It may have been suggested by an earlier post, but every since the earliest school shootings were reported, I’ve been interested in the stories and people behind them; in particular, the shooters. Every time another one happens, I find myself pouring over articles about the latest shootings and past shootings. This time was no different. I now have a folder in my RSS reader for the VA Tech shootings, which is starting to fill up with articles and posts.
But a couple of nights ago, I came across something I hadn’t thought about until now. I’d written earlier about the anti-gay bullying and harassment I’d experienced in school, and how as result I identified to some degree with the anger the school shooters obviously felt and some expressed. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across a website that suggested I had more in common with these guys than I thought.
It started with web page about sexual orientation harassment in schools that made the following statement.
Five of the eight recent major school shooting incidents have involved anti-gay teasing. Charles ‘Andy’ Williams (left to right), who allegedly killed two at Santana High School in California, reportedly faced anti-gay taunting, as did Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot 13 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Calif., and Barry Loukaitis in Moses Lake, Wash., Luke Woodham in Pearl, Miss.; and Michael Carneal in West Paducah, Ky.
It wasn’t the anti-gay harassment that made me do a double take, so much as the number (more than half at the time this site was last updated) school shootings in which it was a factor. Some of the names I recognized, and remembered the shooting they were responsible for. The rest I found myself researching late into the night, long after I should have been in bed.
I didn’t know that Charles Andrew Williams, who killed two and wounded 13 when he opened fire at his California high school, was actually born here in Maryland. Nor did I know that he endured anti-gay harassment.
And a former girlfriend of Charles Andrew Williams — who killed two classmates and injured 13 others at his California high school in March 2001 — reported that Williams was tormented by anti-gay harassment he experienced being the new kid at his high school.
In addition to the run-of-the-mill harassment.
Williams came to California less than two years ago from a town in rural Maryland. After a spell in the town of Twentynine Palms, his dad got a job as a lab technician for the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, and the two moved to Santee (pop. 58,000). Williams was instantly picked on by the bigger, more streetwise kids there. Laura Kennamer, a friend of Andy’s, saw kids burning their lighters and then pressing the hot metal against his neck. “They’d walk up to him and sock him in the face for no reason,” she says. “He wouldn’t do anything about it.” Jennifer Chandler, a freshman, saw the same pattern of torment: “Kids were mean to him. He’d slack it off. Like he kept it all inside.”
Barry Loukatis was another whose shooting at a Washington state high school was said to have its origins in anti-gay harassment.
On Feb. 2, 1996, 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis allegedly gunned down classmate Manuel Vela in Moses Lake, Wash. At the trial, students testified that Loukaitis pledged to kill Vela after Vela repeatedly taunted him by calling him a “faggot.”
On February 2, 1996, 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis killed a teacher and two students at Frontier Junior High School in Moses Lake, Washington. He had been taunted by school jocks who said he was a “faggot.”
Luke Woodham, who opened fire at Pearl High School in Mississippi? Same story.
One of the things that they are teaching is that school shooters were most often victims of harsh teasing. “They’d always talk about me and push me around and start fights with me and stuff,” Woodham told agents during the interview. “They’d call you gay or call you stupid or fat or whatever. Kids would sometimes throw rocks at me and push and kick me and hit me and stuff like that.”
Michael Carneal, who killed three students and wounded five more at Heath High School in Kentucky? Same story.
Unbeknownst to his family, Michael had spent the year before the shootings battling obsessive fears.
He kept kitchen knives and a sickle under his bed to protect himself from imaginary intruders. He sometimes walked on furniture to avoid the floor, where he thought people with chainsaws were waiting to cut off his feet.
Given his peculiar torment, any teasing by classmates was going to be too much. In his eighth-grade year, the school newspaper printed gossip that Michael and another boy ?had feelings for each other.?
One student began calling him “faggot” or “gay” at least four times a day, Michael told doctors.
And, of course, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris? Pretty much the same story.
