South Carolina SS

[CoffeeDrink]

SC School Shooting

Sum: A recent event that occurred this Wednesday was a school shooting in South Carolina. What, to me, seems strange is that the perpetrator was homeschooling, and went on to kill his father and commit to fire at children and teachers at a nearby elementary school, which left at least three seriously injured.

What caused this? How would it have been preventable? What does homeschooling have to do with this particular shooting? Why an elementary school? Your thoughts and opinions? Whose to blame? Discuss.

 

[Esper]

Well, the fact that the shooter was captured alive means we might have some idea of what made him do this, but that might take time to find out.

Personally, I don't think homeschooling is really all that important to this discussion. Lots of teenagers get homeschooled and don't shoot people and plenty of kids who've gone to regular high schools have shot people. Unless there was something specific about the home environment I don't think there's much we can say about the shooter's school life being a factor. I mean, I know that homeschooled kids can be a little weird and have some trouble socializing, but that isn't necessarily what happened here and by itself it wouldn't explain the extreme action to shoot people.

Teenager killing a parent though, that feels like some kind of personal anger they had, some grievance they felt they had to act on. I'm gonna add my expected two cents on the easy availability of firearms as a contributing cause because guns make it easier to react quickly and tragically where their absence might mean more time to cool off, etc.

 

[Melody]

This is tragic; but really only time will tell what it was that caused and motivated the shooting. Unfortunately I'm going to have to agree that guns being handily available are a big cause of shootings; and that people really need to be forced to lock their guns away somewhere safe so that children don't get access to it.

This feels like the gun was too accessible when it should have been locked away somewhere or kept somewhere away from where they were allowed to go. Unfortunately the ones who might have been held accountable were killed. But I imagine that the shooter might be incarcerated for a very long time.

I don't believe that preventing people from owning guns could have stopped this; but I do believe that guns should be firmly kept safe and away from anyone but it's registered owner at all times. If the gun had been placed in a safe under a lock; it wouldn't have been so quickly accessible to the shooter who was emotionally volatile and unstable. It might have bought enough time for the kid to cool down and such. This is why devices such as trigger locks and gun safes are so essential to owning a gun responsibly; and people who fail to implement such shouldn't own guns; this I do agree with.