Why are kids shooting other kids at school?

[MineralMan]

74. And you've misunderstood me.

What I want is schools that have enough staff to watch for bullying, mistreatment, and early symptoms of developing mental health problems. I want schools with staffs that have training in these things and support from administrators for their watchfulness. I want intervention done in every bullying situation so that it is clearly not an acceptable thing, as it is in so many schools today, like the ones in the Anoka-Hennepin district in Minnesota near where I live.

Not utopia, but responsibility and ability to solve problems. I didn't even mention mental illness. While it can be a factor, simple, justified rage at problems being ignored is the more common issue, frankly. I'm talking about programs that remove the kind of behaviors that belittle and provoke, not some sort of looking for likely perpetrators of this kind of violence. I want to prevent it by removing the stimuli that trigger it.

To do that, our schools need to be fully staffed, with classroom sizes small enough that every teacher knows her students. Those schools need to be intolerant of bullying behavior, diverting bullies into programs designed to teach the bullies not to bully by finding out what's causing the bullying behavior. Often bullies are themselves victims of bullying. I'm talking about a society that actually cares about the individual children. That's the way to end most of these unfortunate incidents. There aren't many school shootings. Let's work on the causes for them by making our schools places where children thrive, rather than places where they disappear into the background and are not the center of the process of education.

So, you see, I'm not in favor of things that don't work. I want things that do work, and that will have many other benefits, besides.