School Shootings

You are in the mall and someone yells everyone "'Get down!" Or I will shoot." Your first instinct is to hit the ground before shots are fired. Now imagine that in the school cafeteria. Scary, right? As scary as it sounds scenarios from horror movies are playing out in schools all over America. You are eating lunch in the cafeteria and a student enters the cafeteria and starts firing off a firearm. First instinct is to scream for help and get on the ground, but why are scenes like this taking place in the learning place. The place where we are told we are the safest, maybe even safer than home. If school is so much safer than home then why are school shootings on the rise? "Most of us already know that too many of our movies, television shows, music songs, and video games are filled with trash: grisly murder scenes, dismemberment and disembowelment, nonstop profanity, rape and torture scenarios" (Bennett par 14). By placing scenes like these in movies for the youth to see the media is causing America to become more violent than is needed. We must prevent violence in schools, solve violence in schools and violence needs to stop now.

Although overall school violence is declining in America, mass shootings in suburban and rural areas are becoming more common ("School" par 1). On April 20, 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold decided to bring firearms and explosives to Columbine High School to go on a shooting rampage. These two boys, before killing themselves, killed 12 students, one teacher, and wounded 24 others. The cause of this Massacre was violence at the school place, Harris and Klebold were bullied as students and no action was taken when they started talking about killing people or physically hurting people. At the beginning of the school year teachers should give students talks about violence and school shootings. Teachers should tell students that violence is not a joke and it needs to be taken as a serious offence, whether there is going to be a fight at moon base or talking about shooting up the school. Staff must talk about how serious school shootings are and how damaging to one's future violence can be. The worst consequence would be getting sent to prison for life. Killing someone is psychologically devastating to the murderer. ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ "It is the value of belonging and, conversely, the damage of isolation. With the exception of the few who have turned out to be clinically mentally ill, the shooters have mostly been kids who existed on the outside, who felt profoundly uncared for" (Crutcher par 9). The truth is that most school shooters are mentally ill in one way or another and these individuals need help.

For solving the school-shooting problem in schools there should be harsher punishments for little violations. Severe punishments for anyone who breaks the violence rules, violence should not be tolerated. Rule breakers cannot be tolerated, but do not let one bad student ruin the outlook on the rest of the students, just because one is bad does not mean all the others are bad too. Students need to take responsibility for their actions; no one can do that for them.

"Needless to say, nothing shifts the final responsibility for violence away from its perpetrators. But such unexpected fellow-feeling