You’re completely contradicting yourself. Reread what you just said. The first response posits that the kids doing this “are, well, nuts,” the second wonders why the heck they aren’t going about doing it rationally if they’re going to do it at all.
I believe that the reason is that the other kids are to a great extent the “reason” they are driven to kill.
The kids who do this are already “different” and “off” in some way, and already unable, or quickly approaching unable, to deal with life at school. They’re unpopular, “geeky”, and so on.
Being excluded, picked on and made even more miserable by some of their peers, like in the Columbine case, is imho, what causes a lot of these problems to happen at school, where the “problem” physically exists as far as these kids are concerned.
And of course it’s not just the bullying, or every kid who ever had to deal with that would become a killer, it’s the combination of already existing emotional and psychological problems, compounded by bullying and mistreatment by his peers.
Which brings up another interesting question/point. Why is it mostly boys who do this?
Do you remember being a teen? Do you remember how long a school year seemed back then? Heck, when I was in high school I thought there was some strange Einstienian time warp thing going on that only affected school. Time slowed WAY down. The closer the summer came the slower time went. Then factor in the fact that teens aren’t well known for looking ahead.
I would bet that for alot of teens, especially the loners, school is everything. It is the center of their life, where they spend most of their time, where their value as an indivdual is decided. School is central to a kids social life, to their sense of belonging, and defines their selfworth in many ways. If a kid is an outcast in school and gets picked on he probably isn’t going to think “Man, school sucks but in a year or two I’ll get out and everything will be great”. He’ll probably thinks that the whole world is going to be like school if he bothers to think that far ahead.
I’m sure there are things that can be done to help these kinds of kids but I have no idea what those things are.
Am I suprised that kids shoot up schools? Not really. Kids can be extremely cruel to each other.
Slee
Why do, on average, more men commit violent crimes than women? I think–and I don’t have cites for this yet–that it has to do with two things, one nature, one nurture:
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Nature: Men have more testosterone, which can cause aggression,
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Nurture: Males in general are allowed “violent play” more than females. It was okay when I was little (and I’m only 22) for boys to play “War” with guns, complete with killing each other, but the girls were expected to play “House” and be gentle.
Very good points.
And another thing to take into account is that kids are often sold a whole bill of goods about how school is supposed to be the best time of your life. You’re supposed to have a lot of things happen to you, mostly good, and even the bad things are supposed to eventually lead to triumph. So if your life sucks, you figure, if you can’t make your mark on the world one way, you can another.
And I gotta say, I hate it when people take this approach to a school shooting, or any juvenile crime. When people start beating their breast and howling, “What’s WRONG with These Kids Today?” I can almost complete the thought: “Why can’t they be like we were—perfect in every way?”
Why is this so incomprehensible to you, Finn? Why are you blaming the kids instead of examining the reasons for their behavior? Why didn’t you make this a Great Debate, and leave out all the “But WHYYYYYYYYYY?” and just ask, “What can we do?”?
Good points, and how many parents mistakenly pull the old “big boys don’t cry” garbage on their little boys?
FinnAgain, I’ve got a pretty high regard for you, but I’m now about to write something which may shock you.
When I was a teenager, over 20 years ago, I had the potential to become a school shooter, despite being female and, on the surface, a good kid.
Let me describe what life was like my junior year of high school. My best friend had had a “nervous breakdown” the summer before. She was handicapped and may have had somewhat deformed features (I don’t have a picture of her and I’m too biased, still, to be objective.) I blamed the nervous breakdown on the constant bullying and harassment she and I received. When I say “constant”, I mean it started before we got on the bus in the morning, continued throughout the day and didn’t stop until we got home. My friend even got picked on and teased in church. With her gone, I was literally at the bottom of the social ladder and worse, I was beating myself up for not being able to defend her. My junior year I confessed to a suicide attempt in social studies; not only was nothing done, the teasing got worse. Later that year, a kid pulled a knife on me while I was waiting for one of the few friends I had. This was in a small town in the late 1970s. It was made clear to me that no one was going to do anything, no one was going to defend me, and no one seemed to acknowledge what had happened to my friend. I was afraid to go to school. As I saw it, they had destroyed my best friend and they were hell bent on destroying me. Frankly, they nearly succeeded. I was incredibly, unspeakably angry at what they’d done to my best friend and what they were doing to me, “they” being my peers and the teachers who stood by and did nothing. My senior year, when my classmates were indulging in typical senior-year hype about how great and wonderful our class is, I was very tempted to stand up at a pep rally and say, “Oh yeah. You guys are really great, all right. You’re so powerful you destroyed a handicapped young woman. Look at tbe brave, courageous class of 19__!” :rolleyes: I didn’t because I couldn’t see a single, positive consequence that would come of it.
