Among Friends

[stevieb]

Trying to control weapons probably won't work any better than trying to control any other 'banned' item or substance. That probably doesn't mean that realistic and meaningful efforts to review policy would be a waste of time, but it's not the solution.

In the short term, school security needs to be beefed up and if that means reallocating portions of what are the more than significant budgets enjoyed by most school systems then so be it...

In the longer term, while I have no idea how... we, individually and collectively, need to come to grips with the issues that are creating these monsters and, until we do, find a way to identify, isolate and control them. At the same time, we need to deal with media influence, of all kinds, that desensitizes us to violence and that aggrandizes these events. We also need to address apologist societal thinking that somehow, in whatever twisted way, has served to legitimize violence as a bona fide response to being lonely, frightened, disenfranchised, marginalized and on and on and on... There have always been and there will always be poorly adjusted people and people who feel marginalized, but the phenomenon of that then translating into episodes of mass violence while not new, is more pronounced now. A big part of the reason for that is because it's somehow come to be the expectation that when some people feel bad about whatever it is they feel badly about, it's a natural consequence to go out and hurt someone...