the problem over night. If you're passionate about making a change that's great, and I hope people can figure out something, but the reality is that mass murders are one of the most difficult things to study in all of the field of psychology because they happen so infrequently compared to other problems (despite their high profile in the media) and they often look so different from each other that it becomes hard to reliably say why they happen or what could prevent them. I'm not saying give up, I'm just saying don't throw an "off the top of my head" solution to a complex problem.

[AppleQueso]

But all of these ideas of indefinitely holding people in institutions, turning schools into a police state with armed law enforcement patrolling the halls, or arming every teacher with a colt-45 (seriously BoringSupreez? Seriously?!); these are ideas that have the potential for so many other negative consequences it's not even funny. I can practically guarantee they would all cause more problems than they would solve.

I only mentioned it because we had a police officer on campus at my own school. Simply having an officer around for helping with situations involving violence, crimes, etc is hardly a police state I think. I brought it up because it's something already in place in a lot of areas, and I sorta feel that simply expanding it wouldn't necessarily cause any harm.

[Xeogred]

All my schools were the same as well. I definitely think expanding to two officers per school at least is a pretty good idea.

[ninjainspandex]

I went to highschool in a very affluent safe are and we had a sherriff in our school at all times, but maybe he had nothing else to do

[Luke]

I went to highschool in a very affluent safe are and we had a sherriff in our school at all times, but maybe he had nothing else to do

Your school system should have spent more money on their English teachers.

*shrugs* what?

[Forlorn Drifter]

I'm surprised so many of you had uniformed officers and metal detectors and the like at your schools.

I guess its because I go to a smaller country school, but I can't imagine that. We have a bad fight on occasion, but we've never had anything that third party students/faculty couldn't handle...


On the question of armed people being at the schools, I don't know about other states, but in Texas ONLY officers can have any kind of firearm on school property, and even then it is preferred that they don't.

[ninjainspandex]

I went to highschool in a very affluent safe are and we had a sherriff in our school at all times, but maybe he had nothing else to do

Your school system should have spent more money on their English teachers.

*shrugs* what?

Sorry i wrote that in the security line at the airport on my ipad, i hate using this thing without my bluetooth keyboard it always seems to not register all my keystrokes or it will cause me to doubletype a letter. >.>