The shots heard round the world

Aaron Wells

Copy Editor & Assistant A&E Editor

Sagebrush, 3-6-2001

Yesterday, there was another school shooting. Actually, there might have been several for all I know, but there was one done by a white kid acting alone in an upper-class neighborhood. As a member of the American press, that's the only one I care about.

The American press clearly does not consider shootings that occur in low-income, inner-city schools as real "school shootings" when it decides what will get more coverage than a quarter-page column on the second page of the afternoon paper. It's not because the deaths are any less real. It's just that they're not nearly as cool. The kids in inner-city shootings usually know one another. The press is only interested in shootings where the victims seem to be chosen at random. Such shootings are extremely rare, like serial killers, but they make much better ghost stories for the news-watching, ad-absorbing, money-spending middle class.

But enough about that. I'm not JR Tillett.

"When America teaches her children right from wrong and teaches her children values, to value life, we'll be better off."

Those were President Bush Jr.'s words in response to yesterday's upper-class-school shooting. He says that we need to teach our children ethics that value life. Like the death penalty perhaps, Mr. President? Like increasing funding to the military?

Often these shootings are described as "baffling". They're not. These kids are an unusual personality type, but they're not unique. They're the classical "nerd" personality type you can run across in computer labs and IRC chats throughout the nation. Introverted, abstract, and withdrawn, they seem easy-going and untroubled because they keep their emotions deep inside, where they sometimes build up until the pressure finally makes them explode.

The difference with shooters is that they have learned from somewhere that death and weapons are the proper means for righting perceived wrongs against them. Like, maybe from the death penalty? Like maybe from increasing funding for the military, Mr. President?

This is not to say that nerds are dangerous. To me, the spreading belief that antisocial people are dangerous is scarier than the possibility of more school shootings, though mostly because I'll never be rich enough to send my kids to a school where they'll stand a good odds of being randomly shot. Perhaps in the future, it can be seen as a sign of distinction in college applications: "14 dead and 30 wounded? Why, this must be an exceptional school!Give the boy a full-ride!" Except, of course, when it's done by gang members: "What, the shooter was wearing a bandanna? Never mind..."

Nerds and other anti-social people are not, for the most part, dangerous. They just have bad social skills. This anti-nerd backlash that's occurring, persecuting the kids who wear trenchcoats, excluding them even more because of a fear that's slowly growing to an increasing hatred of them, this is exactly the opposite of what would lessen the phenomenon. If Johnny Goth wears all black because he feels picked on by his high-school peers, and it causes the high-school peers to make jokes about him bringing guns to school, that's not going to defuse the situation.

Likewise, trying to eliminate violence in movies, TV and music is not going to stop this anymore than is locking up every angsty teenager who fantasizes about taking revenge on a school full of boys who taunt him and girls who won't date him.

Maybe it would help if these kids were taught to lash out with violence, on a slightly smaller scale. Instead of sending them into anger-management classes they can fake their way through like the Columbine Kids did, send them t offensive jujitsu classes. Teach them how to kick asses and taken names. Then, when they get picked on, maybe they can break some jock's nose and get suspended from school for a week, instead of saving it up for years and shooting random kids who are probably having just as touch a time in school as they are. They might still kill someone by puncturing their lung or something, but that's a small price to pay for freedom from upper-class-school shootings.

It's tough to teach kids not to be violent. It's easier to teach to be violent effectively.

And then perhaps the media can go back to covering what it's supposed to ­ celebrity deaths.