Kendrick Castillo is the name of the student who was murdered. He was interested in technology. His photo shows a happy smiling young man who was loved by his family and friend’s.
I don’t think we should make speculations/listen to gossip about the suspects mental state, religious background, or whether they were transgender before actual statements from the police. There have been shootings where people said the shooter was muslim, black, etc. and they ended up being white. Making assumptions is never healthy even if they end up being true. Also I’d just like to say that the “all shooters have mental illness” trope is so disgusting and frankly just wrong. People with mental illnesses are far more likely to be the victims of violent acts, not the perpetrators. Yes, some shooters will have mental illness but not all and it isn’t fair to people with mental illness who are not violent (the vast majority) to assume that school shooting = mental illness or mental illness = violent. Also I recognize that mental illness is a huge problem (mostly because it’s awful to deal with and hard to get insurance coverage), so if you want to blame shootings on mental illness could you at least back up your position and advocate for better mental health treatment?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180509-is-there-a-link-between-mass-shooting-and-mental-illness
this bbc article is particularly interesting if you want to read more about mental illness and shootings
The victim was a hero, and there were other heroes as well (per Today show interview, which confirms something I had heard locally).
I see your point. Do you think it’s semantics?
That is, using the term mental illness for a wide range of dx — from depression, anxiety, bipolar, psychosis. etc?
Perhaps using mental illness broadly means “treatable” and “not the normal mental state”???
@Seina19, thank you for your post. I’m on the Board of Directors of NAMI Maine, and we keep trying to get out the message that mentally ill people are much more often victims than perpetrators. My son has a serious mental illness and is about the most gentle soul imaginable.
@Siena19 I completely agree that our country need to throw a lot more resources towards mental illness. However to say that
““all shooters have mental illness” trope is so disgusting and frankly just wrong”
doesn’t strike me as accurate. Completely sane, mentally healthy people don’t commit school shootings.
I would love, for once, to hear someone claiming the protection of the second amendment, cite the ENTIRE thing.
You know, that part about in order to maintain a well-regulated militia?
And let’s consider the type of guns that well-regulated militia would have been carrying at the time the 2nd Amendment was written.
CNN was reporting it as soon as the police arrived. From what I saw on the various news programs this morning, there were warning that the 18-yr old was a problem. A friend/associate student said the shooter talked about causing big harm but the student didn’t believe the shooter would do anything. They shown investigators with the shooter’s car and had to blur out to large stickers/panels on the car that one reporter reported as containing an obscenity. Did no one close to him see that?
It is horrible. The kids have had to physically fight for their lives and the lives of other students. The student who lost his life and others fought back. As a parent, that is not what you want for your children. Just yesterday morning, I was watching the video of a student asking presidential candidate O’Rourke a question about school safety and crying as she told him she was afraid at school. That poor child and all others have good reason to be afraid. Nothing is being done and it could and does happen anywhere.
Someone on this thread said the news “sensationalizes” these school shootings. What? Should these be so ho-hum normal occurrences that they no longer get our attention?
The juvenile shooter is reported to be female, which I think is unusual in comparison to other school shootings.
@OhiBro-That really is such an unfair summarization that I wonder if it was done purposely to stoke misinformation.
That school shooters have mental health problems isn’t a trope,
it’s a fact borne out by a very comprehensive study (easily googleable if you want the citation). They were looking for the commonalities in school shootings (they were thinking family strife, bullying etc) and found that besides being male and predominantly white, the one thing they had in common was mental illness, and most had had contact with mental health services before. And it was overwhelmingly three types of mental health issues: severe suicidal depression, paranoid schizophrenia or psychopathy. It’s a bit old but every single school shooting since (I have followed this out of personal and professional interest, in more than one country) has conformed to the pattern.
Socially withdrawn male, obsessed with ego shooter computer games and violence, a history of concerning or off putting social behaviour (NOT violent or criminal behaviour), few friends (but NOT no friends and NO evidence of bullying, but avoidance by others due to the concerning or off putting behaviour).
The Virginia Tech schooter, for instance, had shown concerning and off putting behaviour for a DECADE (apparently all his mom did was go to church and pray,) and frightened fellow students for months before he started shooting.
It’s a logical fallacy to complain that “all school shooters are mental ill” is somehow saying “all mentally ill people are school shooters”. Come ON.
You know what’s a trope? That school shooters were “massively bullied”, as a PP suggested (or couldn’t handle academic pressure, you get that one as well).
They certainly all FEEL bullied and pressuredas one can tell from their social media, their journals, their manifestos. They’re full of grievance, but it tends to be imaginary or wildly overblown. One18 year complained that he was teased on the bus in 6th grade. Yeah, that was it. Oh, and that the girl he was interested in wasn’t interested in him. Guess which gender that one went for in his rampage.
By looking for the reason that somehow makes the mass murder of children understandable, you will make it justifiable for more people, create another hero for some more mentally ill kids, and prepare the ground for the next shooting. We all become complicit that way. Look for the pathology and the patheticness. Not the limaginary grievance.
