Yesterday and Today

I was in middle school during Columbine. People were talking about Marilyn Manson, video games, and Satanism (I wish I was kidding). Even as a preteen, I didn't think the dialogue surrounding school shootings could get any worse.

Man, I was a blissfully naive child...

For all the ridiculous moral panic and blame-gaming surrounding Columbine, at least I could kind of understand why we were talking about some of the silliness we were talking about; there was an attempt to get to the root cause of the problem. The conclusions people came to were ridiculous, but at least the conversation was about why a young person would want to do something like that and how we could prevent more people from going down that path. The idea behind the conversation was valid; unfortunately, the conclusions people came to were not helpful. They relied on pre-existing moral panics (rock music, violence in media and satanic ritual abuse) that have never been proven to have a direct link to extreme violence and some of which (satanic ritual abuse) aren't real.

Yet, I find that the current conversation surrounding school shootings is even less helpful. It still centers around demonization, but the demonization is hardly conceptual. It's become a cesspool of vilifying people with mental illness, political opponents, and, to some extent, children. The latter existed with Columbine, as well, and I'll say what I felt at the time: blaming school shootings on bullying is a trope that is not scientific and is little better than victim-blaming. We can and should have a dialogue about bullying and preventing it in schools, but once you go as far as to say "and Harris and Klebold shot up the school because the classmates were mean to them," you are blaming the classmates. You are also presenting bullied kids as inherently dangerous. That's not a great combination. I wasn't surprised upon the revelation that the bullying of those two men was exaggerated, if not largely fabricated, but I gotta say I was pretty pissed off thinking about how many years people spent pointing fingers at traumatized students who watched their friends die.

In regards to the Parkland shooting, there's the concept of "walk up, not out." This one is a bit reminiscent of Columbine-era thinking: the idea is to prevent social alienation by being friendly to outcast students. It's a great sentiment, and I can hardly be dismissive of a movement started by the father of a student who passed. The trouble is that it's a concept that should be applied to bullying as a whole. It's also a concept that one can't really apply to the situation of the students; if we are to assign blame to individuals, it's to the many institutions who failed this student despite a staff that did everything they could to prevent this, not the peers, who said of him that he was abusive to them.

So what has come of this on a grander scale? Seems like mostly a debate over whether or not we support or oppose kids who are walking out for engaging in political activism. That this is a question is ludicrous. There shouldn't be any debate over whether or not you support these kids for standing up against guns. You may disagree with them, but how can you not applaud a child who took a situation like this and used it to fight for a better world? In politicianland, there's more discussion of sending protective gear to schools. It's a discussion about self-defense. People are talking about giving teachers guns and giving kids bullet proof blankets as well as weapons of their own. There's talk about treating a school like a battle ground and giving teachers the right to kill students. How the hell did we let this get to this point?


As critical as I was of the dialogue surrounding Columbine, a dialogue that was cynically commandeered by people with a pre-existing agenda, at least there was an attempt to figure out how they got to the point of murder to begin with. Because school shootings aren't relegated to isolated incidents: they are a tragically common occurrence. In this case, it does seem like a lot of people made a lot of mistakes. And perhaps that is a thread between shootings. But it doesn't get to the root of why this keeps happening. We seem to have accepted that because this guy was "troubled," a vague statement to begin with, that that's the end of the conversation. And if this existed in a vacuum, I'd be willing to consider that as an acceptable response. But it doesn't. Meanwhile, aside from one misguided but well-meaning attempt to curtail the old standby (bullying), there's very little discussion of that. So what is it? Home life? It's a favorite amongst blame-gamers, but while this seems to be part of the problem in this case, there's not a whole lot of evidence that most school shooters have bad or absent parents. Sorry to disappoint the "easy answer" crowd. There isn't one. Heck, maybe shootings have little in common. Maybe there is no root. But we'll never find out if we either don't discuss it or only allow people with a pre-existing agenda to carry the conversation.

"How do we stop people from wanting to do this?" is an important discussion. We don't have to allow the Bill O'Reillys and Pat Robertsons of the world to take it over again to have it. Because we do need to have it.