By: Susan Ohanian

Sandy Hook

Thinking there's already way too much comment on this horrible situation, I keep my silence except to say I hope they tear down the school tomorrow. Children cannot go back there.

That said, I recommend that everybody read this comment by Chris Clark at Pharyngula:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/15/thank-you-teachers/

It stands by itself, but if you follow the links, I guarantee you won't get through the surviving first grade teacher's account without crying. . . and gratitude for the thousands of teachers like this brave, resourceful, and loving teacher.

By: Jean Schwab

School shooting

So sad.

By: Al Korach

Sandy Hook

The killing of all those children and adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary school is a national tragedy. I along with the entire nation grieve for the families. I have nor offer any solution that is totally workable. Deranged people intent on murder seem to always find a way. If not guns some other mthod. WE ARE A VIOLENT SOCIETY. We see violence daily in our newspapers, television and radio. We get our amusement from TV cage fighting and violent self-controlled vidio games. We have become unconscious and insensitive to the death toll we weekly see. The total weekly toll of individuals killed in the USA exceeds the number killed in the school massacre. Just look at the numbers killed in Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of them still in their teens. Those of us that have retired from the Chicago School System have our own horror stories. We have gone from small school yard fights, which is what it was when I began teaching in CPS in 1952, to drive by shootings.

Solutions???

By: Rod Estvan

President Weingarten's wise comments

The Sandy Hook mass killings are totally overwhelming and deeply disturbing to any of us who work with young adults with a variety of mental illness. Vast majority young adults with a variety of mental illness issues never hurt anyone but themselves.

According to the National Institutes of Health, in 2007, suicide was the third leading cause of death for young people ages 15 to 24. Depression and other mental disorders, or a substance-abuse disorder (often in combination with other mental disorders) are huge risk factors for suicide. More than 90 percent of people who die by suicide have these risk factors.

In Illinois we have seen cut after cut targeting mental health services and the biggest cuts have been for community based mental health services. As we know Mayor Emanuel closed several community based mental health service centers in Chicago.

Adam Lanza and his family may or may not have gotten support services, clearly his family had money and he was provided health insurance as part of his parents divorce. We can argue that Adam's mother should not have had guns in the home with a disturbed young adult in the house, and she clearly was the very first one to pay for that mistake.

But Randi Weingarten the AFT President correctly spoke out about over the weekend about how our nation and the states have cut services to adults and children with mental illness. She should be commended for the progressive stance she took on that issue. We can't protect every school from what happened at Sandy Hook, no safety plan, no armed security guard can assure teachers and students that this can't happen again. Reducing ammunition clips capacity by law might reduce the number slaughtered but it won't stop it from happening.

If one thing of good comes out of all of this it will be that President Weingarten and many others of us who have been trying to restore mental health services for young people might be listened to.

Rod Estvan

By: George N. Schmidt

Cuts in mental health services another Chicago first

Those with a quarter century memory will recall that some of the first cuts in public services -- before the libraries, before the schools, before the privatization of the Skyway even -- came against public services to those with mental health challenges. Twenty years ago, Mayor Richard M. Daley began purging city services of certain services to those with mental illnesses. It has continued to this day, most recently in Rahm's closing of the mental health centers.

The "logic" of the plutocracy has been manipulated for decades. Austerity. Austerity simply means that men who can "earn" $18 million during three years as a "relationship banker" (Rahm, whose college training was in "communications" and ballet -- certainly not finance) will always follow the plutocracy's script: THERE IS NO MONEY.

So, first, the cuts went against the most vulnerable (not the poor children in inner city schools; but the people -- children, men and women -- with mental illness). Daley's purges of some of the most important mental health public services in the early 1990s was the first step. We have watched long steps since then, but it began with the attack on special services to the men and women who used to be cared for by society, and who are now working the exits on every expressway, begging, on days when they don't desperately need their meds...

By: Bob Busch

Fear -- and phony guns in school

I was at Bogan about a month when this happened. One afternoon during passing period I was watching the hall when i saw a boy slip a Beretta semi auto into his belt above the crack of his ass. The hall was full of kids so what to do?

Well, I went up to him and said, "What is in your belt?" If he had so much as blinked his nuts would have visited his liver.

Thank god he said "A prop gun for the school play..." Sure enough out came a copy of a real pistol. it was a perfect working replica.

I took him to security, and after telling the cop I proceeded to verbal unload on him. The fear did not kick in until later. But if it was real and he was bent on destruction that would have been it for a lot of people.

If a cop had observed what he did he might have been shot. God was I stupid.