That, as I said, was 20 years ago. Since then, I’ve learned my old high school has a reputation for being a particularly bad place to be an outcast and an odd ball. In the 1990s, it was sued by the parents of two students who were being bullied and settled out of court rather than, in my opinion, admit responsibility. The irony is the way the girls who sued were being treated waa better than the way my friend and I were. After the school shootings in the late 1990s, they instituted some kind of “Kindness Credits” or something, designed to reduce bullying. According to what I read in the local newspaper, I think, what this meant was a kid would trip another kid then collect a Kindness Credit for helping the kid up. I studied what happened at Columbine, Paducah, and elsewhere, trying to sort out what happened. The conditions at those schools were chillingly close to the conditions at mine and for a while I was concerned that my old school would be next. I hope things have changed.
Kids die in schools every day. Kids are afraid to go to school every day. The difference is the kids who die usually kill themselves one at a time, not taking others with them. There have been times in my life when I wished I was one of them. High school was over 20 years ago and, in the intervening years, I’ve had good therapy, straightened out my life, and come to realize just how wrong the insults which were part of my daily life were. On the other hand, last night, less than 12 hours ago, after doing some rather gruelling emotional work with an old and trusted friend, I wound up slightly in tears in the arms of a man I love dearly while the old words and old fears of being unlikable, unlovable, and unable to find a place to belong echoed in my head.
I’m not writing this to justify kids who shoot up schools; I’m as appalled by them as anyone here, maybe more so because I see that monster in my own soul. I’m just trying to explain how it is that someone can become so desperate and so blinded that they do something like this.
Respectfully,
CJ
Clearly, the answer is to disarm the police.
I like this plan.
Since posting, I’ve read more details about the kid. It follows the usual pattern. According to my local newspaper, he was a “loner who wore black all the time and was teased by other kids.” His father had committed suicide and his mother is in a nursing home because of brain injuries shes suffered in a car accident.
During my junior year of high school, it was made clear to me that my life didn’t matter, that worthless scum such as me deserved to die and no one was going to do anything to help me. Damn it, I asked, screamed for help and got none. What do you do when everywhere you turn for help you’re turned down and made to feel foolish for asking, especially when you’re a teenager who’s learning to cope with the world? If you’re the ugly, useless, worthless, piece of scum everyone makes you out to be, why bother trying? What the hell do you do? I didn’t choose to kill others; I didn’t succeed in killing myself. Ultimately, I like the person I’ve become, but it was a hard road getting here. Why couldn’t someone have intervened with this kid before this happened?
CJ
Lot of things could be going on, some of them you might not agree with.
Kids having too easy access to guns.
Kids being taught to glorify violence and meanness by the music they listen to, movies and TV they watch, and the role models presented to them from an early age (maybe explains both bullies and school shooters).
Kids not having a strong support community to deal with stress.
Kids having too much time on their hands when they get home from school.
Adults not picking up the warning signs of impending trouble, and turning a blind eye when they do.
Schools being crowded jungles where anonymity and pressures to conform results in alienated students. Neighborhoods with cookie-cutter houses, where no one knows anyone else, maybe does the same thing.
Kids having screwed-up brain chemistry (either due to real disorders or substance abuse).
Also, we can’t forget that the media, purposefully or not, makes it seem like these kinds of school shootings are an epidemic:
“This just in…we have ANOTHER school shooting to report on. After the story, we will tell you how YOU can protect your child from the NEXT school shooting, which is bound to happen in a neighborhood like yours any day now. But before that, let’s see how the weather’s doing. Bob?”
It’s just like when everyone seemed to be getting attacked by sharks a few years back. After 9/11 hit, we didn’t hear anything more about shark attacks. Do you think the “epidemic” suddenly came to a halt? Or was it a manufactured one?
