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NIU: Unraveling the unthinkable
Staff Editorial
Phoenix Discourse
Issue date: 2/20/08 Section: Discourse
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During our staff editorial meeting on Sunday, we attempted to identify the catalyst not only to the savagery at NIU, but to all school shootings. We tried to discover why a person would resort to such an action, while looking for a solution to the apparent rise in school shootings across our nation.
We struggled to establish a profile of these attackers, reasoning that there must be some common thread identifying and linking shooters in order to predict and prevent future acts. But can anyone accurately paint such a portrait? While the majority of the assailants have been young, white males, this hardly constitutes a usable profile. Only a week prior to the attack at NIU, a woman killed two students at a Baton Rouge, La., vocational college and then turned the gun on herself. Last spring, Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old South Korean, killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. It seems clear that these attacks are an exceptionally U.S. phenomenon, with the worst attacks worldwide occurring in U.S. schools. If this violence is truly a U.S. epidemic, then we must ask ourselves: Is there something about our culture that breeds this?
Social critics and analysts debate over the prevalence of violence in Americans' daily lives, arguing that we have become oversaturated with brutality and death to the point of indifference. Commentators blame rap music, first-person-shooter video games, Hollywood and television for inundating us with images of massacre and destruction. The news media also does its part to intensify our exposure to such incidents; the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times ran a cover piece titled "Portrait of a Mass Murderer."
Perhaps these acts were perpetrated as a result of social antagonism. The notion of a bullied loner arose after the Columbine shooters were portrayed as outcasts among their peers, separated from the rest of their schoolmates due to their apparent non-conformist lifestyles. Their barbarity was assumed to be a reaction to years of bullying by their peers.
Yet a U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education study released in 2002 determined that 41 percent of attackers "appeared to socialize with mainstream students or were considered mainstream students themselves," and 44 percent were involved in organized activities, whether a sports team or other extracurricular activities.
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