Another school shooting, another Twitter rant, we talk this week's news and the bad stories we tell ourselves with author and podcasters Steve

Almond. This is Sarah from the left and Beth from the right. You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. No shouting, no insults, plenty of nuance.

Hi everyone, thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We will warn you that we have kind of a long discussion today and we'll tell you more about that in a minute. Before we jump in, we want to thank everyone who has joined us over on patreon.com slash Pantsuit Politics to support our work.

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Sadly, we have had another school shooting in the United States of America. There was a shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas. 10 people, eight students and two teachers were killed. 13 were injured in a 15 minute assault.

I think what is so tragic about this story, they're all tragic in their own ways, right? And what is so tragic about this one to me, that there were just so many warning signs.

I don't know how to talk about this in a new way because we keep having these things happen. We keep burying more children and teachers. We keep going back to the same old tired debates.

The only thing I know to say this time is that I find myself wondering even more than usual, why does this keep happening? What is I under I we can have the gun conversation and we've had it a lot here. I want to know why we have so many prospective school shooters.

Well, the heartbreaking part of the narrative that seems to be surrounding this particular school shooting and I don't know if it was because of the some of the language from the students coming out of the school or if it's just where we are as a nation.

But there does seem to be this shift of well, this is this is how it is now we have to prepare our students to go to war like they inter I think everybody was struck by the CNN interview with the student afterwards when they said were you surprised and she said no this is what happens right this is how this is how it works of course I wasn't surprised so that narrative of

schools as war zones that it seems to have passed from sort of a metaphor we use to know this is this is the new reality that we have to prepare our high school students and younger for gun violence on a mass scale which is the most absolute depressing thing I can possibly imagine.

And I don't know what to do because that just doesn't work right i'm not prepared.

For a country in which we accept as inevitable that some of our children to be slaughtered at school.

Well, until your point about this particular situation and both the warning signs and sort of the disturbing nature.

Of the shooter and also the access he had to guns to things I was I was thinking about first I watch a documentary on HBO called a dangerous son about you know I think the statistic was one in ten.

Children are emotionally disturbed just excessively violent prone to emotional outbursts just don't have the capacity or skills to control their violence in these basically and I was so struck by the lack of

resources and they talked about like Adam lands and how everybody wanted to blame his mom and this woman wrote this viral post and she's featured in the film called I am and of lens's mother about how she just she had a son who she knew was new is dangerous and was exhibiting all these warning signs and how she just felt abandoned by society that there were everybody basically wants to say like if you were try if you would try harder if you were discipline your child and there's just no mental health resources because we do institute.

And so there's no place or system you know one of the mothers feature in the film lives in this I think it was the state of Washington and she was trying to get her son into a residential treatment facility and there were six beds for the entire state for kids like this six.

And it just you know it put in stark relief how bad the situation is that it's really not about oh well do these kids exhibit warning signs we can all see these stories and say yeah they did it's what didn't do we do where do we send these people do we have good systems in place and for.

And so I think it's really important to have these kids who are emotionally disturbed kids who are danger to themselves and to others I was sitting at church this weekend our church had an important decision to make.

And so I had a specially called meeting for it and I was noticing sitting there as a relatively new member of the church kind of how much time has been devoted to this decision and even during the meeting how much time was devoted before anybody got into the business to talk about.

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