mlinden84

To anyone directly or indirectly involved with the Omaha mall shooting, my thoughts are with you. What a horrible and senseless act.

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3958863&page=1

COBettaCouple

What an evil and selfish thing to do. Not content to kill himself, he had to steal the lives of others and bring pain & suffering to all those families.

Oblivion

The fact that he left the note saying, "Now I'll be famous..." infuriates me

COBettaCouple

yea.. perhaps a fitting thing to do would be to erase any records that he ever existed. "infamous", "reviled", "detested" maybe, but not "famous".

mlinden84

I am praying for everyone that was killed, Robert Hawkins included. His life was cut short as well. He'll have his place on Judgement Day, as will the rest. Meanwhile, I mourn the senseless deaths of the nine people who were involved.

swords3711

yes it is very strange
the shooter was a dropout from papio lv
i go to papio lv south not 5mi from there
if anyone has any questions just ask me and i will be happy to answer them
we just can't believe it would happen here
we have shootings in the north part of omaha quite frequently but this is more west O which is quite strange.
We never have violence happen on this part of town

swords3711

that is just sickening
although with how the media is, its true

sirdarksol

Ugh... Such a screwed up kid. I love that the child services guy is quick to say that they had no part in it, pointing out that the kid was in a group home. I know a guy who worked in a group home for years until this past January, and those are not good places for troubled kids.
I am appalled at the violence, but as I learn more about humanity as well as my own self, I find it harder and harder to deplore any person, no matter their actions (there are still a few exceptions, such as terrorist leaders like Bin Laden and Bush). As mlinden said, judgment will be rendered, and it's not really my place to second-guess that judgment.

COBettaCouple

yea, it seems like the media sits around hoping for another shooting or something to put on.

Here in Denver, we're near the school shooting that seemed to start this rash of copy-cat "poor me, i've got it so bad, i'm going to murder innocent people and be famous" shootings. A friend of Stacy's family just graduated from Columbine and right next to the school is a nice public park for having picnics, etc. It's so sad that there are people like that.

swords3711

well u know it is messed up how people think this day in age
"it's not really my place to second-guess that judgment." thats where this world goes wrong
then how will people know between right and wrong

if he was suffering from depression, there's something called therapy
maybe he should have gotten get some common sense and try it

oh ya its really a good idea to go into a mall during such a happy time of year and shoot 8 random people for the heck of it
i could see how he could get confused
thats a load of crap!

Now we'll here about how this could have been prevented
no matter where anyone points the'ir figers they all know deep down that Hawkins was the cause of it all
get a sense of decency and get help if u need it
hopefully this won't happen again...who am i kidding this will happen again and again and again and again and again
this will never stop
this is how this time is
it makes me sick to see what the generation i am entering is coming to
i hope this all ends, but it won't
life will go on and more of this will keep happening
as much as i hate to say it...we all know
the question is...what do we do now
just think about it

swords3711

in grade school we based everything we had on preventing another colombine

sirdarksol

Saying that the individual is the only source of a problem is a negative answer. It is the opposite end of the pendulum from "his mommy and daddy beat him so he didn't know he was doing bad." Nothing is black or white in this world. It's grey. The kid was screwed up. There was obviously something wrong with him. The fact that he didn't kill his ex girlfriend, his boss, and then himself shows that he was lashing out for the sake of lashing out rather than just exacting revenge (note that I'm not condoning revenge, just making a distinction between a killing with motive vs random murder). But society also knew something was wrong with him. The Child Services employee's response of "we spent $265,000 'fixing' him" shows that we are taking the wrong tactic with people like this. You can't throw money, drugs, and group homes at problems like this to make them go away.
The difference between myself and this kid is that my parents paid attention to me, nothing more. If my parents hadn't been as involved in my life as they were, if they had gone through a divorce, or something like that, I could have ended up doing something horrible to my school, because I was treated like garbage. But I had support in one aspect of my life, at home. I've grown a lot since then, and I know how messed up my mind was, and I'm not the same person anymore. Group homes are not support, they're jail for people to young to go to jail. They're ways for parents to get rid of kids that they don't want to deal with.
Columbine was not the first issue like this, it was just the first time that it happened in a middle class school and a large number of people got injured. This will not be the last time that this happens, and it will keep happening with greater frequency until we, as a society, recognize that we have a part to play in it. There is a reason that different cultures have different rates of incidents like this. In Japan for example, it's almost unheard of for a person to go on a killing spree like this, but suicide rates are higher (partly due to the fact that suicide was, in the not-to-distant past, an acceptable method to end personal pain and dishonor).
Yes, the person who perpetrates such horrible acts definitely holds accountability for his or her actions, but so does the society that saw that person's plight and did not do everything necessary to deal with it.

