Well, it’s going to be hard for me to do better than @mohawkjohn (dude, I’m extremely sorry to hear about your loss), I’m going to try to give a coherent and comprehensive answer based soley on my opinion (I’m not expert though).
First off, i don’t think you can ever eliminate them. There is no way to make sure that every person living on the pleanet or even in this country doesn’t just snap one day. We could however do a number of thing sto reduce the number of incidents. And there are certainly superficial things that can be done, like metal detectors in public places, harder access to guns, particularly if you have mentail health issues, thigns that will help, but which are far from the be all end all solution. I like @mohawkjohn‘s answer and I think this organization is a tremendous idea…after all if we get to people who are sick before they snap and get them the help they need, AND combine that with stricter gun controls, a lot of tragedy will be averted.
First off, I think if you have a good screening program for anyone who wants to own a gun, buy a gun or work with guns, you could start with something like the MMPI, maybe made a bit more specific, more robust, to make sure that peopel with certain tendencies just aren’t allowed easy access, it would be more proactive than waiting until someone develops a criminal record. In fact, I’d support testing with something this robust in school aged children, if we could determine who had certain violent tendencies, who was likely to snap, etc….we could identify the people who are at the greatest risk of not beign able to cope with extreme stressors.
Then yes, we need to destigmatize mental health, first off by making it covered by all insurance carriers just like physical health, make psychological screening and therapy part of our upbringing, something that people just do, not something that makes you feel like you’re going to have t spend a bunch of money you don’t have to have somoen make you feel like you’re crazy. It needs to be imbured in our culture, so that people are made ready for the real world before they are pushed out into it, and so they have been trained to have the stress management skills they will need to cope with life when it gets to be too much. I think people are by and large ill equiped to deal with th ereal world and everyone just kidn of does their best…if you are lucky, things go well in life and you are never pushed all the way to the breaking point. But then some will be pushed there….some may be weaker and thus have a weaker breaking point, but we dont’ know who these people are until they snap. And when they DO snap, we don’t know if they’re likely to go quietly crazy or if they’re going to go postal.
And I used that term not to be glib, but to illustrate my next point….this kind of activity used to be far more associated with one particular job…a very high stress job with a lot of bureaucracy, much of which is almost certainly unnecessary (because most bureaucracy, or the private sector equivalent…politics) is unnecessary, it’s about exercising control over people who are both capabale and desirous of being able to do thign sthey way that makes sense to THEM. This is done to keep people in line, to keep a sense of control and predictability, which leads to (or can lead to) higher profit margins in the long run. So, I think anohter important fact is that our entire culture puts profit first, far ahead of the mental needs of people who do the work to create all this profit. I suspect that if our society didn’t place quite so much emphasis on wringing every last ounce of profit from every single venture and maybe our companies put time, money and effort into employee retention rather than trending towards finding ways to get fewer and fewer people to do more and more work for less and less money, I think people might by and large be happier at their jobs. And I think that while a lot of people who end up getting fired may really be bad at their jobs, or may really be bad employees, perhaps they COULD have succeeded in an atmosphere or corporate culture where they felt more useful, less like an expendable headcount. I know the people in my experience who’ve bitched the most about their jobs are the ones who are more likely to commit little acts of hostility (like stealing pens or pissing in the boss’ coffee cup), and they are the ones more likely to be habitually late, take less pride in a job well done, and it leads to a cycle where the boss just has more and more reason to criticize the employee, when really the employee’s delicate psyche is being cracked a bit more every day by the constant stress of a job they hate….a job which they originally voluntarily accepted and even sought out by the way…one for which they were qualfied enough to be hired…something is going wrong when a person gets actually fired, and it’s probably a combination of a person who is not equipped to deal with an environment, and a corporate culture which uses up people like this.
But now days, you don’t even have to be fired to lose your job, increasingly people are treated like headcount, the CEOs who make millions look at a layoff of 2,000 people…people with families and financial commitments, as a mere 10% reduction in “headcount”, again, all because of the relentless pursuit of maximization of profit. Maybe the people who are left have to do more work for the same money. Or maybe they ALL get laid off and the jobs are shipped to a country where they can pay pennies on the dollar for the same work. The point I’m getting at ultimately is disillusionment, it’s not hard to become disillusioned in this society in America today. Because think about the greatest illusion we all hold…it’s called the American Dream. The American Dream says that ANYBODY, as long as they’re willing to work hard, can be a success in America. But yet, it’s maybe 1 or 2% of the population who really do well, who get ahead, who want for nothing (and not all of them work by the way). Yet the other 98 to 99% of us at best live paycheck and at worst don’t know where our next meal is coming from, and this has little to nothing to do with how hard we work. Even a college degree is no longer a key to success…hell, I have a professional degree AND 15 years of work experience and I’ve been out of work for 9 months. If a certain, even small percentage of people are mentally unstable and capable of snapping and going on a killing spree, when 99% of people will never get ahead in this world, despite being imbued with this nationalistic sense of pride from the day they’re born that they live in the greatest country in the world, because ANYONE can write his own ticket. It just ain’t like that in the real world, and peoples’ illusions eventually shatter.
