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We used to take our guns to school to go dove hunting afterward. The guys cool enough to have pick-ups had gun racks with loaded firearms, usually a deer gun and a bird gun.

I never enjoyed it and wasn't good at it so I never pursued the hobby. I'd rather be in the woods tripping on acid than trying to kill sh*t.

That was 1968.

Yeah Greger, I remember that too. I must be a bit older, I graduated HS in 1964. My dad gave me first gun at either the age of 12 or 13. A .410. Good enough for squirrel and rabbit hunting. I used to ride my bike 8 miles into town and buy shells for it at the Western Auto. No questions asked. Different times. That was a time when teachers would leave their rifles and shotguns in the rakes in the back of their pickup in the parking lot of school. Cars and pickup’s unlocked and no one bothered them. Heck, no one locked their cars when they went into town and left their homes unlocked.

My grandpa had his shotguns and rifles in racks above the fireplace with the ammo on the mantle. We kid’s left them alone. My dad kept his guns in a closet by the door leading into the kitchen, ammo on the shelves in the closet. Again no one bothered them. We knew better. Every kid had their toy guns to play with. This was the 1950’s. Dad would tell me I could use them anytime I wanted, as long as I cleaned them after I got back home.

I think something has changed in our society, a change that occurred around 1970. The numbers of mass school shootings and mass shootings in general prove that. But people want to ignore the numbers. That the cause and perhaps the cure for mass shootings/mass killings goes much deeper than just guns. What I find interest is the change from the shooter knowing his victims, the killings were familicides and in the commission of a felony pre-1970. Remember going postal? Post 1970 that changed, most shooters don’t know their victims, their victims are innocent bystanders and the shooting occurs in public places. Killing for killing’s sake.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/mass-shootings-in-america-a-historical-review/5355990

It is what it is. I’ve lost all hope in finding the reasons and the cure to mass shootings, killings. Gun control may be useful in cutting the number killed per mass shootings, but I expect the number of mass shootings to continue to increase regardless of any gun control measures. In my mind, gun control can limit the number killed and injured per shooting but won’t decrease the number of mass shootings per year, they’ll continue to rise. Then the killer may switch to other means other than a gun. Bomb, arson, chemicals, whatever. The reasons and cause for the killings will still be there.

Well, you can't ban shooter games. You CAN try, but we know it doesn't work, and we know what happened when the "Parents Resource Music Center" got created by Tipper Gore. If you want the Frank Zappa of online gaming to tear do gooders a new one, that's how you get that rolling.
Zappa had some good points, by the way.

School bullying IS indeed one of the motherlodes, because it's been on the rise...you're absolutely right.
Show of hands, who here can guess what peer group has been getting fed super-sized helpings of the basemost deepest darkest hate messages lately, and from whom?
Show of hands again, what peer group has also been getting fed with supercharged messaging about the role of women in the world, and by whom? That last one is tricky because it's not just everyone's favorite domestic terror group masquerading as a political party...they have help from online resources devoted almost exclusively to refined curated anonymous hate.

As has already been more than adequately described by others much smarter than me, the average school age kid these days is bombarded by social media messages that tell them they're inadequate, and then they're picked on mercilessly by classmates who are addicted to the refined anonymous online hate groups.

Combine that with parents who are at the end of their resources and their rope, and you wind up with kids who entertain ideas no adult should even be forced to deal with on a daily basis. A ratings obsessed news media that will chase sensationalism over substance, and no one is really sure what's fact anymore, then add in the wannabe Lord of the Rings styled offerings from reality TV and you have the perfect cocktail to raise a generation of kids who dream of wasting everyone instead of climbing the ladder to opportunity, hard work and reward.
Limiting access to the most hardcore weapons of war would help a great deal, too.

Safe sexual activities are going to be a nonstarter until we first teach kids to reject the hate messaging about women.
The kids who have guidance from healthy messages about women (or any partners) are already enjoying the company of their sexual partners.
That group needs unfettered access to contraceptives, sex ed and family planning help.

I wonder if the pandemic has actually caused the problem. If you google something like; "pandemic teenage mental" you will find a LOT of stuff that tends to backup that up. Perhaps our real problem is the way we don't take care of our mental problems in any real way. This just doesn't extend to the growed up but kids. It used to be that schools, especially high schools had nurses which could discern mental problems and, sometimes at least, get some help for the kid with the problem. Now, we are told, many high schools no longer have even a single nurse. I also believe that a lot of our crime is also done by them with mental problems as well.

Its REALLY time the entire country starts dealing with things mental! There is a reason that there are huge swathes of all sorts of mental problems, ie. people who can't actually deal with reality, people absolutely devoted to any number of conspiracies, serious depression, etc. This is a known fact. Our problems seem to have begun when our state legislators took money previously devoted to taking care of the mentally ill for "more important" stuff. I live in the State of Washington. Our last state supported Insane Asylum actually got shut down by the feds due to being a really bad place run by some that were getting the minimum wage. I think they fixed it but, still........... Same thing, incidentally, happened to our orphanages. Their problem was also that they lost enough funding to carry on. Now we have another system which is, pretty much, yet another disaster. In other words our state legislators just don't seem to want to deal with social problems. I won't even start with our state supported Universities who have undergone all sorts of cuts which was simply moved to the students who have, now, created something like a 1 trillion dollar plus debt underwritten by our federal government (yet another disaster).