And investigators were adamant in dismissing rumors that the killers were gay, which swirled around Columbine High, and some national talk shows, immediately after the tragedy. The rumors seem to have originated two years ago, with a single member of the Trench Coat Mafia who may have been gay or bisexual. Investigators described how the animosity escalated between jocks and the Trench Coat Mafia, and this individual preyed on the jocks’ homophobia to get a rise out of them.
“[He] knew that it freaked the jocks out,” Battan said. “So he quite often would act out — somewhat inappropriately — more to get a reaction than what he may have been thinking or feeling.” Another investigator said that this same person would “taunt [the jocks] back by hugging and kissing on one of the other Trench Coat Mafia guys.” Although Harris and Klebold were only sophomores at the time, rumors have persisted ever since that anyone associated with the Trench Coat Mafia was gay.
But despite all rumors to the contrary, and just like every other school shooter above. Klebold and Harris were not gay. In fact, Harris, in his diary comes across as a frustrated, dejected heterosexual.
“Months have passed. It’s the first Friday night in the final month. Much shit has happened. Vodka has a Tec 9, we test fired all of our babies, we have 6 time clocks ready, 39 crickets, 24 pipe bombs, and the napalm is under construction. Right now I’m trying to get fucked and trying to finish off these time bombs.
“NBK came quick. Why the fuck can’t I get any? I mean, I’m nice and considerate and all that shit, but nooooo…The amount of dramatic irony and foreshadowing is fucking amazing. Everything I see and hear I incorporate into NBK somehow…feels like a goddamn movie sometimes…
“I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no, don’t fucking say, ‘Well, that’s your fault’ because it isn’t, you people had my phone #, and I asked and all, but no no no no no don’t let the weird looking Eric kid come along, oooh fucking nooo.”
That is how the journal ends — not with the howl of the wolf-god, but the whine of the pathetic geek who can’t land a prom date.
And decides everybody deserves to die.
And Cho Seung-Hui? His stalking of female classmates has already been reported, but his creation of an imaginary girlfriend offers a window into his own frustrations.
Girls figured somewhere in his yearnings, but always from a distance.
In his junior year, Mr. Cho told his then-roommates that he had a girlfriend. Her name was Jelly. She was a supermodel who lived in outer space and traveled by spaceship, and she existed only in the dimension of his imagination.
When Andy Koch, one of his roommates, returned to their suite one day, Mr. Cho shooed him away. He told him Jelly was there. He said she called him Spanky. SpankyJelly became his instant-message screen name.
He became fixated on several real female students. Two of them complained to the police that he was calling them, showing up at their rooms and bombarding them with instant messages. They found him bothersome but not threatening. After the second complaint against him in December 2005, the police came by and told him to stop.
A few hours after they left, he sent an instant message to one of his roommates suggesting he might as well kill himself. The campus police were called, and Mr. Cho was sent to an off-campus mental health facility.
This isn’t to suggest that Cho Seun-Hui or Eric Harris might not have gone on their rampages if they’d gotten attention from young women, or gotten laid, lest I be perceived at laying everything at the feet of young women who turned them down. It’s not about that. Instead it goes back to themes of masculinity and definitions of masculinity that I’ve written about before. I heard echoes of it in Jessie Klein’s insightful essay on Huffington Post.
In every school shooting, boys targeted girls who rejected them, boys who called them gay or otherwise belittled them, and other students at the top of the school’s hierarchy–white, wealthy, and athletic–and then shot down other students in an effort to reinstate their injured masculinity.
…Boys are taught to believe that sexual interest from a girl is imperative to affirm their manhood. When boys are rejected by girls, it can bring up fears that they are not perceived by others as strong and powerful and can cause many to doubt their masculinity and heterosexuality. Headlines about Cho confirmed he struggled with these same concerns about his manhood.
If you look at these guys, and look at their lives, one thing they all have in common is that they were not what’s conventionally considered “masculine” in the most superficial sense of the word. (Whether anything beyond the superficial matters to or is valued by their peers or their culture, is another matter altogether.”) Quiet, shy, bookish, bespectacled, non-athletic, slight of build, etc., all of which reads as something less than manly.
