Return of Parkland
Oh no no no no no.
#BREAKING: Second Parkland shooting survivor commits suicide, police confirm https://t.co/kjLOKi37zT Via @MoniqueOMadan pic.twitter.com/M2am516uU0
— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) March 24, 2019
A second Parkland shooting survivor has killed himself, Coral Springs police confirmed on Sunday.
Investigators told the Miami Herald that a current Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student died in “an apparent suicide” on Saturday night.
…
The death comes just about a week after a recent Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School graduate, Sydney Aiello, took her own life after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office told NBC News that Aiello died from a gunshot wound to the head.
Ryan Petty, father of Alaina Petty, a 14-year-old freshman who was one of 17 people murdered on Feb. 14. 2018, told the Miami Herald the student who died Saturday also died from a gunshot wound to the head.
As if compelled to do the murderer’s work for him.
Petty founded a suicide prevention foundation called the Walk Up Foundation after his daughter’s death. He said “the issue of suicide needs to be talked about.”
“This is another tragic example,” Petty said, who has partnered with Columbia University for his Foundation.
“When you look at Columbine as an example, almost just as many students killed themselves after the fact than in the actual shooting. That needs to change,” he said. “We need to get them the help they need.”
I didn’t know that. It’s horrifying.
How horrible.
Yes, we need to help the survivors as completely and quickly as we can.
But we will never be able to predict and stop all suicides that result from the aftermath of trauma. There is no “mental-healthing-our-way-out-of-this”. Nothing can make up for the trauma happening in the first place.
People who survive these horrors are going to kill themselves. No matter what. The only solution is stopping the horror in the first place.
Indeed, Josh. These suicides are just as much victims of the original killer as the people who died directly by his hand; that doesn’t mean we can’t get better at treating post-facto trauma, but it would be far better to prevent the trauma in the first place.
It’s another illustration of the stark contrast between the real world, where a mass shooting is a traumatizing event, and even cops can’t be counted on to react the way they’re supposed to, and NRA fantasyland, where the average student or schoolteacher is expected to coolly whip out his or her (ha, just kidding, clearly “his”) concealed pistol, dispatch the killer, and presumably utter some action movie hero quip over the corpse.
New Zealand banned assault weapons within hours.
Death seems to breed death, but I still hear people claim that guns don’t kill people. Yeah, people with guns kill people. And yes, it is possible to kill people with knives or blunt instruments or poison, but it isn’t common. It’s a lot more work, and isn’t seen as cool in quite the same way (though knives can be that way in some situations). As long as guns are seen as cool, we will not escape this cycle.
So if we can’t control or regulate guns (and it appears we can’t), maybe the next best possibility is to find a way to make them uncool. Hollywood, you listening? Stop the damn gun movies already, can’t we?
You can’t make guns uncool; hell, I want them banned and I still think they’re really cool. The FPS genre of gaming exists for a reason.
All I can find from searching is one Columbine student and one Columbine parent who committed suicide. Wikipedia has a section on this (disgustingly entitled “additional” suicides, referring to the shooters killing themselves, as if these were in the same category), and it lists those same 2. Since 13 died from being shot, I’m not sure “almost as many” is accurate. Maybe there are more out there that weren’t widely reported.
Regardless, hopefully these kids will get the help they need.
Following the Port Arthur massacre of 1996, the then Australian Prime Minister John Howard moved swiftly to enact pretty draconian gun legislation. The US NRA sent one of its top leaders to Australia to lobby against it, but without success.
SLRs (self-loading rifles) were banned outright, magazine sizes limited, all firearms licenced, and self-defence ruled out as a legitimate reason for owning a firearm. Howard became a target of derision by the local and overseas gun lobbies, and used that fact very skilfully to his own political advantage. He stood up in front of a crowd of baying and slavering gun enthusiasts wearing a bulky and obvious flak jacket under his suit, politiely addressed them and let the media record their howling, screaming and baying for his blood. That footage was all over the media for weeks afterwards, and to this day the lobby still appears oblivious to the way it was dudded.
(On other policy matters I disagree rather strongly with Howard, but am prepared to give credit where it is due.)
As I see it, America’s devotion to guns began on its frontier, where they were seen by settlers as necessary for self-defence against dangerous wild animals, indignant first peoples, and rival settlers. Hollywood has traded its whole genre of westerns on the strength of this, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis.has been at the forefront of American historiography for over a century now.
