I truly appreciate the fact that our young adults/students are capable to mobilize not just others in our nation, but also students in other parts of the world; we adults can learn a lot from this. Having said that, we have not yet identified the root-cause of this major problem; so far we are trying to address only some of these contributing factors, while totally ignoring the root or primary cause of these mass school shootings.
The root-cause for these school shootings are not the existence of guns, or the lack of background checks, nor the age of the gun buyer; these factors always existed, in previous times, when we did not have this phenomenon. We have to ask, what has changed?
Our children/students have now a very powerful tool, the 'Social Media', which can be used for good, as well as for evil. We have here, one example where the social media is used for the good; young people organize and come together, for a common cause, and that is good. However, this very same tool has been used in very destructive ways, driving some of our children to suicide because of cyberbullying. This social media tool, unfortunately, allows some users to insult and malign others anonymously, thus emboldens those cowards to be extra vicious in their destructive messages.
While we always had a few isolated Bullies in Kindergarten or School, we now have entire groups of young people ganging up on a single person. In the past a bully, acting alone, was more easily set straight, with proper discipline but now we are no longer faced with a single bad actor, it is an entire group or click that is acting badly. When a child, in the past, was bullied someone (a teacher, friend or parent) usually came to the rescue, and stopped the bully. Now, these bullies find security in their number, and like a school of fish, it became much harder to identify, single out, and stop this anti-social behavior.
As a Quality Engineer, I spent 40+ years looking for, identifying, and lecturing about Root-Cause determination. Drawing from this experience, my conclusion is that the Root-Cause of these mass school shootings is the antisocial behavior by too many of our young people/students towards their peers. While the students currently cry for their protection at schools by society, too many of them make life, at school, pure hell for others, outside of their click.
Let them refrain from bad social behavior, and make school a place where everyone is a friend, odd looking or not. Let them come together not only in a crisis situation but every day. This would be the only effective corrective action necessary to eliminate the root-cause for these mass school shootings. Of course, better gun control would be the icing on the cake.
Please talk to your children about this problem, ask of them to be always social towards others.
Added 3/30/2018, taken from my comment posted earlier. I want to be sure that the following will not be missed.
Please visit: http://www.cyberbullyhotline.com/07-10-12-scourge.html, for more information.
The following was taken from the linked site shown above.
42% of kids reported having been cyber-bullied.
7.5 million Facebook users are 13 years old.
81 % of teens say bullying online is easier to get away with.
3 million kids, per month, are absent from school due to bullying.
20% of kids cyber-bullied think about suicide, 1 in 10 attempt it.
4,500 commit suicide each year.
Suicide is the No. 3 killer of teens (car accidents #1, homicide #2).
Per the foregoing, on average over 12 children kill themselves daily; where is the outcry?
I think our teens need to take a hard look at themselves, before they look elsewhere. The number of young children and young adults (teens) killed by gunfire pales by comparison to the above suicide statistics.
Acknowledgement by President Trump
