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Open Question: School Shootings Are Now Commonplace In The Culture - Why?
Ask the collective
I was talking to the soldier…
“Remember that girl, it was 1979 and she shot at those kids in the playground across the street from her house? They wrote a song about her, I don’t like Mondays,” I said.
“Yeah, that was the Boomtown Rats, wasn’t it?”
“Right. Well I vividly recall when that happened. It was astonishing. People were flabbergasted. We were shocked and horrified and she was the first, I think. Do you recall a kid shooting up a school prior to that?”
“No I think she was the first and she’s been copied since. Copy cats.”
“Yeah, well she was a pure sociopath,” I said. “Brenda Ann.” I read him her quotes after the slaughter. But what strikes me is that this is now commonplace now. Kids shoot up schools - Period. You hear about it and we are used to it now. We just accept this as a culture. We know that some percentage of children are going to be killed at school by other children and at some point we as a culture are going to have to stop and take a look at why this is and what has gone wrong.”
Updates on Brenda Ann Spencer over the years
I think this is Pluto in Capricorn topic but what do you think? What is the root of this problem? What has changed that would allow us to go from no school shootings ever to seeing this occur on a routine basis?
11 Responses to “Open Question: School Shootings Are Now Commonplace In The Culture - Why?”
I don’t think these kids have learned how to cope. Seriously, kids who know how to manage their anger, who feel safe within their circle of select adults, who feel validated and listened to, don’t shoot up schools.
It’s the ones who aren’t taken seriously, who are abused, ridiculed or otherwise broken, who can find no other way to express themselves than ‘I’ll make them pay’ or ‘at least I’ll take some of them with me’ or ‘at least I’ll die famous’, who turn towards violence as the last resort.
I think what’s really sad is that we HAVE become acclimated to this tragedy. One of those, no matter how well I prepare my kids for life, someone else’s kid could murder them in a fit of rage.
What can we do?
“What can we do?”
Daeshii - Start talking about it for one thing. Acknowledging this is going on, it’s real, it is NOT normal and we are doing something very, very wrong somewhere.
funny the first one was a girl (so far. i wouldn’t be surprised if there were others who didn’t get recorded so clearly. and there was charlie starkweather but he wasn’t a student at the university, was he?)
when colombine happened, i was surprised it had taken so long. i don’t know what that says.
my father told me a couple years back that all of the school shooters had been on ritalin at some point. i don’t know how accurate that is at this point.
i think, above all else, it’s a sign we need to take mental health issues seriously.
and take bullying a whole lot more seriously.
i’m not sure what can be done about that, though. make schools smaller? lower student/teacher ratios?
besides. sociopaths have been around a looooong time.
but wyrdling - have the rates of mental illness increased in this time frame? Probably not. More often diagnosed but I am not sure this explains the turn here.
School shootings are the Western world’s version of suicide bombers.
Brenda Spencer the first “kid” to kill at school was Jan. 29, 1979.
The first modern suicide bombing occurred in Iran in 1980.
So, we have young people around the world who are willing to kill and die to be “right” and to “win” at all and any costs. They don’t snap, it’s well planned out.
I’m going to play the anomie card here. Prior to the 60s, we had America the Beautiful to believe in - the government was the unquestioned and benevolent authority, and as a nation we believed we were protected and morally correct in everything we did. We were the good guys in the white hats. Then came Viet Nam and Nixon, and the America concept we had lived with and under was shattered. A school kid in 1979 would have been one of the first generation to grow up in the chaos and embattlement with no cohesive society to believe in and be a part of. It hasn’t really gotten any better, and since we’ve become such a hyperconsumerist country, all there is to believe in now is the power of the dollar. Throw that empty values system in with the mix of hormones and Ritalin that constitutes an adolescent nowadays, and it’s a deadly concoction.
semiautomatic guns widely available.
most of the population attends high school (rather than “liberated” into a less structured working world. usually with a touch more choice in how one spends their time.)
greater and greater population density. (rates stay the same, but greater population means more seriously ill people.)
more alienation from human contact (seriously, people spend less time with other people.)
and i think there’s something in the water. or the medications. these things weren’t tested on developing adolescent brains. but they’re being handed out like candy. i remember they were even when i was a little girl.
but there’ve been sociopaths all the time. school just make better pressure cookers and targets nowadays. and people are less likely to drop out fif they can’t stand them than they were 50 years ago.
for a really unpleasant list of historical murders, there’s stuff like this: http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/history/index.html
i’m sure google has more. turns my stomach.
I honestly think though that it is a combination of environment and biology. I was teased, taunted, etc. had an abusive childhood and never once thought of guns,or violence as a way to deal with it, not towards others. Some people deal with it outwardly and some inwardly, and neither are right or wrong, they just are. These kids aren’t taught how to cope, I agree, but I also agree that it needs to be talked about and discussed so that they realize it isn’t a way out or a way to correct things. I have a lot of anger stemming from my childhood and the rest of my life but I don’t hurt others because of it, and I think a lot of that has to do with biology. It’s a great subject to talk about, but will we ever know what causes these things in the world?
I thought school shootings would be more Aries. But if you think deeper, Capricorn represents society’s “systems”, which includes the dark side of the school system, so yeah it makes sense.
Anyways, I think some kids are horribly teased at that age. To be honest, I don’t think the teenagers are the most transcendent (if that’s a word)and wise at that age. Also, are culture doesn’t really teach us to deal with our emotions. It only teaches us about sex and violence. It’s the only thing our pop culture is all about sadly.
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All I can think of is how horrible it is that they made a song out of that for profit. It seems so callous.