School Shooters are all mentally ill IS a trope. If we’re going to identify commonalities, then let’s focus on ALL of them - white, male… - and be more specific. Unfortunately when the general public is told all shooters are mentally ill, they don’t differentiate between specific serious mental illnesses (psychosis, severe depression, etc). They become scared of anyone that shows signs of mental illness, and add to the strong stigma that already exists. OK, no “normal” person shoots up a school, but that in an of itself does not equate to a diagnosis of mental illness. Like MaineLonghorn, I am the parent of a young adult with a severe mental illness, yes she is usually the most gentle person I know - and when she gets violent it is because of psychotic episodes, and the violence is aimed mostly at herself, and then at me. When that happens, my choices are to involve the hospital (who may or may not decide she is dangerous enough to keep), or the justice system (which is ill-equipped to deal with mental illness - their response is to issue a restraining order related to behavior my daughter can’t control).
We need to prioritize mental health treatment, and we need to keep guns out of the hands of anyone that is even marginally unstable. We need to train school staff to recognize signs of instability, and to act on them. We need a system where students feel safe reporting odd behavior, and where those expressing odd behavior are given help, rather than being punished. Regarding the bullying, it doesn’t really matter whether they were “officially” bullied. If they felt bullied, there’s a good chance it happened, but the bullies were smart enough not to get caught. If they were “overreacting” then again, get the student some help!
@Tigerle your approach just further stigmatized mental illness. I think there’s far more to these shooters, and mental illness is only a small factor. Further, by claiming “they’re all mentally ill,” it diverts attention away from anyone without a diagnosis, and while many of them are found to be mentally ill after the fact, they are not known to be mentally ill by those around them. It’s a feel-good statement, because it makes us all feel safer that there’s nobody “acting strangely” within the walls of our own schools.
I think everyone understands that there are different types of mental illness, but engaging in a mass shooting at one’s school is not sane behavior.
I like lots of diversity because people tend to treat others with more respect. “Fitting in” is much less emphasized & much less important as it becomes “normal” & accepted to be different.
PA, at least, is doing this. Anyone can report anything they feel is suspicious. It will get looked into.
On top of this locally teachers are also given ways to report things and told what to report.
What I wonder is how much can be done ahead of time. Often we are told signs were seen, things were reported, but nothing could be done because the student (or adult - doesn’t have to be a school shooting) hadn’t actually done anything yet.
How do we get past that?
Not long ago on here a parent reported her college student had a roommate with an obsession who had legally bought himself a gun and was playing with it in his room. The student had mentioned it and no one could do anything (police, campus security, etc). Did that thread ever have a conclusion? I travel a bit and don’t always get to read “the end of the story.”
FWIW, we’re up to 4807 gun deaths so far this year. The number has increased by 27 since I last looked/posted. We have a gun culture problem. Only some of it is manifested in school shootings.
@Creekland So rather than legislate to limit access to weapons, they’d rather set up a system in which police will investigate every anonymous tip about a teenager behaving “strangely”. There is absolutely NO way that this could go very wrong, is there?
The school shooter trope is worse than just “mentally ill”. In the trope, the attackers are the same kids who are already bullied by their peers and treated badly by their teachers, So now, on top of the rest of the garbage they have to suffer every day at school. They need to worry that they will be investigated by police because they wear black clothes and listen to depressing music.
So, people want to militarize schools, abuse kids who already are being bullied, further victimize kids with mental illness, set police on any kid who does not conform to the nice suburban stereotype. Why are the measures that so many people want to take to “protect” kids always actions that harm kids?
I think that @Creekland was referring to situations which clearly call for some intervention as students & teachers are taught what signs to look for. For example, someone who isolates themselves & talks of suicide, then buys a gun.
Wearing black clothes & listening to alternative music is not enough.
Also, tips would be referred to a trained specialist who should further evaluate the information provided by the tip before acting.
What is the harm in having a very depressed or unusually angry student coming in for a session with a trained counselor ?
It all goes back to civil liberties. The reason the police can’t address the concerns the “odd” kid or even the one referenced in post #96 before they “do something “ is because they haven’t committed a crime yet. Unless we are going to embrace the idea of anticipatory criminality as seen in Minority Report there are significant limits one can place on an individual…such as involuntary commitment to a hospital or removal of a legally purchased firearm. What I see repeatedly on this thread is the idea that certain rights should definitely be curtailed but other rights are sacrosanct. I don’t own a gun and I don’t have an issue with the so called gun culture in this country. If I was single mom I’d like the right to have a gun. Heck if I lived in certain places in this country I’d want the right to own a gun. There are millions of responsible gun owners in the US and the push to restrict their rights all the while proclaiming that the rights of the mentally ill are untouchable is problematic. Take the kid in the Parkland shooting or Sandy Hook. So many red flags, calls to the police, Mom was afraid of the kid etc…yet the idea that either of those boys should be involuntarily committed for observation or required to attend therapy etc…brings out the ACLU and other civil liberty activists. And should we be able to lock up people because they MIGHT do something? Another issue is that many of these shooters were evaluated by professional, ie the police or therapists etc…and they’re cleared. Who is liable at that point? It’s a hugely difficult problem. I don’t know what the solution is but it’s unlikely to present itself in the short term.
@MWolf - that’s a lot of assumptions. First, maybe we should properly enforce gun laws already in place before creating new ones.
Secondly, should we do absolutely nothing while waiting for politicians to do something?
Our schools, in PA , hired resource officers.
Our school not only has access to what creekland has referenced, but also other ways to report suspicious behavior. You can no longer just waltz into our schools. We are all extremely happy with these improvements. Last year a student threatened to shoot someone. An anonymous tip from a student who overheard prevented a potential shooting.