One school district I work in…has armed retired or former police officers in every single school at the main entrance.
Our teachers are all trained in how to hide and protect students. It’s very likely that the folks in a public building in VA Beach were similarly trained.
This is just sad…and the community is shocked to the core, most likely.
Yes, it is always traumatic for the community when there is a senseless act of violence like this. In our state there was a mass shooting in the xerox building by an employee in 1999. Many, many folks knew or were related to the victims.
@hawkbird I also live about 20 minutes from the municipal center. At school, in addition to fire drills and hurricane drills, my kids now also take part in active shooter drills. Such a sad, but necessary reflection of the times. We will all be wearing our blue tomorrow to support our neighbors in their grief.
Our movies typically involve shootings and killings. An “R” rating for violence is not uncommon. When this is our culture’s entertainment, I don’t understand why people have become surprised we are seeing the same actions in real life. Now we’ve added violent video games to the mix.
I’m another that lives in the general area and was just in Virginia Beach that morning with a friend to check out the new Wegman’s there. Husband has had meetings at the municipal center many times over the years and has co-workers that have worked with a couple of the shooting victims. One of the people still in the hospital is a child of a late co worker of my husband. He has had lots of contact with the city manager over the years. Very upsetting.
I was home to see the initial reports that there were injuries but gasped when the news came that there were many already dead.
Okay, so threads like these are for expressing (as my kids use to call it) “the Sads”. Anger, and certainly rage is probably off limits, but how about despair? Confusion? Emotional exhaustion? Apathy? Apathy’s probably safe, right? In another day or two, this thread will have dropped down two or more pages, so how about we all just shrug and move on until the next S-word event, at which point we can lather, rinse and…
See you back here then.
After Columbine I actually went to a mental health/ministry services office on campus and talked to a counselor. That said, I hope to god that none of these can ever get to me more than Newtown, because I can’t even bring myself to contemplate what that would take.
I find it strange that in Las Vegas, and now Virginia Beach, both murderers had no apparent overt motive and no prior warning signs or interaction with law enforcement that could have flagged them as a threat. The Vegas murderer was a millionaire professional gambler and the VB murderer was an apparently reliable civil engineer with more than a decade of service. In the days leading up to their mass murders they conducted themselves normally, as if nothing was bothering them. Both murderers bought their guns legally. Both died in a gun battle with police. Both used a different, but unusual and hotly politically contested firearm accessory(bump stock & suppressor) to commit mass murder.
@GKUnion both men are also significantly older than most of the shooters. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any certain flags that warrant intervention…that is one of the more serious deficiencies we’ve seen over and over.
I can comprehend suicide and I can sort of understand murder if someone thinks they have a reason (NOT that either is OK), but I just don’t get this business of shooting up a bunch of strangers or acquaintances for no apparent reason.
To a previous poster … almost all cultures have violent movies and video games. And yet, in the US, you are 25x more likely to be shot than in any other industrialized county.
@vpa2019 The shooter was 40, a somewhat typical age range of workplace shooters .
The Vegas shooter didn’t have a history of mental health diagnosis, but the picture his family paints is of a narcissist who may have been looking for notoriety. His father was on the FBI most wanted list at one point. He did it because he could.
I suspect it goes along with depression - suicide by police essentially. But we may never know. Columbine was bad, but the one that really killed me was Sandy Hook.
Mathmom, Sandy Hook plunged me into the depths of despair as well. But after the “Sandy Hook Was a Hoax” campaign, waged by certain self-interested entities began to gain traction, I lost all hope we would collectively mobilize to end the madness. I’ve gone through virtually all of Kubler Ross’ Stages of grief over this phenomenon. All except that of “acceptance”. I don’t think I’ll ever get there, which is too bad for me given that the majority of people seem to have have done just that. I’m still so heart-shattered. I hope I can say that here without it being perceived as emotional vomit.
I still object to your characterizing the emotions of others when you really have no idea how someone else feels! How can you say the “majority of people” have moved to “acceptance” of that terrible, terrible event? You aren’t the only one who struggles to make sense of the fact that there seems to be no solution to these tragedies. I find it condescending that you think the rest of us riff-raff don’t have feelings.
I work in a busy hospital and 3 weeks ago we had an alarm for an active shooter in the building. Thankfully it was false but it caused some panic for 4 minutes. A positive that came out of this panic is to show the deficiencies in our system and how unprepared we really are. Some staff even needed counseling to cope, especially those who have been close to a victim of gun violence.
@poetsheart Not understanding how fringe , crazy stuff like “Sandy Hook Was a Hoax” threw you for such a loop. No rational people believed that nonsense.
There are very few people whom I would characterize as riff-raff, MomofWildChild, and certainly, you are not among them. I’ll try to answer your question of why I believe most of us have moved on to accepting these types of events as something we just have to live with, though I have little faith at this point that I can express it adequately. But, here goes. In a word: Inaction. That which a people find unacceptable, they soon move to change.
I personally am not struggling with the idea that there “seems to be no solution to these tragedies”. I think there are plenty of solutions that could greatly reduce the likelihood of these horrible mass killings, but apparently it’s not polite to suggest that there are, much less innumerate what they might be. It’s certainly verboten on CC.
Every time one of these massacres occurs, the outpouring of sadness is tremendous. Indeed, those feelings are very real. But they are short-lived for most people who have no direct connection with the victims. We hoist the flag back to the top of its staff, and get back to living life as we did prior to it happening. Each and every time. It simply doesn’t doesn’t hurt enough to evoke change. Or perhaps it’s a sort of learned helplessness response; the belief that these massacres just occur and we are helpless to stop them. We resign ourselves to that which we believe we cannot change. resignation=acceptance. You might disagree, but from my point of view, perennial acceptance is less than a hop, skip, and jump away from apathy. That’s where I despair we’re headed.
You are of course free to disagree with every word I just wrote, but please know my intent was never to condescend to anyone, and certainly not to emotionally vomit upon “strangers on the Internet”. I have received the memo that expressions of frustrated anger in the face of yet another of these slaughtering is not stranger appropriate here, so rest assured you’ll not see a repeat of that from me.
I think many of us are very frustrated. You are certainly not alone in that.