You can blame the bullies. You can blame the Prozac. Blame it on parents, violent flash animation, explicit lyrics or the fact that no one saw the warning signs. Or you could blame it on the two factors that truly resulted in the death of six high school students and four adults: a loaded gun and a violent kid.
School shootings, such as the one that occurred on the Red Lake Indian Reservation last Monday, occur because of two main, intricately entwined issues. First is a statement that I would consider fact, but many consider debatable: guns kill. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearm deaths totaled 29,573 in 2001. The classic saying goes that guns don’t kill people, people kill people; however, it is painfully apparent that guns belonging to already violent people are not just hanging around and watching crime being committed from their cozy positions in locked cupboards.
Published last year, David Hemenway’s book “Private Guns, Public Health” calls attention to an important idea: The United Sates is not necessarily a nation more violent than the rest of the world. As director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the School of Public Health, Hemenway comments that the crime rate in our country is comparable to other industrialized nations of the same size; however, lethal violence because of easy gun access represents the real disparity.
“It’s not as if a 19-year-old in the United States is more evil than a
19-year-old in Australia — there’s no evidence for that,” Hemenway writes in his book, “but a 19-year-old in America can very easily get a pistol. That’s very hard to do in Australia. So when there’s a bar fight in Australia, somebody gets punched out or hit with a beer bottle. Here, they get shot.”
The United States’ acceptance of guns will always lead to lethal violence in schools, and lethal violence in society. Which leads to the second reason why school shootings are probably not going to end in this country: The United States cannot simultaneously promote and decry violence. Remember that the United States attacked Iraq not because of an action taken by the Iraqi nation, but because of the threat of violence from them toward ourselves. Kind of like a school yard drama in which the nerds feel threatened by the jocks, and suddenly a kid has a pistol (or army, if you will) resting at someone’s forehead. It may be painstakingly pacifist, but the logic remains that to kill is to kill. Jeff Weise caused the death of ten; the United Sates has caused the death of well over 100,000 in Iraq alone.
Schools are not a separate entity from the world; rather, they are a microcosm of it. In every grade level, within every classroom, are the children representing the roles of brown-nosing coworker, submissive housewife, or crazy bag lady engulfed in a life of generic formula mind-altering substances and “For Maximum Value” TV dinners. Children and teenagers are aware of the world and society in which they reside, and will mold their individual values around their settings. If the United States remains lax on gun laws, not to mention the absurd army-worship in which our country increasingly engages, homicide in schools by gun will not end.
There is not a problem with violence in schools, there is a problem with violence, period. Metal detectors won’t solve the problem, and neither will parental advisory warnings on video games and music. If the U.S. government wants to make a real change in violence within schools, then they need to set up a real change in the mindset of this nation. As long as citizens are supplied with lethal weapons and violence is promoted as an acceptable solution to problems, improvements will be few.

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