But drawing that line of demarcation around manliness or masculinity, thus defining it, means defining those outside that line as well. And if the authors above are defining “what makes a man a man,” then those who fall outside that definition have be seen as not being men no matter how we define ourselves. In that context we are not “real men,” but are either something other than men or something less than men.
And thus, while none of the authors above would necessarily use the terms, we become “sissies” or “faggots” for falling too far outside their ideals of manliness or masculinity. We don’t “act like men” or “like men are supposed to act.” So we are like something other than men. Or like something less than men.
The queer thing about school shooters isn’t that they are queer or that they’re not. It’s that they are, all at once, too queer and not queer enough.
[To be continued.]
Try as I might, I just can’t write these boys off as “evil” and be don’t with it.
This is great stuff Terrance.
As a society, America has always been a bit coarse, a bit too enamored with the myth of hyper-masculinity. Who invented super heroes after all? American pop culture. Germany developed philosophers like Neitzsche, but we took that philosophy and turned it into Superman.
We turned the equivalent of todays gangstas, the gunmen of the old west, and celebrated them as heroes, and made them into legends. Most were nothing more than sociopathic killers. The same for mobsters in the 20th Century. Yet they caught the popular imagination in cheap dime novels and later in movies.
In America, with its dream of equal opportunity, its idealistic vision of the individual conquering all and rising to wealth and fame on merit, we have forgotten that individuals without the support of family and community rarely achieve such lofty heights. We ignore the effect of race and class, because we choose to buy into that Randian myth, and because we prefer to think that no matter how uninspired our own lives are, there is always someone who is lower than we, someone who we both blame for his or her own failures, and paradoxically celebrate because their failures reinforce our own sense of esteem in whatever status we have reached.
Combine this with a culture of gun worship, especially among men, and a society that makes guns easily available to anyone who wants one, and it’s not hard to see why these tragedies occur. The gun grants everyone who chooses to use it the powers of a super hero, of being able to dispense death or spare life. What greater seduction could there be for someone who feels oppressed, who has been bullied and belittled, who is a social outcast?
The gun is a great equalizer, so long as you have a weapon it doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how good looking you are. You are a fucking menace. These people seem to have decided that society isn’t giving them enough incentives to play by the rules. Not enough respect, friendship, pleasure, whatever. They choose to reject the society that they feel has rejected them, and they take revenge as well as they only escape route they know.
It really isn’t that much different that what I imagine kids in Palestine or in our own inner cities go through when the choose to be suicide bombers or find their way into a criminal society.
For much of our history those who felt they were outsiders and unrooted would go West. Now that the West has been won there is no longer an escape in pioneering. Gun violence becomes the easiest available release valve when they feel they don’t belong and have no future to work towards.
in that, I believe, it is hard to know HOW to be a man. There are all kinds of archetypes for men, but all of them are somewhat limiting, IMO. From the outside, it looks as if it is okay for a boy to become a man by 1) going into the military or 2) become employed or 3) have a family unit of ones own to care for. But it doesn’t seem as if it is that easy on the inside. I feel terrified for our young boys getting pitched into this war grinder machine. I see that the women serving along side of them face a huge risk of rape and so I know that just the military aspect doesn’t allow the guys to feel comfortable in that masculine skin. There are wholesale slaughters that also go on in this war with little to no provocation that speaks to the fact that becoming a military unit doesn’t equate manliness or at least humane -ness.
Guys on the job seem to feel they have another hurdle they have to overcome – they have to be able to intimidate others – or a least a portion of them do.
I know the “Promise Keepers” and some “Warriors” groups have tried to define what being manly is and should be. And I have tried, at this late date, to understand what I would want it to be. Mine falls short in that I want my Grandsons to care about others (a truly FEMALE concept) and write me even after they have left home! (A concept that my oldest Grandson is even now ignoring completely!)
I think the fault lies in our archetypes for “manliness” and I am at a loss as to what we can do to evolve here.
