It wasn’t a mental health crisis that caused the shooting at Garfield High School, it was the gang affiliation of the shooter.

It took us a year to find an MSW to treat our daughter - counseling for the usual teen stuff. Trained mental health support is a in very short supply right now and the idea that they can “fix” the powerful forces of poverty, grievance, and loneliness of the American psyche in the schools is a very tall order.

that's Okay
we'd Much rather
Bitch about the Symptoms
of Amerikkka Inc LLC [lol] than

Address their Causes.

just say No to
predatory Winner
-take-ALL Capitalism
'Private Equity' not to Men-
tion Housing-as fucking-Commodity
and a Citizenry, second-fiddled into a one-way
Meal ticket for Monopolies Profiteers & Billionaires

tho I repeat
myself. the Business
of America IS Business

the
Citizenry,
Secondary.
at best with
Mother Nature
who always bats
Last not even an
Honorable Mention.

Small Wonder
those set to Inherit
this now-ravaged Planet

are a lettle bit
Pissed Off.

on what planet are young men obsessed with a tough-guy image jumping at the chance to go see a counselor?
pro-tip: they aren't

A good way to tell that Hannah doesn’t actually give a fuck about the mental health of children is that when parents begged the city to protect their kids from rampant criminality in their neighborhood Hannah wrote an article ripping the shit out of them:

“The issue was gun violence, fire, and drug use at the encampment (which exists because people can’t afford a home, just saying). Some parents used that framing to argue that KCRHA must sweep the encampment immediately and treat residents like “any other criminal '' by jailing them for using drugs and firearms.”

https://www.thestranger.com/news/2023/03/21/78913110/the-parents-dont-want-shelter-they-want-sweeps

Said one parent that Hannah criticized for being concerned about the well being of his children:

“If someone has a gun a block from a school, he said the conversation should be about arresting that person, not referring them to shelter.”

Immediately after this quote Hannah embedded a tweet saying “This is a photo of wealthy people who DGAF about the survival needs of people in their community.”

When parents begged the city to protect their children’s mental and physical well being from people with guns committing crimes, Hannah said the parents were in the wrong, and the criminals with guns were who the city should accommodate. Shootings like the one at Garfield are the predictable consequence of Hannah’s demand that no one be held accountable for criminality, ever, especially when it harms children. Stop pretending that you care about the well being of children when it’s clear you don’t. They’re just another pawn for your constant mendacity.

For every mental health counselor in a public school, they need to add a mental health counselor to the local police precinct. Cops are all crazy as jay-birds.

@6

so True.
they need
all the punching
bags the City can supply

and're likely
vastly Cheaper
than the Public
at large. good idea.

"A national shortage of psychiatrists and mental health workers" you say? Well clearly we need to increase city psychiatrist and mental health worker entry level pay to at or around the highest in the nation and provide hiring bonuses. Or does that only apply to city workers who arrive after the fact, not the people who might actually prevent a tragedy from even occurring?

@8
that only 'works'
for those who use
Deadly Force -- not for
those who may Prevent it.

so for Now
we'd Much rather
Bitch about the Symptoms
than even consider Addressing their Causes

we're being
Socially Engineered
by all the Wrong People.

if we really cared about kids' safety amd mental well-being in schools, why are we letting students with weapons violations attend? police told the schools of 69 students with known weapons violations. and that's only the ones who have been caught, how many other kids out there with guns?
why was a student killed by a fellow student last year, even after the killer was found to have previously brought weapons to school? why are these people allowed to attend with the general student population?
students said they want more counselors, but they also have been polled as wanting metal detectors, zero-tolerance weapons policies, and things that would prevent them from having to sit in class with known criminals. how you gonna learn if you are worried about kid next to you probably has a stolen gun in their bag?

https://www.kuow.org/stories/king-county-prosecutors-have-notified-schools-of-69-felony-gun-charges-against-students

@10: “…students said they want more counselors, but they also have been polled as wanting metal detectors, zero-tolerance weapons policies, and things that would prevent them from having to sit in class with known criminals.”

See @5 for an excellent recounting of how the Stranger responded to parents of kindergarten students, after those parents had the unmitigated gall to ask for a gun-free environment near said kindergarten.

Somehow, I doubt the Stranger will be any more supportive of older students who request gun-free schools, either.

@12 you really think having a cop in the school would have prevented this? Big-government libs are really recycling "good guy with a gun?"

@13: Unsurprising, that’s all you got out of @12.

But thanks for picking up the slack for the Stranger’s staff on the weekend. Validating @5 and @10, and, more importantly, reminding everyone just how gawdawful the abolitionist position really was, all performs a valuable public service. Thank you!

@14 no I also got out of it that @12 associates primarily with classic Seattle performative libs, and when their daughter became politically aware they tried to nip it in the bud by uprooting her to a different school. But that's all besides the point, which is that putting cops in schools is an infinitely stupider intervention than adding mental health resources.

