Bravo. This is well analyzed. Your explanations are also well organized to give a clear picture of what was missed and a roadmap of what could have been done. The interesting contrast for me is how your analysis in review of the history diverges with how people along the way missed things and let matters go down a different path to a mass shooting.
What do we need to change in the way we view and interpret behavior, including our own but more importantly others' behavior? Particularly those of us whose responsibility in part includes raising, educating, and treating children and adolescents, how can we focus better and not turn away from situations obviously in need of intervention? That's it in a nutshell. Pay attention and respond appropriately. Bring in the right help at the right time.
Between the lines of your excellent recounting and analysis, we should also take note that much of what was missed or let slide occurred because of the emotional state and assumptions of those responsible for taking the right actions. A mother's love for her child, her resentment of potential stigma and of insinuations about his obvious antisocial behavior, her desire to compensate for her own feelings of failure; her using medication and therapy as crisis intervention rather than ongoing behavior modification efforts; the teachers, counselors, and mental health professionals, whose workload or preference to avoid dealing with this to focus on someone and something they liked, and lapses that allowed them to be lulled by ordinary evasions; and everyone else who reframed abnormalities and danger signs as being within normal limits and acted as if.
My favorite in all this is perhaps the gun-ROTC training nexus. Well, the lad has finally found an interest in something his ADHD doesn't get in the way of! Let's indulge that, and isn't it great we have a culture and community that provides, nay, facilitates such openings?
Before it gets away, I also feel inclined to bring up the responses in the wake of Uvalde, another example of how prevention is completely, intentionally de-prioritized because, frankly, we live in a society that values allowing opportunities to learn and promote acts of efficient, effective use of force, including mass shootings. I'll skip the obvious ultimate preventative of removing weapons entirely or at least those with the capacity to kill a lot of people quickly. What is interesting in the aftermath of Uvalde TX is the focus on how the response was not more focused on getting in there quicker and killing the killer and that is the lapse and failure raised high and most loudly reported now.
Are we expected to agree it would be nice if for every antisocial aka bad guy with a gun there were at least one handy fearless social aka good guy with a gun ready to go gung-ho without any sense of self-preservation and repugnance at the taking of another human life? Is that what we ought to take away from at least this one shooting in the Lone Star State? Given the talk about turning schools into "hardened targets" aka little fortresses bristling with gun-toting teachers, that seems to be the after-the-fact approach some folks believe is the best we can do.
I prefer your approach. It seems more social and less militarized. The militarization of civil society and our thinking about problems may likely be the result of the longest wars in a period of relative global peace in our history. I'll conclude by pointing out that the gunfighter period in our history followed the Civil War, when all these males got training and practice in using violence and specifically with state-of-the-art killing tools and techniques as a normal way of dealing with important social problems. As an expert in these kinds of behaviors and human behavior generally, do you think there may be a connection there, and in our own life and times?
Bravo. This is well analyzed. Your explanations are also well organized to give a clear picture of what was missed and a roadmap of what could have been done. The interesting contrast for me is how your analysis in review of the history diverges with how people along the way missed things and let matters go down a different path to a mass shooting.
What do we need to change in the way we view and interpret behavior, including our own but more importantly others' behavior? Particularly those of us whose responsibility in part includes raising, educating, and treating children and adolescents, how can we focus better and not turn away from situations obviously in need of intervention? That's it in a nutshell. Pay attention and respond appropriately. Bring in the right help at the right time.
Between the lines of your excellent recounting and analysis, we should also take note that much of what was missed or let slide occurred because of the emotional state and assumptions of those responsible for taking the right actions. A mother's love for her child, her resentment of potential stigma and of insinuations about his obvious antisocial behavior, her desire to compensate for her own feelings of failure; her using medication and therapy as crisis intervention rather than ongoing behavior modification efforts; the teachers, counselors, and mental health professionals, whose workload or preference to avoid dealing with this to focus on someone and something they liked, and lapses that allowed them to be lulled by ordinary evasions; and everyone else who reframed abnormalities and danger signs as being within normal limits and acted as if.
My favorite in all this is perhaps the gun-ROTC training nexus. Well, the lad has finally found an interest in something his ADHD doesn't get in the way of! Let's indulge that, and isn't it great we have a culture and community that provides, nay, facilitates such openings?
Before it gets away, I also feel inclined to bring up the responses in the wake of Uvalde, another example of how prevention is completely, intentionally de-prioritized because, frankly, we live in a society that values allowing opportunities to learn and promote acts of efficient, effective use of force, including mass shootings. I'll skip the obvious ultimate preventative of removing weapons entirely or at least those with the capacity to kill a lot of people quickly. What is interesting in the aftermath of Uvalde TX is the focus on how the response was not more focused on getting in there quicker and killing the killer and that is the lapse and failure raised high and most loudly reported now.
Are we expected to agree it would be nice if for every antisocial aka bad guy with a gun there were at least one handy fearless social aka good guy with a gun ready to go gung-ho without any sense of self-preservation and repugnance at the taking of another human life? Is that what we ought to take away from at least this one shooting in the Lone Star State? Given the talk about turning schools into "hardened targets" aka little fortresses bristling with gun-toting teachers, that seems to be the after-the-fact approach some folks believe is the best we can do.
I prefer your approach. It seems more social and less militarized. The militarization of civil society and our thinking about problems may likely be the result of the longest wars in a period of relative global peace in our history. I'll conclude by pointing out that the gunfighter period in our history followed the Civil War, when all these males got training and practice in using violence and specifically with state-of-the-art killing tools and techniques as a normal way of dealing with important social problems. As an expert in these kinds of behaviors and human behavior generally, do you think there may be a connection there, and in our own life and times?