The shooters want to be on the news. Seeing that they have no future, or they think that they don’t have one. To give one last F.U. to the system.

Everything is a catastrophe for some teens. Not all of them but a handful are. Also teenage to young adults are when mental illness start to be diagnosed. Like bipolar and schizophrenia. Not that they deliberately want to cause harm, but rather the stigma is believed to mean the life is over. No CEO of Hasbro or community leadership position for them. Only a bagger position at Wal-Mart for eternity. Nothing wrong with a honest job at Wal-Mart, but they don’t know that. None taught me that all work is honest work when I was a young adult and I refused to give up my dream of being a psychologist or career councilor. Hence I was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, and I.B.S. I was lucky that I had a positive supporting mom and I was granted disability and prescribed helpful pills that don’t have nasty side affects.

Many of these kids have been bullied.
Teenage years are torturous. Kids don’t see a future, and the pressure they feel is enormous. The chemicals in their brains are changing, and the result is they are temporarily brain damaged.

^^ This is so sad. I’ve been bullied but I never go to those kind of extremes. I wish there was a way to get through to those that believe they have no future. We need more counseling and better awareness of those problems :(

All of the above is true, for the most part. The final gig is when the cops shoot the shooter. It is a form of suicide by cop by someone who absolutely hates themselves as much as society in general and who doesn’t have the nerve to just put the gun to their own head and then pull the trigger.

Ted Talk given by a man who says he was almost a school shooter. https://youtu.be/azRl1dI-Cts

The reason is easy access to guns.

Basically they never learned good coping skills and thus act out in anger and frustration.
It start with teaching them how to handle NOT getting what they always want ( birthday presents, etc)

Why do birds fly? (Hint: they have wings). Why do lunatics with access to guns shoot up schools? Wanna guess? What might you expect in a land with schools and enough guns to arm EVERYONE along with their dogs and cats?

@HP I will bite. wiki Anders Behring Breivik

Though I can’t find it now, he was reported to have played a lot of World-Of-Warcraft and first person shooters just before his rampage. Read into that what you please. I avoid first person shooters because they amp me up too much. I stick to chess and civilization games; Like Sid Meyers Alpha Centari.

He can be paroled soon… for murdering 77 (8 in Oslo, 69 on Utøya).

Schools tend to be targeted by younger shooters. Often they have some personal connection to that school. It’s probably a place they have some kind of negative association with and a school is a good target if they want there to be many casualties. As for why someone wants to kill a bunch of people in the first place, that discussion could go on for a long time and there’s no one correct answer, but these people often have suicidal impulses, they’re angry and isolated and want to lash out and make a big splash and take others with them.

@RedDeerGuy1
This was in that link that you previously sent for this question, also the reasons given.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting

“The motive for mass shootings (that occur in public locations) is usually that they are committed by deeply disgruntled individuals who are seeking revenge for failures in school, career, romance, or life in general[7] or who are seeking fame or attention.[8] If multiple people are shot in a robbery or killed in a group’s terrorist attack, that type of violence is usually not included under the definition of mass shootings.[9]”

I think that video @JLeslie pretty much sums it all up. How horrible he was treated and what was going through his mind. I am so thankful he found the help (or the help found him) and he is doing so much better now.

The sick losers that turn to these cowardly, self serving attacks, are concentrating their efforts at the source of their troubles.

Schools represent turmoil & rejection to them & so this lashing out gives them some twisted sense of retribution.

They happen in the US by orders of magnitude more than anywhere else in the world.

Teens are hormonal, go through stress, get depressed, and face bullying pretty much everywhere in the world.

It’s something about US society itself. It may be that guns are too easy to access. It might be the individualistic culture, whatever that means exactly. Maybe there are fewer adequate support networks. Maybe social services aren’t good enough.

Maybe it’s all those things and more.

It’s clear that the common sense solution is for children to wear full body armour to school and be trained and armed with guns to protect themselves.

@Kropotkin ”It’s clear that the common sense solution is for children to wear full body armour to school and be trained and armed with guns to protect themselves. I sure hope this is some tongue in cheek comment not meant to be serious. OMG, Because this is horrible and scary.

@RayaHope Maaaaybe.

