School Shootings

There have been several school shootings in Canada. One such incident occurred in 1975 at the high school that I later attended. In that incident a student and a teacher died and 13 others were wounded before the gunman killed himself.

If you were to do a news search you could several other incidences in Canada - if I remember correctly I read somewhere that there was a shooting that was set off by a disagreement between two students about the merits of Kiss' music.

Edit: I did a google search and found this case. It was from Winnipeg back in 1978. My my, schools were SO much safer back then compared to now.

If we extend our range into Universities I am sure that most Canadians are well aware of the 14 female engineering students shot to death in Montreal. That of course brings to mind the sniper incident at the University of Texas from back in the 60s but that incident is conveniently ignored by everyone who claims that things were so much better back then.

If you ignore media sensationalism and look strictly at the facts, I think that it is quite possible that rate of school violance is really not significantly worse than it was back whenever. I remember reading about incidences of school violence from the 20s and 30s that were every bit as bad as the ones that we have had recently. I would seriously like to see some comparative statistics based upon incidences of violence compared to enrollment at that time. However, I don't expect to see such a detailed/logical analysis anytime soon - people always love to say that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket without providing any support except recollections that things were different back in the good old days.

One of my sociology professors' main areas of research was in violent crimes and she had many studies that demonstrated that the violent crime rates in Canada and the U.S. had actually declined from the 50s to the 90s. Just about anyone who I know who is old enough to be able to compare the 50s and 90s would say the exact opposite - I imagine that this is partly due to the good old days syndrome and significantly due to the media's scare mongering and constant reporting of violent crime.

As far as the guns issue goes, guns undoubtedly increase the death toll in such incidences but if guns were not being used I am sure that many of these individuals would have found some other weapon. Heck, the worst U.S. school killing that I know of is from the 20s when a farmer retaliated over having the bank call his mortgage by blowing up the local school using dynamite.

[ March 23, 2005, 17:06: Message edited by: JSBB ]

 

@ Viking, Isotolil & Tal

Although I agree that acess to guns is a big problem and there wouldn't be any school shootings without guns, they aren't the root of the problem. Kids don't want to go on a killing spree just because they have guns at home. What I think NonSequitur wanted to discuss is why these kids would want to kill their classmates/teachers to begin with.

 

Actually, you can. They're called zip guns. You can make them out of pens. There are instructions on how to make them on the internet, and the Anarchist's Cookbook, also available on the internet, goes into quite a bit of detail. A pen gun isn't big enough to kill someone? So make a shot gun out of a pipe. There's instructions on that too. Granted, it's only a one shot deal, and it takes a few seconds to reload, but still, make four or five of them (the shotguns) and you can kill and injure dozens of people. They aren't that hard to make either, not that I've tried. Has anyone watched Bowling for Columbine? That has a lot of good information on the why's. Whatever your opinion of Michael Moore, I think you should watch it.

 

@ Kerlun,

Couldn't have said it better.

@ Tal,

Yes and no. Certainly, without guns, schoolyard massacres would be reduced in number and severity. I do not think schoolyard killings involving other weapons would disappear entirely. As Ravynn has pointed out, makeshift weapons are relatively easy to construct and the information necessary for that process is simple to find. Homemade explosives are frighteningly easy to make and use, and I'm not talking about soda bombs which are only really powerful enough to obliterate a letter box. While I do not deny that gun control is pivotal to stopping school shootings, it is not the sole cause or reason why these kids come to school with homicidal intent.

Again, I think this is oversimplifying. Angry kids plus guns does not necessarily equal shooting rampage, but without guns there can be no such rampage. However, this doesn't address why the kids are acting this way. What I wanted to discuss in this thread was why they get to that point. The shootings are the symptoms of other problems, and while access to firearms is a big part of that (obviously, since it's hard to shoot people without them), the weapons themselves are only instruments in the hands of already-motivated killers.

Of course restricting access would reduce school fatalities; only the gun zealots would argue otherwise. It is, however, only the end point of a process, one that facilitates and worsens the event. What I wanted to discuss was why and how it comes to that, and obviously gun control is a large step in the right direction in prevention, but it will not necessarily alter that process.

 

The kid had a pretty screwed up childhood from what I read in the papers. They went on to say all the usual cliches - antisocial, listens to Marilyn Manson, dresses like a goth, drew violent comics, etc etc. Didn't seem like he was constantly bullied or anything though. I think he just lost it and went nuts. He was living in some dream world of his and wanted to act it out in real life. Not cool.

 

When talking of kids, any problems they have can 9/10 times be traced back to the education system. Here in India the incidence of kids committing suicide around exams has been increasing with each passing year. From kindergarden to graduate school kids are pressured into persuing marks over everything else. And when parents too decide to become blind to every other aspect of the child, it can get too much.

As far as mass school killings are concerned however I would rather blame the child, popular media and guns in that order. There is a real difference between a kid suffering from the stress and taking his own life to one who goes out to kill others. These guys ARE psychos. But its the access to guns that allowed them to go out and kill school students. Without the guns the kids would probably have stuck to killing their neighbours pets.

