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Columbine shooting (courtesy wikimedia.org)

At huffingtonpost.com, self-proclaimed School Safety Advocate, Educator and Writer Jonathan J. Doll, PhD offers readers A Framework for Understanding Lethal School Violence: Part 1. “It is critical to bear in mind that lethal school violence seldom occurs completely unannounced in a perpetrator’s life,” the good Doctor reminds us, “but rather often has a lengthy runway leading up to them — of weeks or even more than a year.” I’ve posted a list of his questions for schools looking to institute “behavioral intervention” after the jump. My question to you: what would be your list of questions for educational institutions who want to defend themselves against a school shooter? . . .

(1) For all schools — Does your school/district have in place a systematic program to make sure each student is connected to positive mentoring relationships with at least one adult?
(2) For larger schools, districts — Does your school/district have referral, bullying and other disengagement data disaggregated by date/time to allow analysis of trends and targeted prevention/training?
(3) For smaller schools, districts — Does your school/district have deeper knowledge of every student’s family/guardian situation and/or peer relationships as these relate to each student’s emotional state and the school’s awareness/sensitivity?
(4) For all schools — With students who engage in more serious offenses (larger than a single days’ referral/punishment), does your school utilize a strengths-based approach with students, or a similar program like restorative justice, to help correct deeper life issues in positive ways?
(5) For larger schools, districts — Have you mapped out what would happen from start to finish if a student exhibited moderately large, destructive behaviors and how you would help get them back on track? Is there a potential pathway back through reconciliation?
(6) For smaller schools, districts — With each student, are staff members routinely applying a strength-based approach to tap on gifts and creativity and potentially avert future problems?

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69 COMMENTS

  1. THERE.IS.NO .PREDICTING.WHO.WILL.COMMIT.MASS.MURDER.

    School administrators would be better served to focus on effective response, instead of ineffective prevention.

    • Thank you for using the correct terminology “Mass Murder.” “Mass Shooting”, is a media coined phrase that doesn’t mean anything and was specifically designed to give an anti-gun message. Anytime “mass shooting” is heard or read, the recipient of the information is left with a negative impression of firearms. (At least in those with little experience with guns or gun politics)

    • I disagree, all defense should be in layers.

      I am okay with the above listed measures, better to prevent a few than to have to respond to them all. The only issue is that schools always take zero tolerance stances because it is easier because they do not have to think about any situation. I would also add that they should have programs to monitor those with a history of mental illness or mental illness drugs.

      When all that fails, an effective response is necessary.

      You need both, not just one or another.

      That said, the more we ask schools to do, the less they are in the business of education and the more your taxes will rise for non-education purposes.

      Every time we try to figure out how to stop some idiot, the idiot finds another way around it.

      Ultimately everyone just needs to understand that these are 1:1mm cases and while we should change some things (entry into schools can be safer) at the end of the day, the risk is very low and you cannot stop everyone (See Germanwings disaster)

      • This.

        Anyone actually aware of the conditions a lot of students live under knows that our society is acting in ways that generate the sort of unhappy, neglected, kicked-around kids who will resort to shooting their peers. Many aspects of society may as well be designed to generate angry, alienated kids.

        The first line of defense has to be changing conditions so there are legitimate avenues for anger. It’s become PC to call it “acting out” and to punish it, but that’s counterproductive; it just makes kids hold the anger in until it becomes a major force inside — and some kids will just go with the “fvck it” attitude and go over the tipping point.

        So the questions in the post are good — they’re trying to defuse, which is always better than letting a bomb go off and then picking up the pieces.

        The bullying situation brings to mind an incident when I was in college where there was a high school right next door: a teacher came up with an intervention for the school’s worst bully. He invited the son of a missionary to China to check out classes at the school, when the missionary and family were back home for a bit. Inevitably, the bully decided to pick on the “new kid”. Unbeknownst to the bully, the missionary’s son had learned enough martial arts overseas to be close to a black belt at fifteen years of age. For several days the missionary’s son just endured the harassment, until the bully flat out said, “You’re gonna fight me or I’m going to pound you!”

