When do isolated outliers become a disturbing trend?

Regardless of whether or not you buy into the American high school ideal, it's a sad day when a bright, promising boy picks up a gun and kills his entire family. What stays with me the most is the message of the gun-control advocates: a gun is 22 times more likely to be used against a family member than to be used to protect the family against intruders.

Second is this idea that the system obviously isn't working for many young people. Those who are coming into power now, after the baby boomers take leave. When a school becomes less a fertile socioacademic playground and more a dry, confining standardized testing station -- or when the home becomes more of a repository for techno must-haves, in which there's 0.5 daily hours on average to spend together, since mom and dad work longer hours and dutiful daughters and sons shuttle from activity to activity, essential for the college application, you begin to detect you've developed a major problem. I'm not sure how to synthesize any kind of comprehensive review of what American cultural practices might be contributing to a growing detachment and disaffectation (see Affluenza for that), but this is how it appears in my fish-eye lens: we are judging quantity over quality. And paying qualitative consequences.

Or it could be a lingering consequence of World War II values. That's pretty plausible, observing how that value set has irrevocably altered almost every kind of consumption and industry there is in the US (not to mention the continuing dominance of economics over other values -- sustainability, for example). That reminds me a little of something I heard about that's been going on in Japan: the hikikomori.