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Comment by agarden | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that at this point there is a certain script for violence. It involves guns and maybe bombs, and the point is to kill as many people as possible to get as much media attention as possible. To a certain kind of person, that sounds like glory.

I think the way to stop the trend is to break the script. The key to it is that everyone cowers before the power of the attacker. For a brief moment, he can feel like a god. Make these attackers look incompetent, weak, and ineffective and the allure of the thing dies. If we could somehow change things so that the next time someone tries this no one cowers, but the perpetrator is instead killed or incapacitated or in some way humiliated by those he intended to victimize, the script breaks.

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Every principal's office should have a instant open (biometric and push button pattern, as well as slower methods) safe with a few easy to use carbines (short rifles) with optical sights.

To take one of many examples, yet another autistic shooter who seems to fit at least some of the patterns in this, the administrators and teachers at Sandy Hook were entirely willing to die to protect their charges (per the official story). Which did neither of those groups any good.

Somehow, though, this sort of thing is "unthinkable". Just as school shootings were unthinkable in my father's days, when in the late '40s/early '50s lots of kids took a gun to school and stored it in their locker, to save an extra trip for before or after school hunting. Only a few years younger than my father Supreme Court Justice Scalia related in the Heller oral arguments that he would carry his .22 target rifle on the NYC subways to and from the range.

Various things have changed since then, and in this area nothing good.

I don't even know how to begin to search for sources about "when in the late '40's/early '50s lots of kids took a gun to school and stored it in their locker..."

I'm not questioning your own validity, I'd just love to know how pervasive this was and where it was happening.

I was able to find references about Justice Scalia in the Heller arguments.

Well, you should be able to find references to kids that continued this sort of thing, storing them in their vehicles, who got sweep up in the post-Columbine zero-tolerance bullshit. I know I read more than a few of those, and to this day kids still accidentally forget and leave their hunting gun in their vehicle and get punished.

I have no idea of how pervasive it was outside of Joplin (MO) High School in that period, but given that Joplin is somewhat urban, with a population of 39,000 then, I'd expect it to be very widespread when you add more rural districts.

I'd guess was fairly common in the rural US anywhere that an after-school hunting trip was common. This has probably always been a relatively small but non-zero percentage. I wouldn't be surprised if it still occurs in some communities.

Anecdotally, growing up in Northern Wisconsin in the 1980's, storing guns in lockers would not have acceptable, but this was a non-issue because many students drove themselves to school and would keep their hunting guns in their car rather than bringing them inside. It's possible this it was officially forbidden to have a gun in the car on school property, but in the absence of other circumstances wouldn't have been any cause for concern.

I find it hard to imagine that one will see less of these incidents with even more guns around. Incidents like this are not common in developed nations.

Incidents like this are not common in developed nations.

You mean like those comprising Western Europe, and, say, include Canada to pile it on? The former has had more of them in recent decades than the US. Here's the detailed accounting I did for Western Europe 2+ years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4970408 and with more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5070201

Wikipedia seems to have rearranged their previous lists that made this a lot more clear, but see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres_by_de...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Notable_school...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers#School...

I don't know how thoroughly you read the article, but it did get pretty in depth about what was going on in this particular case, the motivations you are outlining aren't the same as the ones LaDue had.

He wasn't interested in the glory. He has a mild case of autism, displaying what is called a "restricted range of interests" causing him to obsess deeply over various aspects of his chosen field, individual acts of terrorism.

On some level, he understood that what he was planning was wrong, and self-sabotaged his efforts at a subconscious level. I get the impression that if left alone, he may have talked himself out of doing it "this year," setting subsequent dates that will then get put off in the same manner.

What seemed to drive him was his very obsession, carrying it out would have robbed him of the ability to keep obsessing. Redirected, his obsession would make for a great career in law enforcement, once he gets his condition under control.

This case of LaDue is certainly on odd one. I agree that it isn't clear he actually had the nerve to follow through. But it is clear he is following a script. He calls Eric Harris his hero. He cites all the precedents. Maybe humiliating such perpetrators would not have prevented LaDue, but if it prevented people like Eric Harris, then it would reduce the precedent, and hence probably also the attraction, for people like LaDue.

It's the riot theory the article starts with. If you can deter the people who get the riot started, you can possibly deter the people like LaDue who follow along just because it is now a thing that people do.

I think the way to go is to teach people to think rationally about what others do and why, since if they can marginalize the initial perpetrators, they themselves can neutralize the threat of a violent phenomenon snowballing.

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