From Smoking to Shooting

From Smoking to Shooting:

What Drives a Teenager to Kill?

By Michael Bradford

They are the shots heard ‘round the world- the shots that have been fired in so many schools across the country. Like everyone else, I am captivated by this sudden phenomenon. After all of the media coverage, though, there are always unanswered questions. Why is this happening now, when the biggest problems in schools used to involve getting caught smoking in the bathroom stalls? Who is to blame for these tragic occurrences? What can be done to stop it? Despite my research, I haven’t found the answers, and I don’t think that I ever will.

When I began to research this topic, I was weary of the “cliched-ness” of it all. I hail from East Carter High School- home of what was quite possibly the first high school shooting ever- and I’ve heard people talk about school violence so much that it seems everything that can be said has been said. But then I began to do the research, and found some disturbing trends. Every case of school violence seems to be middle or high school related. Try as I might, I was unable to find a single incidence of college violence; even college hazing reports seemed strangely absent from the newspaper and magazine articles that I searched. As I searched for any reports to the contrary, I noticed two other trends: almost all of the shooters shared a common race (Caucasian) and gender (male). The foundation of my report had been laid.

College hazing seems to be a typical problem; I can’t remember the amount of “Movies of the Week” that have been made on the subject. A few hours of searching, however, was not enough for me to produce even one report of college hazing (or college crimes in general, for that matter). It seemed that, whatever it was that caused students to kill, it was exclusive to the under-18 demographic. I was determined to find out why.

One of the first pieces of material that I found on my subject turned out to be one of the best: a review of an essay posted on an Internet message board in the days following the Santee shooting, entitled School Shootings and White Denial. This was supposedly such a scathing and controversial essay that “one man...[had] been fired for posting the article on his office bulletin”. (Fernandez; Tawa) The review was pretty thorough, but I knew that this was an essay I just had to read for myself. Luckily, the reviewers had not exaggerated; an Internet search generated 3,150 results based only on the title of the essay, and I quickly found a full, unedited copy of the essay.

A glance at the opening sentence of this essay made it easy to understand why the essay was controversial. The author, activist Tim Wise, states in the first sentence, “...White people need to pull our heads out of our collective ass.” (Wise) His argument, put quite simply, was that white people are unable to accept that the thing that is killing our students isn’t “black, brown, and poor”. (Wise)In one of the most eye-opening statements I’ve ever seen in an essay, Wise writes:

...once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no "profile" of a school shooter. Come again? White boy after white boy after white boy, with very few exceptions to that rule (and none in the mass shooting category), decides to use their classmates for target practice, and yet there is no profile? Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still hesitate to put a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful. (Wise)

Ouch. Wise goes on to say:

Indeed, if any black child in America - - especially in the mostly white suburbs of Littleton, or Santee - - were to openly discuss their plans to murder fellow students, as happened both at Columbine and now Santana High, you can bet your ass that somebody would have turned them in, and the cops would have beat a path to their doorstep. (Wise)

He is quick to acknowledge that “there is plenty of violence in urban communities and schools”, but points out that “mass murder; wholesale slaughter; take-a-gun-and-see-how-many-you can-kill kinda craziness seems made for those safe places: the white suburbs or rural communities.” (Wise)

Wise, like any red-blooded American citizen, is mad as hell, and he isn’t going to take it anymore. His essay contains more expletives than any other “serious” essay that I have ever read, and his tone is so condescending toward the white community that it is difficult to remember that Wise is, in fact, a white person. But that tone and indignation is exactly what caused me to take his essay so seriously. Face it- the man has a point. Is it possible that we have had our “profile of a school shooter” since the first school shootings took place, and we have just been too proud to admit it? If so, we could have conceivably prevented incidents like Columbine and Santee from ever taking place. What a terrible thought.

Mr. Wise had given me what I thought was a convincing answer to the question “Who commits these heinous acts of violence?”, but I wanted to know why. I consulted my resident tie to the psychological world- Dr. Virgil Davis- for answers. He confirmed what I had already suspected: the biggest influence in teenage violence was probably the teenager himself. He said, in part:

...something that comes to mind is freedom. College students choose to be there. Typically, they’re bright people, people who liked school enough to be willing to endure several more years of it. They’re paying to go there, as well. Frankly, they’re more stable than the types of people that have been committing these crimes. Also, as you know, the high-school years are tumultuous, especially for males, because of the huge hormonal changes that they go through during that time period. It’s more important for them to be popular, and unpopularity can be very harmful during the high-school years. (Davis)

I was inclined to agree. I remember that the Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, had nice cars, computers, and spacious homes, but their parents were completely oblivious to the amount of weaponry that their kids had acquired. Poor parenting probably isn’t the reason for school shootings (though I consider it to be one of the main reasons), but maybe the lack of knowledge exhibited by the shooters’ parents points to a lack of love in the shooters’ lives. It’s impossible to believe that a “poor” childhood, devoid of designer clothes and Rolex watches, is what leads to killing sprees. What does seem plausible, however, is that these murderers were unhappy before they committed these crimes. In almost every school shooting, the students interviewed after the tragedy said something along the lines of “he was such a nice person.” If he was such a nice person, though, why didn’t he have any friends? Why was he a loner? Perhaps students do not want to believe that they may have been, in the shooter’s mind, the reason that he committed the crime that he committed.

In the wake of all these school shootings, administrators and lawmakers have attempted to create some type of magical plan that will prevent these horrendous acts from occurring again. The only thing that they have proven, however, is that such a feat cannot be done. The murderers are as different as the schools that they attended, and the only distinguishable similarities that anyone has been able to find involve color and gender. I find it hard to believe that this is a coincidence. Furthermore, I find it impossible to believe that there is a place in this world where “these types of things just don’t happen”, as is heard every time a school shooting is reported. The profile for school shooters is Everyman, and the profile for location is Anywhere. “Normal” people are exactly the types of people who have committed these crimes thus far, and “normal” locations are exactly the locations that these crimes have occurred in; I see no reason for this pattern to end anytime soon. I went into this research paper wanting answers, and in that respect, I’m not satisfied with this report at all. I’ve found that there aren’t any explanations for these acts of violence- only more questions. But I do have a better understanding of the situations involved, and that’s more than I had when I began. I can only hope that, soon, everyone understands this phenomenon well enough to put a stop to it. Let’s go back to the days of yore, when busting smokers in the bathroom was the biggest problem a school faced.

Davis, Virgil. Personal Interview. 5 April, 200.

Fernandez, Maria Elena; Tawa, Renee. A Call to Take a Closer Look at the Culture of ’Whiteness’. Los Angeles Times. 2001

Wise, Tim. School Shootings and White Denial. Internet. 2001

(http://www.minorities-jb.com/Article_Detail.asp?Article_ID=3606)

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