swords3711

well this is true, but why taking it out on complete strangers
i am against suicide but in all ways, its better than murder
it just makes me mad every time i hear about it and i feel like im about to explode just wanting to unload
just wishing i could have been there to stop it
just wish there was some way to go back in time

sirdarksol

Taking it out on random strangers is part of the reason that society shares the blame. Murder with motive (woman catches her husband cheating, kills him and the other woman, for example) may happen with little or no external warning.
This kind of slaughter, on the other hand, requires such a screwed up mind that there is some sort of warning (in fact, the article states that there was such a warning).
You say that you want to explode and that you wish you had been there to stop it, presumably by killing the kid. This is a response that makes sense in the human mind. Kill the source of pain to the self or to other members of the race. Now try and imagine if your brain lacked a method of selecting an "appropriate" target for your anger. This may have a chemical source (either from drugs or just from a screwed up internal chemistry) or it might have a social source (which I'm guessing is at least partly the case here. Not much is said about it, but if you read between the lines, you can guess that the kid didn't have a good home life even before he ended up in a group home).
Like I said, I'm not saying the kid isn't responsible for his actions, but neither is society innocent. It's normal to want to direct your anger at the perpetrator of such violence. To admit that society has some fault is basically to admit that you have some fault, even if you live across the country from the kid and have never met or heard of him, any of his family, or any of his friends. It's hard to admit one's own fault, and so I understand this. However, like I said, this will continue to get worse until we start taking some responsibility for the troubled members of our society. Heck, even as I'm writing this, I'm seeing on the news that there was a drive by shooting in one of the more peaceful suburbs of the Twin Cities this evening. Kid was shot right outside his school.

COBettaCouple

i think that depression and things like that are more acted-out towards self.. mowing down innocent strangers with an automatic weapon shows more than depression was going on inside his head. it was planned random-murder ("now i'll be famous") and that part is on him. nobody made him do it, he chose to. everyone makes choices, he made his and unfortunately other people are dead or mourning tonight because of it.

mlinden84

I was just trying to make the point that people can lead crappy lives, but that doesn't mean they all go around shooting people.

armadillo

Actually you're making a very interesting point, Dave. I've heard something VERY interesting about the biochemical side of depression lately.

Think of serotonin (our happy hormones, the ones that are released when we exercise or are exposed to sunlight). These relax us. They also desensitize our the neural receptors associated with the feeling of guilt and empathy.

Some a-type, overly ambitious people unnecessarily took anti-depressants in order to become more performant at work. They did so although there were not suffering from depression. After a while, these people were found to show atypical psychopathic behaviours (psychopathic in the sense of lacking in guilt and empathy) such as criminal behaviour including violence, dishonesty and fraud.

On the other end of the serotonin spectrum, people severely lacking in serotonins (clinically depressed) will have an acute sense of guilt and empathy (which is why a lot of depressed people are actually great listeners).

Oh, and I've heard something else that's interesting: pregnant people have that really happy phase (around the 3rd month? not sure). You know? That phase during which the husband is all: honey you're glowing. Anyways, that phase is associated with high levels of serotonin which themselves are associated with feelings of nausea in high doses - morning sickness! And this is why antidepressants give nausea at the beginning of the treatment.

I loooooove endocrinology!

armadillo

And do you know what the sad thing is? Nobody ever remember their names. Why don't they know that they will be denied the fame they were desperate enough to get by doing such atrocious acts? People remember the events, but not the name of the perpetrators. And rightly so.