Quote Originally Posted by Dayuhan View Post
Have you any course of action to suggest?

Lots of people out there thinking, and lots of proposals, but I'm not seeing anything terribly compelling. Given that we're dealing with a tiny number of deeply disturbed individuals, I'm not sure we're going to accomplish much by looking for root causes or energy sources, which are likely to be different in each case.

Better mental health care is desirable certainly, but even mental health professionals admit that they cannot reliably predict who may be involved in these events. My concern when we discuss greater alertness or anticipation on the mental health side is that kids that just happen to be a little strange (there are many of them) may be stigmatized as potential mass murderers, which is going to make already difficult lives even harder. Aside from being unfair to those individuals, that could provoke precisely the behavior we seek to avoid.

Those with pre-existing biases against guns and video games will have predictable suggestions, but I personally see few solutions there.

I don't have any good ideas, and I'm not seeing many I think are good. I think it would be great if the identities and histories of those involved could be kept out of the media completely, but realistically I can't see how that is to be done.
I fall back to where I began in post #6. A call to look at the problem holistically and to not leap to any program of activities designed to simply mitigate or prevent the obvious symptoms. There are many factors coming together within the context of American history and culture to feed this problem. We could begin that analysis by building a list of as many of the factors as possible, and then working to backtrack each of those, both independently and in the context of how they interrelate with each other in a effort to better understand how we got to where we are, and then also how to better get to where we want to be.

I believe that both the 1st and 2nd amendments play critical roles in keeping a healthy balance of power between those who govern and those who are governed; but recent trends have been to increasingly remove restrictions on the first, while increasingly place restrictions on the second. We tend to think of these amendments in isolation, or at least not in the context of why they were created in the first place. The result is that we are out of balance. We need to find a balance across these important rights that is tuned to the overall mission.

We need to see this trend of these tragic attacks as a powerful metric that the health of our society is trending in the wrong direction. We overly focus on the individuals who act out. We can't prevent individuals from acting out, but we can look to ways to address the trends in society as a whole. This very thread is named in the context of the individual, the "lone wolf." That is tactical thinking: How do I stop the lone wolf. I think strategic thinking would be: how do I change this trend in the society as a whole.

The approach to the attacks of 9/11 share this same flaw. We focus overly on how do we "defeat, disrupt, deny" organizations such as AQ, rather than on how do we better understand and address the trends in society that are fueling the rise of such organizations.

The tactical approach provides immediate gratification of action, and also allows us to not have to take responsibility for how we have all contributed to the conditions that feed the problem. It enables the same type of avoidance of personal (or societal) responsibility that one sees in people wrestling with addiction.

We all want better answers, but first I think we need to spend more time working on getting to better questions.