        Short result: bully never managed to touch the missionary’s son. But he didn’t end up humiliated, because that son was also a missionary at heart. They ended up friends, just as the teacher had expected. As a result, the bully learned to stand up to a very dysfunctional father, thus gaining self-respect — and stopped being a bully.

        So while what we grew up calling “touchy-feely” programs are good, there has to be room for insightful creativity. Sometimes what a bully really needs is to be thrashed by someone who nevertheless treats him with respect and friendship.

  2. I found this article interesting and relevant: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a30024/mass-shooters-1014/

    Esquire generally takes a more anti-gun stance, so take this with a grain of salt. But this is still worth a read for someone trying to understand the mass shooter mentality.

    Posting armed guards at every school is difficult to implement for a variety of reasons, cost being the main one. I think the best solution is one that would cost nothing, i.e. stop making schools gun-free zones so the teachers that want to carry, can.

    • Or, gee, MANDATE teacher carry. Just like police carry, while they are shooting radar at speeders, they are carrying guns. While they are writing parking tickets, they are carrying. While teachers are teaching, they should be carrying. Simple change. Why has it not been done? What about the CHILDREN??!!

      • You really think mandated teacher carry will happen anytime soon? Teachers are often super liberal and anti-gun. They will fight tooth and nail against a carry requirement.

        It’s much better to start by removing the gun-free zone status and then eventually proceed to requiring carry, when the environment is more favorable.

        Baby steps. We win the battle for the 2nd Amendment by baby steps that can realistically be implemented.

      • No. Just no. NO ONE should be mandated to carry. Never. (Of course, if you apply for a job (LEO) where you are expected to, then yes, of course, you know that going in. But to tell someone that never signed up for that to now start carrying is simply not an option. Phased in approach? Maybe, but it’ll never happen.) I am 100% FOR allowing teachers who want to, to carry though.

        • Exactly.

          The freedom to do something entails the freedom to NOT do it — or it is not freedom.

    • Gee, clicked on the Huff’npuffPost link and all I got was a laughing skull and crossbones.

      Wonder what that means…oh wait.

      Gotta’ run…

      • It means your shields are down and your ships will soon come under attack by what remains of the worlds air forces. Also, Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith are about to shoot you in the face with a nuclear missile.

        • Ah yes…if the antis could only have their way with us…in their perfect utopian world we’d all be…a flash in the past.

    • Wasn’t hard for me. Every one of the 5 or so times I did went to HuffPo a few years ago, I kept hearing the article I was looking at being read inside my head by Arianna Huffy herself, in the world’s most annoying accent.

  3. Yes! School shootings can be prevented! They can be prevented if all guns are banned and that law is enforced with nazi fervor. Then everyone’s children would be safe from School shooters with guns (maybe not knives, scissors, pencils, or anything else). However, make no mistake, that as our children become adults they will suffer the decision we made for them (to be disarmed) and the government would be even more corrupt than it is now. After all, there are no school shootings in places like China or North Korea. Gun control really does work. But do we really want to be like China or North Korea?

      • Or gasoline attacks. Or fireworks with shrapnel in a pressure cooker…

        A pressure cooker fits nicely in a student’s backpack…

        Good thing school kids don’t use backpacks…

  4. I’m not taking the bait, Robert. I’m not clicking on it.

    The few times I’ve been tricked into reading an article on HuffPo, making any sense out of it made my hair hurt.

    That aside; Questions for schools? Here:

    What actions are you taking to lessen a potential shooter’s belief that targeting your institution would offer them a high probability of meeting their aims?

    I wish harm to no one, but I’d rather put up with occasional “suicide by school” gallows humor than hear about another successful madman. Not all homicidal psychopaths are stupid. When it becomes common knowledge that attacks at schools never succeed, they will become even more rare than they are now.

  5. Can some? Yes. Can all? Not a chance. There always seem to some signs along the way but its silly to expect people to connect the dots when they all have their own lives and jobs not specifically looking for the clues. Likewise there’s always the chance for some crazy to turn crazy out of the blue and leave no clues.