 

Watch Gus van Sant's film "Elephant". It bravely refuses to offer answers, and so do I. But it does put the question with considerable power. (Think of the old conundrum of the committee of blind men trying to describe an elephant.)

 

Did you intentionally leave out "parents"? I imagine parents have a great deal of influence on their childrens' development, but, hey, that's just me.

On a lark, I googled a few things "sword + slaying, sword +"mass murder", and sword + murder". And yep, no mass murder found in the few minutes I spent looking, but I did find a half dozen recent cases of murder by sword. One in England, five in Merka. *shrug*

*nods* Right. But considering how many school shooters have ended up killing themselves, I don't have any trouble believing they'd blow themselves up.

 

We had a man in New Zealand attempt to go on a killing spree with a katana but he only managed to wound 2 women before he was stopped/caught. I can't picture a child managing to do much damage unless they've taken fencing or something...

 

Seriously, when I was 14-17 and I for some reason had decided to kill myself and had access to guns the question would be more: Why not kill a bunch of people at the same time? If you decide to kill yourself you are a dramaking/queen and what is more dramatic than taking a bunch people with you in death? The strange thing is that not more people who kill themselves not take a bunch of people with them.

 

I guess that's the benefit of religion. Taking your life is one thing but taking innocents in the process? Sure-fire way to hell. Also, not all suiciders are evil people I guess.

 

@Abomination: Having taken fencing classes would not prepare anyone for a sword-based killing spree! At best you may get the chance to pull a few John Steed moves with your brolly, but that's about all.

Oooooh, I call unfounded generalization! To the best of my knowledge (which means that I can't cite any statistics to back this up), the majority of Americans *DO* support some form of limited access to guns and/or increased licensure requirements. Unfortunately, the NRA is too powerful a lobby for the wishes of the majority of Americans to mean a damn thing to our elected legislators.

Other than that, Tal, I think you are in large part right. What reason is there to believe that American youth are any more angst-ridden than teens anywhere else in the world? Given that, you have to look at outlets for that angst. Are American parents less attentive in recognizing signs of impending violence or psychological instability in their children? Has American society made violence so socially unacceptable that there are simply no ways for kids to release these feelings before they become dangerous? Or is it that American society has become so inured to violence that kids can't think of any other way to vent their anger?

Ready access to guns provides a simple solution to the complex problem of dealing with teens' anger, depression, inadequacies, etc. Tightening up gun laws *may* reduce the number of school shootings (and I say *may* because of the easy access to illegal guns), but it will still leave the problem of how to deal with the feelings that led these kids to pick up the guns in the first place. We'd end up just replacing one effect (school rampages) for another (perhaps increased teen suicides). Neither situation is acceptable.

@AMaster: Speaking as a parent, I take full responsibility for my childrens' development. However, their personalities are their own. The best any parent can do is teach their children right from wrong and hope that those lessons are taken to heart so they're remembered when it's time for the kids to make the hard choices.

 

I agree with Tal' for the most part but as an aside, smoking has nowhere NEAR been banned in the US. Several counties and cities have tried banning smoking in public resteurants and bars and such but this has invarably, thus far resulted in failure .

The tobacco lobby is incredibly influential with the conservatives(as are any big bussiness) in particular and to a lesser extent with politicans in general.

Whether gun control is ultimately good or bad is a moot point here because there is no way in Hell we could ever enforce an outright ban on firearms because of the fringe nutcases(the Aryan/KKK militia compounds and such who have stockpiles of assasult rifles and worse). They see David Koresh as the posterboy for revolution(rather than the pedophilic messiah wannabe that he was) for no other reason than he had guns and the ATF stormed his Waco compound.
The second worst terrorist attack on US soil was enacted because of the Branch Dividian affair!

Imagine if we tried to outright ban guns here! to say a civil war would erupt between rednecks(along with other advocates of gun rights) and the rest of us would be understating things.

 

Checking in from St. Paul, the capital of Minnesota. Our local media is covering the shootings extensively, especially drawing connections to Colombine and a shooting incident that happened about a year ago in a small southern Minnesota town. There a 17 year-old boy shot two students before a teacher stopped him. I don't know if that incident made the national headlines.

In 1999 I was just beginning a masters program in education to be an elementary school teacher. For a class I wrote a paper titled "The Why of Violence" which dealt with a lot of the topics this thread is discussing. If any of you are interested you can check it out here: The Why of Violence

In the six years since I wrote it, my opinions might have changed on some things, so if you do read it and totally disagree with something, I might disagree with it too.

After I got my teaching licence, I taught for a semester in a level 5 emotional behavior disorder class in St. Paul, a year and a half at a Catholic inner-city elementary in Minneapolis, and for two years in my current position in a Catholic elementary school in a small rural town south of the twin cities. In all of these positions I worked with 4th to 6th grade students.

As a teacher and a parent of school age children, school shootings are definitely something that I have thought about, although I don't worry about them inordinately. Just as I don't worry about getting killed on my daily commute as I drive by highway intersections marked with several crosses. I do drive carefully though. Likewise, as a teacher and a parent, I try to educate the young people I am responsible for to make good moral decisions.