But the bigger problem is when someone loses everything. If you have nothing left to lose, then it’s just natural to want to have the last say, to give your last middle finger to the work, the society, the ex lover, whatever who tossed you to the curb when you most needed help and compassion. And quite frankly, we don’t live in a compassionate society, we live in a voyeuristic society where what is prized above all else is spectacle, the biggest rated shows on TV are when American Idol shows the rejects. Sure, someone who believed she was going to be the next Britney her whole life is told point blank that she can’t carry a tune, it makes for good human drama, good spectacle, real entertainment for the masses, yet really this is a person having her lifelong dream and her illusions about her own capabilities shattered. We like to knock people down a peg as well, we love to see how far someone will go for say 10 grand, a mere pittance…sure, I’ll eat that horse rectum, and not even for 10 grand, but for a chance to win 10 grand! We love it, the most popular shows on TV for the last DECADE have all been ones in which people are put through really emotionally and physically trying challenges, only to see the vast majority of them EPIC FAIL.
So, think about it from the point of view of raising one’s kids. There is a cognitive disconnect here as well…at a time when we are the meanest and most voyeuristic of any point in history, we are also raising our kids in a threat free, conflict free world. We are no longer toughening our kids up…forget about spanking a child who gets out of line, hell, you pull their hair and your spouse probably accuses you of abuse and threatens to call the police these days, and GOD forbid you physically discipline a child in public, you could go to jail and have the kid taken away. We empower our kids from an early age to think that whatever they put their mind to, they will succeed, and that all that mattters is you tried. But then suddently you leave high school and BAM, it’s not so simple. Sure, a parent can tell his kid that being an adult isn’t so great, but how does that sound stacked up against a lifetime where kids are no longer allowed to “fail”. Fact is, some kids are good at some things, some are good at others…it’s called aptitude, and we need more testing of aptitude alongside testing of personality traits in schools. And let’s face it, schools SHOULD be our #1 priority from a governmental spending point of view, but they are not. We should NOT have any kids going to substandard schools…if we made sure everyone got a top notch education starting in early childhood, with assessment to lead the child to more custom tailored training and education in the later years, we would be much better off. We seem adverse to admitting that not every kid is college material (because we know how hard it is to make it even WITH a college degree these days, the thought of our kids not going to college is unthinkable). And then when it comes time for us to pick a career, we literally know nothing about it. I had no idea what it meant to be an Accountant when I picked my major…I just knew I was good with numbers, I liked my high school Accounting class and I could make a lot of money doing it. Some kids go with what their gut feeling, their preference is…in a way it’s a lot like marriage and dating, and we see how that turns out. Think about it, you go with what your instinct tells you on who to go out with and who to marry, it’s based on what you feel, but you don’t know what you don’t know. So, ½ of all marriages end in divorce, and I’ve read (even though I personally only dated one person besides my wife before I got married) that the average person dates 17 people before they marry. So, what’s that, 17 and a half out of every 18 relationships are ultimately misguided. Yet we pick our careers in the same way…but it’s even harder to divorce your career than it is to divorce your spouse….it’s how you make your money. You get divorced you might lose half of your money, you quit your job you lose ALL of your money. So, we’re I believe doing a disservice to our kids, or more accurately our future adults by not really figuring out their aptitudes as much as their interests. Even when they DO have a career preference test in high school, they ask you “would you like to do x y or z”. So, people often end up in jobs or careers they don’t like, having to deal with things that make them feel unfulfilled, just so they can survive…it’s very disheartening when you believe that all it takes to succeed is hard work, and you have gotten a degree, man you should be set, and you still end up just getting by. So, you have been led to believe one thing, delivered another, and given no mental tools to deal with crushing disappointment, and add to that, no one has ever tried to determine which of these sure to be dissillusioned people are likely to be able to roll with the punches and which are likely to shoot a couple dozen people.
Consider that the ONE thing in common with almost all of these shooters is that they feel they have nothing left to lose. My point is that society pushes a LOT of people to the point where they might feel they have nothing left to lose, particularly if they have the propensity to react badly to disillusionment. I guess to summarize I’d say we could imbue people with realistic expectations, we could have a govenrment that takes care of its people and invests in its future via its kids, in which the success of the individuals in the society were the barometer of success and not just the gross domestic product, where no one was allowed to fall through the cracks so if you DID lose your job for any reason, you weren’t this close to losing everything. We could equip people better to deal with adversity and do a better job of identifying at risk individuals, we could make mental health as important and run of the mill as physical health, take away the shame factor and make sue we know who’s at risk, and how to deal with them, and make sure that people know what they’re going to be good at whent hey grow up, and that people with delicate psyches aren’t put into roles that will make them crack. We keeep dangerous weapons out of their hands, and focus on making our culture more appreciative of literate pursuits rather than spectacle based ones. I think if we could achieve all that, we’d see these types of shooting approach, but not reach zero. I think we’d see all manner of crime go down. But there will always be sociopaths and psychopaths who work their ways around the system no matter what. There are countries (Germany for example) where the cutlure is VERY different, a lot closer to what I described than what we have in America, and yet they have had at least one big shooting in the last decade…they haven’t however had as many as we have had.
OK, off my soap box, I hope that makes sense.
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