Red Lake ranks up (down?) there with Pine Ridge on the socioeconomic scale. Lowest school stats in the state in just about every measurable concept (aptitude scores, household income, teen pregnancy, divorced parents, single-family homes, graduation rates, substance abuse…). There are few jobs and no industry to speak of. All those horrid stories one reads about inner-city poverty don’t have jack shit on the res. Quite frankly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.
I think part of the reason, too, is that to live that long in an intolerable situation (for varying degrees of intolerable) just isn’t a real good option. Think about it - if you had to go to WORK every day in an environment where your co-workers did everything they could to make your job and your life miserable, your bosses not only didn’t care, but sometimes even added to the problem, and you saw no way out except to endure it for the next two / four / eight years before some sort of escape was possible…would you continue to work there? Really? Telling yourself every day, “only three more years…only two years and 364 days…only two years and 363 days…” Or would you start looking for another job?
Unfortunately, kids don’t have that option of finding another school. To them, there is no way out, and a lot of them, (I daresay most of them), even the “normal” ones, don’t have the maturity and experience to look at their life and say, “Hey, this is gonna be OVER in a couple years.” And, if the situation is completely and truly intolerable, humans are geared to start “shutting down” the “unnecessary” parts of ourselves so we can devote our entire being to mere survival. Once you’ve shut down the parts that care about anything but just making it through One. More. Day., it becomes a lot more difficult to see your fellow students as anything but obstacles to your survival - and therefore, sadly, easier to eliminate.
Shut the fuck up. Boy, you gun-control schmucks never miss a chance to make jackasses of yourselves.
There is a lot of unstated pressure to treat rampage killings as individual aberrations. IMO, they make a lot of people feel that the system is broken in some very serious way that they don’t really want to confront.
Repeat after me: America is the greatest country in the world. This cannot possibly be due to anything about our country, our culture, or our system. Or else there is no hope, and even worse, no God. So don’t you dare assume there’s anything special about America at work here. If you do, you don’t deserve our freedoms and our rights.
So the media focuses on the individual and his psychopathology, and the subculture of the family, the town, the school, etc. Meanwhile, the culture channels its feelings of powerlessness and rage towards less threatening issues, ie: show trials, Social Security, and mercy killing.
Finn, why do you blame the country as a whole for the actions of these nutjobs? If you’re looking for someone to blame (and this is a whole 'nother subject from my usual disdain for the media) then in my opinion mass media is much more to blame than the country is.
How many times have you heard of some random act of violence occurring only to have it repeated several more times around the country as a result of copycat crimes? Next time you hear of a rock being dropped on someone from an overpass, or bums being set on fire, or another occurance school shootings,ask yourself if the media’s sensationalism of the incident isn’t more to blame for its occurance. I personally would favor a voluntary media blackout on these kinds of things, but competive pressures, greed, and the fact that the media doesn’t really give a shit about what happens to people as long as they can report it, will keep such a practice from ever being adopted.
Why? do kids do this?
Immediate, direct reasons:
Access to guns, chronic bullying (that is often condoned by the school, even today), lack of a strong family–and I don’t mean a traditional one, neccessarily–I mean some adults who show they care on a consistent basis, lack of a peer network (aka friends), no real sense of future/consequences, overwhelming feelings of despair and rage.
That poor kid–what his life was like, with that family constellation boggles my mind.
I am not excusing what he did. But I wonder how much help and support he got from any teachers, social workers (if any), relations, neighbors etc.
IMO, we as a society have failed the kids who do this in some fundamental way. Is it because we laud youth, but really want nothing to do with teens? Think about it–none of us really want to be 16 again, or even 18–we want the irresponsibility of those ages, while keeping our cars, our indepedence, our money, along with the skin tone and that fresh faced appeal.
It seems to me that we dangle a shiny, bright myth in front of teens today–and denigrate them when their adolescence doesn’t measure up. Anxiety, fear of future, intimacy, sex? No way, dude–these are the best years of your life, man.
It’s BS-and teens know it. High school sucks for many teens-especially those who are too mature emotionally and those who are immature emotionally.
As to why this didn’t occur in the 1950’s-I dislike it when that decade is used as an example of all that was just and good in America. It sucked-it must have–blacks had no rights; essentially women were dependent on marriage to have a decent standard of living, out of wedlock kids were shamed etc.
