A Navy SEAL Weighs In On School Shootings | Joe Rogan and Andy Stumpf

I think you're right though in the generational fix to it. I think that's true of a lot of the stuff that like, I get asked all the time, school shootings, right? It's like the topic of the day. I don't have a solution for it, but I know it's not going to be overnight. It'll be generational in nature, just like it crept in generational in nature. I think a lot of these problems, people look for a light switch solution where the solution in and of itself is the exact opposite of that. Yeah, I think you're right. Um, I don't see any solution to that either. And I think there's a lot of positions that people feel like they're supposed to take. And if you're on the left, the big position that you're supposed to take is gun control. Get rid of the guns. The guns are the problem. Look at all these people shooting people with guns, guns, guns, guns, and all the mass shootings, what they have in common guns, they all have guns in common and they want to take away guns. And then there's the people on the right and like, you're not, I never done anything wrong with my gun. You're not taking my fucking gun. And then there's this fucking in unstoppable battle between these two sides and that there's a lot of factors. Like what, what happens to a human that leads them to get to this state of mind where they're able to go into a school and shoot it up? Like, what is that? What, what, what, what could possibly be going on? How do we stop that from ever taking place? These people have to be in some sort of insane pain. There has to be something unbelievably wrong with their life that they're capable of doing this. How do we stop that? How do we look at that? It's like, if this is our, our global community, if this is our national community, how do we stop this from happening in our national community? I don't know what the answer to that is. I think there's an answer to stopping school shootings and not to oversimplify anything. There's, I would say there's a couple of key issues. One of them is location. The other one is motivation. You can solve the location issue. Like if we, as a country, we're legitimately interested in stopping school shootings. How many have ever occurred at a school where the president's children go? Zero. Why? Because it's defended, right? They actually take a proactive approach to it. They're going to have layers of security, defense and depth. They're probably going to have somebody looking out the front door or a system looking out the front door, controlled entry points, uh, entry and exit points. You're going to have a metal detector. You're going to have security staff on the site. So you can control the location aspect. And I, you know, I, I go to, uh, every time I met my kid's school or unfortunately, or fortunately every building I've ever been in, I'm viewing it from a pseudo tactical perspective at least. So I'll go walk around my kid's school and there's issues that I see from a perspective of somebody who would want to exploit that from aggressors perspective, but they could all be solved. But that doesn't solve the second aspect of that, the motivation, because I have absolutely no answer as to why a 17 year old kid would think that a solution of any kind would be to kill their classmates. I don't understand that at all. And although people, it's funny, like at every shooting, surprisingly enough, there's two things, a gun and a shooter. And vast majority of the time I hear people talking about the gun. Yeah. I think we got to balance that conversation and talk about the motivation. Yeah. A hundred percent. And then also psych medications, you know, you got to talk about that. The, the rise in psych medication has got to be correlated with the rise of school shootings. I mean, the amount of people that are on psych medication, and I understand that correlation does not equal causation. It's not necessarily that the medication is forcing them to do this, but there's, I don't know what study has been done on what is, what is the effect? And is there some sort of a connection other than the fact that they're all on medication? Is there some sort of a connection between taking certain types of psych medication with certain biological makeup that allows you to have this diffusion of reality, like this, this, this is some, some weird thing happens to them where they're capable of horrific things and horrific actions. Like how much of that is monkeying with human neurochemistry? I don't know. That's why I think the location portion, it's not that it's an easy solution, but it's, it is solvable, but isn't the problem funding? Like there's no money for, to pay for teachers. They don't have money to like secure schools. It depends on how serious we want to take it. Yeah. If, if, if we really wanted to stop it, what I'm saying is there are ways that can't stop it. I'm not saying those ways are easy. I'm not saying that those ways are cheap, but there are concrete things. Just looking at a structure from being vulnerable to an assault. There are things that could be done, but that doesn't solve the school shooting problem. It changes the address because the individual that would want to go do that at a school, if you make a target hard, that doesn't remove the motivation. That's what I'm saying. There's location, motivation and obviously a lot of other factors. The location one, if you solve that, you still got to talk about the shooter. And I mean, that's where I butt my head up again. I don't, I would actually like to see this country have a conversation