School Shootings and white denial

[Vintij]

I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to pull our heads out of our collective ass

Two more white children are dead and thirteen are injured, and another "nice" community is scratching its blonde head, utterly perplexed at how a school shooting the likes of the one yesterday in Santee, California could happen. After all, as the Mayor of the town said in an interview with CNN: "We're a solid town, a good town, with good kids, a good church-going town…an All-American town." Yeah, well maybe that's the problem.

I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I'll say it again: white people live in an utter state of self-delusion. We think danger is black, brown and poor, and if we can just move far enough away from "those people" in the cities we'll be safe. If we can just find an "all-American" town, life will be better, because "things like this just don't happen here."

Well bullshit on that. In case you hadn't noticed, "here" is about the only place these kinds of things do happen. Oh sure, there is plenty of violence in urban communities and schools. But mass murder; wholesale slaughter; take-a-gun-and-see-how-many-you can-kill kinda craziness seems made for those safe places: the white suburbs or rural communities.

And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no "profile" of a school shooter. Come again? White boy after white boy after white boy, with very few exceptions to that rule (and none in the mass shooting category), decides to use their classmates for target practice, and yet there is no profile? Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still hesitate to put a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful.

Indeed, if any black child in America -- especially in the mostly white suburbs of Littleton, or Santee -- were to openly discuss their plans to murder fellow students, as happened both at Columbine and now Santana High, you can bet your ass that somebody would have turned them in, and the cops would have beat a path to their doorstep. But when whites discuss their murderous intentions, our stereotypes of what danger looks like cause us to ignore it -- they're just "talking" and won't really do anything. How many kids have to die before we rethink that nonsense? How many dazed and confused parents, Mayors and Sheriffs do we have to listen to, describing how "normal" and safe their community is, and how they just can't understand what went wrong?

School Shootings and White Denial

Amazingly, I agree with you on this point. "church going" should not have even been uttered because all major cities in which school shootings happen are 90% church going. Not to mention that every terrorist who ever lived was "church going"

That was an excuse, nothing more. Just because a town seems to have the right people with the right religion, does not mean this type of shit will not happen.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

the cause of the shootings is psychotropic and narcoleptic drugs ..in every case the without exception the children where on depression medications ..which have been proven to cause in many suicidal and homicidal thoughts

Liar.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

linois Shooter was Treated with Psych Meds Prior to Shooting Rampage
2/17/2008 - (NaturalNews) It comes as no surprise to anyone who's been following school shootings all the way back to the Colombine High massacre in Colorado: Every young, male shooter that has gone on a killing spree in the United States also has a history of treatment...

school shooting news and articles

Lets think about this for a minute, shall we? They have a history of treatment because, gasp, they have mental problems. They have a history of taking medication because, gasp, they have MENTAL problems.

It is not the drugs causing the behavior you dumb shit. You have no cause and effect.

Anti Depressants do not help with psycotic thoughts nor will they help much toward treating those thoughts. Further the brain is a strange unknown. The medications have to be tested on each person and changed or adjusted, sometimes taking years to find the right one or ones. And even then 20 percent of those afflicted are untreatable.

The kids that do this stuff are SICK. Drugs did not cause them to be sick, nor did the drugs cause them to act out in the manner they did. The drugs are THERE to try and help fix the problem.

 

[strollingbones]

Everybody knows that the blacks are to blame. They brought their violence to the white kids with rap music. Oh, the humanity!!!!

no no its liberals to blame....arm the teachers arm the other students...arm them all....

 

[strollingbones]

Lets think about this for a minute, shall we? They have a history of treatment because, gasp, they have mental problems. They have a history of taking medication because, gasp, they have MENTAL problems.

It is not the drugs causing the behavior you dumb shit. You have no cause and effect.

Anti Depressants do not help with psycotic thoughts nor will they help much toward treating those thoughts. Further the brain is a strange unknown. The medications have to be tested on each person and changed or adjusted, sometimes taking years to find the right one or ones. And even then 20 percent of those afflicted are untreatable.

