Antidepressants.

I've seen these at work, since my employer is involved. They are a whitewash for school officials, so they don't get blamed when the next shooting starts. The program is mostly embossing pencils with "Don't tolerate bullying!" or some other stupid slogan, and pamplets and posters and other educational horse residue.

The fact is that bullying for athletic males is as common and unavoidable as menstrual periods for women. They have to beat up on people. They will always find a target, always the ones that can't fight back. And no matter what pretend programs schools run, teachers really don't give a damn about their students, as long as they don't get personally blamed for anything that goes wrong.

In all honesty, Harris and Klebold did only three things wrong. They shouldn't have killed themselves. They should have restricted their carnage to the people who actually caused their pain, the damned athletes. And they should have done so quietly, secretly, individual murders in isolated places, not showing off before the entire school. Their indiscriminate random targets, their egotism and their suicide wrecked what could have been a positive, uplifting moment in their lives.

I wonder if the book touches on the impression I've gotten that this seems to be a rural/suburban phenomenon.

I live in NYC, land of metal detectors at schools and all the rest of that fun. And we certainly have violence, but (again this is the impression I've gotten) its pretty directed and not random at all. Of course, if you're a freak in the city you just go ten blocks and its a whole new "world".

These kids are being raised by people who believe in nothing. The only value these kids learn from their folks is economic.

Better that kids should be raised with bad values than no values. They form a base of a sense of orientation with the universe, without which leads them to founder with no moral compass. With no values, nothing matters, nothing counts.

And when I say 'believe in' I'm not talking specifically about religion. I'm talking about a sense of self, who you and your family are in the world and what you think is right and wrong based on strong feelings. These kids need the sense of belonging that comes from a strong sense of us (family) and them (everyone else).

Golly. I'm guessing you weren't athletic in high school?

I wouldn't go back to high school for all the oil in the Middle East. High school is like putting a bunch of cats in a pillowcase and kicking it. It's like office life... if you weren't allowed to quit... and the douchebag in the next office were allowed to spit on you and throw things at you... and you both have to wear gym shorts. The only way not to feel total despair in high school is to be one of the douchebags yourself. It's not surprising some kids snap, and once the paradigm of shooting other people to blow off steam was established, it was going to happen again and again.

Criminals aren't generally very inventive. Remember when the Tylenol was poisoned? Before that, you could walk into any store and open any package, but no one ever did. Now, and until the end of time, there are seals on packages. The paradigm changed. I know "paradigm" is an overused buzzword, but this is one of those times it's actually appropriate to use it.

There's not a lot we can do as adults to stop this sort of thing from happening (the douches who were bullies in high school all grew up to be coaches and principals) but there are a few things. We can stop lauding coaches for being mean to young people. We can ask the hard questions, like why must little boys who mostly hate their own bodies take off their shirts to form teams in gym class? (Anyone who thinks girls have the market cornered on body image problems has never listened to a boy who's just been teased by an entire class for having funny nipples.) And most important, we can show that adult life need not be a long slide into nonentity and tedium. We can live our own lives in such a way that young people watching actually think there might be some reasons to stick around long enough to grow up.

You 'think' you know why teenagers blow themselves and the 50 people nearest them up? Lemme guess. They're righteous freedom fighters against American zionist imperialist crusader invaders.......?

Maybe the fact that your whole world view is 8 different kinds of retarded is a good place to start looking.

People kill with guns because they have access to guns. Lots of motherfucking guns. There are almost more guns than people in the US. We have gun shows all the time here. All you need is to show up with money and not obviously more fucked up than the Unabomber and someone will sell you whatever you want. Straight up. But if you would prefer we all go McVeigh because somehow that's something you feel sorry for, pity or pretend you understand, then I am game. More carbombs.

The main thesis of this article, that there is no one, overarching reason these kinds of shootings occur, is one that should be repeated as often as necessary, especially in the face of a hyper-sensationalist broadcast media which stresses the easy, soundbite answers over actual discourse in these cases.

For instance, it seems clear that some kind of chemical imbalance in the killer's brain at least contributed to the massacre at Virginia Tech, whereas it seems that some kind of genuinely-felt social pathos mostly drove the shooters at Columbine. Those two infamous examples have both similarities and differences, and the different killers have both similar and different motives, and anyone looking to affix any standard explanation onto both of them is doing the world a huge disservice.

In the specific case of Columbine, what bothered me most about the media coverage was the constant references to the shooters being either loners and/or social outcasts. This was troubling because the terms "loner" and "social outcast" mean two completely different things, yet they were constantly being thrown around in the public discourse like they were interchangeable.

As an avowed loner (or, if you prefer, introvert) myself, I cannot, by definition, be a social outcast, since I choose my own fate - how often I talk to other people, how many friends I have, when I stay at home and read instead of going out, and so on. I cannot, by definition, feel rejected by a society that I voluntarily choose to stay away from most of the time.

By contrast, it's obvious that the Columbine shooters were two kids who really, really wanted to fit in, but were made social outcasts by the typical societal clickiness that makes some people cool and others not. If those two had really been loners, they would not have formed their own little social group (the Trenchcoat Mafia), and they would not have been bothered by their 'outsider' social status.

But in fact, as the article says, they needed to make a public statement to the people they felt rejected by, which is why they chose their public, grandiose display of violence. It seems that they were extremely bothered by being bullied and/or rejected by the 'normal' group, and they wanted everyone to know it.

Contrast that to my own experience in high school as an introvert, where I never really cared that I was not popular. I never have and never will judge myself by what others think of me, or where I fit in in the social order, because that's my personal preference. Not only am I not the life of anyone's party, I'm happier not to be, thank you very much.

Many people in the media and in government are quick to peg these shooters as 'troubled loners,' and whenever they do so, they do a huge disservice to all of the genuine introverts out there who self-identify, proudly and happily, as loners. There is nothing inherently wrong with being alone, and there is nothing inherently wrong with preferring to be so.

In fact, preferring a bit of alone time is perfectly natural and normal, and feeling so secure in your identity that you don't rely on group membership to form the basis of your own self-worth is a strength, not a weakness. And if, in our hyper-conformist society, adults would simply tell the young people in their care this one, simple fact, instead of encouraging the sort of constant, mindless conformity that plagues our social order (especially in schools), I think a lot of this grandiose, attention-seeking school violence could be eliminated.