What part of our society is ultimately responsible for the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL?

Reading the responses to this tragedy, I find, at least on this board, many who seem to shrug their shoulders and say "it's the shooter's fault" while others say "arm everyone." A few stand up and say "something needs to be done." Others blame the parent, society, and Liberals. I believe it is all of the above, and more.
As to "arm everybody" I fear that would be tantamount to buying a bottle of booze for every automobile driver out there. A disaster. I would support better trained, qualified, experienced security guards in place. Of course this would costs more that the old retired crossing-guard type, or the young, untrained individual. Hire professionals, pay the costs.
We as a society must step back and take a long hard look at ourselves and decide what kind of world we really want to live in, Do we want a society that shootings of our most precious quanity, our children, are in daily threat of being killed? Do we want a society where school shootings are the new normal?
In this latest tragedy, here is some food for thought:
19 year old Nikolas Cruz could not buy a Ruger Bearcat single-action 22 caliber handgun(I picked this one because it is a simple revolver) if he wanted to, but he was able to buy an AR 15 and multiple high-capacity magazines. Something is wrong there.


My words will probably make no impact here. I am not of an age to get out in public and campaign for answers to this problem. However, I will not sit back and be quiet. I will do what I can online and in my close group of family and friends. Will you?

I think we definitely need to start paying more attention to mental illness. A lot of people shrug it off or down play people when they ask for help. So many people struggle with it in the early stages if we gave them the support they needed initially things like this could be prevented

1. We failed. 2. Parents have not taught their kids to respect much of anything. 3 14 teenagers commit suicide daily- most of the time due to bullying, lack of respect. 4. This kid was not of legal age to purchase weapons nor ammunition- so where did he get them? 5. He was living with neighbors- why- what happened to the parents. 6. Where did he hide these weapons, items, why did no one know? 7. The kid was a troublemaker, had threatened other students, not allowed to bring a backpack to school and later expelled- was law enforcement notified? 8. They had only 1 safety officer on hand for a multi-building high school of 3000 students- why? 9. We as society have glamourized the "bad boys/girls", the gangs, made publicity stars out of killers. 10. Big One- We as society have taught kids all about their rights and what they can do, but absolutely nothing about their responsibilities and obeying the laws!

While the shooting is a horrible event, it's not really society. As we are learning, the shooter has been showing signs for quite some time. The gun free zone policy makes it easier for those with intent. Schools near me have altered their intruder response plans to be more than hiding in a corner. However, having a resource officer, that's what they are calling a police officer assigned to a school, would be beneficial. Or even a retired cop or military as a carrying security officer would be beneficial.

It seems we now live in a society where some people have been raise totally devoid of any moral or social conscience. To me it is unthinkable for someone to walk into a school and just start shooting down unarmed students and teachers but we now have people who are doing it. I don't know if it is social upbringing or video games, or even movies. But somewhere along the line we are raising kids who seem to think this is okay and they way to get even or what ever they are thinking. Maybe it's the news and all the TV coverage they give to this type of stuff. So along comes this morally degenerate who plots out all this killing. I would like to see his psychological evaluation, there has to be something wrong with him.

We lost our society when we started listening to godless people outside our family for guidance. We lost our society when we began that someone owed us something for nothing. We lost our society when we let government become parents and parents become friends with no responsibilities. We lost our society when we told our men to stop being men. The final blow of destruction came when we became complacent in the wake of the self destruction that we wreaked upon ourselves. It is probably too late to reverse our course from this point forward, I sacrificed 28 years of my life to our armed forces doing my part to preserve our republic and our way of life and now it appears to all have been for nothing.

With respect, the initial question is poorly asked. Society is not ultimately to blame because an animal wearing a human form took another life.

Mental health, on the other hand, is a responsibility of society, but it's easy for politicians to ignore this. When you look at the mentally ill, you see people who have no pull with politicians, which means money which should be spent to help them is used on things which are of less help to society, but more help to the politician's reelection chances. Thus we have people who should be under a doctor's care who are not.

There is also a component of society which seeks to absolve the shooter of responsibility for the crime. They prefer the gun to be at fault, as if having a gun forced someone to be a murderer. Those who follow this logic are themselves partially responsible for such crimes. Without their cover, the guilty could be assigned blame properly, punished appropriately, and an example set for society.

I think there are also too many laws. For example, if I drive without insurance, I can be charged even if I haven't caused an accident. But an illegal alien driving without insurance is not charged. The more laws we have which are not respected, the more all laws are not respected.

The Roman historian Tacitus said, "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the society." If we expect laws to be obeyed, we need to either enforce them or remove those we don't intend to enforce.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is DIRECTLY responsible for this tragedy. They were notified well in advance, knew of the problems and potential and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I don't accept the apology by the head of that organization - I want him GONE! I want President Trump to FIRE this loser and get someone in there to clean house and make sure something like this NEVER happens again! No, there are no other options as long as we are homo sapient on this planet. Why? We are inculcated as a race with VIOLENCE in our genes (flight or fight). There is NO method in existence to know when any person is going to break due to individual factors and go off on a spree of violence. Want to do something positive attempting to turn this around? Turn off that damned TV set - throw it away - pass laws preventing the extent of violence used by the media and Hollywood. The "media" we have today is directly responsible for the hugely irresponsible influence on our young. I believe with all my heart in the First Amendment, but there has to be SOME better guidelines on permissiveness. And finally, what does anyone out there expect when we have society of latch-key kids, one-parent homes, young teens raising babies, drugs, combined with a horrific statistic demonstrating that one aspect of our society has 70% of babies born into a household with no father? Virtually all of this mess starts in the HOME and will never bet any better until that fact is corrected. My two cents. JCH

I want to share this, a gentlemen who teaches high school shared this with me today. They had a minute of silence for those who lost their lives down in Florida, he said he had 6 students who talked the entire minute. They could not shut their mouths for 1 minute for those who died. In some ways we are raising a selfish generation.

The perpetrator is responsible. We are failing to respond because a significant number of us are more concerned with protecting an ideology than protecting ourselves and our children