OT: parenting and the santa barbara shooter

[njtosd]

[quote=SK in CV][quote=Blogstar][quote=SK in CV]He didn’t have a screwed up value system. He had a screwed up brain. Perfect parenting wouldn’t have fixed that.[/quote]

Having to have the hottest girls or hate them is a value system. Something I have already taught my boys not to embrace. My boys may be crazy as hell when they grow up but the normal thing won’t be to go kill girls they can’t have .[/quote]

But your boys probably aren’t anywhere near as crazy as this kid was. That’s the point. He was broken. Possibly beyond repair. It wasn’t bad parenting. He didn’t need better parenting. He had a brain that did not function correctly. That may very well have been well beyond the fixes that current mental health care has available.[/quote]
+1

[njtosd]

I don’t think there is any evidence he was rejected by women. All that I’ve read indicated he didn’t engage socially with anyone. you can’t be rejected by someone you don’t talk to. He was deluded. This has nothing to do with social learning and everything to do with being crazy. As a friend used to say of people that removed from reality – “40,000 years of therapy wouldn’t fix him/her.”. And I think that’s the case here. So what do you do with these people?

[paramount]

[quote=CA renter]I’ve seen kids who were born pure evil, and no amount of parenting or psychiatry would be able to save them. But I think that this type of entitlement mentality — including the belief that one is entitled to sex with beautiful women — is largely learned. But that learning can come from the parents, peers, the media, the larger social network, etc.

Asperger’s certainly didn’t help his cause, either.

One thing I will say is that his videos, the calls from his mother and psychiatrist, etc. should have warranted a bit more than a visit from police. They should have made sure that he didn’t have access to guns at that point (though he killed a number of people without a gun, too…something to keep in mind).[/quote]

Couldn’t agree more.

One thing I wonder though; how common are these type of crimes in other 1st world countries?

[CA renter]

[quote=zk][quote=CA renter]

Asperger’s certainly didn’t help his cause, either.

[/quote]

All of these mass murderers were socially inept: Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Columbine, the Colorado movie theater, and UCSB. Many others, as well.

Some kids are weak at math. Some kids are weak at social skills. If a kid has weak math skills, he gets a tutor or, at worst, bad grades. If he has weak social skills, he gets bullied, ostracized, mocked, and maybe beaten up if he’s a boy or talked about ruinously behind her back if she’s a girl.

Obviously weak social skills are not the only factor here. But they are common to the above mass murders. That is not a coincidence. I honestly think that if society treated the socially inept less poorly, none of those crimes would’ve happened.

As long as we continue to act like this as a society, these crimes will continue.[/quote]

We are in total agreement about this.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=flu]Somewhere buried in this news is the fact that he killed 3 asian kids because they “were too nerdy”…with a knife….

Kid was messed up….Was gonna find a way for maximum destruction…..knife, gun, car, or whatever else was available…..

Mental illness isn’t exactly the easiest thing to identify….Some people can I guess just “snap”….[/quote]

he was 50% asian himself; mom was chinese…his racism was some sort of selfloathing…

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=njtosd]I don’t think there is any evidence he was rejected by women. All that I’ve read indicated he didn’t engage socially with anyone. you can’t be rejected by someone you don’t talk to. He was deluded. This has nothing to do with social learning and everything to do with being crazy. As a friend used to say of people that removed from reality – “40,000 years of therapy wouldn’t fix him/her.”. And I think that’s the case here. So what do you do with these people?[/quote]

freedom isn’t free.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=zk][quote=scaredyclassic]…but…gosh…there’s lots of mentally ill people who don’t act liek this…[/quote]

No doubt. It’s only one factor.

Lots of people are mentally ill. Lots of people are socially inept. A smaller but still large number are both. And only a tiny percentage of those will actually lash out violently. Nonetheless, considering that most spree killers in this country these days are socially inept, it seems obvious that it’s an important factor. Which makes sense, given the toll that years of merciless social torture from your peers must take on a person.[/quote]

it is more useful to think in terms of risk factors that under the right circumstances trigger a conflagration. but theya re only risk factors. they don’t have to trigger anything…

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=FlyerInHi]hard to believe the guy felt rejected.

He was goodlooking (better than average for sure), from a good family and had everything.

I wish I had a BMW in college. My life would have been more fun.[/quote]

why would a BMW help you have more fun?

