<p>Good grief, physicsfreak.</p>
<p>fluffy, saying “there is danger everywhere” is NOT the point. Any of us could go to any other developed country and be a lot less likely to die from gun violence. It’s TWENTY TIMES higher here than anywhere else.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/17/lisa-bloom/americans-are-20-times-likely-die-gun-violence-cit/”>http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/17/lisa-bloom/americans-are-20-times-likely-die-gun-violence-cit/</a></p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/14/schoo-shooting-how-do-u-s-gun-homicides-compare-with-the-rest-of-the-world/”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/14/schoo-shooting-how-do-u-s-gun-homicides-compare-with-the-rest-of-the-world/</a></p>
<p>I think right now…the public is overwhelmed with the mass shootings and is more aware of them. Everyone is highly sensitive to anything gun related. To physicsfreak, I don’t mean to pick on your post, but my college had two back to back occurrences with people bring guns on campus (or hiding out on campus with a gun) just eight months ago and there wasn’t the reaction there is now. Just eight months ago, the reaction was “Why is there a guy with a gun on campus?” or “Sweet, my class is canceled.” or “Are we still getting a late lunch?”. </p>
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<p>Absolutely.
That suicidal kid needs to closely watched and removed from things that they can hurt themselves with.</p>
<p>Lock up the guns.
Lock up the medicine cabinet.
Lock up the car keys.
Lock up the knives and other sharp objects. Make sure all windows are tempered glass so hard to break and use the glass shards.
Lock up ropes, belts, and other things they can strangle themselves with.
Lock all the second floor or higher windows.</p>
<p>Half of suicides are via gun and 60% of gun deaths are suicide.</p>
<p>Funny (sad?) thing is you can go to places like El Salvador and find guards at a bunch of places - not schools there - and you can find guards at various places in a number of countries … all of which people in the US look down on as violent and uncivilized. I doubt we’ll look in the mirror.</p>
<p>From the perspective of a teenager, it’s hard to feel numb about something that seems like a natural occurrence inside schools. Suicide, Gang Violence, Murder, and Shootings are now commonplace things that dominate the headlines. You know that tragedy will strike your school or someone /in/ your school at some point throughout the year and it’s something you accept. You just wait for the day that it happens. You never know who the kid sitting next to you in class really is, and to be honest, you don’t care.</p>
<p>It’s a strange combination where it’s uncommon enough that you aren’t worried, yet frequent enough that you aren’t surprised.</p>
<p>A student at my school did in fact kill someone this year. </p>
<p>@lergnom Funny thing is that El Salvador has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than the U.S. That sounds pretty violent to me, relatively speaking. So I have no idea what your point is.</p>
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Yes, I agree with you TheAtlantic. Earlier today I was thinking about the shootings and what I would do in that situation, and it dawned on me that I didn’t think “If a shooting occurs…” it was “When a shooting occurs…”</p>
<p>fluffy - you seem to be falling back to that old “lock up everything” trope to mock me (forgive me if you are not being sarcastic). It remains a fact that hunter safety classes do not keep disturbed kids with access to guns from taking those guns and using them against others and/or themselves if they decide to do that. This kid had a rifle or shotgun (I have seen both terms used). It was likely one kept at home for hunting or possibly even his own. Educating kids how to properly use firearms in sanctioned settings doesn’t make them safer in unsanctioned settings where their intent is to kill. I will take my chances around a disturbed teen in a second floor bedroom over that same teen with a shotgun any day of the week. </p>
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<p>I am confused by this post. Most suicides are by adults, not kids. Agree that guns are a huge factor – my adult brother committed suicide with a gun. But this seems again like… deflection from the discussion at hand about gun violence in public places.</p>
<p>I personally think we only ought to let women own and handle guns. Almost none of these mass shootings in the past few years in our school, malls, movie theaters, or other public places have been carried out by women. And if they are really needed for “protection” – well, who is the victim of most assaults? That would be women…</p>
<p>@saintfan Sorry. I did not mean that in a mocking way.<br>
Half of suicides are from guns.<br>
If you have someone suicidal, you shouldn’t lock up your gun, you should remove your gun from the house.
You should also take plenty of other measures…the most important is dealing with the underlying issue.</p>
<p>Which is a good metaphor for this whole violence thing.
