DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus From the Mouths of Babes--Colorado Shooting

I find it completely irritating that you are trying to belittle the idea that American society is creating mass murderers and teens who are taking their own lives.

It is you, sir.........who is trying to tie things up in a neat little package by putting all the blame on guns. Stricter gun laws will not solve our problems. Guns will still be accessible. They will never completely disappear. Crimes and suicides will still continue.

I find it sickening that people act like stricter gun laws will improve the emotional health of our population. Or improve the social competence of our population. Millions and millions of American citizens have access to guns. They don't all just start killing others because they have access to guns.

Stop trying to act smug and demeaning a very real issue just because you are on some crusade against guns. I've already said..............we can pass stricter gun laws. What the hell else do you want?

I asked you to please start a "gun" thread in this forum. I asked you to not derail this thread. I even said "please," twice.

I'm not an advocate of gun control in your country. Used to be. But it won't work in the states.

I am not a huge gun advocate. I am not deflecting.

I am simply telling you that emotionally disturbed students are the real issue here. We are a caring society and the laws and policies have been governed to protect those students. I admire the act of kindness.

that school shootings are the blood tax you pay, and will continue paying.

I think you are misinterpreting my message. I am a proponent of making dramatic changes in how we diagnosis and treat our troubled youths and how schools deal w/such individuals. I think we need to make dramatic changes. And this thread hasn't even been close to the other "School shootings" threads. I was trying for a different perspective.

It didn't work. No one is wanting to talk about making these painful decisions.

j/c:

Let me try again........This is important to me.

I taught for years. I still run a tutoring service. I have a pretty good feel for what is "really" going on in schools. I have tried to bring this up before when school shootings turned into gun control threads.

I am not a huge gun advocate. I am not deflecting.

I am simply telling you that emotionally disturbed students are the real issue here. We are a caring society and the laws and policies have been governed to protect those students. I admire the act of kindness.

The problem is that some [not all] of these emotionally disturbed students receive special rights and escape consequences that the general population does not. Their parent[s] claim bullying, but in fact, they bully more than others.

I will give you one story that symbolizes what I am speaking of. I had a student who used to pick his boogers and smear them on the arms of other students. We were in cooperative learning groups and he did this to the girl beside him. She was grossed out and screamed at him. He fell on the floor and began screaming about how people were bullying him. His mom came in and demanded action against the "offending" student.

He used to steal pencils, papers, and other educational items from another boy in his group. When the boy grabbed one of his items back, he screamed that he was being "bullied." Again, his mom complained.

He used to throw himself on the floor and bang his head. We were instructed by the psychologists to ignore this behavior because he was expressing himself.

He punched another student in the face because they touched one another in line. He escaped punishment because of his "circumstances."

The kids were terrified of him and his mom. The teachers were afraid, too. How do we serve his needs while protecting the needs of the entire class?

I could go on and on and on ............but y'all, this is a real issue.

Please stop deflecting the real issue by making dumb ass political arguments that solve nothing. Identify the real problem and move to correct it.

Believe me, it won't be easy and might never happen due to sensitivity issues, but please stop the facade.

When I was in school I got bullied. Talked to Dad about it and he taught me how to handle a bully.

Never had a problem since. Never needed "Others" to step in to help me or stop a bully.

You teach your kids how to have manners, what to eat, what to avoid, the importance of exercise, how to pick themselves up after a loss, etc.

Man up people! Teach your own kids about bullies!

Serious question, What if any part of this problem in schools is directly due to the litigious and pc society we have now.

My Dad taught me how to not have to fight but when it came down to no choice, he taught me how to take care of business.