The kids that do this stuff are SICK. Drugs did not cause them to be sick, nor did the drugs cause them to act out in the manner they did. The drugs are THERE to try and help fix the problem.

you admit yourself that the brain is complex and man does not know the full effects of these drugs on anyone much less the long term effects. the brain of kids this age is still in developement we do not know what effects these drugs have on a developing brain, now do we? please do not assume that because a drugs company does r & d on drug and it passes the fda that it is safe. we are now drugging kids more often and at a much earlier age, these drugs are bound to effect the child and over the long term society.

no other factor would be ignored if it effected 50% of the test group so this factor cannot be ignored.

the us must stop drugging kids ... if kids need mental health they need more than drugs they need a lot of one on one counseling..not just tuned out on drugs.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

you admit yourself that the brain is complex and man does not know the full effects of these drugs on anyone much less the long term effects. the brain of kids this age is still in developement we do not know what effects these drugs have on a developing brain, now do we? please do not assume that because a drugs company does r & d on drug and it passes the fda that it is safe. we are now drugging kids more often and at a much earlier age, these drugs are bound to effect the child and over the long term society.

no other factor would be ignored if it effected 50% of the test group so this factor cannot be ignored.

the us must stop drugging kids ... if kids need mental health they need more than drugs they need a lot of one on one counseling..not just tuned out on drugs.

They know the effect and the long term effect. They just do not know how to pick the exact one for each person. For what ever reason some people react to one over another. I have taken all manner of seretonan reuptake Anti depressents with very little effect. One did absolutely nothing, the others sorta worked for a while then quit. But after 9 years we finaly found that not only did I need an anti depressent, I needed a mood enhancer and an anti psycotic. Even after we figured out what worked it was another 4 years before I finally have the right dose, When we found the right meds it was like night and day. AS time past and I realized what did and did not help we adjusted the dose on the meds.

If I had done anything in between, it sure as hell would not have been because of the drugs, but the lack of drugs. Some people have imbalances that can only be helped with medication.

What we NEED is more study on the brain and the reason why things work and why they do not.

Claiming that crazy kids did crazy things cause they were taking medication is ignorant. Perhaps the meds did not help or were not the right mix or dose, or were not needed at all. But anti depressants are not the problem.

I do agree that our society looks for the quick fix and drugs kids that do not need it. However those drugs do not cause them to act crazy. They happened to be crazy to begin with and the drugs were an attempt to help them.

 

[editec]

Slaughting your fellow students (usually followed by suicide) is just one of those fads kids go though.

You know, like swallowing goldfish or steaking.

And look on the bright side...at least this fad isn't something most kids do more than once.

I'm only half kidding, you know.

It really is a fad.

Seriously.

 

[Lycurgus]

Blacks aren't in denial about what goes on in their communities, its frequently talked about and discussed.

Well congratulations. I think you will agree this has taken places for a very long time. No denial and plenty of chat about it. So if this is such an important ingredient I must wonder why nothing has changed!

That fact is your comments are just as biased and racist as the ones are which are slung from the opposite direction. The above quote proves and solves nothing. Your original post proves and solves nothing. It only makes the separation wider. I don't care what race you are or what economic or demographic status you hail from.

The fact is, crime and violence can and does happen anyplace, at anytime. In this nation or any other. No one race, religion or culture owns that block.

A great many things come into play on how to help ease this and they could be discussed until we are blue in the face. But we all have one common factor which can come into play and which can stand a chance of making a difference. That is being the very best, very active and proactive parent we can be. That is no guarantee, but, it is a hopeful start. All of us, no matter what, let life get too busy and we need to be a part of our children's live, not simply in their lives.

Comments like yours are counter productive. I'm white and I don't live in denial. I am prepared at each moment to kill a person of any color and of any age, if my life or my families life is placed at risk and I fully expect that threat to come from any direction. I doubt that I am the exception to the rule. Sadly, very sadly, I am not shock, surprised or turn in disgust when I read the daily news from our nation and around the world.

That my friend is a sad reality!

 

[eots]

Excuses, excuses when it comes to whites and with blacks you whites assume that thats the way blacks are.

I assume no such thing Mr bass..I am just giving the facts on the effects of psychotropic and nercoleptic drugs ..especially the youth ..many of whom are black children

 

[eots]

Lets think about this for a minute, shall we? They have a history of treatment because, gasp, they have mental problems. They have a history of taking medication because, gasp, they have MENTAL problems.

It is not the drugs causing the behavior you dumb shit. You have no cause and effect.

