Stopping School Violence in Your Community

Stopping School Violence In Your Community

2 years, 7 months and 3 days ago, our lives were changed forever. This marks the date of April 20, 1999. When the students arrived that day at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado they had no idea that 12 students and 1 teacher wouldn’t be leaving by the end of the day. What could ever drive two high school students to the point where the only answer was death and suicide? Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold took the only answer to their graves.

And it gets worse. Since Columbine, Georgia, Virginia, Oregon, Michigan and Tennessee have had violence plaguing there schools with children as young as 9 years old committing the acts. School should be the last place that a parent should fear for their child’s life. Juvenile homicide is now twice as

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common as it was in the 1980’s and that statistic is rising. To stop a problem like this you must know where it starts.

To do this, you need to know what drove these kids to

commit such an act. It seems that most politicians blame television and video games for the violence in the school system. “People keep saying video games and movies caused the violence. It's absolutely the reverse. Part of the attraction young people have to violent video games is simply a reaction to their imprisoning school system… and the harsher and wilder the video games or the speed metal music, the more inspired the young people feel, because there's nothing else in the cultural environment to inspire them” (Sischy 1999: 2).

Jason Dorsey, a motivational speaker and author of the book "Can Students End School Violence?" believes it’s the fear

of being excluded. “The fear is not that