@15: “…putting cops in schools is an infinitely stupider intervention than adding mental health resources.”

I wasn’t aware this was an either/or proposition. Thank you for clarifying that!

There’s just no way having police at schools could possibly make any students feel safer, because you said so. Another helpful clarification!

(It must be nice, living in such a clean, simple, strictly-ordered, and thus easy-to-understand little world. None of that messy nuance the rest of us must deal with on the daily.)

@16 what you or I think might possibly maybe make students feel safer is not important. The students themselves requested more mental health resources. The city says there's no money for that which means, financially speaking, it was an either/or proposition. That money was spent on something else (maybe the recent massive new pay raise for cops?).

@17: “The students themselves requested more mental health resources.”

Yes, they did:

“…but they also have been polled as wanting metal detectors, zero-tolerance weapons policies, and things that would prevent them from having to sit in class with known criminals.”

Luckily, they have you here to tell them how stupid they are in asking for such things.

until parents take an interest in raising their kids, none of these bandaids will help much. letting Auntie and Grammy raise these hellcats is a recipe for more of the same. Nice try though, performative words about 'more counseling' will really make a difference.

@18 first of all you appear to be quoting a comment by "420blazeit" that didn't cite to any actual poll so I'm not certain that's accurate. But regardless nowhere does it state that any students want cops in schools, which is what I called a stupid intervention. So while your ideas are definitely stupid I wouldn't say the same about the students'

City pols good at sitting on their hands.

@20 -- It's fine for the Seattle Student Union to demand whatever they want, but nobody should view it any differently than when SA/Sawant would pack the council chamber with people yelling about whatever topic was on their mind at the time. They're a high school DSA/SA group and should be viewed accordingly.

More importantly, considering there is a statistical reduction in firearm related crimes and homicide (good!) with more active policing, along with a ton of analysis that says that additional police hires reduce criminal activity (particularly homicide, which is what we're talking about here), you should reassess your incorrect position that cops in schools is a stupid intervention. Just because you don't like cops doesn't change the mountain of data that having more of them reduces homicides. We should want schools to be gun free zones. The only way to realistically enforce that is to have cops assigned to schools to deal with the students who are breaking the law by carrying guns.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4850382

@22 data is inconsistent from jurisdiction to jurisdiction on the question whether more police equals less homicide (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/police-crime.html), but more to the point data is fairly clear that School Resource Officers do not reduce gun crime in schools.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-police-prevent-some-violence-but-not-shootings-research-finds/2023/07

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.22498

"We find that SROs effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent gun-related incidents."

Also:

https://humanecology.wisc.edu/research-insights-police-may-not-make-schools-safer/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cl2.1360

"The existing literature does not find that School Based Law Enforcement makes schools safer. The evidence suggests that SBLE has detrimental consequences, particularly for exclusionary discipline."

@20 the student walk-out of 2023 where students were trying to call attention to the safety problem in the schools after several shootings and lockdowns across city schools. including the parents of several slain students, part of their demands included metal detectors and zero tolerance policies. instead they got...door locks changed and a lot of lip service from superintendent.
fat lot of good the walk out did, unfortunately.

The kids are not alright, that's pretty evident. It's also evident that using guns to solve disputes is becoming the norm all over the country and Seattle is no different. The kids seem more interested in solving a centuries old problem in the middle east that they just learned about. Sadly many more will die and from this form of domestic terrorism but we don't recognize it as such or want to admit it. There are too many people making too much money from things like guns and social media that are causing real mental health and educational issues and there seems to be very little courage to take it on. Debating whether we have the police or mental health resources has its place but it's like debating great gas mileage on a car that has wheels falling off.

@26 until you address poor and/or absent parenting, no amount of police or mental health spending will fix the majority of the criminal behavior. the fact that murder convictions are rare and relatively light does not help either. www.king5.com/article/news/local/2-men-sentenced-southcenter-mall-parking-garage-shooting-claimed-life/281-4e5d514d-8033-45b9-b9d4-01f7ea61dcec

School counselors aren't there to prevent shootings; their job is to rubber-stamp students' self-diagnoses of popular maladies they found out about on the internet. Think of TikTok as the doctor and your school mental health counselor as a notary public.

Vote out every worthless Seattle School Board member. The board is owned by Labor Unions and work for them first.

Why is City of Seattle responsible for any public school? The only reason is more money for our failed and bloated Seattle Schools and a rotten superintendent.

Or perhaps we can go after the bad guys with guns who are terrorizing the community. You know, like Nikita Oliver types who shouldn't be in prison because it's racist or something.

Oh sorry, I always try to put this here. Hanna is just the epitome of a clueless white chick who thinks she somehow know how the "ghetto works." It makes me horribly embarrassed for her via proxy.