Comments about ‘Report: NM teen had homicidal, suicidal thoughts’

Homicidal thoughts + easy access to guns = Americans dead.

The fact that a 15 year old child had access to guns is argument enough.

We need to do something different.

Would it have been possible to foresee a problem with this boy and prevent this from happening? Probably not.

Teenagers are impulsive. They don't fully understand their impulses and certainly don't foresee consequences.

But the NRA tells us that we must find some way to read the minds of people who may use guns against others before they have a chance to do it.

"Guns are not the problem," they cry.

Well, yeah. Not until someone intent on doing harm gets ahold of one.

Easy access to guns while keeping them out of the hands of those who might be homicidal is an idea at odds with itself. Mass killings that it facilitates are no small price to pay for the right to bear arms, nor an acceptable one in my view.

One of the most disturbing aspects of these events is that the idea of getting yourself killed in a shootout with police seems to have some allure to the troubled kids who are committing these atrocities. If they're already suicidal, then why not go out in a blaze of glory?

This is not as isolated an occurance as we want it to be. It's a spreading anti-social phenomena of our times. How we get to the bottom of it is baffling but we can't give up. Life can be beautiful but that may not seem likely to one so trapped in the depths of despair that ending it all in one last burst is not an unthinkable way out of a torment that neither they nor we understand.