We almost had another mass school shooting the other day, but the young man decided only to take one life. His own.

Since Parkland, there have been two school shootings. One, a teacher had a gun. Two, a 7th grader had an assault rifle. The teacher hit no one, the 7th grader, at the last second, killed himself instead. Just FYI @Emma4Change, @davidhogg111 Words of the 7th grader below: pic.twitter.com/nRiuysiwUt

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) March 2, 2018

Courtesy of the AP: 

A seventh-grader who shot and killed himself inside an Ohio middle school restroom last week was planning to shoot others at the school before changing his mind at the last second, a police chief said Thursday. 

The boy, 13-year-old Keith Simons, came out of the bathroom holding a semi-automatic rifle just before classes began and then abruptly went back inside and shot himself in the head, said Jackson Township Police Chief Mark Brink. 

Police don’t know why Simons didn’t carry out the attack and probably never will, the police chief said. “We should thank God every day, whatever made him change his mind,” Brink said. 

Investigators found messages on his cellphone that showed the teen had been planning an attack for at least a week at Jackson Middle School, near Massillon. He also showed admiration for the two students who carried out the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado nearly 19 years ago. 

“I’d hurt and destroy something bigger but my schools an easy target,” Simons wrote in one message found on his phone. 

“I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,” he said in another message written days before he took the.22-caliber gun to school on Feb. 20. “I’m going to die doing it.” 

The messages indicating he was planning a school shooting began a week earlier, the same day that 17 people died in the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Brink said.

That tweet up above is beyond chilling, and it reminds us that these school shooters often have no expectation of surviving their attack, so the idea of having armed teachers, or even more police, on site does not indicate that it would deter any of them.

I think it is hard for any of us of a certain age to remember what it was like to be an adolescent, but since I work with them all of the time I can tell you that they experience EVERY emotion more profoundly then we do as adults.

So crushes can quickly turn to obsessions. Depressions feel like the end of the world. And anger is all encompassing.

Most of us will navigate these emotional extremes without doing anything too disruptive to our lives.

But provided access to a deadly firearm, and suddenly a momentary emotional crisis can metastasize to an explosion of violence which can end multiple lives.

I hate when people call these shooters "evil" or "crazy."

No, they were likely mentally unstable or emotionally upset. Or a combination of the two.

In other words they are treatable just so long as you do not have to navigate a hail of bullets to reach them.