(or a woman), I’d like to see this society stress what it means to be a HUMAN.
Absolutely Cali, the concept sounds so startlingly simple yet that idea seems to have eluded humans through the ages and instead have made these artificial guidelines for what is masculine/feminine…just so incredibly stupid and damaging to everyone. Putting people in one dimensional boxes never has worked and never will except to cause confusion, heartbreak and trouble…and divide people instead of bringing them together to celebrate each persons unique talents.
a difference in the way we tackle things. And it may be only in degree rather than a wholesale difference. Looking at sports, military, etc., it SEEMS that there is a tendency for the masculine to just DO IT, whatever it is, in a physical sense, rather than talking it out.
My friends and I were continuously bullied in high school 30 years ago for being different (poor, ethnic, fat, gay, etc.) by the jocks and rich kids with what I’ve always believed to be the approval of the school administration. It was a way for them to express their fear and disapproval of us without actually doing anything themselves. And I have no reason to think that’s still not the case. I had murderous fantasies myself and once pulled a (very small) knife on one group of tormentors.
The other word that comes up in those quotes, over and over, is jock. And jock is used in opposition to ‘gay.’ Why is that the standard of behavior that boys are supposed to strive toward? As much as my son plays sports, if I ever saw him acting like a ‘jock,’ I’ll disown him.
And, of course, the other issue becomes why calling someone ‘gay’ is such a devastating taunt. It starts in elementary school and continues through high school. Wh has being gay become the ultimate symbol of otherness?
We have worked very hard with both of our kids to tell them, in no uncertain terms, that to try to insult someone by calling them ‘gay’ will not be tolerated under any circumstances. They know lots of lesbian and gay adults and their kids, so I think (I hope, at least) that they know that kind of language is way beyond the pale.
But how we expand that to the broader society, I don’t know.
You think the United States is the only country where fag-bashing goes on in schools?
Happens in Japan and Europe all the time.
What doesn’t happen in Japan and Europe are massacres at the schools.
The difference?
The Japanese and Europeans have enough sense to keep guns away from emotionally and mentally disturbed people. In fact, they don’t bother trying to sort the “norms” from the “psychos”, so they just make sure that damn near nobody has a gun.
The Virginia Tech massacres seem to have become the blank slate onto which everyone can write their favorite agenda.
Except the only agenda that REALLY could have prevented this massacre and which is NEVER going to be discussed:
Instituting strict gun control.
No easy access to guns and ammo = no Virginia Tech massacre.
See? That wasn’t hard, now, was it?
But let’s not let a simple fact like that destroy our fantasies that what the Virginia Tech Massacres are really about are (check one or more below):
__Anti-gay sentiment
__Racism
__Decadent liberalism
__Sexual promiscuity
__Prejucide against the mentally ill
__We sinners have displeased God
And so on and so forth.
If Cho had not had the access to the guns, who’s to say he wouldn’t have taken some other action, like say a homemade bomb? Yes, we need to limit the easy access to weaponry, but we can’t ignore the root cause.
Also consider those who take out their frustrations on themselves, rather than lashing out at others — are the deaths of those who choose to kill themselves rather than others any less tragic? Certainly they’re far less noticed…it’s likely that Cho set out to get the attention in death denied to him in life.
Gun control is another subject for another diary — maybe you can write that one…but in the meantime, we can’t ignore the effects that words have on people…and that someone referred to as “faggot” may someday prove his “manhood” with a gun…
homemade bomb…now theres a memory.
1986 i believe…clemson university….outdoor showing of the rocky horror picture show (which i had seen hundreds of times in philly but was excited to see again with my future husband of the time whom had never seen it.)
and a bomb went off right in front of me….i felt the percussive force hit me in the chest and i will never forget that feeling….or the sight of all the blood on the walkways as we rushed out of the area behind the students carrying out the wounded… including the dumbass who made the bomb.
cant see that movie without that memory which really sucks because i loved that movie and have so many cool memories of me and my friends heading to the TLA on south st every weekend to see it.
i still have no idea why that guy had a bomb…i left clemson soon after before completing my degree.
and its not true that gun control would stop these kinds of shootings…there are plenty of places where most of the people have guns and they dont shoot people because they are mad.
im also not worried about criminals or crazy people having guns….im more worried that republicans have more guns than democrats (by 4 to 1 i read somewhere).
when the revolution comes the guys with the guns are going to win.
