Discussion: Third Student Dies In Washington High School Shooting

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Discussion for article #229339

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Cue the gun control posts. I am a big supporter of gun control. But this isn’t about gun laws. Yes, if the handgun had been properly locked up and inaccessible to the boy, this terrible crime might not have been committed, and in that respect gun safety plays a role. But I doubt the boy’s family had any idea how mentally and emotionally troubled he was. And that’s what it’s really about–a community of kids who lack adult supervision of their lives and activities. Read their Twitter feeds, not just the shooter’s but other freshmen at the high school, friends of the shooter’s, friends of the victims, even the victims themselves. Many of the Tweets and re-Tweets are highly sexual, in some cases pornographic. It is clear that these 14-year-olds are sexually active and have been for some time. There are also ample references to pot and alcohol. A local newspaper, the Everett Herald, has a sympathetic profile of the shooter, an attempt to try to make some sense of what happened. A line from it “He was in a long-term relationship with a great girl.” How can a ninth grader have had a long term relationship? How old was he when it started – 12? Why are 14-year-old girls Tweeting about how great it is to wake up in bed with your guy? If someone sitting at a computer a thousand miles away can so easily get a picture of these kids’ activities, then why weren’t the parents and teachers and other adults in their lives just as easily able to do so? Fourteen-year-olds, sexually active right from the start of puberty, in relationships that belong in the adult world, kids without the mental and emotional maturity to deal with breakups and betrayal and jealousy. Kids in distress and anguish, who are in no way old enough to be navigating adult relationships. The shooter was clearly in pain, anguish, and angry. It looks like he wanted to make others see just how badly he was hurting, and to hurt the people who he blamed. Parents, wake up, pay attention to your kids, make an effort to know what is going on in their life and their world. Talk to them a lot, set some boundaries, don’t just be the adult-aged person in the house but otherwise uninvolved and unaware of your kids’ lives, *parent your children.

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I am really sick of hearing about this kid being so happy and mentally stable. Happy, mentally stable kids do not take a gun to school and kill people, because some damn girl broke up with him, and happy, mentally stable kids do not post their mental angst on Twitter for months before they do it.

It is not hard to tell from what we know, that this kid grew up in a house full of guns, that apparently were easily accessible to him, so please spare me the NRA crap that this was just another mentally unstable kid, and not a gun problem. If you want to teach your kid to hunt then fine, but do not automatically suppose that kid is either mature enough or mentally stable enough to have easy access to them, when he wants to solve some emotional problem he is having.

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‘But I doubt the boy’s family had any idea how mentally and emotionally troubled he was.’

Well, thanks for the typical NRA crap we hear every time, but you just ignorantly described the entire problem with their and your mentality that there should be no laws protecting the rest of us from people like this.

What you just basically said, is that this totally irresponsible gun obsessed family has more rights than the rest of us and our children do to be protected from them.

Look genius, hand your keys to your car to a 14 or 15 year old, and they kill someone, and see how fast you are held LEGALLY responsible. Why do you gun nuts think that something that is meant to kill and ONLY THAT being so easily accessible to a mentally sick kid, should be any different when it comes to holding parents responsible? That no parent ever is held responsible , and instead they are felt sorry for, IS THE REASON THAT THIS WILL CONTINUE TO HAPPEN!

Those parents are the LEGAL owners of those guns that their kids get hold of and kill people with, and damn it, it is long past time that we start holding those legal owners legally responsible for the deaths caused by their irresponsibility. These dam irresponsible parents are the ones responsible for these two dead girls, and yet they can continue to go on buying more guns to leave lying around their damn home. It is a FACT, that without their irresponsibility, two girls would be alive and going to school today, but to idiots like you they had no rights. Keep your damn guns, but I want laws holding every one of you irresponsible ADULTS who own them, held responsible when your kid uses one to kill.

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  1. I would take teen-age claims of sexual activity with a grain of salt.

  2. Even if these were, by generally accepted standards, prematurely sexually active kids, that in no way should lead to killings. And if there were a causal connection, than that would be all the more reason to restrict access to guns.

  3. Added: Kids have early sex around the world, yet we’ve had over twice the number of school shootings since 1996 as the rest of the world combined. Maybe, just maybe, it has more to do with our gun culture and gun laws than bad parenting per se.

  4. Oh, for Fuck’s sake. The mild tone I chose in responding to you was inappropriate, informed by under-caffeination. You are suggesting that emotional immaturity in sexual relationships leads, somehow, to murder because bad parents and teachers. You are either an idiot, or just flat out mendacious. Though maybe both?

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By the way, gun nut, STOP DOING THE TYPICAL NRA CRAP OF BLAMING TEACHERS. THEY DID NOT LIVE WITH THE KID, OR BUY THE GUNS, OR KEEP THEM UNLOCKED NOW DID THEY??? Yeah I am screaming, because I am so sick of hearing about innocent dead kids, because of selfish, ignorant, and totally irresponsible gun nut parents. Teachers are not dating police!

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…But, hey! Why focus on solutions!

Every day in the news we see examples of how guns are becoming a substitute for civil discourse. Had the gun been properly and safely stored, maybe the kid would have chosen the option of talking to his parents or someone else, instead of getting all wrapped up in his own head.

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Fail.

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Cue the NRA propagandists.

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Hearing the parents’ reaction always breaks my heart.

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A close friend of our daughter’s committed suicide late last winter. She was pretty, athletic, popular, an honor student and in the orchestra. Yet she felt under a great deal of pressure, though no one could explain after why it was all too much for her.

In many ways, kids grow-up much quicker now than they did even than in the supposedly wild 60s. Early teen sexual activity is more prevalent than it was even a decade ago. So I agree with you - you’ve got kids messing with adult emotions (if you don’t have the emotions, you’re not doing it right) with brains that are, on average, a decade away from being fully mature. The availability of the gun made the situation deadly, but it didn’t create the situation.

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You would? How many teens do you know? how many teens have you raised?

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I would take my two teenagers’ claims of sexual activity very seriously, but I remember being a teenager, and there was a lot of bragging among my (male) peers that was not always factual. And I challenge your assertion that sexual activity is more wide spread than it was in the past:

“Teens are waiting longer to have sex than they did in the recent past. In 2006–2008, some 11% of never-married females aged 15–19 and 14% of never-married males in that age-group had had sex before age 15, compared with 19% and 21%, respectively, in 1995.”
and…
“Fewer than 2% of adolescents have had sex by the time they reach their 12th birthday. But adolescence is a time of rapid change. Only 16% of teens have had sex by age 15, compared with one-third of those aged 16, nearly half (48%) of those aged 17, 61% of 18-year-olds and 71% of 19-year-olds.[1] There is little difference by gender in the timing of first sex.”
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-ATSRH.html

I have been around long enough to live through several teenage sex scares, and while the internet is a new factor, teens have survived, for the most part, social upheavals before, and will continue to do so. It is not easy being a teenager today, but I suspect it never has been.

I am sorry for your daughter’s friend’s loss. I do not mean to trivialize that loss, but I do want to point out the primacy of our out-of-control gun culture in these deaths. Teenage mental illness will be a given going forward (though we certainly should strive to make life better for them), but gun control is a simple (!) matter of legislation.