Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa...
The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said
In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said. Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school.
“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people”. Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.
Contagion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-ar...
The big difference between UK and USA is the number of guns we have in our country compared to theirs. We probably can't stop bullying, but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society. We humans are nothing but animals down to the core. If a person wants to kill they will find a way.
Another issue in the USA is the lacking mental Healthcare that other nations have. Many are afraid to seek mental health help because of the stigma of looking weak, much like men not reporting rape or sexual assault that they experience. Also couple that with covid19 lockdowns and that gives these at risk people lots of time to think, plan, and execute. At this time its far to late for them. As a result you get more mass shootings.
In the UK we had one school shooting (conducted by an adult), and after that very strict restrictions were put on gun ownership. A similar case happened in Australia.
The fact that it is still controversial whether “guns are the issue” shows that the US has not yet begun to grapple with the issue.
In your opinion what lead to the crumbling of the institution of family, that did not happen in other countries?
You haven’t _THOUGHT _ of killing another person? Ever? It must be amazing to live with such purity of thought.
> The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society.
The United States is unique when it comes to crumbling family?
I fear this message has lost something in translation.
Anyways, I digress. But here are some of my thoughts: I just got from a three-day trip to Monterrey, a city in Mexico. This is where my mom and dad went to college. Yet there is this vibe, always, either inside or outside the school that just feels like _everyone_ is always hustling. Making their lives work. Going to big measures to achieve their dreams, whether legal or not. I met a wealthy guy, interesting acquaintance. We talked about life. One of the main things he said to me was that - emphasizing that although it's cliché it's just too true - "the universe is yours. take it."
And this just rings too true for me, I think that our education has decoupled from American values. Or maybe those values were already broken to begin with. My point is, bureaucracy has led us to do unimaginable things and not see "action -> result." Yet we were raised by our parents telling us that dreams will come true with hard work and effort. We are all socially forced to follow the rules, not skipping lines, etc. But it feels more and more like those lines are crossed everyday and goals are more important.
Can we? AnimalMuppet already mentioned the legal barriers, but there's another issue: the US is currently suffering from extreme political polarization which has already led to an insurrection. How do you think that would interact with an attempt at mass confiscation[0] of guns?
I fear such a policy any time in the near future would spark a civil war, leading to many times more deaths than all the school shootings added together.
[0] I read your post as implying mass confiscation. Simply restricting the purchase of new guns would take many decades to significantly reduce the number of guns in circulation.
I'm sure there'd be pushback, but restrictions on gun advertising might be another option. Other countries have regulations around advertising pharmaceuticals, fast food, tobacco, gambling and so on.
We can't solve this problem because we're all talking about highly theoretical and utopian solutions that don't account for actually existing realities.
The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The US constitution says "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preface about a well regulated militia, and yes, people were using muskets when it was written, but the Supreme Court has ruled that this confers an individual right to possess modern firearms.
And the Supreme Court is even more right-wing now, and likely to force blue states to loosen their gun laws to look more like red states.
So maybe we'd have a more productive conversation if we talked about what's possible in the actually existing United States instead of dreaming about Australia's successes, because there's zero probability that we'll be able to learn from Australia.
> The root cause may be bullying combined with the media contagion effect.
You need the bullying (or other oppressive social condition) and the media contagion. And, as you say, you need the massive amounts of guns.
> but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
It is not clear to me that your statement is true. Given the Second Amendment, given the Supreme Court (and, in particular, the current makeup of the Supreme Court), I'm not sure what can be done.
If you see a path, we'd all love to see the plan...
But we probably wouldn’t even need to restrict it. If the president and other politicians shamed every media company that named the shooter when this happens we could probably make some progress.
According to a report[1] by Small Arms Survey in 2017, there were an estimated 120 civilian firmarms per 100 people in the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
That's almost twice as many as the next-closest nation.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smalla...
What gives?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...
Quite possibly, not much.
It's something that varies a lot from one culture to another, and you need a lot of it, unchecked for years to destroy a person.
The issue there is that the solution is (at least in Denver Public Schools) that the burden is put squarely on the students. The message is that only students can prevent bullying. My experience is that teachers and administrators absolutely will not intervene. One of those 4 kids was getting picked on/bullied, sometimes directly in front of a teacher. Who did nothing. The only times I got any help from schools was when an actual, observable injury, like broken skin, appeared. Other than that, my bullied kid just experienced "restorative justice" where the bully refused to show up, and therefore nothing changed.
I dreaded going to lunch, then school in general. At one point I didn’t want to leave my house.
You know what stopped it? Mr. Alexander, a NYC schools science teacher who let me eat lunch in his room, saved me the Tuesday Science NY Times section and gave me science teacher manuals with experiments to do. He was a wounded Korean War vet, I believe a master sergeant who presented a very stern appearance. I’d do random errands and do science stuff and eventually helped with a few things in class. He took the time as an adult to help me understand that I was something, was a mentor and worthy of friends. Looking back, he changed the course of my life. One of the only regrets that I have in life is the I was never able to find him and thank him, as he’s almost certainly passed by now.
Every kid needs a Mr. Alexander. Someone who gives a shit and takes a moment to do something. It makes me angry that these shooters are often kids struggling with emotional problems, and instead finding someone to help, end up on online forums grooming them to be bigots or monsters.
Mr. Alexander knew he changed your life, and expected nothing in return. Teaching was his reward.
That’s not to justify shootings at all. But people who suffer years of abuse, especially during childhood, can’t imagine a better life because they’ve never experienced one. An irrational act of terrorism to us is a rational act of balancing the scales to them.
In general, I think that teachers do use bullies to extract revenge on students they wouldn't otherwise be able to punish. Same as we as a society let cops do extra-judicial killings and such.
Some family's studied in the U.S., and even their middle school and elementary is 2000 students ! That's enormous, gigantic!
Here in Mexico schools are small-scale. Education here is much, much smaller scale. I think that the bigger the student population is at the campus, the bigger the chances are of failing at important problems such as bullying, since extreme standardization of these processes creates more problems than genuine solutions. Plus.
All this is just my n=1 experience, and I could be misreading things, but I'm convinced there's a cultural element that can explain the helplessness of bullied kids in the US school system.
Maybe the problem with the US is that the society is just too free. Or not enough churchgoing.
The problem is our lack of social fabric. Kids don't have enough friends. They spend too much time looking at screens, and they can't imagine positive futures that they'd like to live out. They don't have enough guidance from parents and other adults to put them on a more positive path.
This isn't the one I was thinking about, but is on the same topic: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43323577
[1] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contag...
Is there a stronger element of the individual and individual glory/success/achievement in the US than other countries that might explain the narcissism?
I have no comment on the contagion effect.