But the media wasn’t as pervasive then, and the “queston authority” mindset hadn’t happened yet. I am not blaming the media for Columbine etc–but I do think it is a minor factor. It (TV, Internet, games etc) have become a substitute for human interaction–and it must have some impact. The 60’s and early '70’s with the “don’t trust anyone over 30” stuff broke (for the greater good, IMO) the back of Authority is obeyed because it is Authority mindset.
Indirect reason: (along with media and change in mindset)
I wish we as adults treated kids with respect–that does not mean giving in to their silly demands for Play stationAND Nintendo or other materially spoiling that is so bad for them long term. I mean–why don’t we listen to kids?
Kids know–they know about Uncle’s drinking, Mom’s special pills, Dad’s bit on the side. They know that teachers and principals lie to them and also when those people want to arbitrarily abuse the power they have over the student body.
And they resent it like hell. IMO, we try to hard to impose order and discipline from on high–when we should be guiding kids in learning self-discipline and teaching them how to be independent, productive members of society.
I am not saying that the above are reasons for the shooting sprees–but IMO, they are all pieces of the puzzle.
As to the “it doesn’t happen much, so meh…argument”–that enrages me. That it should happen AT ALL–even if only once–should be enough for all of us to rise up and say, “no more; never again” and work toward a solution.
My life is invested in my kids (as is most good parents)–to witness such a waste of life is sickening and evil. NONE of those kids was irredeemable, but it’s too late now.
Wow, thanks everybody for your responses! I’ll get to them all in due time, right now I have to get ready for classes.
Just a few things: I don’t hate America or think that as a nation we’ve somehow gone wrong. It does seem that certain factors within our nation allow/contribute to this sorta thing happening, but I don’t believe they’re essentialy American, if that makes any sense.
As for why I posted in the Pit rather than GD… I was in a rather emotional place when I wrote the OP, and wanted to allow for a ‘looser’ discussion. I also understand that this discussion might be emotional for other people, and wanted to allow the possibility of harsh language and harsh views. I didn’t have anything more well-planned or elegant because, well, I’ve got a lot of contradictory emotions and thoughts when it comes to issues like this, and a lot of sadness.
I’ll see y’all tonight when I get back from school.
The teen years is the time when we all start breaking away from our parents and start forming the path to adulthood. The way to do that is by becoming part of a group. That group can be unified by just about anything: music, sports, collecting stamps, doing drugs, church. The people of this group will always, always perceive themselves better than the schmucks in any other group: “Yeah, the jocks get all the dates, but wait till we science geeks graduate and make money - then we’ll see who gets all the babes.”
Part of this groupthink may be, and it depends on numerous factors, to pick on some sorry individual. There’s no way to discern what it will be: red hair, glasses, bad complexion, sucking at sports, high pitched voice. Just about anything that is a little bit off the norm for the groups that bully will suffice. It’s all part of initiation rites and have been going on since, well, forever. Society sets a norm and teens, trying to achieve adulthood, will pervert that norm and push out an individual, in order to cement the relationship within the group.
We tend to blame the bullies, but that’s just a small part of the problem. A much bigger part is what the adult world does, or is perceived as doing, by the bullies. Many times we inadvertently reward the bullies, who grow up to be strong, popular and successful. The bullies often don’t think they are being really bad - it was just “fooling around, giving X a little hard times, because she’s always such a stuck up miss goody two shoes.” Teens are also very self centered, even totally self absorbed, and empathy is very low on their lists, because many times the bullies find life to suck too.
It’s very complex and it must start with the adults in school taking a firm stand and making school a safe place. Kids tend to spend more time with their teachers, than with their parants and no matter how much we harp on about it starting at home, doesn’t remove the fact that when kids hit high school, many times a teacher will havea larger impact on a kid than the parents do.
:dressed and ready to run:
Just wanted to say something real quick:
Thank you Siege for your perspective. I guess it’s just hard for me to get into the head-space of kids like that… and it’s too tempting to simply look at them as berserk lunatics. I suppose that view is neither nuanced nor accurate enough to serve. Thank you for clearing up my ignorance, and especially for having the courage to share such traumatic memories.
Strength and courage.
Namaste.