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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: February 21, 2001
Latest update: March 6, 2001
 E-Mailjeannecurran@habermas.org

On Guns and Killing and Why? II

On Tuesday, March 6, 2001, Tiffany Bolling wrote:

Dear Jeanne

I was e-mailing you on the Santana High School shooting that took place yesterday. I was watching the news when they said there was another high school shooting and two people were dead. I was so sad because the shootings are getting closer to us now. It was said that the young man who did the shooting was in the 9th grade and was always teased at school. The young man then threatened his peers that if they did not stop teasing him he would shoot them. His peers took him as a joke and kept teasing him. Then yesterday he followed through. Now the boy is in custody of the police and will be tried as an adult. Is this fair? I feel as though the boy needs to get some kind of counseling, because he is so young and may end up spending the rest of his life in jail. Maybe if the school system were to enforce some mentoring with the students, we would not have shootings at the schools. Now we have two people dead, one in jail, and thousands of kids afraid to go to school.

On Tuesday, March 6, 2001, jeanne responded:

You have certainly identified one of the major social issues, Tiffany. Can we afford to just abandon young people like the shooter in this case. This brings into question the effectiveness with which our dominant discourse constraints are, in fact, working. There are clearly many young people out there whose communities and families have failed to reach them. They are isolated, angry, confused. Durkheim would have suggested that social facts are controlling in such matters, and would have expected society to have the power to constrain such violent outbursts. But somehow these young people have gained a sense of "agency" in which they do not respond to the contstraints.

How has that happened? How does respect for the Other fit into this equation? Consider the choice of words to describe the young man. Could we alter some of the pejorative terms we use?