How do you suppose we help would be school shooters?

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Say we can identify someone who might go of the rails or cause a shooting; how do you suppose the person could be helped before they get to that level?

Good question.

It seems like most of these Columbine type shooters were both:troubled for a long time prior to doing the shooting, and during the long period of being troubled their parents gifted them with guns, and encouraged their interest in fire arms.

So if you're a parent- it might help to not encourage depressed offspring to be interested in guns.

But beyond that its hard to say.

If outside authorities (school, social worker agency) learn of an individual at risk of becoming a school shooter (and sometimes there are warning signs) it would be nice if they could intervene. But you can only do so much. You cant arrest and detain someone for a crime they havent commited yet.

How would you identify a potential terrorist? How could one person observe hundreds of students and determine which ones are just quiet and contemplative and which ones are quietly plotting the deaths of teachers and fellow students?

Should we round up all of the unpopular white males and force then to undergo interrogation? Should we then take the word of the interrogators and lock up every one they deem as a potential threat?

It is not justice to put someone in prison just because they're unpopular, or because some fool seeking to make a name for himself picks a few kids at random and calls them "monsters".

It would take getting to know the thoughts and feelings of every student in every school, and to monitor every one of those thoughts and feelings on a daily (hourly?) basis.

White? All races have rampage shooters. For example, the Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho.

How about continuing services after folks become adults, which is typically defined as reaching the age of 18?

Seems to me that cutting off services to folks who really need them can send people who are already identified as mentally disturbed into a downward spiral.

Let's say we know because the person has told about their plan.

What next? I think to try to get them to focus on something else and to get a sense of purpose and a goal other than the one they set themselves.

Also people should continue to get support if they have a mental illness but I don't think everyone who does this is mentally ill. Even so they are troubled and have problems sI those things must be addressed.

It should be remembered that society is set up to benefit certain groups of people. It is not beneficial for everyone equally.

Agree. People still need help after 18. They don't suddenly get better and feel able to cope because they had their birthday.

No no. All these things I think would make the problem much worse. I really dislike how there seems to be the approach like this though. 'We should all become less trusting and place tighter controls' but no that's a terrible idea...

Make sure they're busy enough and afraid enough of not having a future so they can't afford the time to be either. Cheap and removes essentially any need for monitoring.

That kind of thing will cause more tragedies! We are not machines. We are not commodities, we are not consumers. We are human beings.

What can we do to help parents of disabled children before they head to the level of killing them?

It's great how we are showing sympathy for school shooters and wanting to help them before they get to that level but if anyone does that about parents of special needs kids especially with autism, it's frowned upon. Talk about a double standard.

I couldn't resist pointing this out.

I say one way of spotting a future school shooter is if they are always talking about violence and killing and have obsessions with murder and violence. I wouldn't even let these kids be around guns or introduce them to them and make sure there are no guns around.

People {usually NTs} believe in double standards because they use double standards to see themselves as better than everyone else. Even though people believe what they want to believe, double standards are just a part of what the media uses to exaggerate their stories to make believe people believe that such concepts like victimization are absolutely normal.

On another note, it's been rumored for some time now that the Thurston shooter was an Aspie because he didn't talk much, therefore he was called "a creep" by his classmates, along with being abused by his parents. However, it was more likely that he was slowly becoming schiziophernic.

I know it would be a giant pain in the ass, and I'm too old and cynical to believe that it's ever going to happen, but I've got an idea.

We could be a little more honest in teaching people the facts of life, instead of singing "Free to be You and Me" to little kids and then whacking them over the head with "Grow Up, Shut Up, and Conform" around the end of puberty.

And, if we think those facts of life are just too brutal to confront our beautiful little indigo rainbow children with, then maybe we could work on, I don't know, changing the facts of life a little bit.

Maybe just a LITTLE more tolerance, and a LITTLE less judgment and condemnation.

Maybe just a LITTLE more openness, and a LITTLE less pressure and paranoia.

Maybe just a LITTLE more listening and honest compassion.

Maybe just a LITTLE more not judging, harassing, and pressuring quirky (in all ways, not just ASD ways) teenagers to "fit in and be successful."

Maybe just a LITTLE more help and support and empathy and compassion for parents working with "alterna-kids", and a LITTLE less finger-wagging, clueless "advice," judgment, and blame.

Not that I know anything, or anything. I'm just a mom of an alphabet-soup lite kid. I'm just some broad who was probably school shooter material at 14, and wasn't any more at 18, and has spent two decades thinking about how she got from Point A (school shooter material) to Point B (not school shooter material, reasonably sane instead).

But I don't have any, like, lettered credentials or cool sound bites or anything. So I'm utterly ignorant.

How do you suppose we help would be school shooters?

By not turning them into spoiled-rotten BRATS!!

It seems like anytime we've heard anything about a mass-shooter's parents, the parents have done just that, to the kid that turns-out to be a mass-shooter----from the Columbine duo, to Adam Lanza, to this Chris Harper Mercer.

The Columbine duo: One of them (I can't remember which one) had rifles on his bureau, when the cops investigated----I got the idea that Mommy and Daddy spent more time looking for the next rung on the corporate ladder, than they did spending time with their kid; then, when they DID spend time with him, they gave him whatever he wanted, to make-up for the TIME, they weren't giving him.

Adam Lanza's and Chris Harper's mothers coddled them into narcissists, IMO. It seems they expected EVERYBODY to walk on eggshells around them, and if everybody wasn't saying "Awww, poor baby", every minute, it ticked-them-off----and / or, after Mommy did back-flips for them, they didn't understand why EVERYBODY didn't treat them like they were "special" (as in, the sweetest / smartest boy who ever lived, way).

I truly wonder whether these kids (at least, the last two) hadn't already figured-out that Mommy hadn't done them, any favors, and that THAT, ALONE, angered them enough, to go on a killing spree (maybe that's why Adam killed his mother). I mean, I totally understand being angry at the world, and wanting someone to pay (I'VE been there); but, I'm thinking their mother's coddling, encouraged / enabled / whatever their thinking (that the world owed them). I also feel that it's quite possible that that's why they had this "hero fantasy" thing----maybe, because that would be a way to MAKE people look at them / consider them / appreciate them / whatever, in the way their mother did.

This describes just about every fan of Star Wars, Iron Man, and just about every other action-adventure movie, comic book and TV show.Well, good luck with that one. One episode of Gunsmoke, Bonanza (old TV westerns), or Star Trek, and the kid would know exactly what a gun is and exactly what it is used for.

Have you ever heard of a "zip gun"? It's a one-shot urban assassin tool that is easy to make from parts found at any hardware store. Prohibiting the sale of firearms is not going to eliminate the threat entirely, because with a little research and effort, any kid could make one of his own.

Even if you eliminated the possibility of the kid making or having access to any kind of firearm, he would still have knives, explosives, and improvised garrotes to use as murder weapons. Rocks, bats, bottles and fists round out the arsenals that violent people have at their disposal.

Violent people will be violent, after all, and you can not make the world completely weapon-free.