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Something I've thought about before, and which Pirate asked about on the way to the school bus stop this morning. Most states these days have mandatory seat-belt laws for everyone. Here in New Hampshire, seat belt use is recommended for everyone, but still mandatory for children (up to age 18, actually). You can be cited and fined for not having a seat belt on your child.
So how come school buses don't have seat belts?
On a slightly different subject, NPR reported on the way back from the bus stop that medical insurers in New Hampshire are considering not paying hospitals to treat conditions caused by medical errors.
Sure makes sense to me... if I'm a mechanic, and I'm working on your car, and I fuck something up that was fine when you brought the car in, you should expect it to get fixed on my dime, not yours. Why should a hospital be any different?
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On 40' busses? No. Never.
Why?
Go find a friendly bus driver. Take a big child and a small child with you.
You sit the the driver's seat, and look in that little mirror above your head.
The big child (The "bully.") and little child (The "victim.") sit in the back row.
The bully pantomimes wrapping the seat belt around the neck of the victim, below the back of the seat ahead of them, whilst maintaining an innocent expression.
How easy is that to see when your prepared for, and looking for, it?
How easy do you think that would be to see if you were busy driving on a snowy day?
Seatbelts on 40' busses is a timebomb to the first day a strangled child isn't found until the bus gets back to its base.
I drove those busses for 18 months. I will never advocate that they get mandatory seat belts.
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Of course, the other side of the coin is that if a bully on the bus can get away with strangling another kid with a seatbelt, he can do it with a belt, or a shoelace, or a backpack strap, or a piece of string.
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Murdering psychopaths don't spring, full grown, from a clam shell coming up out of the waves. They're not rare named guys like Dahmer or Bundy. 5% of the population are sociopaths, and the psychopath subtype is not rare.
You know why kids can't be psychopaths? Because the psychologists defined psychopathy with a bottom age limit. That's it. A kid can show all the features of psychopathy except for the long history (cause he hasn't been alive that long), and he's not a "sociopath" because he's below the purely arbitrary age the profession has stuck on the diagnosis as a lower limit.
That's all. Have the same symptoms, the same mental state, one day before your 18th birthday and you're not a sociopath. The next day, you are. Merely by definition.
"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?" "Four. Calling it a leg doesn't make it one."
"How many legs does a dog have if you say every limb below the rib cage is defined as a tail?" "Four."
The psychological profession does not want to admit that anyone below the age of 18 is unfixable---and they definitely don't want to consider that anyone below the age of 14 is unfixable.
When I was a kid, the psychological profession was adamantly convinced that kids could not get bipolar disorder. To the point that they essentially defined the diagnosis that way.
Not as emphatically as they've defined sociopathy by age. To my knowledge there is no evidence that you can take a child who lacks a conscience at age 10 and develop one in him by age 18, no matter what you do.
And all that abuse you find in the childhood of adult sociopaths? It's childhood abuse that's significant, not teenage-hood abuse. That demonstrates that the critical brain changes that take the kids pre-disposed to sociopathy but on the margins of "could go either way" happen young. I'm not a researcher, but I haven't seen any evidence that they've been able to take kids with the abuse plus the genetic predisposition for sociopathy and "save" them. Truth: nobody knows if any of the "at-risk youth" various programs think they've "saved" had the genetic predisposition in the first place. And, even if some have been, nobody has the foggiest clue how many. One in a hundred thousand pre-disposed plus triggered saved? One in a hundred? One in ten?--thousand? One in a million?
It's just a bit difficult to sort out who's who, since even normal ten year olds are more known for displaying their impulses than their consciences.
It's not "our society" that has a problem with sociopaths in their childhood years. It's all societies.
Our society just tries desperately to cling to the notion that all cute little chubby faces and bright eyes are sweet little tabula rasas and that none of them are just plain rotten to the core, unfixably, from a very young age.
Every murderer in prison, or even on death row, was once an eight year old.
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You have to go to some effort to take off your shoelaces or belt and garrote someone. You have to think about it first--more so in the case of the shoelaces.
A shoulder-belt already goes close to the neck and is so convenient a momentary impulse is enough to set one of the little psychos off.
Most childhood bullies grow out of bullying. But nobody knows what was different about the ones that don't, and nobody knows, out of the ones that do, how many had not conscience as children and have no conscience as adults, but are simply hiding behind the facade of one of the non-criminal or less-criminal variants of sociopathy.
The lion's share of sociopaths are never caught, and never have anything happen to them for it. Did the bullies "grow out of" being conscienceless bastards--or did they "grow out of" being so obvious about it as to get caught?
The non-psychopath sociopaths still have no conscience at all. They may be politicians, they may be the corporate guy who steals credit for his subordinates' work, they may be the back-stabbing socialite, they may be the bum on your sister's couch---but they all, if they knew they were immune from prosecution or wouldn't get caught, would kill you casually and with no remorse if you were in their way and/or they were bored. The only problems the non-psychopath sociopaths have with killing is that there are other things that they want more, getting caught would be a pain in the ass, and killing people is less interesting than their preferred "games."
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i'm not sure she even knows what a livejournal is. yet.