    • Personally I don’t even think it needs that must. Just someone in that troubled kid’s life that’s willing to listen or to do something if you’ve got a kid that’s showing signs of sickness. And even then it’s kind of a crap shoot if it will work.

      But at the end of the day who’s going to do anything about it? No one, that’s who. Not as long as there’s political capital to be gained when someone breaks.

    • “..There always seem to some signs along the way but its silly to expect people to connect the dots”

      It is so much easier to see all the dots that were connected AFTER whatever event occurs. Sandyhook shooter is a good example… lots of people were given a bunch of dots but no one knew what they meant individually (or even in small groups). It wasn’t until *after* he did what he did that anyone paid attention to all of the dots to connect them.

  6. Yes they can be prevented. But it requires parents (note the plural) who are actively involved in the child, a willingness to admit the child may have a mental illness. A school district willing to work with the family and youth. A willingness to hospitalize or detain the youth, by family and/or authorities. And a family that locks up their guns, if they have them (this does not preclude the youth from getting guns elsewhere.)

    So, I do think you can prevent school shootings from happening with the exception of gang related, and the media or the left really doesn’t care about those because it foils the narrative.

    • Parent involvement, on almost every level, has a positive effect. 4 out of 5 kids who are acting up in our after school program, can generally be directly trailed back home to a lousy parent/living situation. I have personally seen a family, poverty stricken, that is fully functional and both sons are functional members of society with jobs, no criminal record, and well liked. I mean so broke they lived in a very old, decaying mobile home with no power, a generator to run the pump and house when they needed it. But they had clean cloths, good personal hygiene, and were pleasant folks.

      I have seen the flip-side, lousy kid, nobody likes them. Mom/boyfriend fight a lot. even tho kid has latest and greatest i-device, they are still a spoiled shit with no real friends. You can’t replace good parenting skills with money.

      If the parents are worth involving, they are usually the best way to effect positive change in a youth, given you can provide a decent environment at home and at school/after school with the same standards enforced. Always be patient with kids, but never tolerant.

  7. If teachers cared about their students then they should choose to be trained and armed. Instead of a gun free zone, schools should become “If you try to hurt our students we will shoot you” zones. That would be a good start.

  8. My question to you: what would be your list of questions for educational institutions who want to defend themselves against a school shooter?

    I have only one question: Why do you allow your school to be a target for psychopaths, by allowing it to remain a so-called Gun Free Zone?

    Eliminate the Gun Free Zone designation, and you will eliminate mass/spree shootings at schools. Whatever minuscule chance remains that a school could still be targeted would be mitigated by having staff members who are willingly armed.

    On the other hand, allow the Gun Free Zone designation to remain for schools, and you have to ask all kinds of strategic and tactical questions, the answers to which make schools more and more like military institutions or prisons – and still won’t keep schoolchildren safe in an attack.

    • Chip, you are correct. Even if prevention reduced the numbers we will never reach zero. But remember, guns are evil and POTG must be shamed and shunned. How then could we ever get these idiots to admit that the average armed citizen is capable of defending our children instead of being a mass murderer in waiting?

      • Every employee armed, every day, without exception, and very quickly you will achieve that “zero” number. Shooters will decide to attack police stations first, cops put their guns away while eating their donuts, chances there are better. Attack a school and you die, before even getting inside.

  9. Ok. Here’s my list of questions:
    .
    1. Administrators: Do you have a comprehensive plan to actively counter an “active shooter”?
    2. Administrators: Have you coordinated your plan with local law enforcement agencies and
    ……emergency response agencies (Ambulance, Fire & Rescue, SWAT, etc.)?
    3. Administrators: Have you encouraged your teachers & staff to obtain & carry a pistol at all times.”
    4. Administrators: Have you encouraged you legislative representatives to introduce and pass laws
    .. .. that permit concealed carry on campus by licensed CHL holders?
    5..Administrators: Do you inform parents that CC with a permit is not only acceptable but encouraged
    ……at your school?
    6. Administrators: Have you posted signs at all entrances to your school announcing that school
    ……personal are armed & authorized to use deadly force?
    7. Administrators: Have you insured that ALL staff that carry firearms train regularly TOGETHER
    ……for an “active shooter” scenario?
    8..Administrators: Does the District assist in funding training for ALL staff!?
    9. Staff: Do you own a concealable handgun?
    10. Staff: Do you have or have you applied for a CHL?.
    11. Staff: Do you meet together with other CHL holders to discuss issues of Action and Safety?
    12. Staff: Do you drill REGULARLY?
    .
    Well that’s my 2¢ worth.
    I’m sure someone with more brains & more knowledge can add zillions to it.
    .
    When defending against an active shooter: SHOOT.
    The time for phycology is long past!

