SENSELESS
The news out of Pennsylvania yesterday was unfathomably horrific. I know it's often said that crimes like these are beyond comprehension, but I truly cannot even begin to understand how a father of three could drop his kids off at school then storm a classroom and begin executing children, girls at that.
Ironically, I had been spending the last few days looking over material on masculinity in America for my classes at Long Beach State and especially with this recent spate of school shootings, especially the Colorado incident from last week, it's just another reminder that these kind of rampage killings are more or less a uniquely male province (the fact that they've been combined with sexual assault or selective targeting of girls only highlights this point in sickening ways).
Though I, like many, want to try to make sense of what's going on, I'm also filled with a wariness of how this may play out in public. If there wasn't already a stampede towards hysteria, there almost certainly will be one now and no offense, but hysteria is a very poor position to make intelligent policy decisions from.
On that note, I read that President Bush will be convening some kind of conference or meeting next week to discuss school violence. I'm not suggesting this is a wholly bad idea but it must be noted - despite the last week of school shootings, the "rampage" events (premeditated acts of mass murder on school grounds) are still extremely rare. You're about twice as likely to get struck by lightning than get killed on a school campus in America.
However, rampage killings, especially in suburban and rural schools, tend to gain all the sensationalist attention, usually under the auspices of wide-eyed, "we never thought it could happen here" incredulity. Two things I want to say here:
First of all, in many inner-city schools, violence is endemic yet rarely attracts the same kind of attention as when suburban/rural schools are the sites. To spell out the difference here, it's largely race and to a lesser extent, class. The conventional wisdom has been that urban students are victims of larger patterns of violence within their environment, usually pathologized as being a result of drug or poverty-related forces.
I feel that this often times excuses officials from having to address the specific manifestation of violence in or around these campuses. They push the blame onto the surrounding neighborhoods and it's questionable if any kind of site-specific policies are explored (besides increased policing and criminalization).
It's not that drug or poverty-related violence isn't part of what inner city students have to contend with but on top of that too is just the general culture of violence that we live in now and this is not something restricted to just urban settings. This should be the key tie between urban school violence and suburban rampage killings[1] - that the commonality they share is how young people - and adults - are exposed to a violent set of ideals that manifest from the most seemingly innocuous forms of popular culture all the way up to the actions of the American nation-state while in time of war. That the perpetrators are almost always men is no coincidence either since this kind of violence has a uniquely male quality that isn't always addressed.
By the way, I highly recommend people check out the documentary Tough Guise by the Media Education Foundation to get an idea of how violent behavior among men is neither a wholly urban or suburban (or Black/White) issue.
Added thoughts: I realize that I, myself, may be guilty of the same "missing the forest for the trees" mentality that I'm critiquing above. One of the things worth noting about 2/3 of the shootings this past week is that though they may resemble the kind of Columbine-style rampage shootings we've come to fear, they were 1) not by former students and 2) shootings whose site wasn't necessarily a result of symbolic choice but rather opportunity. In the PA shooting, police have claimed that the shooter chose the school because it was convenient but it wasn't an action taken against the Amish or that school in particular. Similarly, it looks like the CO shooting had to do with picking a location where the shooter could find the right population to victimize (blond teenage girls) with relative ease (i.e. less a chance of being caught or circumvented by law officials).
That's not to say that similar factors guiding both these recent shootings and other ones aren't still in place - social isolation, culture of violence, access to guns, etc. - but this seems to be a disturbing trend towards acts of sociopathic opportunity rather than a specific manifestation of hate or anger towards schools as a social or public institution.
Notes:
[1] Ironically, one reason why there's a lower occurrence of rampage shootings on urban campuses is likely due to heavy police presence and metal detectors at the entrances.
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