Columbine

As the husband of a high school teacher I worry a lot about school shootings. I think that schools do not take threats seriously and that there is still a danger of school shootings happening in about any school. I woke up this morning not thinking of school shootings but about what I had to do in school today. I have an assignment I should be working on for composition class but I instead spent the last hour and a half reading about Columbine.

I remember sitting in my classes at Greeley Central when all of that went down. We watched the news coverage as it happened and I remember being so confused by what was going on. All the coverage was unclear and confused, as it should have been, but the one thing that they kept saying, the one thing that seemed so important to get out, was that the shooters listened to angry music, played violent video games and were trouble.

As the years have passed it has come to light that there were probably some underlying psychological problems that the shooters had coupled with bullying and other social norms that are accepted in high schools. These kids had problems, problems that were ignored by both school officials, parents and law enforcement. It is my hope that because of tragedies like Columbine that we as a society are better at helping people so that this sort of thing never happens again.

But of course it has happened again. The shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 was another horrible tragedy that could have been prevented if the shooter would have been giving help, treated less like an outcast and more like a human being, and maybe just maybe prevented from getting a gun. Because really all of these shootings could be prevented by limiting people’s access to fire arms.

I understand that the Right to Bear Arms is a fundemental right of americans. Go us. I have definatly felt the need to own a gun since we a constantly being invaded by foriegn powers. You know how the british are always coming here to take our land… oh wait… that doesn’t happen. I am not saying that we need to get rid of guns, though that would be my prefered solution, what I am saying is that we need to make it damn hard for people to get guns. And why does anyone need more then one gun.

Sorry, I kind of went off on gun control a little bit. What I really meant to say with this blog post is that we, as a society, need to remember what has happened in the past an learn from it. Sticking our head in the sand and pretending that nothing bad has happenend or is going to happen is just silly. We are all human, we all make choices, we are all different. It is impossible to say that something like this will never happen again and we need to try and make it as difficult as possible to get the tools needed to do this. If guns where harder to get, then the shooters at Columbine would have possibly had less ammo or less guns. Maybe they would have just continued to be pissed off and not decided to kill people.

I would ask that everyone take a moment today and think about what happened at Columbine. Think about the people that died, including the shooters because they are people too, and think about what we can do to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. My heart goes out to victims of shootings no matter where they are in the world. To people with violence in their hearts and minds: Please stop hurting people.