Japanese and European schoolboys are tormented not only with the tacit but often the explicit approval of the schoolmasters. Peers are used to mete out cruel punishments that the teachers and principals dare not levy themselves.
Why don’t the Japanese and European kids make bombs and blow up their schools?
Lack of technical know-how? You’re telling me that Germans and Japanese don’t know how to make BOMBS? Both countries excel in science and I’m sure there are many A-level chemistry students who could rig a nice big bomb if they wished.
Cultural differences? Ok, you might use that to excuse the Japanese, but what about the Europeans? You really think their culture is that different from ours?
Actually, it is: the United States has a culture of violence. You don’t realize that until you’ve traveled outside the boundaries of North America (or even to Canada).
Anyone recall the scene from “Bowling for Columbine” where Michael Moore contrasted the sedate, facts-based reporting on Canadian news broadcasts with the sensationalistic, blood-soaked US “news” broadcasts? The United States is a culture that openly encourages fear and violence. Television is a big part of it; the ready access to guns is another cultural signal that the only bad problem is a live enemy.
I’m sorry, but the entire theory of Terrance’s diary is nonsense.
Did you know that according to a 2001 Center for Disease Control study, only 20% of school shooters had a history of being bullied or teased? Terrance has deliberately selected cases that fit his theory, rather than examining the cases and then formulating the theory.
(And yes, I work as a high school teacher, and our campus actively works for an atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance. It’s something I think should happen everywhere.)
I don’t deny that American gun culture is a huge factor in every case. The ease with which these boys got their hands on their weapons of choice (which, in and of themselves, carry a lot of symbolic weight in the context of this post, from the shaft to the bullet) made their crimes easier to carry out, and possibly made the body counts higher in some cases.
However, in the case of Harris and Klebold, they would have killed many more people if they’d been better at making bombs. Most of their bombs didn’t go off, and after waiting a few minutes when the bombs didn’t go off, they decided to go in and just start shooting.
(I was playing around with Lycos new video mixer, and I came across a documentary of Columbine called “Zero Hour.” You can see it online here.)
But culture and environment is part of the picture too (as well as biology, etc.), so I think it’s something we have to discuss as well. Otherwise, we’ll institute gun control only to find that some of these boys simply choose another method.
First of all, school shootings only accounted for 1% of all juvenile gun homicides in the years 1992-2001.
What about the other 99%? Even if we stopped all bullying and teasing tomorrow–a laudable goal–99% of all juvenile gun homicides would still occur.
Second of all, a 2001 Center for Disease Control study shows that in school shootings from 1992-2001, only 20% of the shooters had been bullied in school. That means the vast majority of school shooters (80%) were NOT the objects of teasing or bullying.
The idea that people will find another way to kill if they don’t have access to guns is just ridiculous. Strict gun control in Europe and Japan have led to very low rates of gun homicides, and the juvenile gun homicide rate for Japanese children under the age of 17 is ZERO. Are you telling me Japanese and German kids don’t know how to make bombs? Trust me, American kids aren’t better at science than their Japanese and German counterparts.
Guns make it very easy to kill people. Training in the use of guns is widely available, and ammunition is both plentiful and cheap. Bombs are not easy to make, as the Columbine killers showed: their bombs fizzled, but their guns proved all too reliable.
What I see in the Virginia Tech Massacre is a willingness to discuss anything and everything EXCEPT the one thing that would stop this from ever happening again: GUN CONTROL.
…reacted immediately to the story. He said that in several decades of counseling, he knew that the most severely socially maladjusted kids were those who couldn’t face their own sexuality. He has reflected many times on how schools today are only just beginning to convey the idea that every young person must be accepted as is. That was never an option ten years ago.
