Well unfortunately it may mean undoing some of the things we have been teaching boys over the last 30 years or more. This is not a short term thing and has been sliding down more as time goes on. I think we need to give up some of that childhood safety in schools, or while playing. When boys act like boys now we mostly punish them, and I am not talking about sexual things. We as men are inherently dangerous, we are attracted to dangerous things, and we need to encourage that. When we look at the shootings in the western world they are unfortunately a mostly urban problem, mostly. We need to encourage the healthy outlets of our dangerous nature with sports and activities. We need parental involvement in kids lives, both parents. It is nor surprise to me that with the rising tide of single mothers you seem to have a correlation with crime rates rising 15-20 years later. You have had a large percentage of the population grow up without a male role model, or one who didn't have one themselves.
As an aspriring child educator I do the education system is playing its part, but I would believe the root of the issue, goes much deeper than that. I quote :
>>"Mental illness cannot be fixed by parents or caretakers alone either because they are often not financially equipped to do so nor trained to deal with it," said Susanne Babbel, PhD, a trauma therapist. "Children and teenagers with mental illness often need a team of providers but many times do not receive adequate support, nor does the parent or caretaker who tries to meet their child's needs."<<
And this is something I actually experienced a few times as well and which is one of the really frustrating parts of my job, when children and teenagers with issues simply didn't get the support they eventually needed. Which leads to another issue, teenagers and children experience an immense social preasure today and partiuclarly those teenagers that are sensitive. I quote:
>>The majority of the attackers had difficulty dealing with loss or personal failures, or felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others. Many also attempted suicide.<<
If we leave out the kind of shooters with serious mental issues right from birth - the ones that tortured animals at a young age for fun, then we come to something that's concerning behaviour which has developed over time, a resentment and hatetred for society, the surrounding world. We're not spending enough time listening and actually asking what the children need, particularly the quiet ones, the ones that are frustrated and experiencing panic/angst.
I am not an expert (yet), but in my humble opinion a hell of a lot of issues could be solved, if we actually listened more to our children, their needs and what they want as teenagers. But this might require to change our whole education system and the way we see children in general - which we should do anyway. Grades and evaluations leading only to extrinsic motivations would have to be abandonded entirely, classes and lessons would have to be a lot more flexible, the school a lot more personalised with the individual strength of the pupil in mind. Why do we still force someone interested in math to learn subjects he hates and most probably doesn't need anyway. The target should be to teach learning and not subjects, so children and teenagers develop instrinsic motivations where learning something new and figuring something out becomes the reward - which every child actually posses right from the day it's born I am currently supervising children between the age of 1 and 3, and none of them isn't curious or not eager to learn. But we manged to build a system that's perfect in doing one thing, beating the natural 'curiosity' every human has, out of the child. And we do this, because we still believe humans and children in particular, would have to fit in to schedules and where efficiency and standardisation is key. We're not educating people we're conditioning them. But we're becoming post industrial societies where this is actually harming us since we're still forcing children trough an educational system that's build for industrial socieites.
To be honest, I am not surprised that some children/teenagers take some weapons to let out their frustration.
That is the same thing as trying to tell children not to glorify war. Ever since the dawn of time, people have glorified war and weapons.
Some people do feel manlier with a gun but it doesn't necessarily correlate into that same man using it to kill innocent people.
Just tell people that guns are not fucking toys and to have a healthy and proper respect for them. Make sure those mentally un-balanced folks can't get access to guns. It really isn't all that hard.
Again, the issue here is we have mentally broken individuals who believe that is ok to murder other folks because their fucking feelings were hurt. It is called learning to handle what life throws at you, including being called names.
Nuances. It's about the nuances. No one said those things are inherently evil or the cause of every viollent school shooting or that it's something that should be outright banned.
It's like with porn really.
Watching porn and drinking alcohol alone doesn't turn you in to a viollent rapist, but that still doesn't mean you would be suddenly fine with your 3 year old child watch it every day while drinking.
