Deadly ambivalence

Schools need to teach our kids how much they matter. If they don't, we will see Santana and Columbine copycat shootings again and again.

By Meredith Maran

Mar 6, 2001 | The news is all too familiar: Another school shooting, two teenagers dead, 13 injured, thousands traumatized. The heart aches, although we've seen it all before: the sobbing girls, their blond ponytails whipped across their crumpled faces by the winds gusting from the choppers overhead. The fathers, stunned with horror and relief, clutching their not-shot, not-arrested, not-dead crewcut sons to their chests. The mothers running toward the empty school, crossing police lines, dodging ambulances and reporters, screaming their children's names. We've seen it all before, but each time, the heart is ripped again.

The kids are white again: the shooter and the students he shot. The shooter is a boy again -- this time he's 15, a freshman -- and once again, he's a kid who got picked on at school all the time. It's another large suburban school -- there are 1,900 kids at Santana High School, in Santee, near San Diego. We don't know much about the boy who did the shooting yet, but from early reports he fit the increasingly familiar profile of the schoolyard gunman -- a white teenage boy, a misfit, in a large suburban high school.

According to his best friend, the shooter bragged all weekend that he was going to do this on Monday. He even invited his friends to join him. "But we said no," his friend says.

"Did he have access to guns?" the reporter asks the peach-fuzzy 14-year-old. The boy nods, yes. "His dad had lots of guns," he says, and rattles off their calibers.

The mind struggles to understand -- How did he know all that? Did these boys play with guns? Did the father take them shooting? But the reporter is on to the next question. "Why didn't you tell anyone that your best friend was threatening to go to school on Monday and shoot a whole lot of people?"

"At the end of the weekend he said he was just kidding," the friend answers. "I didn't want to get him in trouble if he was just kidding." Against the background audiovisual of sirens screaming around him, his bleeding, dazed classmates being loaded onto gurneys, the SWAT teams sweeping the campus for bombs, the boy adds, "Anyway -- he's not the kind of kid to do something like this."

Apparently, though, he is that kind of kid. And just exactly what kind of kid, the politicians, pundits and psychologists will spend the next days and weeks pondering, is that? These few things we know.

He was the kind of kid whose father owned guns and didn't keep his son from getting to them. The kind of kid who was picked on, often, at his large, suburban school. The kind of kid who spent a weekend telling his closest friends -- and their parents -- that he was going to go to school on Monday and shoot as many of his classmates as he could.

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