1. We are the United States of America.

2. We have the 2nd amendment.

3. I don't want to be Australia. I don't want to be the UK. I don't want to be Canada. I don't want to be another country. I want to be the United States of America. Do you realize how unique we truly are? We were an experiment and we have the 1st and 2nd amendments among others. There are zero countries as far as I know that are as free as we are. When you advocate for rights to be taken away, which your statements seem to indicate (correct me if I'm wrong), I have a problem with that. Maybe the 1st step won't take such a measure that effects ordinary people's gun rights. Maybe the 2nd one won't either. But mark my words, if you go down the path of restricting rights of guns, you are complicit to the government 100%.

The 2nd amendment was created for a good reason. Do you agree with the 2nd amendment? Do you believe that citizens have the right to protect themselves? Felt the need to ask because of your statements.

How do you explain the differences between the 50's, 60's, 70's and now relating to school shootings in the US? Can you answer that question with a meaningful answer?

We’re seeing a lot of suggestions today from the right side of the political spectrum that events like the massacre at a Connecticut elementary school are something novel in American history — that they’re a reflection of the fact that we took prayer out of schools, or that our society has lost its sense of morality, or something.

Well, a couple of years ago I did some casual research on the history of American school shootings. A conservative scholar on a blog I read at the time had said that he’d looked for evidence of such shootings in the 1940s and 1950s, and found none, so I fired up the search engine for the archives of the New York Times, looking for articles published between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1959 that included the words ”shot” and “school.”

The search returned 4,940 results.

Most of these weren’t actually articles about school shootings, of course. Many were stories about gun violence that happened to refer to a school that a perpetrator or victim attended. A significant number were sports coverage — articles about target shooting competitions, or shot-put records, or even teams that the Times believed to have a shot at a state or national title.

But as I made my way through the articles, I found that eighteen of the first two hundred were reports of school shootings in which one or more people were killed or wounded.

There were three suicides and six homicides among these eighteen incidents. More than half involved a student perpetrator, and at least three were accidental shootings on school grounds.

Reading these stories, each of which I’ve excerpted below, suggests a world in which gun violence was anything but rare in the school setting. There were premeditated killings alongside instances in which tempers flared or caution was absent, and the Times seems not to have been terribly surprised by any of it. (In March of 1949, for instance, when a student at New York’s elite Stuyvesant High School accidentally shot one of his classmates with a 38-caliber revolver, the story got just five short paragraphs on page 30, and the shooter was charged only with “juvenile delinquency.”)

Anyway, here’s the list of eighteen. Remember, this is only a small sampling of the shootings that occurred — the result of a spot check of about four percent of the hits on a search on one metropolitan newspaper’s archives.

