Almost exactly eight years ago, I was a 15-year-old high school freshman getting a ride home from school, when my friend’s mom asked, “Did you hear about what happened in Colorado?”
It was hard to imagine a more random question, and my friends and I all muttered a quizzical “no.”
“Some kids shot up their high school,” she said in a quiet raspy voice, as if she was trying to hold back tears.
“Did anyone die?” I asked.
“A lot did,” the Mom answered.
A lot of people our age died again yesterday, but instead of it happening where it usually does in Baghdad, it happened in Blacksburg. The crime that led to their deaths was the same one Cal State Long Beach students commit every weekday – they went to school.
We will probably never know the exact reason why someone thought it was a good idea to be responsible for the largest mass shooting in the 231-year history of the United States. For the next week, the question that will be continuously asked on cable news channels is why this is continuing to happen.
Are there too many guns? Are video games and movies too violent? Are parents not teaching their children basic values? Are kids so starved for attention that they are willing to do anything to become “famous?”
I’m not an expert on this, so I won’t try to guess to explain the unexplainable.
But the shooting that happened on the Virginia Tech campus reminds us is that our generation is the most violent youth generation in the history of the world.
Whatever the reason, the era that we are currently living in is breeding violence. Some quick research shows there have been at least 40 school shootings since 1990, and almost all of them were kids shooting other kids.
Just like there is no simple answer to explain the violence, there is also no simple solution to solve it. But I hope that in classrooms today, questions about our society are being raised. There is a reason why these shootings are happening in the United States and not in, say, Denmark, and there needs to be a serious debate by people smarter than I about why that is.
As the death toll steadily rose yesterday, going from one to 20 to over 30, it brought back a lot of memories of being 15 and staring at the television as I watched kids my own age run for their lives. The scenes on television yesterday were similar, but in Columbine, and now in Blacksburg, what can’t be seen is the magnitude of the loss that so many people are feeling.
Sometimes that is forgotten. The people we see on television have just gone through a horrific event that no one should ever go through.
This is why the issue of school shootings is so important. It is not enough to dismiss it as an unfortunate event that occasionally happens. It is socially unacceptable for students to be murdered at school, and we should show appropriate outrage.
My heart goes out to the community at Virginia Tech. I’m sure many of the students that died yesterday went through the same morning routine I did: woke up, brushed their teeth, took a shower and drove to school. I will continue that routine and they won’t. That saddens me.
Patrick Creaven is a senior journalism major and the sports editor at the Daily Forty-Niner.
