Some of this view of the world must be very indirectly connected, but somehow linked, with the mental problems of so many high school kids who don't understand that the school is just a transient step, and instead finally totally Freak Out and decide to kill some classmates with a gun.
They could choose to use a large truck on a street, but decided to bring a gun as too many others have done. Their extremely fragile self-identities must consist only of what they see in social media?
I remember high school well, took time off, and then remember college well.
A big part of the problem is that high school is hardly geared to get people prepared for the world now, it's geared to prepare them for college. Many school lost their funding for career-oriented classes (wood, metal, and auto shops), and just have many have been moving away from the more social classes and creative outlets--arts, band, and the like.
They're punished for protesting against overbearing teachers, overreaching rules, and lately even if their complaints about them on social media reach the administration.
My core classes dumped half an hour of homework each on me, and I actively avoided advanced classes and academic electives so I could handle it. School from 8 to 3--seven classes total--then two to four hours of homework, and then a job so I could afford my own school clothes and an occasional movie on the weekend, and had to wake up before 6 in the morning to catch the bus to do it all again.
And school--and society in general--drills it at them that they
must go to college or the best they can hope for is to manage a McDonalds.
High school is a
terrible time for students, in that they're beginning to figure out who they are as a person, have less time and fewer outlets and social opportunities than previous generations did. Social media is by far their most available option, and that outright bombards them with all the worst that current news has to offer, along with ample opportunities for bullying.
And on top of all that, the system pushing them to college tells them that will be even more difficult (which has so far proven mostly false) but can't explain the record number of college graduates unable to find work in their field, why they're earning less, or why they have less in saving or investments than any other living generation. They already have everything about their future getting pushed on them and
it's the best time of their life. With everything else they're increasingly able to understand but from the enforcement of their limited perspective, they can only conclude that means that
it's never getting better.
Compounded with beginning to cope with the hormones and the changes the brain naturally makes during that time, it's no wonder so many suffer from anxiety and depression--which is also often when the purely clinical affects start to surface on their own. I'm very familiar with that part of the teens and young adulthood; in all honesty I mostly kept going purely out of
spite.
It very much is a mental health issue, and it saddens me that so many people that speak out against gun laws also do so little to make it any easier to identify and treat the root cause, if only just saying "we dealt with it before, just suck it up."
And this is where it comes back to guns. See social media above: they get hit with all the most current, collected, sometimes hyperbole-splattered worst that the news has to offer, with blood and body counts at the top of the list--and usually with the perpetrator's name and sometimes even face plastered front, center, and larger than anything else on the page. When that depressed, anxious teenager (of which there are more now then ever) decides he's had enough, occasionally they decide they want to be remembered. And being stupid and getting drunk and wrapping his Honda around a tree, or chugging down the contents of his medicine cabinet
might get a moment of silence at his school, delivering an acute lead overdose will probably get his name out across the
continent.
And through all that, so many students understand that the causes really are a mental health thing. Contrary to popular belief, many really are astute enough to understand that, and to think critically and know very well to separate violence from reality and objects from actions.
And when they get the chance to call out an 'authority' that fails to see what the 'naive teenagers' clearly do, to speak out against anyone that yet again claims to speak for them without actually allowing them to step up to the microphone, to demand that respect be paid, and know they will be heard and understood, they
jump on it.