I disagreed, and still do. Don’t look at the behaviors that the college dorm mates described, but at the behaviors that his parents and aunts described from his earliest childhood. As an educator, all the flags would have been raised on this child…whom his parents called “autistic.”
That was the only term they knew to describe the severely antisocial behavior of this young man from earliest (presexual) years onward. Schizophrenic? Aspbergers? Manic depressive? Only a good psychologist could guess, not outside observers.
Let’s spend the time, instead, analyzing what’s wrong with a society that allows a young man who was referred as severely mentally disturbed to three separate agencies by guns and rapid fire ammunition, and practice for hours at a range. Now that’s odd and morally inexcuseable.
It’s funny how in America our public reality is constructed by corporations together with pressure groups.
Thanks for finding what I remembered hearing. What I was trying to say in my comment is that while many teenage problems are due to sexual maladjustment, this one appears to have gone far, far beyond that and Cho’s problems were not caused by how he was treated by peers. Rather, his treatment by peers was the result of deepseated problems.
There are many issues for educators, here, and rather than show pictures of Cho brandishing his guns, the media would be wise to ask them. As a school administrator, I often had to confront parents who were ignoring the problems of their children. Some were receptive; many more simply denied them, changed schools, or didn’t educate their children at all (filing a letter saying they were “home schooling.”) Educators have few tools to force such treatment, even for the most severe cases, unless they file protective services. I did that exactly once in ten years, and my life was threatened for doing so.
Cho’s parents resisted…so did the school simply give up? I’m not trying to throw blame, but to figure out some positive steps that might come of this tragedy.
…of gun homicides.
Out of the 30,000 or so murders committed with guns in the United States every year, since 2001, less than one-tenth of 1% have been in school shootings.
ALL of these deaths could have been avoided with strict gun control laws, modeled after those in Western Europe and Japan.
Why are we looking for a pattern in the school shootings? I already found it: people in the United States can get guns and ammunition too damned easy.
i doubt it
this culture is different than europe and japan, etc
not better or worse….just different.
make all the gun control laws you want….a few crazy white boys who are mercilessly teased and taunted, with inadequate mental health interventions, will still find guns and shoot people….
and in germany a crazy white guy will kill and eat a willing participant.
and in africa men from one tribe will murder everyone from another tribe.
and in the middle east gay teenagers will be hung in the public square.
and in india women will have acid thrown in their face or be set on fire if their husband wants a new wife.
nobody has ever figured out how to stop man’s (and unfortunately i do mean mostly men) inhumanity to man.
no culture, sex, group, country, religion etc has a monopoly on hate and the consequences of hate.
i was in florida when all this shooting happened….mercilessly away from tv and the computer…very little seeped into my conciousness…..but for me it all goes back to the phenomenom of surplus powerlessness….michael lerner wrote the book on the topic (literally) and although its a hard slog of a read the concept really explains the unexplainable very well….now all we have to do is figure out how to empower people in a healthy way so they dont resort to murder (among other things).
Uh…it’s that remarkably different?
Ok, so what’s the cultural difference that makes Americans murder 30,000 of their fellow citizens each year with guns, while the British only manage a piffling 30 or so?
Could it be the violent culture perpetuated by the easy access to guns?
Do you really think the British aren’t violent? Or the Scots? Have you ever BEEN to a soccer match that turned violent? I’ve been in the midst of a soccer riot (in Aberdeen) and I saw fans bashing each other with chains, rocks, and clubs.
Know what, though? Some fans were badly injured, but NOBODY WAS KILLED. That’s because NOBODY HAD A GUN.
A lot of those taunts stab at the target’s self-image — something that is often extremely vulnerable, especially in kids who already feel different from what their peers acknowledge as “normal.” It’s the same vulnerability that is primed and targeted in most advertising — who try to convince us that without their product, if we don’t dress in the latest styles, have a body like a model, make the football team, have a boyfriend or girlfriend, drive the cool car, makee enough money…. we are hopelessly inadequate.
