School Violence

My attention this week was captured by the school shooting at NIU. There were tons of articles written about it and it was on all of the major news stations. My heart went out to every student on that campus and I was interested to find out that the shooting at NIU was not the first shooting on a school campus this year it was not even even the first on a campus in the past week. In the past week there had been 4 school shootings. I found on article at U.S. News that chronicled all of the shootings on campus starting in 1966 it is truly mind blowing to look at. Of all the school shootings on campuses in the United States 22 of them occured from 1966 to 2000, 33 have occured since 2000.

There is no way to say that one paticular thing has had an impact on the rise of violence in school systems but it is hard to rule out the effect of media. In 1966 there was not violence on television and movies, people did not have the violent video games and computers were not even a reality. By 2000 all kids are exposed to violence. There certainly seems to be a correlation between violence in the media and the rise of violence on campus. Violence has become such a huge part of society, because of that people become desynthesized to it. People expect the things they see on to be more lifelike so images have become even more gruesome. People have seemed to blend reality and fantasy

It will be interesting to see if people in my generation raise their kids differently. We have seen the effects of media violence and the media is not going to change unless there are government regulations put on them. Protecting kids from violent media will have to fall on the parents. I wonder if my generation will be more savy about the damaging effects of constantly watching violent images can have, or will things just get worse.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2008/02/15/timeline-of-school-shootings.html?PageNr=1