There are far too many schools in the United States and it is all too easy for young impressionable kids to become enrolled in a school. Close the schools, free those kids and school shootings will become a thing of the past.

There unfortunately are no simple reasons on why someone does something when mental illness is involved.

I’m with @RedDeerGuy1 on this one. Most of these shooters have no real future and are tired of being just a blip on the screen. There is obviously some mental illness at work. But really all they want is for people to notice them…to talk about them…to be famous, even if they are dead. They at least get remembered.

@flutherother Okay now I know you are joking…right? Too many schools? Close all the schools?

@RayaHope Easier to abolish the schools than to abolish the guns and I’m not sure I am joking.

@flutherother So everyone would have to be home-schooled? That is not even practical since so many households are ..umm ..not capable of doing that for tons of reasons. If not that, then how would young people get educated?

People generally fail to recognize their own insanity and seriously underestimate other people’s insanity. A prime example of this is attempting to make sense out of actions that are obviously insane.

(You can’t make sense out of nonsense.)

The most delusional action people are guilty of is pretending we “know”. If we know as much as we think we know why is the world increasingly and persistently screwed up? Things don’t happen in a vacuum. There is a cause for EVERYTHING, but when it comes to problems in the world we habitually fail to recognize how we contribute to these problems.

It’s incredibly insane. There are people in the world actively trying to change their own misguided interpretations of the world they live in while there are other people just as actively deriding and opposing any attempt these people make to correct mistakes of the past to enable all of us a better present and future.

They’ve turned doing the right thing (increasing one’s awareness i.e. being “woke”) into an insult or an object of ridicule.

You want to know why school shootings happen? They’re a result of an angry, ignorant, immature mass consciousness that’s been nurtured and allowed to thrive for many many years.

And if we have to ask “why” we’re probably contributing to the problem.

I would hope that I’m NOT contributing to this problem just by asking “why?” I think questions and discussion should HELP solve problems not make them worse. We should actively be looking for solutions and implementing those solutions for a better tomorrow!

@RayaHope We ALL contribute to a multitude of problems in the world despite endlessly discussing everything under the sun. At some point these discussions should lead to actions that work toward resolving these issues. Ever notice that nothing significant is ever done to resolve our most pressing issues? We’re very good at paying lip service to being oh so concerned but when was the last time we asked ourselves…

…what can I do about this?

We do nothing but talk until something tragic directly affects us personally. Until then someone else’s tragic event is nothing more than a segment on the evening news or a Fluther topic to generate lurve.

@SABOTEUR I believe the problem is everything is based on money! How does this make me money or what’s in it for me? THAT is the problem, we need to change that type of system. Now don’t even ask me how that will be accomplished since in America we can’t even adopt the metric system 100%. Too many old minds are stuck in their ways that can’t get out of their hole. We need to change if we are to ever evolve into true greatness.

No guns no shooting @RayaHope it has nothing to do with money:

Columbine was not money

Sandy hook was not money

University of Texas tower shooting 1966

^^I got kind of off-topic talking to @SABOTEUR which was a more broad scope of problems. I apologize:(

@Tropical_Willie Wait a minute. We all recently saw how easy it was to ban the rights of women to get abortions. Why isn’t it just as easy to ban guns? Because banning guns would threaten the profits of businesses associated with gun manufacturing. There’s your money.

They wave the American flag and the 2nd amendment at us while we watch mentally disturbed people shoot school children. This will continue because WE continue to vote for politicians that tell us what we want to hear, who proceed to line their pockets with cash once they get in office. They don’t give a damn about your kids. Perhaps if the American public paid them more than the gun lobby fewer children would die. Or perhaps we stop voting for people who really don’t care about us. What about term limits? There are steps we can take to curb these incidents but the American public has the attention span of a 60 second TV commercial and we absolutely REFUSE to acknowledge the people we elect do nothing of consequence to help us.

We can ask all the questions we want. We might even come up with valid solutions. But if we insist upon doing the same things while expecting different results we’ll continue to nurture the same insanity that places us in the predicaments we continually experience.

@SABOTEUR You explained this better than I ever could. I am glad you saw the connection I was trying (but failed) to make. I like the way you think :)

Easy access to weapons