by David D. Horowitz
“He seemed like a nice boy, although he kept to himself. But I didn’t think he’d do this…”
No, the assistant principal did not know the student planned to change his name from “William” to “Killiam,” nor that he’d bought two pistols and several rounds of ammunition at a gun show last month, nor that he’d assembled a workable home-made bomb by studying various Internet sites, nor that he harbored a terrible crush for a girl, a classmate in his trigonometry class, who ignored him once when he tried to initiate a conversation. He felt crushed and privately vowed revenge, as his notebooks and Facebook page cryptically indicate.
But to shoot the girl in class, killing her, then killing the teacher, another boy (to whom the girl had been visibly friendly), and then himself? One reads about horrors like this in the newspaper, one sees reports about it on the nightly news, but to be an assistant principal at a high school where it happens… “He seemed like a nice boy.”
And yet, who has not at some point wanted to kill another person? Who has not fantasized about an enemy dying? Who has not vowed retaliation over a petty, even an inadvertent, slight? “Wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them…” Hamlet’s profound rumination resonates with another: “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”
Humanity emerged from nature, and in nature killing is remorseless, although rarely focused on a particular individual for revenge. We nevertheless inherit a monster of violence in our hearts and hungers. And we must struggle to overcome its influence. Whether through meditation, prayer, love, friendship, discussion, or all of them, we must work to cultivate empathetic awareness. We must work to evolve our conscience to appreciate others’ suffering and maintain civility despite dislike. I seldom argue we “must”—but restraining violent impulses is for me a rare exception. Capitulate to random thoughts of violent revenge, and who would be alive in a year?
Another boy at the same time as the murder-suicide felt depressed because he could not find a summer job, his ex-girlfriend was openly dating a friend of his, and his father’s business was floundering financially, causing his father to drink heavily and indulge frequent tantrums. The boy visited his school counselor. He volunteered for a charity through a program at school. He visited the school librarian to learn how better to write a résumé and research online employment sites. He considered cities to which he would like to travel—Paris, London, Istanbul, Beijing—to help motivate himself to continue seeking remunerative employment. He did not buy a gun. He considered an act of violence once or twice, but immediately rejected the option. “Alas, poor Yorick…” The boy had recently studied Hamlet in his English class, and he’d lost a beloved uncle to cancer the year before. He knew grief. He hoped others never endured any more of it than resulted from naturally occurring death. Moreover, his life did not feel “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,” but full of promise, albeit difficult to realize. And now his school had been shattered by this violence. He had been casual friends with the murdered girl, and last year he had taken the math teacher’s trigonometry course. The student thought the killings terrible—but not “senseless.” He understood well enough the impulses that could impel a young man to kill—but one did not succumb. Wise people know we need not behave like monsters.