Anti Depressants do not help with psycotic thoughts nor will they help much toward treating those thoughts.

no but they can cause psychotic thoughts ..it warns of this right on the manufactuers own listed side effects..its a fact



Further the brain is a strange unknown. The medications have to be tested on each person and changed or adjusted, sometimes taking years to find the right one or ones. And even then 20 percent of those afflicted are untreatable.

The kids that do this stuff are SICK. Drugs did not cause them to be sick, nor did the drugs cause them to act out in the manner they did. The drugs are THERE to try and help fix the problem

not true the drug company's own warnings say it can cause suicidal and homicidal thoughts and a whole host of worsening mental symptoms..again a simple fact

 

[catzmeow]

Saying this is a white problem is nothing more than a racist comment in and of it's self.
I'm offended.

Actually, the data on serial killers and mass murderers, by race, is interesting:

Serial killers
Serial murder lends itself nicely to the analytical methods developed here provided suitable data are available. Only a few systematic accounts of the race and ethnicity of serial killers exist. There is an exhaustive study of African American serial killers (Homicide Studies 2005; 9; 271) by criminologist Anthony Walsh, and also Eric W. Hickey's book, Serial killers and their victims, Brooks/Cole, 1997. That's about it.

Walsh identified 90 African American and 323 white American serial murderers, all men operating between 1945 and 2004. (Though Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans were not included in the study, their addition would not alter the fact that most serial killers are white men.) African American serial killers made up 22% of Walsh's sample, a figure in close agreement Hickey's enumeration. But, as blacks number well below 22% of the U.S. population, they are actually overrepresented among the ranks of serial killers -- roughly by a factor of 2.

So, why are most serial killers white men? The short answer is that serial murder is primarily a male enterprise, and in the U.S. white men outnumber black men seven to one. The long answer, however, is instructive**.

The ratio of black to white criminal offenders generally increases with the progression from passive white collar crime to pernicious violent crime. In 2003, for example, blacks were imprisoned for violent crimes at approximately 7 times the per capita rate of whites, but only 4 times the white rate for property crimes. Serial murder, by any reckoning, ranks at the top of this progression. Consequently, black serial murderers should, per capita, outnumber their white counterparts by at least a factor of seven. In actuality, the factor is closer to two. The appropriate question, then, is not why most serial killers are white men, but rather why black men are only twice as likely as white men to be serial murderers. Criminality distributions provide the answer. The mean criminality of black males is almost 1.3 SD greater than the white. But, with a black-to-white variance ratio of 0.46, white men display much greater variability. A symmetric way to view this is in terms of black homogeneity rather than white variability. Either way, at the extraordinarily high level of criminality peculiar to the serial murderer, white representation increases. We explore this in more detail in the next section.

Hispanic serial killers
Though, data on Hispanic serial killers is scant, we have learned enough to make some predictions concerning them. We ask two questions: What is the minimum value of criminality in the population of serial killers? And, what percentage of white, black and Hispanic men achieve this criminality?

we find (as expected) the minimum criminality in the serial-killer population is way out on the right tail of the bell curve, approximately 3.6 SD from the white mean. Transforming to units of the black standard deviation, we find the minimum criminality of serial killers falls 3.4 SD out from the black mean, and in units of the Hispanic standard deviation, a whopping 4.1 SD out from the Hispanic mean. This means that roughly 0.018 percent of adult white males, 0.033 percent of adult black males and 0.0025 percent of adult Hispanic males have values of criminality in the range of serial murderers. Using Census Bureau population estimates, the percentages translate to 13,000 white, 4,000 black, and 350 Hispanic adult males with criminality in serial-murderer territory. Many of them -- bad hombres all -- are locked up. Only a small fraction are actually serial killers. The numbers are upper bounds to the actual numbers of serial murderers. The small upper bound on the number of Hispanic serial killers should warm hearts in the Nation of Aztlán.

We looked for data to test this bound. Hickey examined a sample of 226 male serial killers for which race and ethnicity could be determined. He found 73% of the offenders were white, 22% African American, 3% Hispanic, 1% Asian, and 1% other. Our prediction that Hispanics constitute a very small fraction of serial murderers is confirmed. The ratio of white to Hispanic offenders in Hickey's sample is 24 to 1. We would predict 37 to 1.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/serial.htm

Okay, revised statement: interesting if you're a crime nerd like me.