Tag: Victimology

My community never got the help it needed to actually heal. But even now, our community is still experiencing the aftershocks of the attack. Over the course of just one week in March, two more MSD students died, this time by suicide, adding to the horror of this senseless and preventable tragedy. In the days immediately following the Parkland shooting, before the families of the victims had processed the magnitude of their loss, a cadre of vocal students, fueled by the news media frenzy, focused on political action. Read more commentary: Flashback: Here's what it was like to watch my friends die in Room 1216 I moved my kids from Florida to New Zealand, only to need to explain mass shootings anyway While the sense of political urgency from students was understandable and in some ways admirable, it came at the cost of a focus on the health and healing — for the families of the victims, students, teachers and the community at large. Mismanaged media frenzy The lack of focus was recently highlighted by MSD teacher Kimberly Krawczyk, who bravely spoke out about the failure of the school district to address the trauma experienced by students and teachers. The SSI found that only one-third of attackers had ever received a mental health evaluation, and fewer than one-fifth had been diagnosed with a mental health or behavior disorder. As shocking as it may sound, as a group, school shooters are similar in this way to suicide victims. Solutions to the suicide epidemic The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center has recommended a proactive approach to school safety called the Threat Assessment Model, which uses a team of mental health, law enforcement and education professionals to help identify troubled young people. My good friend and collaborator, Dr. Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber and her colleagues at Columbia University, developed the Columbia Protocol, a suicide-prevention tool with six simple questions to help determine whether a person is at risk for suicide.

CALLER: Oh, Rush, thank you so much for taking my call. I’m not a Joe Biden fan, but I do not understand how these high-powered educated women can wait years and years and years to come out and say that Joe Biden made them uncomfortable. RUSH: Well, wait, now. I’ll pretend to be a victim, a helpless victim. I need to go public 30 years later and make sure his career is ruined, because I support Bernie Sanders and I don’t want –” It’s all politics. But they are willing to have themselves seen as victims with great abuse perpetrated against them and they were powerless to do anything about it ’cause that’s how the left’s political agenda is advanced among women, by creating even more and more women who think that way. It really ends up being demeaning to all women because it portrays them as helpless victims of whatever kind of man, a powerful political guy or a physical brute kind of guy or whatever rotten characterization of men happens to be popular at that particular point in time. CALLER: Rush, you are exactly right. CALLER: Well, Rush, you are exactly right, and these women are as culpable as Joe Biden if they cannot tell him “no.” And it is my opinion that the majority of the women out here feel the same way that I do. Apparently Bite Me is out there making all these videos about how sorry he is and never intended to offend anybody and, gee, it was a different time then than it is now, and he’s gonna have to get with the times.