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Thursday, September 14, 2006

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School Violence, the Solution is Vigilance

by Whymrhymer

A boy or man enters a school, pulls out a weapon and begins shooting. A too familiar scene that was again acted out at Dawson College in Montreal yesterday.

From the Associated Press:

"A young man in a black trench coat and a Mohawk haircut opened fire Wednesday at a Montreal college, slaying a woman and wounding at least 19 other people before police shot and killed him, witnesses and authorities said."

The search will begin immediately for the motive for this particular incident and the authorities and experts will, no doubt, find that this shooter matches the psychological profile of dozens of others who have committed similar acts in similar situations.

After the incident in Littleton, Colorado in April of 1999 where two students entered Columbine High School and started shooting, eventually killing 12 students and a teacher before turning their weapons on themselves, people around the world started to take a much closer look at this type of violence and at the motives of the perpetrators. In its wake there have been literally hundreds of theories and thousands of pages of statistics published analyzing every detail of every incident -- yet it happened again yesterday.

Statistics, tell very little of the actual story behind these types of events and theories on how to stop this insanity are abundant; the following are just a sampling of those put forth by the public and by the media:

Create more gun laws or outlaw guns altogether
Institute tighter school security
Punish the parents of the shooters as a warning to other parents
Allow school officials to carry guns
Institute more zero-tolerance policies toward violence and educate all parents and educators so they know the warning signs that often precede violent episodes.
Encourage students to report any suspicious or dangerous behaviors on the part of their schoolmates
Put stricter controls on the entertainment industry

All of these tactics, at different times in different locations, have already been implemented and each one has met with some success and, unfortunately, some failure; which would tend to suggest that a child with a violent agenda will, too often, be successful in spite of the strictest practical safeguards.

There are, I propose, four types of people:

Type 1: Those who will NEVER intentionally take a life; not even in self-defense.

Type 2: Those who feel it is justified to kill in self-defense, or in defense of a loved one, but who could never justify (to themselves) intentionally taking a life out of hatred, revenge or rage.

Type 3: Those who will kill out of hatred, revenge or rage and either claim that they could not control themselves or claim that the victim deserved it. Either rational indicates mental and/or emotional instability.

Type 4: Those very few truly insane who will kill for no apparent reason whatsoever (or any reason that presents itself) or because they enjoy having the power to do it.

If there is any validity to this "type casting," its clear that the children who have gone to school to kill their schoolmates fall soundly into type 3; they are, to different degrees, mentally or emotionally unstable.

We like to put a face on evil and blame the parents, the media or the NRA. There is a chance that this type of dangerous instability could be caused by any of these three influences or by some other external influence. There is also a chance that an emotional or psychological instability can have a genetic or physiological source.

Playing the 'blame game,' however, is an exercise in futility. The type of behavior that creates these situations starts in childhood and the only effective weapon is vigilance:

As parents, there are three effective measures that will prevent your child from becoming involved in this type of violent behavior:

Watch your child, listen to your child, talk to your child, control (as much as possible) what your child watches and/or listens to.
Setting rules is never enough! Rules are too easy to bend, break or just ignore; they must be enforced.
Research! Learn to recognize the difference between normal, childish behavior and dangerous, telling behavior. Then, if there even appears to be a problem, intervene -- do anything and everything you can to help your child through an emotional crisis.

News Links:

Lone Gunman Killed One Before Dying in Montreal School Shootout

FACTBOX-Recent shootings at schools or universities

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posted by Whymrhymer at 7:50 AM