  10. They can be. Just because we haven’t found the way to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Maybe the above responses are part of the way to do it, maybe they aren’t. But there’s a way to prevent anything – including school shootings.

  11. Why does no one ever seem to associate these mass murders with the medications they are taking.
    Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors or serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors[1] (SSRIs) are a class of compounds typically used as antidepressants in the treatment of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders.
    These powerful psychoactive drugs are being dealt out like candy to young kids with no understanding of the long term effects. It seems to me that this link is being ignored.

    • I agree that SSRI’s are bad news, but correlation does not equal causation. Kids are on SSRI’s because they are being treated for one issue or another, not just because doctors get a stiffy every time they scratch out a scrip. The fact of the matter is psychology is largely voodoo science and the schools of thought on it vary greatly. Additionally, one doctor will write a scrip to every 7 year old with an attention problem (newsflash, kids hate paying attention to anything but fun stuff) while another will work to help the child focus his/her energy without drugs. There is no standard, and the effects of treatment is notoriously difficult to quantify.

      You said yourself: These powerful psychoactive drugs are being dealt out like candy to young kids…

      There are millions upon millions of Americans who have been prescribed SSRI’s at some point or another, I’d be curious to see the numbers that show that medicated kids have a higher-rate of murderers than non-medicated kids. Mass murder isn’t a new thing and SSRI’S aren’t the cause of it.

    • You should not punish someone for taking prescription drugs which they need, in order to function. When they arrive at a school or elsewhere and present a weapon, you should shoot them dead, but not a moment before. Pretending to remove a threat which does not exist, or which exists in only 0.000001% of the people being considered, is the absolute antithesis of freedom. The ACTUAL threat, the guy who shows up, at a school for example, with a gun and intent to use it, shoot him 463 times with 12 different calibers, who cares? But he took a medication? He took illegal drugs? He jaywalked? Get serious! None of those things demonstrate a threat. Shoot the threat.

  12. If they can get you asking the wrong questions then the answers don’t matter – Thomas Pynchon. I believe the real question is, “Why do public schools exist in the first place? And why do we subject our children to them? Private schools or Home school is a much better alternative.

    • Home schooling has almost zero quality control. The only situation where it is dependably better than public school is where these are in effect:

      1. Home-school parents are allowed to cooperate, pooling resources and teaching kids together.
      2. Home-school parents can make use of resource people to teach things in which they aren’t competent.
      3. Home-schooled kids can make use of public school science facilities unavailable at home.

      Too many home-school laws mandate that the kids can’t turn out any better educated than their parents. That’s a recipe for crappy education, since no parent can be sufficiently knowledgeable in everything to do even a fair job.

  13. I imagine someone can prevent some spree killers from attacking schools. And I am also confident that other spree killers will “fall through the cracks” and attack schools anyway.

    The much more important question is: what is the most effective use of limited resources to minimize the number of casualties of would be spree killers?

    The amount of man-hours required to have a real-time handle on every student’s mental-health status and likelihood of attack is astronomical. And what about tracking the mental-health status of the general populous who are every bit as capable of attacking a school? How much would that cost? Answer: there isn’t enough money in the world. Thus it is impossible to prevent all spree killers from attacking.

    I believe the most effective approach is twofold:
    (1) Educate students and parents about the warning signs of would-be spree killers and provide a framework for rapid response to reports of potential spree killers.
    (2) Have responsible armed parents, volunteers, and staff at schools who can immediately respond to spree killers regardless of any other measures that are available and failed.

    What is so hard about this?

