You demonstrate that there is absolutely zero accuracy in the psychological profiles that "experts" have assembled to predict what kind of young student might start another Columbine, and you instead advocate profiling schools that could prompt a deadly massacre.
Maybe I'll expand on some things I've been thinking about this later, but I want to get some stuff down quickly while that article still has me fired up.
Tess, my roommate, said yesterday "I don't understand how anyone could do that." But I disagree, we all can understand far too easily, I think that's what makes these events so horrifying. As the author says in the above article, in a lot of ways it's all too easy to understand and sympathize; you just pick up the gun and shoot. We've seen it a million times on tv and in movies, done it hundred times from video games to water guns...hell, shooting people is fun! The only thing is the switch, what makes them decide to do it. To loose connection to the reality that these are people, who have clearly not done enough to you to deserve such cruelty.
Again, as the article discusses, who does these things? White people, middle class people, males, "normal" people, who "rationally" set about murdering as many people as possible (edit: well yeah the Virginia Tech shooter was of Korean descent, but the rest still applies). I think it's a) the disconnect from reality that comes from living a sheltered life where the only danger you ever see in life is simulated on some screen and b) the helplessness and powerlessness often felt by people in such a situation, the feeling that nothing you can do (not voting, not protesting, nothing) can really make a difference on all the wrongs we see in the world.
Lastly, I think if you read this article by Jean Baudrillard who discusses the motivations behind terrorism as the response of people who have been given so much, but are unable to give anything in return (not, as we tend to think, the response of a people who have had everything taken from them), I think you can draw a clear parallel to the possible motivations behind such attacks the as Virginia Tech shootings. The actions of a person humiliated by all that is given to him, unable to respond to an impersonal system, they make a category mistake and decide that is the people themselves that are the enemy, rather than the system in which they exist.
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Hmm, all this could be probably be taken a whole bunch of ways that I don't intend, and much of it is still only half thought out...hope no one takes offence...just trying to say something a little more subtle than "guns are bad"