We can all get hot and bothered that people use guns to kill people by focusing on the method (the gun) not the underlying issue (why the heck are people placing no value on life, shooting, stabbing 12 year olds for slenderman, setting fire to a house filled with people, killing 6 people with a baseball bat over an XBOX, and so on?).</p>
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<p>I was responding to the post above mine which mentioned locking up a gun in the house if you have a suicidal kid.</p>
<p>Well, most of them are or were on some kind of psychotropic medication. They’re still crazy. </p>
<p>Have any of you guys seen the picture of the pile of backpacks from when the children were fleeing from the Oregon shooter? Chilling. Puts you in the moment. </p>
<p>For those of us who work in schools, it’s not just a theoretical risk, even if that risk is statistically small. But if I don’t notice the guy on the sidewalk, or get the stopbar dropped fast enough, or herd the class into the office soon enough, someone can die if I guess wrong. We think about it every time we see a car we don’t know. When an angry parent storms out to the car. Our emergency prep classes tell us we have 5 seconds. We are not preoccupied or paranoid, but we are trying to be prepared in a country that KEEPS saying the same thing:</p>
<p>We never thought it would happen here.</p>
<p>Every complicated problem has symptoms. You can treat the symptoms, you can research the cause. We are choosing to do neither when we could be doing both.</p>
<p>The victim has been identified. He was a freshman. A good kid. So sad.</p>
<p><a href=“Oregon high school shooting: Victim identified as Reynolds High freshman Emilio Hoffman - oregonlive.com”>Oregon high school shooting: Victim identified as Reynolds High freshman Emilio Hoffman - oregonlive.com;
<p>I remember my D’s sophomore or junior year of high school. She called me over to her computer one night, and she was very upset. She’d been texting with a not-close friend. She asked me to read the whole conversation and it gave me chills. The boy sounded very angry and was telling her he had a list of people at school, students and teachers, who were mean to him, and he was going to kill them all. He said he had chosen the day and was all prepared. I could read my D saying to him, "You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding ". </p>
<p>The next day I went the police with my daughter. I gave them an overview of what happened then turned it over to my D. The police asked her if perhaps she misunderstood him, and could he have been joking. She said, well you can decide for yourself. And she gave the officer a print out of the conversation. They got very, very serious after they read it. </p>
<p>The next morning, first thing, I called the principal and told her what we’d done. But apparently she already knew, so I guess the police had already reached her. I told her that normally I wouldn’t tell her how to conduct her job, but this was my D’s life. I told her I wanted the boy watched, I wanted every single one of his friends watched, I wanted all the teachers told. If any of those kids gave my D any problems, I wanted it taken care of, period. </p>
<p>The boy did not show up at school that day. The principal called me and (probably against the law) she told me he had been hospitalized that morning. The police found guns under the bed.
He was released some time later, and my D told me the first thing he did was come up to her and tell her that getting help was the best thing that ever happened to him. </p>
<p>Every month or so that incident pops into my head, and while it was never made public and no one knows officially, I say a prayer to thank God because I am convinced my D saved lives by what she did. </p>
<p>I know this is a long post, but for anyone who has made it this far: I posted this to make the point that you can’t solve all the underlying mental problems for these kids or adults. You can’t make them - presto chango - all better. But you can take a lot of steps to keep them away from guns. We’re not even trying. </p>
<p>Actually you should lock them no matter what kind of kid you have because you likely won’t know your kid is suicidal until it’s too late. </p>
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<p>Only with guns do people say we need to fix the underlying issues first, which is basically a recipe for never doing anything. Sure, let’s fix all our mental health issues first–like THAT would be easy!</p>
<p>We don’t make this argument with anything else. There are ALWAYS “underlying issues,” but nobody says we have to solve addiction before we make all kinds of laws about drunk driving and the safe operation of motor vehicles. Most laws deal with the method. And there’s not reason why we can’t work on both at the same time.</p>
<p>Other countries have similar underlying issues, but our gun violence numbers are much higher. How do you explain that?</p>
<p>Do they have similar underlying issues? I don’t know. It’s a question. Does anyone actually know? It seems to me we medicate an awful lots of kids these days.</p>