School Shooters, Depression and Prevention

The killer in a Colorado school shooting a href=”http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15041037/”focused on taking female hostages/a. I wonder what we will find out about his history that led him to conclude that this rampage was his only solution? Notice that many mass murderers/school shooters kill themselves or are killed by the police during the crime. The men and boys who commit these crimes are often highly suicidal and decide that if no one cares about their perceived pain and emotional turmoil, they might as well take others down with them in a high drama episode that lets the world know how they feel.br /br /It makes sense to me that we try to address male depression and high suicide rates as a way to prevent these killings. Ignoring the emotional problems of men and boys can have terrible repurcussions that affect not only the mental health of men and boys, but affect innocent victims like the girls at this high school. Prevention on the front end makes more sense than doing nothing if we are truly interested in saving lives. None of this excuses what these killers have done, but it is better to figure out how to put a stop to these rampages then it is to decide what to do with a perpretrator once they have killed. As a therapist who has worked with potential killers and seen how effective correcting these a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion”cognitive distortions /aand behavior can be, I think that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.