When will we address the real issue in school violence, our troubled youth?

from The Gray Area:

Sadly and regrettably, another troubled youth strikes out violently at innocents in a prelude to suicide which he feels is the only way to justly satisfy and end his pain. The left will go immediately and expectedly to its ideological narrative that guns caused this tragedy as it has with the other recent events that have dotted our news too often the past few years. And, they will disregard the all to obvious pattern in these cases, severely troubled youth.

The core issue is not guns, it is clearly troubled youth. What we need to determine is why so many of our youth are troubled in similar, yet complex ways and find solutions to the problem. The silly response by the President, Democrats and other gun control fanatics to control or attempt to eliminate guns is woefully off the mark and would be laughably absurd if the subject weren’t so serious. Elliot Rodger used knives and guns to implement his plan as others around the world have used many different tools to implement their plans. The problems with gun violence (see Chicago) is due to gangs and drugs – period.

When will we think through the problem of school shootings, identify the real core issue and commit to fix it? It doesn’t take too much thought to identify several enabling factors; bullying, violence and sex in our culture, recognizing obstacles in place that don’t allow identification of troubled youth and the lack of available support and policing structure for troubled youth once identified.

There are immediate lessons to learn from the Santa Barbara violence of Elliott Rodger. With so much evidence of his instability, the police should have done more, like search his room, when they were alerted to the possibility that something horrible might happen. But they can’t, because we don’t allow the police to act unless the crime has already been committed.

Really act against bullying. There is an immediate solution here than most choose to accept. Everyone in school knows who the bullies are, but they won’t address them because they are afraid of lawsuits from parents and other organizations. Every school board should empower their school administrators to aggressively stop bullying! Sadly, bullying is a natural element of human interaction. They operate because they are allowed to. They should be identified and not be allowed to come to school, until they change their behavior, period. Nor should others who disrupt education be allowed in school, period. And aggressively defend their actions in court, if necessary.

Cultural impacts will unfortunately take as long to remedy as they took to imbed themselves in our daily lives. But we must isolate actions and implement them in order to begin the process of healing. Violence in movies and games. Rampant sexual themes in everything from music to television to movies to the internet. The lack of appropriate identification of and response for troubled youth.

This is not even an exhaustive list of source issues. Yet we debate none of these. Instead we allow loudmouth fanatics and misguided political talking heads who manipulate grief stricken families to drive an incorrect and ideological agenda that will not solve our core problem – or save lives.