instead of entrenched positions, either the left or the right. All guns should be bands. Come get them with my cold dead hands, which I don't, again, I find myself in the middle of that. I don't agree with either of those positions because it's more nuanced than just the gun and the shooter. It's the combination of all those things, but I don't even feel like we're having a conversation in this country. I feel like a lot of people are talking. I don't think anybody is listening. And I, you know, I go to the schools in the neighborhood where, you know, where my kids go to school. I don't see a single change that they have made. I think you're a hundred percent correct in that there doesn't seem to be any real, there's no real plans to stop this stuff. And I don't think anybody has a real answer. And that's one of the reasons why it's so confusing to people because you could dwell on it and roll it over in your head all day long. And there's nothing that stands out as obvious like, Hey, there's a fire, go pour water on it. That's obvious. There's no, there's no solution. And the low hanging fruit, the metaphor for the school shootings would be, there's a gun, go pour water on that. Right, right, right. But the more nuanced and complex problem is actually the human being behind it. And I see people, they just, well, that's too difficult. So I'm going to throw my hands up and give up. I mean, but also too, I think it's important to point out that actually it's, thankfully, it's incredibly rare that it actually happens. And it's funny because you look at the stats and you start digging into where the stats come from and two groups of people, and I'm sure you see this across a variety of topics, will take the same study and derive two different sets of numbers. There's school shootings and then there's shootings that happen at schools. And you can make one number look bigger and one number looks smaller. Like if you wanted to include the number of people who commit suicide in a school parking lot, which at a national level is considered a school shooting because it occurred at a school, you can inflate and conflate the number of times and the frequency with which it happens. If you strip that information out, it gives you a much more accurate perspective of how often it's happening. Same thing when you remove suicides from gun violence and the total number of deaths. So, but again, that takes a refined and nuanced person that's willing to actually look at it as opposed to just repeating what their bumper sticker says. Yeah. I saw that when Ted Nugent debated Pierce Morgan on television, he was talking to him about gun violence and the actual numbers. And he was saying, well, this is, these are the real statistics and this is why the numbers are so high. How many of these, when you're including gun violence, how many of these people are like criminals are being shot in the act by police officers. How many of them are people defending their home from a break in? How many of them are suicides? How many, once you get through that, you get to the end of it, then you get to gang violence. How many, how many of them are responsible? How many deaths are attributed to gang violence? How many deaths are attributed to, you know, I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of different factors. Then you get to these mass shootings. Yep. So the mass shootings, it's, it, it's a relatively small percentage, but that doesn't give anybody any comfort for anybody that suffered. Of course it does. And again, it's, it doesn't excuse it. It's just, thankfully it happens infrequently. I wish the number was zero. And I think the answer to getting it to zero will be generational because it grew generationally. I think it will go away generationally. But how does it go to what, what, what fundamental changes have to happen in the way human beings exist, that we stop any, anything that right now we're all the different, I mean, it would be a terrible world if we said, Hey, we're just going to have to accept that people are never going to evolve socially, emotionally, whatever it is, it's causing people to lash out the way they do. What, I mean, what a horrible world it would be if we say, no, that people are just going to be like this forever. We're not just flawed, but flawed and ruthless and cruel and violent and awful. And that's just the way people are forever. I mean, I think there's improvements you can make on both sides, right? So there's a, there's a gun and there's a shooter. There are, I couldn't be a more vehement supporter of the second amendment. Like I completely and utterly support it. Uh, but I'm anti-irresponsibility. And there's a lot of things that we could do as a nation. That would improve safety via responsibility. I mean, look at this, the stats on the percentage of American gun owners that don't own a safe, it's over 50%, which is speaks to access. And what sucks about any improvements that we make, you'll never know about it because you're never going to know about the school shooting that you stopped really. You know what I mean? It because it doesn't make the news, but that doesn't mean, my default position is we can do better. There's ways that we could, I think that the reasonable gun legislation that already exists, there's ways that we could improve communication in our agency. Like the Aurora shooter is a perfect example. It took a pistol and killed five people the day he got fired and injured five police officers. He shouldn't have had the gun. He was a convicted felon. His felony did not show up when they had the