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=spdrun]By the accounts I read, he didn’t even try to socialize, but was rather actively anti-social. I wonder if the rejection was all in his head, and if he didn’t ever even try to get a date.[/quote]

in his mind, he was trying, but his effortsinvolved extremely ineffective attemptsbasically just walking around and smiling at girls. h e tried to pump himself up, try to beleive that at least being outside and being near women would icnrease the odds of something happening. but it was hopeless ina real sense, because he rarely actaully talked to anyone. however, he was doing about as much as he could.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=njtosd]I don’t think there is any evidence he was rejected by women. All that I’ve read indicated he didn’t engage socially with anyone. you can’t be rejected by someone you don’t talk to. He was deluded. This has nothing to do with social learning and everything to do with being crazy. As a friend used to say of people that removed from reality – “40,000 years of therapy wouldn’t fix him/her.”. And I think that’s the case here. So what do you do with these people?[/quote]

you get more and more deluded by repeated failures. more and more isolated, more and more lonely. i don’t beleive there waas nothing that could have fixed him. that runs contrary to the message in the new Xmen movie. there is hope. as we learn in the movie, we need to face our own fears, get out of our own heads, and communicate. it really is a good movie for him. i wish his dad couldve taken him to it and hung out with him for 3 hours discussing it…

[spdrun]

iin his mind, he was trying, but his effortsinvolved extremely ineffective attemptsbasically just walking around and smiling at girls.

Exactly, so the rejection was mostly in his head … I’d suspect that 99% of the women didn’t even notice he was interested, and the other 1% may have thought it was a passing smile, not really to be acted on.

[spdrun]

One thing I wonder though; how common are these type of crimes in other 1st world countries?

I’ve heard of such things happening in other countries, Europe, Australia, the UK, etc. Crimes like these even happened in the Communist bloc pre-1989, though they were pretty well hushed up…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Hepnarov%C3%A1

The Hepnarova case actually seems pretty similar to this one, though of course no guns were involved, and the perpetrator was a woman.

[NotCranky]

[quote=spdrun]

iin his mind, he was trying, but his effortsinvolved extremely ineffective attemptsbasically just walking around and smiling at girls.

Exactly, so the rejection was mostly in his head … I’d suspect that 99% of the women didn’t even notice he was interested, and the other 1% may have thought it was a passing smile, not really to be acted on.[/quote]

Sounds like garden variety neurosis to me.

[NotCranky]

Biggest risk factor is blaming everyone else or blaming the “illness”, too many excuses. Anyone close to pre-school and kindergarten age kids in school can see that there are parents , when confronted with socializing their children, who indoctrinate kids into the blame game, escape game, and parents who don’t. I am afraid of and for the children from the parents who don’t quite get responsibility , and they come from all walks of life.

Look at the Helen Keller story, well kind of fiction too probably, but at some point I am pretty sure she was insane,probably a lot more than this kid, but the risk factors for a devastating life were turned around. Why not with other people in a similar way? That’s what I believe, this stuff is not set in stone it’s an attitude as much as innate and our who society an Annie Sullivan intervention to get things straight.

[SK in CV]

[quote=spdrun]

iin his mind, he was trying, but his effortsinvolved extremely ineffective attemptsbasically just walking around and smiling at girls.

Exactly, so the rejection was mostly in his head … I’d suspect that 99% of the women didn’t even notice he was interested, and the other 1% may have thought it was a passing smile, not really to be acted on.[/quote]

This wasn’t just “the rejection was mostly in his head”. He hadn’t been rejected. I think most guys, maybe even some women here will get this analogy.

When I was in high school, I played on the basketball team. That’s a mild exaggeration, because I didn’t play. I went to practice every day, and sat on the bench during games. I wanted to play, but I knew I wasn’t anywhere near as good as the guys playing ahead of me. But there was this guy who sat next to me on the bench that was convinced that the coach hated him, and he really was as good as the guys who were playing. That he should be “entitled” to play. Rodger wasn’t like this guy. Rodger was a kid in the stands who was convinced the coach hated him, and that’s the reason he wasn’t playing, and he was angry as hell about it. Despite the fact that he’d never tried out for the team. Despite the fact that he’d never picked up a basketball.

That’s not a sense of entitlement. That’s displaced anger. And everything he wrote about women, about everyone else that he was going to “get back at” was displaced anger. It had no rational basis. That’s just bat-shit crazy.

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