A lot of adolescents go through this (and many, it seems, never quite get past it). Even the outward signs of success — athletic prowess, being popular, having a girlfriend or boyfriend, having the right clothes, the right car, the right friends — don’t necessarily make a kid feel any more self-confident or masculine (or feminine). But if those symbols are all they have, they cling to them, making the status symbol itself so important that anyone who doesn’t or can’t have access to it must be made to feel the lack.
Because if those other kids don’t want the exact same things, don’t use the same standard to judge themselves by, then what the status achievers have isn’t as important as they thought, and that affects their own perceived self-value. If being on the football team, or having a girlfriend, or acting, dressing or behaving in a certain way isn’t what defines success and masculinity, then what does? They don’t want to face that question.
But kids like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris don’t fit that image. They may or may not want some of the same things, the same symbols of status — like getting sex, like having respect from others — but they don’t fit the image that their peers consider masculine. And their bullying peers won’t let them change the definition of what they SHOULD be like to suit themselves, but must reinforce their own fragile self-esteem by making sure those who are different realize how different (and thus inferior) they are.
Sort of rambling thoughts on both sides of the question — who gets to definite what “masculinity” is anyway, and why is one definition apparently so much more important than any other?
Can anyone tell me why assault in and around schools isn’t subject to prosecution? When people speak of “bullying”, they don’t mean just taunts, but beatings and threats of beatings.
Guns are called “The Great Equalizer”. Protecting young men from physical brutality might make them less inclined to shoot someone.
…especially on American high school campuses (not on mine, fortunately).
It needs to be addressed on a national level.
However, only 20% of all school shooters have a history of being bullied or tormented.
In addition, the tragic response of most gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered youth to bullying and teasing is to become depressed and suicidal–they turn the violence onto themselves, not onto others.
The Curmudgeon has a real point. Easy access to guns and ammo made this mass murder easy to pull off. Sure Cho could have made bombs instead, but the fact that gun control may not have prevented some deaths begs the question. It clearly could have prevented some, maybe most of them.
I believe the gun control debate is dead, largely due to weak arguments and a lack of determination on the gun control side. So, while I agree with the resident Curmugeon, I don’t think anything useful for our side will come out of this. Just the opposite is more likely.
We’ve already seen calls for campus rules changes to allow students to carry concealed weapons for “self-defense”. This idea should terrify anyone who has seen a bunch of drunk college kids, which is pretty much anyone who lives near a college.
…solving the real problem, quickly and effectively, by immediately cracking down on ammunition sales, followed up by banning certain types of weapons in civilian hands altogether.
Everyone has their pet agenda to peddle. For the right-wingers, Cho’s rampage “proves” that “liberal permissiveness” caused the murders, or that gun control is to blame (if only the students at Virginia Tech had all been heavily armed!).
On the left, one person looks at the Cho case and sees his favorite cause–fighting homophobia–even though it is only a small part of the overall picture. Others comment on race, immigration, etcetera.
Everybody misses the elemental truth: guns make it easy to kill a whole lot of people without a great deal of skill or training. Yes, I suppose Cho could have gone on his rampage with a samurai sword, but somehow I think things might have turned out a bit differently.
Anyway, as you said, there’s no hope of ever getting gun control in the United States. The hopelessness comes not from public apathy–clearly, the public opinion polls show that people WANT gun control–but from the utter fecklessness of the left, which is afraid that the big bad right-wing bogeymen will get mad at them.
In other words, by failing to call for new gun control legislation in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have signaled that they are willing to trade the lives of 30,000 Americans every year for the chance to get that all-important Bubba Vote. (Their silence on the Supreme Court’s decision on partial-birth abortion is also remarkable, since that silence can be construed as yet another concession to the Bubba Vote).
Sigh.
Bubba either doesn’t vote or if he does, he votes Republican. The Democratic Party wants the votes of men who have Confederate flags on their trucks why, exactly?