Venting

Deal with it? They did it.
At 14, a gang was a movie thing. Not even on my radar, much less the thought of having and pulling the trigger to kill somebody.

Kid in critical is committed to play RB at Wisconsin. His 2 dead friends have very recognizable last names in the Polynesian football community.

After working in the mental health system for 2 years and watching the government become increasingly incompetent throughout the course of my life, I’m not sure that politicians getting involved to “improve” it (beyond expanding access) is going to do much good, either.

This type of thing goes beyond what the mental health system can usually address, because the “conduct disorder” kids who often carry out this sort of violence are pretty much beyond help until they decide they want help and will actually make some changes themselves.

The roots of those problems are usually found in traumatic/abusive/neglectful early childhood experiences (like before the age of 2-3), and with single moms working 2 jobs and kids being raised in sketchy daycares or by parents too strung out or self absorbed to parent, it’s like our society is set up to create kids who have little impulse control or empathy for others and do things like this when they get pushed.

This is horrific but it’s also the sort of thing that’s been going on routinely in our country for a while. When immature, hot headed kids are walking around with loaded firearms, bad things happen.

From the description, I’d suspect the shooter was either in a gang or doing something else illegal, like selling drugs, which would explain why he had the gun on him in that situation. It may also also have been premeditated if these kids had a beef before the shooting,

We had a 17 year old kid near me get shot 6 times while sitting in his car in his own driveway by someone who has yet to be found. Thankfully, he survived the attack. He says he has no idea why it happened.

You can point fingers in a lot of directions when these things happen, but I don’t know that there is any simple solution that people would support to stop this insanity.