Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

  Intruder Room My wife asked our grandson about school. As part of his response, he told about the new "Intruder Room." Have you seen them? I used to work as a psychologist in schools. You can imagine we dealt with some horrific situations. Most of us care about our children and all those fine teachers and staff trying to provide a safe learning environment.  I've been in some schools in the past few years and I wondered how safe they would be--especially when a school shooting would hit the news. It's a new school year now. After labor day, students and teachers ought to be engaged in learning again. Now there's something new to learn. How does an intruder room work? How safe is it? I'm a bit skeptical having grown up when we were told to get under our wooden desks in case the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb on us. I asked  Bing's chat-- here's what I got. ____________________________ An intruder room is a safe space designed to protect students and ...

  What makes for a safe space anymore?   Three mass shootings have recently made news—Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa. Yesterday, we made a rare trip to our local mall where we ate our evening meal. As we were leaving, my wife said she found herself looking around to see where she could hide if there was a shooter. We began to analyze her idea. ***** As usual, there are a lot of opinions about how to stop gun violence. Our elected representatives debate. Gun control keeps popping up like a virus that won’t go away. Yesterday (2 June 2022), the American Medical Association injected their ideas. They focus on the means to quickly kill a lot of people. See what they wrote.   increasing the purchasing age for semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21; banning the importation, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of high-capacity ammunition magazines and bump stocks and related devices; closing the “ghost-gun loophole;” and creating federal requirements for safe gun stora...

 In today's Washington Post, there's a story about the Texas shooter who entered an elementary school--19 children are dead. Could you predict that the Texas shooter was at high risk? Possibly. The first paragraph of the WP article caught my attention. "The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said." How is that helpful? Peterson and Densley have studied mass shooters. A large number of shooters had a history of childhood trauma and most were in a state of crisis close to the time of the shooting. Here's a quote from their book, The Violence Project . Almost 70% of the mass shooters in schools had a history of childhood trauma  and they killed more people than shooters who did not have trauma. And there's something else about the Texas sh...

  9/11 and Religious Fundamentalism Thoughts on the Legacy of 9/11   As is our custom in the United States, national tragedies become the focus of a wide ranging study. Such was the case with the attacks 20 years ago on 11 September 2001 known now as 9/11.   In this post I look at the powerful role of religion in framing the transnational narrative for select Muslims in their war to rid their world of American culture. In the United States, where there is a shifting and porous wall between Christianity and governance, we see a visible rise in the influence of fundamentalist Christian values controlling the narrative of judges and lawmakers. Under threat, people become conservative and many turn to their faith. This phenomenon is well-documented in studies of Terror Management Theory . The attacks of 9/11 and subsequent war on terror triggered an intensity in faith for many who were not already highly devoted. As long as people have been spiritual or religious, a...