Columbine
By Dylan | April 20, 2010
As the husband of a high school teacher I worry a lot about school shootings. I think that schools do not take threats seriously and that there is still a danger of school shootings happening in about any school. I woke up this morning not thinking of school shootings but about what I had to do in school today. I have an assignment I should be working on for composition class but I instead spent the last hour and a half reading about Columbine.
I remember sitting in my classes at Greeley Central when all of that went down. We watched the news coverage as it happened and I remember being so confused by what was going on. All the coverage was unclear and confused, as it should have been, but the one thing that they kept saying, the one thing that seemed so important to get out, was that the shooters listened to angry music, played violent video games and were trouble.
As the years have passed it has come to light that there were probably some underlying psychological problems that the shooters had coupled with bullying and other social norms that are accepted in high schools. These kids had problems, problems that were ignored by both school officials, parents and law enforcement. It is my hope that because of tragedies like Columbine that we as a society are better at helping people so that this sort of thing never happens again.
But of course it has happened again. The shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 was another horrible tragedy that could have been prevented if the shooter would have been giving help, treated less like an outcast and more like a human being, and maybe just maybe prevented from getting a gun. Because really all of these shootings could be prevented by limiting people’s access to fire arms.
I understand that the Right to Bear Arms is a fundemental right of americans. Go us. I have definatly felt the need to own a gun since we a constantly being invaded by foriegn powers. You know how the british are always coming here to take our land… oh wait… that doesn’t happen. I am not saying that we need to get rid of guns, though that would be my prefered solution, what I am saying is that we need to make it damn hard for people to get guns. And why does anyone need more then one gun.
Sorry, I kind of went off on gun control a little bit. What I really meant to say with this blog post is that we, as a society, need to remember what has happened in the past an learn from it. Sticking our head in the sand and pretending that nothing bad has happenend or is going to happen is just silly. We are all human, we all make choices, we are all different. It is impossible to say that something like this will never happen again and we need to try and make it as difficult as possible to get the tools needed to do this. If guns where harder to get, then the shooters at Columbine would have possibly had less ammo or less guns. Maybe they would have just continued to be pissed off and not decided to kill people.
I would ask that everyone take a moment today and think about what happened at Columbine. Think about the people that died, including the shooters because they are people too, and think about what we can do to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. My heart goes out to victims of shootings no matter where they are in the world. To people with violence in their hearts and minds: Please stop hurting people.
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Topics: Serious Business | 4 Comments »
4 Responses to “Columbine”
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If guns are illegal, then only criminals will have guns. Don’t forget, drugs are illegal, and kids have a really hard time getting those.
The solution, as you started saying, is to recognize the threats and act on them. Anything else is treating the symptom, rather than the disease. If someone is losing weight to a tapeworm, you don’t just keep feeding them more food to hide the symptoms.
I disagree with the statement that if guns are illegal then only criminals will have them. In the United States there are 3.92 gun homicides per 100,000 people where as in the UK, where guns are very controlled, the rate is .1 per 100,000 people. So apparently when only the criminals have guns they don’t kill people with them. I got my figures from http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF10.htm who got them from http://www.iansa.org/documents/index.htm.
And while personally I advocate getting rid of guns the world over I realize that that is never going to happen. What I do advocate is making it more difficult for people to get guns and to get multiple guns. I could go to a gun store, apply for the background check and recieve a legal gun of my choosing in very little time. I wager that it would take more time for a non-criminal to find an illegal gun then to purchase on legally. Plus, none of the guns used in Columbine where illegally purchased just illegally provided to minors the problem still lies in how easy it is to get guns.
And yet the homicide rate in the US is 5.4/100K, and in the UK it’s 2.03/100K. That’s nowhere near the difference you see in the numbers you listed. Which means that even absent guns, people will still find ways to kill each other. Hell, look at Brazil, where the murder rate is 25.2/100K. They have MUCH more restrictive gun laws than the US. That alone should be enough proof.
Columbine was scary, yes, but so was 9/11. That does NOT excuse trampling people’s rights and freedoms in the name of “safety”, and it in all likelihood will make us less safe. Consider the zero-tolerance policies of most schools that people have cried out for after incidents like Columbine: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-08-09-zero-tolerance_x.htm
The solution is not to ban the tool. It is to get better at recognizing the problems and intercepting them. It’s hard work, but it is the ONLY effective thing to do. Everything else is useless or actively making the problem worse.
People will always find a way to kill other people. I am just not a fan of making it easier for people to get multiple guns. If a kid wants to get all pissed off and steal his dad’s sword and go try and hack up people, by all means give it a go. What I think is interesting is that the number of school shootings in America far surpasses that of any other country. I think that is a problem, which I am sure you will agree with. I fear that if we focus all this energy on becoming better at recognizing people who are going to kill others we run into the problem Philip K. Dick wrote about in the Minority Report. If we can say with some certainty that a certain typed of person is going to kill someone at some point, should we imprison them before they commit the crime?
Zero Tolerance policies are silly. in fact I don’t view them as being related to the problem of kids getting guns and killing their classmates. As someone who is not a fan of guns or weapons in general, unless they are in books, video games or movies, I have to say that I don’t view getting rid of guns as taking away just the tools. Without the gun, no matter how pissed off you are at a group of people you are going to have a hard time enacting violence on the group.
How would making it more difficult for people to own multiple guns make the problem of school shootings worse? I think that it would force kids to involve more people to get their weapons, which would take longer and would possibly allow law enforcement to get off their asses and look into a report about a kid who is talking about killing his classmates.