A terrible, terrible tragedy.

[TheDragoon]

Since the inception of increasingly harsher gun control laws, gun-related deaths in the city of Boston have increased over the years, compared to when gun control laws were (slightly) less circus-like.

What does that tell you?

Nothing, really. Just that both might have been trending in those directions over some period of time. Trends do not show a causality and there are certainly other possible explanations as to why there have been more gun-related deaths than simply looking at the gun laws. :)

Personally, I find fault with the school administration for not closing the campus down, and taking the first shooting more seriously. "We thought it was a murder-suicide" does not cut it with me. If it's a murder-suicide, where's the damn smoking gun in-hand? They screwed up, big time, and I fault them for that, and tell it to the friends and families of those 33 dead that you didn't take action because "there were too many people in transit to the school".

I think that Occhi shares my viewpoint on this issue. Given a single murder event and limited information available at the time, I can't fault the law enforcement and school officials for how they handled campus. Similarly, it sounds like tougher gun control laws (within reason) also seem like they would not have really helped, in this case. One quote from a coworker that comes to mind on this is that "'perfectly safe' is if you never leave the house. As soon as you leave your house in the morning, you are taking risks." Clearly, it is oversimplified (since external influences mean not even your house is perfectly safe) but the idea is that a more realistic approach to this sort of thing is "acceptable risk." If a single murder event usually doesn't lead to some greater problem, then perhaps it is an "acceptable risk" to let people go about their business rather than locking everything down just because of one thing that probably won't lead to further problems. But I digress...

The thing that I think could be faulted for the school administration is that it doesn't sound like they had adequate processes for sharing information about students that were worrying school personnel. From what I have read, it sounds like the shooter had a history of disturbing messages showcased in his writing. In addition, a number of his former professors and fellow students thought him to be "creepy" or some such. Yet despite all of the people who thought these things (and some even acted on them to try and create some visibility of a possible problem!) it seems like no action was really taken. Given the circumstances, it sounds like if there was anything that might have prevented this from happening, it would have been the ability of the school's community to recognize that there was a possible problem and to try and mitigate it.

Either way, I hope that schools (and other communities since this could very well have happened at something other than a school!) across the country take this as a reminder to look at what processes they have in place and ask themselves, "If we were given all of the red flags that there were in this case, would we have picked up and it and acted to try and prevent it from ever occurring?"

The saddest thing about all this? There'll be another, sooner or later. And another after that.

I definitely seems likely to happen again, at some point. This sort of rogue act is something that is very hard to prevent. But hopefully we (as a nation or people of the world) can take some lessons from this and try to take actions that can pick up on this sort of thing before it happens and try to prevent it. :)