In "The Why of Violence" I wrote a lot about the influence of media and video games. I still believe in a lot of what I wrote there. As an avid player of video games, particulary fantasy and WW II games, I have a very personal understanding of their attraction. Still, I have been able to keep a distinction between my "fantasy world" and the real world. Most people do.

After re-reading my paper here are a few notes:

1. As posted on this thread, there have been cases of school shootings in other countries and also in the "good-old days"

2. Further reading has shown me that there are some animal species in addition to homo sapiens where the males often kill competing males, especially chimpanzees, gorillas, and lions.

3. Four years in the trenches on the front-lines of education have turned the "let's change the world!" recently returned Peace Corps volunteer attitude evident in parts of the paper into a more realistic "No, there's a cross for everyone and there's a cross for me" attitude. Don't get me wrong, I love teaching and I love the kids. Experience just leaves one more realistic and less idealistic.

Well, there is definitely a lot more that can be said on this topic, but I'll shut up for now.

 

Just like millions of other kids

Just like millions of other kids

Just like millions of other kids

Just like millions of other kids.

Also, I would say that the number of kids that have ALL of those behavioral patterns probably number in the tens of thousands, and yet, for some reason we don't see tens of thousands of school shootings in the U.S., or even worldwide.

I also think that the "easy access to guns" defense is a cop-out. At least in this particular case, the kid lived with his grandfather, who was a police officer, and that's how he got a brace of pistols for himself. I also understand that he acquired a hunting rifle, which also belonged to his grandfather. So unless the arguement for gun control focuses on that 1.) people should not be allowed to hunt and 2.) police officers should not be allowed to carry a hand gun, then I don't see how any form of law would prevent this from happening.

I understand that the prevalence of guns is far, far, greater in the U.S. than in other countries. However, I would argue that there are people who own guns all over Europe. I mean, does anyone in Europe, perchance, go hunting? Does anyone in Europe, perchance, know of a police officer who carries a gun with him on a daily basis? Does anyone in Europe, perchance, know of history buffs who collect guns and other memorabilia from historical periods? We just had a local case where a guy got arrested for owning guns that weren't registered and didn't have any serial numbers. The problem here was many of these guns were WWI and WWII vintage firearms that he had inherited from his father, and back then, they didn't put serial numbers on guns. The guy was a gun collector - he didn't even use them!

The point is, if you're talking about a kid getting a gun, chances are he's taking it from a responsible person. If you're under 18, you can't purchase any type of gun in the U.S. If you're under 21, you can't purchase any type of hand gun in the U.S. Thus, for children to get their hands on these weapons, they either have to take them from someone who acquired them legally, or get them illegally. I won't go into the illegal side of things, because additional gun laws won't affect practices that are already illegal. And as for acquiring a gun from someone legally allowed to own them, I'm sure this kid would have had just as easy access to a gun if he lived in Europe and his grandfather was a police officer, or a hunter.

After all, AFAIK, this kid wasn't a gang banger, a drug dealer, or involved in any type of criminal activity that would allow him any type of access to guns. The bottom line is, no matter how lax people tend to feel U.S. gun laws are, it's pretty freaking difficult to get your hands on a gun if you're a teenager, unless you're already involved in some type of criminal activity or take it from someone without their knowledge or permission (which, by the way, we have a word for - it's called "stealing").

 

Good points Aldeth.


I would add that the pontifications in the "Why of violence" article in regards to the entertainment media are pretty far off base. Scot tries to make a case that early movies, for example, would show more or less violence "within the law" and that this escalated to vigilante violence(re: Dirty Harry. Justified violence but outisde the law because the people being killed were guilty but got off on a technicality or some such) adn finally to Natural Born Killers and the like which, he alleges show indescriminate and wanton murder.
To make this case you have to ignore the old "gangster" flicks and westerns and such which gave us protagonists who were despicably violent.

The only real difference is in the technology(re:special effects) and the issues relevant to us now. As serial killers became more prevalent, movies and books about them became so as well.

You will also discover that violent crime rises as the population increases. Rome had one million citizens(ridiculous for the time) before it fell(many of which migrated to Byzantium). One nuclear bomb dropped in Afghanistan or Iraq would reduce the incidents of suicide bombings in those regions to almost nil(unfortunately this would be killing a lot of innocent people).

I do not buy the "Video games as trainers for psycopaths/sociopaths" line. I know a number of people who play first person shooters, a few of which have easy access to real guns, and I know of none who want to go shooting people. I myself grew up in the Pong =>Atari 2600 era and watched the progression first hand from "Combat"(2600) to GTA and I have actually become less violent over the years. I chalk this up to maturity and my own desire to not be seen or thought of as a thick skulled moron who needs his a$$ whipped with an aluminum bat.

 

@Runequester

Points well taken. As I said, my views have changed somewhat since writing that paper. Of course, most people can and do distinguish between real life and games. Still, I believe that the sensationalism of violence in the media and games has been an influence on this issue.