High school shooting in Parkland FL

[Rev. Rye]

This issue has happened so many times now. At this point it would be best for the parents to teach their kids the warning signs of a teen/adult shooter.

We tried that in the wake of Columbine. The profiles turned out to be off-base, and were often used as an excuse to victimise other children. It turned out the closest thing to a common thread in school shooters is they tended to tell someone about it beforehand.

And here's my personal experience: when Columbine happened, I was in the third grade, and it would never have occurred to me to shoot up a school. Then people started profiling, and, as the bullying that seemed to be natural to someone on the autism spectrum with emotional problems escalated, the students (and in at least one case, a teacher) used the "potential school shooter" idea as an excuse to escalate the bullying. By the time I graduated grade school, I wound up regretting not going all Dogville on my school. Fortunately, the most lethal gun I have ever touched only shoots floppy plastic suction darts (and very poorly, I may add). In High School (otherwise a comparatively tranquil place), there were actually two campaigns to frame me as a potential school shooter, once through a whisper campaign that led to me having to meet with the dean of students multiple times until Homecoming came and went and nothing happened, and another time, there was a plan to start up a Facebook page in my name and post messages claiming I was going to shoot up the school, but this time I thwarted it by making my own Facebook page before they could do it.

TL;DR: If you give a kid a profile, he's going to want to use it an excuse to fuck with some other kid he doesn't like. And it's not like there's actually that much in the way of warning signs to begin with.