    • Keeping track of every student’s mental (and other) well-being is only impossible because we have schools that are too large. Big schools become like factories, where no teacher knows more than one or two kids well enough to see problems.

      Build more, smaller schools, and things get better naturally.

      Preferably, that would include a LOT of private schools, funded by churches, unions, chambers of commerce, local corporations, the NRA, universities with teaching programs . . . .

  14. I heard Lt. Col. Dave Grossman speak recently, and he made a very convincing case that the problem is too many people denying the need for clear and obvious (“common sense”, as the antis would put it) security measures that would drastically decrease school shootings. Zero kids in the past fifty years have been killed by school fires, he says, and that’s because we construct our schools with layer upon layer of fire safety measures. But we won’t do the same thing from a security standpoint.

    His “Five Ds”:
    1. Denial – The enemy, with no survival value.
    2. Deter – Mass school shooters (excepting hardened terrorists, e.g. Beslan) typically fear failure more than death; they often put the weapons down or shoot themselves as soon as effective resistance appears. Training and arming volunteer teachers, and/or having armed security present at a school makes the probablility of a mass murder near zero.
    3. Detect – Monitor potential problems and respond appropriately. We’re starting to do a more credible job of this – investigating threats (online postings, writings, etc.) and responding to them. Taking mental health seriously in this country is where this needs to go next.
    4. Delay – Make schools harder targets. Simple things like locking the back doors so there’s only one way to enter a school and having school rooms that can be securely locked down instead of being fishbowls. (And practice lockdown drills with teachers.)
    5. Destroy – He names a lot of things under this, but it comes down to making sure any responding police officer has the ability and equipment to be able to engage an attacker appropriately. I’m not in favor of further police militarization, but I’d much rather face a rifle-toting bad guy with a rifle of my own instead of a pistol, for example.

    http://www.policeone.com/school-violence/articles/2058168-Active-shooters-in-schools-The-enemy-is-denial/

  15. Can any crime be 100% prevented? No. Crime can only be deterred, not prevented. No matter how careful we are, no matter how thoroughly we plan, somewhere someone is going to break the law and do something he ought not to. Crime, like every other problem in modern civilization (poverty, disease, etc) will always be with us. The best we can do is make it more difficult to succeed at crime.

  16. While you cannot predict when, where, or why these events may occur you most certainly can mitigate the efficacy of these evil attempts at innocent life by giving those targeted a fighting chance. “Gun Free Safe Zones” have to go. Unless there are metal detectors, bullet proof glass/doors and armed guard stations, we must not remove the 2nd amendment rights of college-educated educators.

  17. “Can school shootings be prevented?”

    Maybe not, but school shooters can be terminated. Mall shooters, too.

    But not in a gun-free zone…

  18. Some can be prevented. Others likely cannot. Even though you can always pick out ‘signs’ in these killers after the fact, it’s useless unless you can use that information in a predictive manner. But the same signs people point to may exist in many, MANY pubescent kids in modern society, making it nearly worthless.

    I’ll tell you how not to stop them… use a bunch of expensive buzzterms like “strength-based approach” to construct an intelligent-sounding but basically meaningless plan.

    • Kinda like how “community based policing” from Congress turned into militarizing hundreds of local police departments.

  19. I am reminded of a TTAK article on a related subject. Our world just had a mass death by plane crash where the evidence points towards one of the pilots crashed the plane on purpose.

    http://www.thetruthaboutknives.com/2015/03/quote-of-the-day-unfriendly-skies-edition/#more-16657

    The safety features designed to prevent a mid-air take over ala 9/11 helped to make this disaster happened.

    Most of your suggestions in this article deal w/ students as the would be perps. Suppose those who are charged w/ protecting are children are the predators. Suppose a security guard, teacher, administrator, cop, or just someone from outside the school decided to cause mayhem?

    There is no way to prepare for every possible contingency and increasingly that seems like what we are up against.

  20. Sure it could be prevented, but at what cost? Face it, we as a people always try to do everything as little and cheap as possible to get the job done, even when it won’t get the job done. Mental health is an example. Mental health is a money pit though, that’s why they try gun control, because it’s cheap. School safety is another example. Sure they could make schools safe, but the unfortunate fact, dead kids are cheaper. You could take every gun off the planet and people could still march into a school and slaughter children.