background check for his, uh, job, but it did show up for the background check, I believe for his concealed weapons permit. But oftentimes I see where there's this disconnect between agencies, not sharing information, very much like the military civilian military infrastructure prior to 9 11 agency didn't want to talk to the FBI and the NSA because budget and relevancy and this is mine and that's yours and this is my rights. We'll get the fuck away from me. I don't want to share information. I think we could do better on the regulations that are in place. I'm not saying add anymore, but maybe let's figure out a way where we could share information or at least make sure we're living up to the letter of the intent and the letter of the law on that side of the house. And then on the other side of the house, I, you had a pin tweet for a long time and I'm going to totally murder this, uh, when it comes to exactly what it was, but some of the longs we're not, we don't have a gun crisis. We have a mental health crisis. I say we have a mental health crisis disguised as a gun crisis or a mental health problem decides the gun problem. Just like we can do better on the firearm side of the house, we can do better on the mental health side of the house. And I just see people throwing their hands up and attacking the low hanging fruit because I think the mental health side of the house is a more difficult issue than the firearm issue. I think it's the most difficult issue, you know, and I think, uh, everyone that I know, including myself has had bad moments in their life and has struggled and the, the struggle, especially mental health struggle, struggle with depression or being unhappy or anger or any of the things that keep you off of a healthy baseline. Those, those, those moments in life are, they vary wildly in how people experience them, what to what level people experience them, what impact they have on them and whether or not they can recover from these things. And for some people, they feel like there is no recovery and the only way out is to just go out with a bang, like literally. And then this is a lot of what you're seeing in these school shootings is suicide by cop. I mean, this, this is one of the things that people want, they want to go out in a blaze of glory. And what, what the fuck is going on where we let people get to that point without stepping in and trying to help. And do they have anybody that even notices, do they have anyone around them that knows that they're this fucked up and this far gone? You know, I mean we all like to think that that could never happen to us, that we could never get to a point where we're so despondent and filled with anger and hate and fear and, and self loathing that we want to do something horrific. But every person who does something horrific is a human being, right? And the difference between you and them might be genetic, it might be environmental, it might be life experience, but they are a human being just like you and I. And something horrifically went wrong in their life to the point where they are in this position where they show up at that, that school shooting in Illinois just a couple of days ago, some guy got fired, went back to work and just shot everybody up. Like what the fuck? That guy worked there for 15 years. Like what is it that it, that gets when someone gets to a point where this is, this is what flashes in their mind as a solution. Go back with a gun, make everybody pay. I felt it myself, that feeling, overseas when I'd lose close friends, the first absolute feeling you have is an, as a, an anger that I don't have the vocabulary to describe. And all you want to do is burn the world to the ground, but it was fleeting and I didn't do it. And I just don't know how we provide the barrier for people if they can. And when it comes to mental health, I mean somebody with more horsepower between the ears than me is going to need to solve that problem because I don't understand it, but I do understand that feeling, but what I needed was time and I don't know how to provide that. Well, you also had character and discipline and a lot of things that, many people lack in your ability to mitigate these horrific feelings and this severe depression and anger. Some people don't have those mental health tools. They don't have those tools. I mean, you're already a seal, right? You're already a guy who's endured more than most human beings will ever in terms of physically and emotionally and how to get through that hump to become one of the elite operators in this country. That just having that as a baseline, like having that as a, you, you have the tool set to endure more than most. Some people are just not capable of handling any real adversity, anything bad that comes down the pipe for them. They just fall apart. And I think for many people, there's a real extreme feeling of a lack of purpose in life. There's an extreme feeling of a lack of, a lack of meaning that nothing they do matters, that they don't matter, that no one cares about them, whether they're there, they're gone. People either mock them or disregard them altogether and they want people to know who they are. And that's one of the reasons why they do these things. I can see that for sure. But again, if I'm being objectively honest about myself, I did have those tools and probably the only thing that prevented me from acting out in that moment is that I didn't have access to the individuals that I wanted to act out against. And I, I mean, it's like I said, I understand it. I don't have a solution for it at all, but I understand it.