Editor,
Like everyone else, I am thinking a lot about this nation's problem with school shootings and how we should answer this problem. It seems like every semester we hear about another mentally unstable person taking the lives of innocent students and thinking he or she can get away with it by taking his or her own life. We should be thinking of ways to prevent this in the future.
The knee-jerk reaction is to blame culture and the media, as well as gun policies. Unfortunately, two months later, the system will have squelched the banning of firearms, and TV stations will run the same programs they were before the shooting. How can we avoid this pointless cycle?
In fall 2005, I read an article in the Daily Lobo about a proposed policy that stated if students report thoughts of suicide to Counseling and Therapy Services, they would be withdrawn from the University. Don't you think the Virginia Tech gunman would have been red-tagged with a policy like this? He was on antidepressants, and he was actually removed from a class for frightening his classmates. All counselors in all schools can be trained to recognize these extreme behavior patterns and keep an eye out to make sure they do not get more agitated. What if the Virginia Tech gunman had been sent home before he hit the breaking point?
To come up with lasting answers to this violent American problem, we must think of ways to pinpoint the few people willing to commit such unimaginable terrors. Our country now has a history of school homicides, which gives kids the chance to emulate people as angry as they are. These people are copycats and probably have commonalities. This is where we are going to find therapeutic policies.
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Jenaca Busse
UNM student
