The Wake

Five innocent girls dead. A small Amish town shaken and hurt. On Oct. 2, Carl Charles Roberts IV held 10 girls hostage at their schoolhouse and ended up wounding some and taking lives, as well as his own, for what seems to be no reason at all. As with all the other school shootings, this leaves communities all around the United States uneasy about school violence. It seems we only worry about it once it’s too late and the body count has been tallied.

When it comes to murder, there are many categories: homicide, gang-related activities, hate crimes and school shootings among others. I consider school shootings and massacres to be different from any other types of murder. They have unique chilling components. They seem more malicious, more hate-filled and more out for some kind of revenge. They also seem to have no end in sight. As long as there are kids with pent up anger who hate school and themselves, school violence will be a never ending trend.

Most of these murders come from nice normal families. There are some alcoholic parents and foster homes thrown in the bunch, but more often than not these students have two fairly stable parents, every opportunity in the world and don’t have a disadvantaged youth. They are missing one thing though: self esteem, and that’s nothing original for a high schooler to be missing.

What we are being told is that these pissed-off kids just can’t get enough attention from their parents, a common theme in most school shootings. Most attackers are lonely depressed outcasts who come from families of opportunistic nature but who have hit a rough patch. The parents have divorced, one parent has developed alcoholism and on and on. Despite what seems to be an okay or at least manageable situation, these kids have decided to take out their frustrations on their suburban communities. That’s right. This shit doesn’t happen in inner city schools, which are labeled as the location of frequent school violence. In the United States, most school violence, including everyday bullying and beatings, happens in inner city schools. This is not the case with school massacres, which occur in middle-class, white non-urban towns.

Despite the Secret Service’s attempts, there is no “profiling” of who would or would not shoot up a school. There is no one characteristic that the school shooters share. Some were loners while others were popular. Some had two parents; others were foster children. Some were depressed; others just had access to a gun.

Research has found that it is almost guaranteed that these killers do not just “snap,” as had been previously assumed. They get the idea, get a weapon and start to plan. Another sick layer to this is that the murderers almost never have a victim in mind. They just want to kill as many people as possible for what seems like no good reason at all. If the student was bullied, they didn’t kill the person who made fun of them. At this point, it is said that they simply want to take as many people down as possible.

The most famous of school shootings was of course Columbine. In Littleton, Colo., the school has been the face of school violence since that infamous Apr. 20 in 1999. It is argued that this is the most well-known shooting because of the extensive media coverage, the number of deaths and the long-term planning of the attack by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. But prior to this, school shootings date all the way back to 1927 with the worst school massacre in U.S. history in Bath, Mich., which resulted in 45 deaths by a school board member.

The thing that seems most interesting to me is that these murderous rampages almost always end in the dramatic ending of the shooter killing themselves. Do these killers really need to kill others in their path of self-destruction? I guess they know that their two choices are to kill themselves or to spend life in prison.

As obvious a statement as it may seem, I have to say it: high school can be hard with self-esteem issues, bullying and stress, but this is no excuse to kill someone.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that after the shooting has happened, and if the attacker survives, they almost always plead insanity in court. While almost all who have survived their own rampage are serving a life sentence if not more, the fact that they have the audacity to blame their horrible acts on “insanity” seems so wrong and twisted.

Nearly as wrong and twisted as killing innocent children as they attend school.