Basically those who we have been electing have not really been doing their jobs. We are now, I think, living with the results. I keep hollering about establishing a new Hoover Commission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission. It may also be of interest that California has a "Little Hoover Commission" https://lhc.ca.gov/ The feds have not had their 'agencies' studied by an independent body for a VERY long time!

Just saying.................

I just came across; https://www.kickassfacts.com/easter...urn-of-the-century-hospital-in-oklahoma/ which, pretty much, describes what happened to most of our insane asylums. Now, of course, we still have prisons to send them to.

JGW, there was a great drive between 1967-81 to do away with mental institutions. That coincides with my pre and post 1970 timeline. Mental health today gets ignored. There were many reasons give for closing them down, your poorly run, mismanagement, ill-treatment, overpopulated and more.

I'm on the mental health side of the argument too. Guns were all over the place before the shootings started and everyone played with them like they were toys.

I'll point to suicide by firearm as an indicator of mental health issues as well as fatal drug overdoses.

I think the numbers show that there are too many crazies among us to allow AR15s with high capacity magazines to continue to be sold like bags of popcorn.

Schumer's proposed bipartisan agreement addresses school security, mental health, and gun control. Just going after guns won't solve the problem.

Yep, I remember when that happened. it was caused by a movie that presented mental institutions has places of torture. I think it was called "The Snake Pit". They were actually pretty accurate as the state legislatures had been chipping at their funds for years and it all came to a head. The solution we have now is pretty simple. Folks with mental problems get to live with their problems. As long as they don't hurt anybody everything is fine. If they hurt anybody then they get to goto prison for, basically, the rest of their lives. The people that run the prisons used to whine about this, a bit, but they got used to it. They solved it for themselves, and everybody else, by just putting them in a room, locking the door, giving them 1 meal a day and forgetting them.

Now there are a number of efforts to try and deal with this. There are places that have now started to deal with kids in schools to one degree or another. I think that Texas actually tried to do this but the governor stopped the funding. Its really pretty strange. I have never understood why our society simply abandoned the mentally ill. I know, it was the legislators, but one would have thought that somebody would mention it but nobody ever seemed to. Same thing about higher education. Their state support has been drying up for years as student debt was created. I almost seems as if society is simply abandoning this social stuff. I also suspect that the ongoing homeless disaster is part of this one.

I have often wondered if we all just decided to walk away from this stuff and let it be. Now, however, we are all upset about the homeless. The problem there, I think, is that just saying "homeless" simply misses the point. The homeless has a serious percentage of mentally ill, it also has people who can't afford a place to lay their heads, runaways, predators, bums, etc. Its just not people without a house! Seattle is a great example of what can happen. They bought a great big building and then filled it with the 'homeless'. When the police have to go in there they will not, unless there are between 5 and 10 cops because they don't think its safe - there is NO security. I know some homeless who will not go to where there are beds because they don't consider it safe is another example.

Anyway, one last. It also seems that we are seriously short of shrinks. That being the case, even if gov really wanted to step up they couldn't hire enough mental workers to do the job.

Interesting times?

This is a tough environment for even the sanest among us. Imagine having a crushing mental illness and trying to navigate through this sh*t.

Society needs to dial back the pace before it spins out of control.

At the root of the homeless/mentally ill problem is actually the incessant drive from Republicans to cut taxes. The math is simple: If you cut taxes enough, then government can't perform things that government can handle best. So YOU get to deal with mentally ill people in your face and homeless people crapping on your back porch! That's what we voted for, so that's what we get.

I suspect that the reduction of things social is due to Libertarian Republicans who don't believe in taxes for such frills. Its really not all that surprising. I remember when a group got together and did away with social firemen. To have them put out the fire at your house you had to subscribe to them, if you didn't your house burned down. It didn't work. The problem is that when houses started to burn then the houses next to them tended to do that too. Its yet another example of politics just going too far. I think that our politics are both in that state which, in turn, causes each side to actually hate the other and it is, unfortunately, insane. The Seattle city council is a really good example of what can happen when the left break out. The result was a disaster. about 30% of their police simply quit and went someplace else. The reason was that the council went to the state legislature and convinced them to pass a law that didn't allow the police to touch somebody they arrested. We got to watch police try and arrest criminals who just walked away. Oh, they also felt sorry for poor criminals so, when they were arrested, and said they didn't have the money to pay for the bail, then they were simply released. Between the two Seattle was in deep do do. (I know, is hard to believe but that actually happened! Seattle is now trying to build up their Police Department and that's not going too well even when they offer any cop that will join up 25,000.00 to do it) I think the legislature got the message and fixed the problem but not right away and it was a flat out disaster. (TV used to show people walking into store, taking what they wanted and just walking out - nobody could do a damn thing!) Its also a good example of how BOTH sides can go too far and, I fear, we are at that point right now.

A lot of this comes from the voters. They have always been somewhat lazy but, now, they have joined up with our political situation and we have ongoing disaster of one sort or another almost daily. The unfortunate thing is that everybody seems to think that they are utterly right. So, we have a political system out of control, a bunch of self obsessed voters, and everybody knows everything and tend to reject any efforts to fix the mess.

I wish us all good luck on this one. I consider the ongoing messes to actually be educational experience for us all and, again unfortunately, now we are killing little kids because of it all. My hope is that, eventually, everybody will calm down, smell the roses, and somehow fix themselves. I guess I should throw in that I am not really convinced that I am just as much a loon as all the rest but I hope not. Oh, one last, most major societies collapse within. One can only wonder?