May 23, 1940: “Infuriated by a grievance, Matthew Gillespie, 62-year-old janitor at the junior school of the Dwight School for Girls here, shot and critically wounded Mrs. Marshall Coxe, secretary of the junior school, on the first floor of the building this afternoon.”
July 5, 1940: “Angered by the refusal of his daughter, Melba Moshell, 15 years old, to leave a boarding school here and return to his home, Joseph Moshell, 47, of 252 East Girard Avenue, Philadelphia, visited the school this afternoon and shot and killed the girl, according to the State Police.”
November 18, 1942: “Erwin Goodman, 36-year-old mathematics teacher of William J. Gaynor Junior High School in Brooklyn, was shot and killed in the school corridors on Oct. 2 by a youth whose hand he had clasped in thankfulness for acting as peacemaker a few minutes earlier.”
February 23, 1943: “Harry Wyman, 13-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Wyman of Port Chester, NY … shot himself dead tonight at the Harvey School, a boys’ preparatory school.”
June 26, 1946: “A 15-year-old schoolboy who balked at turning over his pocket money to a gang of seven Negro youths was shot in the chest at 11:30 A.M. yesterday in the basement of the Public School 147 annex of the Brooklyn High School for Automotive Trades.”
November 24, 1946: “A 13-year-old student at St. Benedict’s Parochial School here shot and fatally wounded himself tonight while sitting in an audience watching a school play.”
December 24, 1948: “A 14-year-old boy was wounded fatally here today by an accidental shot from the .22-caliber rifle of a fellow-student … the youth was shot in the head when he chanced into range where Robert Ross, 17, of Brooklyn, was shooting at a target near a lake on the school property.”
March 12, 1949: “A 16-year-old student at Stuyvesant High School, 345 Fifteenth Street, was accidentally shot in the right arm yesterday afternoon by a fellow student who, police said, was ‘showing off’ with a pistol in a classroom.”
July 22, 1950: “A 16-year-old boy was shot in the wrist and abdomen at 10 o’clock last night in Public School 141 … during an argument with a former classmate. They were attending a weekly dance sponsored by the Board of Education.”
November 27, 1951: “David Brooks, a 15-year-old student, was fatally shot as fellow-pupils looked on in a grade school here today.”
April 9, 1952: “A 15-year-old boarding-school student who shot a dean rather than relinquish pin-up pictures of girls in bathing suits was charged with murderous assault today.”
November 20, 1952: “Rear Admiral E. E. Herrmann, 56 years old, superintendent of the Naval Post-Graduate School here, was found dead in his office with a bullet in his head. A service revolver was found by his side.”
October 8, 1953: “Larry Licitra, 17-year-old student at the Machine and Metal Trades High School, 320 East Ninety-sixth Street, was shot and slightly wounded in the right shoulder at 11:30 AM yesterday in the lobby of the school while inspecting a handmade pistol owned by one of several students.”
October 20, 1956: “A junior high school student was wounded in the forearm yesterday by another student armed with a home-made weapon at Booker T. Washington Junior High School.”
October 2, 1957: “A 16-year old student was shot in the leg yesterday by a 15-year old classmate at a city high school.”
March 12, 1958: “A 17-year-old student was indicted yesterday for carrying a dangerous weapon. He had shot a boy in the Manual Training High School March 4.”
May 1, 1958: “A 15-year-old high school freshman was shot and killed by a classmate in a washroom of the Massapequa High School today.”
September 24, 1959: “Twenty-seven men and boys and an arsenal were seized in the Bronx last night as the police headed off a gang war resulting from the fatal shooting of a teen-ager Monday at Morris High School.”

The 2nd amendment was created for a good reason. Do you agree with the 2nd amendment? Do you believe that citizens have the right to protect themselves? Felt the need to ask because of your statements.

I don't want to be Australia. I don't want to be the UK. I don't want to be Canada. I don't want to be another country. I want to be the United States of America. Do you realize how unique we truly are?

With that being said, I'd die before I gave up my gun to the government or anyone else.

The conversation, as usual, has become so stimulating and enlightening. It's amazing to me that people can't ever get off the rails and try a less-beaten path.

No one thinks emotional problems, social isolation, questionable methods of from the psychology field, fractured homes, bullying on social media, violent video games, tv shows, movies, lack of accountability, a lack of respect for education, labeling, looking for shallow diagnoses, and turning a blind eye to the real issues are worth even discussing.

Nah man. It's guns and being tough guys. It's like conversing w/a bunch of three year olds.

All the points you bring up are not worth discussing. Who cares about the "whys" and the "hows" of spree shootings if your country isn't willing to change or even try to establish and fix root causes?

Carnage might be less if you reduce the types of weapons available.. but it will still happen..

I think you made his point for him.... you really really really like guns. As for freedom? If you feel the need to have a firearm to make you feel safe ... then you are deceiving yourself that you are free, what you are is scared..... The fact that you'd give all your freedoms away by dying to prevent gun control, back ground checks and mental health checks.... seems a little odd to me.

Your point is contradictory. The gun is the tool, it's the HOW, everything Vers mentioned is the WHY, which is the root cause.

All of the knife violence posts from the right are an attempt to point out that you can change the HOW by gun control.. but if you don't try to address the WHY, the violence will still happen..

Carnage might be less if you reduce the types of weapons available.. but it will still happen..