    I live close to an elementary school. Across the street is a large church yard where I take my dogs. Occasionally I am in the church yard while children are in the school yard. It occurred to me one day that there wasn’t a damn thing preventing some whack job from pulling up and causing a huge tragedy in that school yard. That realization sent chills down my spine. It was one of those moments of clarity, like really getting in touch with ones mortality. It was a scary thought imagining the unimaginable. Could it be prevented? Well sure, but at what cost? That chances of the unimaginable happening right there at a school I went to 45 years ago is ridiculously small. So it’s a risk vs cost equation.

    Everything in our society is dictated by two things; the style or the price. We will not do what we have to do to protect the children because dead kids are cheaper than securing schools is. Unless you are filthy rich, or the tax payers are paying for protection, our kids are vulnerable and NOTHING is going to change that because we are cheap fuks, plain and simple.

  21. Prevented? No! Damage caused reduced? Yes!
    The anti gunners always say how ccw doesn’t stop mass murderers. Well thats because in many instances the ccw permit holder stopped the bad guy before it reached the definition of a mass shooting.

  22. Not prevented. Not all of them. Some can be, though, if people are savvy with recognizing signs and not in denial about them.

  23. Well a good first step is to have armed guards. Malls have them, banks have them, many corporations have them. Yet here we are with some schools having thousands of students and what do we give our security guys…hand held radios. What are they supposed to do use profanity?

    Oh just about any private school has armed guards. I guess the peons of America are not worthy of that.

    Better yet they want it to happen to use dead children as there battle cry to ban weapons.

  24. The perfessor is either angling for some federal money, out in far left la-la land, or he’s a candidate for one of those big brotherish mentoring programs.

    Teachers in CA are upside down just trying to understand Common Core. 75% of new teachers fail the math tests, and even those who pass, are thru the one year probationary period that is too short for administrators to identify, and weed out the bad eggs, even if the principals follow mandated reporting and counseling rules per union set point practices. CA students score 4th from the BOTTOM in the 50 US states in math, and good teachers eligible to retire are leaving in droves to teach at private schools.

    The idea that public schools have the ability, time, and money to do something like this is ludicrous. More naval gazing from academics with no grounding in reality…

  25. We would never think of packing people into a sports stadium, the halls of Congress, or even an airplane in today’s climate without armed protection. Yet, everyday parents send their children off to schools where they are packed shoulder to shoulder in classrooms and in most cases without any armed protection.
    The reasons for school shootings vary from revenge, to a need for attention, to suicide. The common factor, however, is that these “gun-free” zones are an open invitation to anyone wanting to take as many casualties as possible before being taken themselves. Even when the police tactical units do respond as at Columbine and Sandy Hook, there is always a significant delay before entry as they evaluate and plan for entry. These delays in entry and intervention provide the shooter with the time to inflict yet more casualties.
    I truly believe that we owe out children the protection they deserve while in school by providing insight armed protection. While this may not prevent all school shootings, it would certainly help to discorage them. More importantly, if shootings begin, there is an immediate armed precense to intervene and to reduce the casualties that can increase waiting for outside response and entry.
    It should be obvious to anyone that the gun free concept is no longer effective in our schools and in fact is an open invitation to shooters. If paying for armed police precense in our schools is a funding issue, maybe we need to look at other options such as arming teachers or trained armed volunteers.

    • Average number of victims killed in an active shooter event is 3. Average number wounded is 3.6.

      A spree killer can rack up those small stats in virtually any public venue, with or without gun free zone designation. With a death wish spree killer, his element of surprise matters far more than your forceful retaliation.

  26. It’s quite simple.

    Ban Schools. This categorically eliminates the possibility of “school shootings.”

    It’s for the children.

  27. If you aren’t identifying the crazies in advance and preemptively removing them from society, then you are doing nothing net to address the problem. All you’re doing is shuffling it around.

