School Shootings

There was another school shooting this week, although unless you were keeping your eyes open when reviewing the media, you might have missed it. See, this one occurred in Finland, rather than in this country or our favourite former colony, meaning there was much less attention given to it.

I wrote a lot about the last massacre committed by an angry loner, and I think a lot of those comments can be related directly to this more recent tragedy. I don't know whether Finland will respond in the same way that the US did to the VA murders, but the temptation will be there to start the old blame game. "Oh, he watched violent videos so he wanted to kill", "Oh, he had access to weapons so he wanted to kill" and so on, ad fucking nauseam, until every cliche has been trotted out. Well, shite. The only person directly responsible for these murders is the person who grabs a gun and starts shooting. And when, as they so often do, they kill themselves after the rampage or as the police close in, well, you just have to accept that the prepatrator has escaped the punishment society so desperately needs to inflict to console everyone.

But if someone does realky want to try to understand why this sort of tragedy intermittently occurs, and what could be done about it, then it might be worth taking a look at the lives these guys led before they aimed their weapons at their classmates and teachers. Because, generally speaking, them seem to be quite fucking bleak. Take the comments about by the detective looking into the Finnish massacre about the killer (as reported on the BBC):

"Det Haapala described the young man as a "lonely rider" who had been bullied by other students at the secondary school"

Then consider these comments about Cho Seung Hui, the killer at Virginia Tech:

"During Cho's time in middle school and high school, he was teased for his shyness and unusual speech patterns. Some classmates even offered dollar bills to Cho just to hear him talk. According to Chris Davids, a high school classmate in Cho's English class at Westfield High School, Cho looked down and refused to speak when called upon. Davids added that, after one teacher threatened to give Cho a failing grade for not participating in class, he began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth." "The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China.'" Another classmate, Stephanie Roberts, stated that "there were just some people who were really cruel to him, and they would push him down and laugh at him. He didn't speak English really well, and they would really make fun of him."Cho was also teased as the "trombone kid" for his practice of walking to school alone with his trombone. Other students recall crueler names and that most of the bullying was because he was alone.""

Or take Jeff Weise, who murdered nine people before shooting himself:

"Weise allegedly had a history of trouble at the school, getting into fist-fights. Although no clear motive has been attributed to Weise's actions yet, he was described as a loner, who was bullied – possibly due to his appearance."

Now bullying is not new, and, not matter how many well meaning but faintly patronising campaigns there are, it ain't really going to go away, if we are honest. And not everyone who is bullied becomes a school shooter, just as not all those who watch violent films are going to go on a rampage. But rather than looking for parts of a country's culture to blame after one of these shootings, maybe it would be would be worth examining exactly how a young man can be so ostracised by his schooling and by those around him that he sould see himself as a "social Darwinist" who has the right to wander around the corridors of his school and can "eliminate all who I see unfit".