School Shootings (Recess Reprieve)

It happened again today. I saw a headline that says: "6-year old shoots other First Grader." Everybody is so afraid, it's still happening, this is gaining speed, more kids are doing it, it won't stop, shut up. Yeah, it's horrible. This is is a chain effect, a few kids started it, and then others did it. Kids are influenced easily, and they're simply following a pattern, the path that everyone else is. It's daring, it's standing out. There's that tiny little feeling inside, the sadistic pride of doing something no one else dared to. It's shown itself a little more now that someone opened up the hole to let it out. Thus, others do it.

But the problem is not traumatized teenagers, in my opinion. I don't think that there's been any major changes in how middle school and earlier grades are run, I just think it's easier for kids to get guns. After the first incident, everyone starts talking about putting stricter laws on getting guns, but while the talking goes on, some kids do it again. Even if they do make it harder for kids to get guns, it won't just end. It will slowly taper off, if it stops at all. Like I said before, it's a chain, and more kids are doing it.

What I think they need to publicize is when they catch the kids with the weapons. The kids that are being influenced by this are seeing all this stuff about kids succeeding. I want to see some: "Kid Fails to Shoot the Hell Out of Teachers and Students" or "Cops Bust Student's Ass" in the headlines. The kids are able to be influenced, so they should see that it doesn't always go right. Half the time in school what keeps kids from doing something bad is the fear of what could go wrong or what would happen if they were caught.

Now I see this crap on Internet pages: stuff like "monsters among us" and "the kids were evil." Oh, give me a frickin' break. Monsters?!?! These are your damn kids that you've sheltered and brought up their entire lives, and these are your neighbors that you've played with and talked to. They're the same as you, only pushed to levels that you weren't, and put in situations you weren't. If one or two of those kids had had major changes at home (for the better), or if they had been moved to a separate school, I would be surprised if the same thing had happened. There are plenty of kids at my school I'd love to get away from, but also if I moved there would be some kids that wouldn't go along with the same things that my friends would. They're not psychos, and neither am I. We're kids, just like they were. Just like you are or were. No more monsters than you. And evil? Right.

I wrote a thing on the shootings for the school news and one teacher wouldn't take it. That inspired a whole "free speech" objection thing that some friends helped me on, but I never did get it printed or shown. In my opinion, the parents were a major factor. Bad home life is the number one producer of messed up people. Then messed up people grow up (still messed up), and have little messed up people of their own, creating bad home environments just like they grew up in. It never ends. Well, it doesn't end until they kill themselves.

The kids at Columbine High were misfits, and didn't quite fit in with the crowd. That amuses me but nobody else, it seems, because my entire group of friends started off as a bunch of kids that didn't fit anywhere else. Not in crowd, not the Hispanic gang, not the 4.0 students, not the punks in the back of the class, not even most of the middle groups. We mingle now more than we used to, but other than that . . . we came together because we didn't belong anywhere else. My mom was shocked that I even considered our group misfits. Maybe she's right and misfits is the wrong word. But if so, what word am I looking for? Mis-fit. Doesn't fit in. Well . . . we don't. We're not going to go around and kill people that piss us off, though I know that there isn't one person alive who hasn't once dreamed of doing that to somebody they hate. Hell, I can think of a few people, but there's no chance I'd do it.

It scares me, too, because a lot of the time kids won't have as much common sense as they should, especially in matters they don't know much about. Kids will do something like that and think that there's a way out. There isn't. But at the time, that's not what you're thinking of. I remembered that when I heard about the 6-year old pulling a gun, saying "I don't like you" and shooting a girl in the neck. This is still a 6-year old thinking and talking. When you're six, you don't have a full perception of what effect things will have. In other words, you don't really think of how shooting someone will fall through.

I'm being brutally honest here, a quality a lot of people don't use in order to save face. Well, I'm not going to try to.

If I had had a gun back in first grade . . . it might have been me on the news . . .