April 20, 1999. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. 12 students and teacher David Sanders, who bled to death while the police secured the perimeter. A nation shocked at another mass shooting at a school. But not shocked enough to change the gun culture that shortly less than 8 years later saw the even larger death toll at Virginia Tech.
I am in a school system which has seen its fair share of violence. One middle school at which I taught had two gun incidents in the same year. At the Christmas party my first year at my current school, my wife asked the two police officers with duty for the school why they had to carry their guns and in unison they both said "We have to, the kids have them" although most will leave them locked in their cars. The attempt to ban guns at schools by Federal statute was overturned by SCOTUS in the Lopez case. And since Virginia Tech we have seen people arguing that students on college campuses should be allowed to carry concealed, or at least the faculty. Does that mean 18 year old students and teachers should also be carrying?
Columbine is a product of many things. The gun culture of the United States is clearly one part. But the gun culture is an incomplete explanation for the number of incidents of shooting that have occurred in this nation's places of learning. Yes, two of the most notable were at institutions of higher education, Charles Whitman at UT Austin from the Tower, and Cho at VA Tech. Far too many have been in public schools - Coumbine; Pearl, MS; . . .
I was curious, so I googled "school shooting" and came across this Wikipedia piece, which shows just since Columbine a score of school shootings, and almost a dozen more at institutions of higher education.
I look at the names, and a line from a Pete Seeger song rungs through my head
when will they ever learn?
Consider just a few:
Amish school, with that religious affiliation giving the contrast between their non-violence and what happened
Delaware State, where my wife's brother now teaches
Northern Illinois - 2 teachers at our school at that time were roommates there, and it is the alma mater of Markos
Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, in an economically depressed part of Virginia
Springfield, OR and Jonesboro, AR;
Middle schools and high schools and even elementary schools . . .
We are a troubled nation. We have easy access to guns, legal and otherwise. And as I rediscovered in this recent diary there are some who view any discussion of the impact of guns upon America as a threat to which their response is visceral, inflexible, and detrimental to an attempt to find meaningful middle ground.
And yet again I go there. Again I question if we are willing to truly consider the damage our culture of guns does.
We have to, the kids have them
I am troubled at how easily those disturbed or angered can turn to guns with a devastating effect upon others. I am equally troubled by our unwillingness to meaningfully address issues of mental health. It is not just in schools, it is in places of employment, frequent enough that when we hear of a shooting at a place of employment our first assumption is almost always to wonder if the person had been fired? We have taken one sub-class of employment related shootings that occurred sufficiently that we created an expression to describe someone "losing it" - going postal
I have and have had students who have lived through levels of violence of which most of us have trouble even imagining. One young lady talked of living through the violence in her home African nation by her family taking the iron bathtub and using it as a shield against the gunfire that came into their home. A middle school student wrote of her early 20's uncle shot by his gang leader because he skipped a meeting to take her out for her birthday. Some of seen family or friends shot and stabbed in front of them. Some have family members who have perpetuated violence, often against other members of the family.
And far too many see violence too easily glorified - in movies, on television, in video games.
The amazing thing to me is how most of my students are able to go on, even with the exposure they experience. Yet it takes only a few, either disturbed on their own or who encounter the application of violence, with or without firearms, that intrudes on their young years.
Police now practice responding to situations of violence in schools - they do not necessarily merely secure the perimeter and wait for SWAT - the approach that led to David Sanders bleeding to death. Still - the individual officer in our school might well be insufficient in the face of a heavily armed pair like Harris and Klebold, or a concerted effort by a larger group.
Yesterday I also wrote about violence - in April 19 I reflected on the violence of that day, especially of Oklahoma City, itself a commemoration of Waco, both on the anniversary of Lexington and Concord (and as was noted in the comments of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising). It was within days of the anniversary of Virginia Tech. Too many anniversaries, too many killings . . .
Today is another anniversary. 120 years ago in Braunau am Inn in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Adolph Hitler was born. It perhaps should be shocking to realize that there are those in this nation, some heavily armed, who admire him, who perhaps even dream of emulating and/or surpassing him. It should be shocking, but to me it is not. We still have much hatred in this country. What is still somewhat shocking is the willingness of some to foment that hatred to gain politically, economic, and/or personal advantage. Are you listening Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and David Duke and Michelle Malkin and others -- some on the left as well -- who will spew hatred without regard for the violence that might ensue and the lives that might be broken.
I am a teacher. Some of my adolescent students are troubled, some even severely so. The most important thing I can do is to be present, not to take the easy path of passing them and their problems on to someone else. And yet I am not a trained counselor, I cannot treat mental illness or the accumulated effects of sustained abuse by others or by them of drugs and alcohol. I sometimes fight against a culture that rewards those who act out, who challenge all authority even as they have no idea of how to manage themselves and may be desperate for the guidance authority can and should provide without crushing their spirits completely.
"For ten years, we've been on our own" sang Don McLean in a very different context. As a teacher those words seem applicable today. As teachers we are still not prepared to deal with the level of violence that occurred one decade past at a high school in a comfortable suburb of Denver. Perhaps we can never be prepared. I for one would not want to be acting as if every display of anger or sullenness had to be treated as if the student demonstrating same were a potential Harris or Klebold. Even for my troubled students, I want to be able to reach out to them as individuals worthy of attention and caring. I don't want to abandon anyone.
Against that I have to balance my responsibility for the rest of my students, in the agonizing understanding that for all my best intentions I cannot reach every student, that some may choose a different path.
This ia a personal reflection. Reflections should lead to understanding. I'm not sure this does. After ten years, what have I learned?
We do not pay attention to the mental and emotional health of our children. In our narrow focus on an even narrower sense of academics we too often lose sight of the whole child, with consequences that are damaging - often severely so - even if few students become like Harris and Klebold and Cho.
We still do not honestly accept the consequences of our gun culture, especially as it intersects with those who are unstable emotionally and psychologically, who may truly be psychopathic or sociopathic, or who may merely be temporarily so depressed or angered that with easy access to deadly means they do irreversible actions that destroy lives and souls, including their own.
And most of all, we are still as a nation far too willing to look the other way, to find easy explanations so that we do not have to confront our own responsibility for the violence that so often wreaks havoc upon the fabric of life here in the United States.
Will some troubled soul use the events commemorated today as an excuse for their own gross actions? Might someone choose to imitate Harris and Klebold, or a failed Austrian painter? Certainly I hope not, even as I must accept the possibility of such a tragedy.
It is Monday morning. It is the first day of our 4th and final quarter. I may be troubled thinking about these things, but now I must do what I have committed to do, to go to school and try to be the best teacher I can for the 180 or so students entrusted to my care. May the events of this day serve as a reminder of what has been and what we hope will not be again.
Peace.