Mass murder: It can happen anywhere

By Jeff Hagy

Here's the thing, if it can happen at a military base, it can happen anywhere. Parents, you need to get involved and make sure your kid's schools are ACTIVELY working with the local police department on plans to not only deal with potential shooter incidents, but to identify and counteract potential shooters BEFORE it happens. You should DEMAND it. How do you do this?

Attend the school board meetings and bring up the issue, speak with your local police department of your concerns. Even if you don't have much time, use the power of e-mail. E-mail your local school boards and police departments and other parents. Get involved, you owe it to your community and more importantly your kids.

If you don't think this could happen in your town just look into this yourself. Google the West Nickel Mines Amish school shooting, or other school shootings. Compare the neighborhoods and the people to your town. If you want to get an idea of how many school shootings or incidents actually occur in this country...Go to this site and enter the term school shooting and your e-mail address. This site will then search news from all over the country and send news stories to your e-mail that match your search. I did it awhile back and there were about 1 or 2 school incidents every few weeks!

Another good source of information about trying to identify children by behavioral indicators who could potentially turn to violence in schools would be the FBI's School Shooter Threat Assessment. This has excellent information from studies of past shooters and behavioral analysis of the incidents. Its goal is to try to identify and intervene with these children before they turn to violence. The biggest part of it is that parents, students, police AND the schools must work together and COMMUNICATE with each other all in the spirit of safety.

BECOME THE THORN IN THE SIDE OF THE COMPLACENT!!!!

Jeff Hagy is a Lieutenant with the Madeira Police Department, located in Hamilton County. He is also the author of the fio obscurus blog located at www.fioobscurus.blogspot.com.