    Harden the schools and arm the teachers! The crazies will adapt and attack instead during arrivals and departures. Or they’ll set the building on fire. Or they’ll attack when there’s only one or two teachers around, as on a field trip, targeting those least likely to be carrying. Or they’ll shoot up their own school bus, starting with the driver, as the kids have nowhere to run. Or they’ll shoot up a mall or festival or park or whatever.

    Google “police station shooting” and see just how many hits you get. It’s scary, and puts the lie to the idea that more guns will deter someone who has no expectation of surviving, anyway.

    You’re just relocating the problem, at best, if you don’t take out the crazies in advance.

  28. I bet if the good Dr. made a prediction on individual(s), he would be wrong 100 out of 100 times. The fact is, these are rare events in the big picture.

  29. Obviously school shootings can be prevented. Simply ban and eliminate all schools and there will be no place for school shootings to take place.

  30. Reading this guy makes my head hurt. This means he most likely has his Ph.D. in Education. People with those degrees are the bottom feeders of higher ed. But, I digress . . .

    While you can’t prevent school shootings any more than you can prevent shootings in other parts of society, you can preempt school shootings. All the bureaucratic protocols in the world, all the anti-bullying observances (most of which never work anyway) are a weak substitute for having trained, armed teachers in every school. I’m also fully in support of allowing concealed weapons on college campuses.

    The only real antidote for for a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Period. End of argument.

  31. Actually, yeah. Get rid of these useless, GIANT, federally funded brain-washing institutions.
    Why do we tolerate the institutionalization of our children? Schools should be LOCAL only, and by local, I mean the neighborhood, literally just the neighborhood, not a 14 square mile region of “diverse” people. Education of the children is the responsibility of the parents and until parents reclaim that responsibility, these things will only get worse.

  32. I do believe these steps could help, but what if said shooter never sought help? Did the Columbine shooters ever attempt to reach out to any one for help? What about Adam Lanza, who had been given medical attention, but it was rejected by him and his mother?

  33. When school shootings become difficult, killers will just buy drones, pack them with some C4, and crash them into schools.

    Technology is making it easier and easier to be destructive. Government can’t possibly keep up. It is, therefore, up to alert citizens to do what they can.

  34. I was bullied in some of middle school, and most of high school. Why? Who knows… I didn’t do anything wrong to anyone, except for point out that they weren’t 21 when they came into the grocery store I worked at with their fake ID’s to buy booze… I could have cared less if they drank it (I did too), but shit, don’t come where I work and expect me to knowingly sell it to you!

    But that’s beside the point – while the schools may care about bullying and try to intervene, ‘snitching’ on those who bully, only leads to more bullying… so most are smart enough to not report it, not tell anyone, and it builds up. I had windows busted on my truck, stuff stolen from my truck, my truck egged, one attempted fight at school (I kept backing up long enough for security to get involved before a punch was thrown), name calling and more… seeking ‘counselors’ didn’t help… not one bit. Maybe some schools are different, but a bully doesn’t change his tune overnight, and bullies tend to hang together. Parents trying to get involved, yeah, makes it even worse.

    Want to solve a bullying problem at school, start treating it with zero tolerance like they are with gun-shaped toaster pastries – suspension or expulsion for a first offense.

    • When I was in high school, the letterman’s club tended to deal with bullies. It wasn’t really out of compassion or chivalry or such, more an attitude that being physically superior required earning it, so in a way it was a matter of protecting a monopoly. It didn’t eliminate bullying, but it kept it in bounds, partly because everyone knew that all you had to do to not get bullied at all any longer was join up for a sport — no matter how lousy, athletes were off limits, period.

      Our wrestling coach several times actually sought out bullies and got them on the team, which generally cured them somehow. Once it turned out the kid was a bully because his dad was, which was handled in a way no one would permit today: the kid showed up at wrestling practice with bruises, the coach learned from another wrestler that the dad had inflicted them, and the coach paid a visit to the dad. I have no clue what transpired, but the dad never beat his kid again and by the end of that season the kid wasn’t bullying anyone any longer.

      Then there was the phys ed teacher, who’d been in special forces, who if he caught anyone bullying someone brought out the boxing gloves…. the victim got to choose a “champion”.

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