The American gun lobby has traded very skilfully using this wild west stuff: just open any of those gun magazines on display down at your local kindergarten, and see for yourself. Civil war started with the Second Amendment, and has been raging ever since.
If I was an American, my choice would be a bazooka: open-carry of course. It is the weapon of choice for those who are through with mucking around.
Bazookas are illegal, because we can make SOME weapons illegal. My choice would be a tank or a helicopter gun boat, if I had that kind of choice.
Guns aren’t cool, IMHO. They’re loud, they smell bad and a lot of people waste a lot of time on them. Guns are tools. You want to kill something, get a gun. Otherwise, I don’t get the attraction, and I don’t understand the dozens of neighbors I have within earshot who spend weekend after weekend target practicing for hours on end.
A large portion of the American population treat guns like some sort substitute for religion, or sex, or something I don’t understand. I blame the NRA’s marketing branch, which is about all that’s left of it besides lobbying. It wasn’t always like this. Out here in semi-rural America, folks used to have maybe one ‘varmit gun’, a rifle, for getting rid of things killing their livestock and hunting. If they were a paranoid, they might have a handgun as well. Maybe a shotgun too for duck hunting. Now, just about everyone has a freaking arsenal.
I had a coworker friend I used to hang out with along with his wife. We used to have a variety of interests in common. I remember when things started to go downhill with them. First, the wife started refering to their NRA publications as “gun porn” and insisting on reading aloud from them. Then, at a dinner party, they brought out their latest acquisition of weapondry. The other guest and I were unimpressed, so we were accused of being ‘afraid of guns’. My response started with “they’re tools…” and I don’t remember the rest, but I’ve never been invited back.
We still have a good working relationship, even though any conversation is likely to turn around to the latest gun show or the second amendment or his gun club or people ‘clutching at pearls’ and every time that happens, I regret helping to hire him.
(BTW, this is a liberal organization in a liberal corner of a mostly liberal state).
I actually had a point relating to the OP before I took off on that last rant.
Gun nuts like my co-worker mentioned above have absolutely ZERO ability to sympathize with victims of gun violence. They seriously believe victims and survivor are ‘clutching at pearls’.
There are a lot of these yahoos out there and you can run into them anywhere, which cannot be helping survivors cope with their trauma.
A minor quibble, Omar – I don’t think Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis has been at the forefront of American historiography all this time. It was a hot ticket for a time and then came in for a lot of dissent from new generations of historians.
OB: I think that the Roman historian Polybius was first to suggest that history moves in cycles. Could be that a new generation of historians will make a name for themselves ‘debunking’ Turner, and then their successors will make THEIR names by restoring Turner.
Turner noted that he was writing pretty well right at the close of the frontier, so new dynamics were coming into play. But the whole thesis was about the impact of the frontier on the American national character and psyche, and on the way Americans see themselves.
The Australian historian Russel Ward, author of ‘The Australian Legend’ who I knew personally, did a lot of admirable work applying Turner’s thesis to Australia.
I saw no reference to both suicides being by firearm until I read this post.
American gun-nuttery is way beyond frontier/Clint Eastwood fantasies. We have anti-government, neo-Confederate, apocalyptic white supremacist etc. groups stockpiling para-military weapons to use against the United States. In addition to the ‘lone wolf’ terrorists.
The ‘well regulated militia’ of the 2nd Amendment was supposed to protect the country from just this crowd.
I would say you can’t do it easily, but I think it could be done.
When I was in high school, a lot of people despaired that smoking could ever be made uncool. It took a lot of work.
I gotta say, I don’t see the cool of guns myself, except maybe as a kind of clothing accessory. I grew up on tv westerns, in which men simply wore guns just as they wore boots. But real guns, now, in real life? No aura of cool that I can detect. So I don’t think it is necessarily all that hard to make them uncool. The idea that they’re cool is acquired, so it can be unacquired.
Well, in principle, that is. In reality…as cazz points out, given NRA marketing, that’s another matter.
Yeah. Difficult. But I agree about cool/uncool. If we quit putting them in the hands of “cool” characters on TV and the movies like we quit putting cigarettes in the mouths of “cool” characters, that would be a start. But we see so much so-called cool stuff (doesn’t much seem cool to me as it does excessive swagger), it’s hard to see past that. I have had too many friends from other countries that do not see guns as cool to believe it’s impossible to render them uncool.