In this case, it actually looks like the authorities acted on every measure they could within the confines of convention, investing significant resources as it is.

How much harassment, judgement and alienation would it have taken to get this teenager locked up before he had a chance to take a gun to school? It’s an enormously difficult problem, sure, but I wonder whether more effort to demonize and demoralize individual teenagers on a basis of superficial loosely correlated rumors would help. I assume the returns are swiftly diminishing. Although selling less assault rifles on the open market would be a good start, even strict gun laws fail to offer hope in the foreseeable future.

It’s not acceptable to discuss school shooters ‘as human beings’ post-massacre and that’s definitely understandable. But, as these events become more commonplace in America, I think the whole things is due some humility. Even if we can accept and afford multiplied law enforcement efforts, we can’t keep treating these cases as self-contained bouts of evil. Statistics have made it clear this is overwhelmingly an element of contemporary American society. But our response consistently predicates the cause was one of 2 things:

- not sniffing out enough clues

- not incriminating the suspect soon enough

This seems irresponsible to me. Of course we want to take every preventative measure possible but that might necessitate more than beefed up law enforcement and social stigma.

Not curbing this problem might be a short sighted thing

That notion is devious, and I'm sad to say that it's probably a reality.

So FBI opened a file and could do nothing. If someone wants to do something, they'll do it, unless the intended target has Papal or POTUS style security.

sigh