Originally Posted by TheSquealer

What fascinates me about these conversations most is the fact that our brains are hard wired to identify and point to a single cause. The kid, music, video games, the cop, the parents etc. no one thinks a kid deserves to die for any reason and the simple fact is that incidents like this are complicated and the causes that led to the event itself are many. Shitty parents, a reactive student body/school staff, police training/equipment, a kid that was apparently suicidal or deeply disturbed in some manner and so on and so on.

Blaming a cop doesn't solve the problem of kiss bringing guns to school in a world where school massacres happen. Blaming the child doesn't address the shitty parenting, our fucked up "me me me" culture, the mental illness, the medications or everyone's inability to deal with him before it got to this point and so on.

Of course this stuff will happen over and over. It was said that "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" and if there was ever an inescapable truth of man, it's that history rarely does anything at all to change future behaviors. We are what we are... talking, self important apes living in the shared delusion that we are not as primative as we are. 2014 and we are still watching genocides, still watching hungry children die, still starting wars. Still acting like unevolved apes.

Originally Posted by Jel

This is part of the overall problem, obviously, and lends itself to everyone just passing the buck to circumstances x, y, and z. We can achieve some pretty spectacular things, and have done, and continue to do so, but a 1st world country can't solve the situation where instant death is the 'only' route in a scenario like this