Nineteen Minutes

I started reading Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes last night and although I only meant to read for a few minutes and go to sleep, I didn’t put it down until I was about 150 pages in. I’d never read a Jodi Picoult novel before and figured I’d start with this one. So far, so good. She’s done an excellent job building the main characters, so I feel I know them and she’s gotten me up to and just beyond the shooting.

Jodi Picoult’s website lists a timeline of worldwide school shootings beginning in 1996 and leading up to the Virginia Tech shootings and in that short period, there have been 48 of them. Countless books and articles have been written about the phenomenon, but I feel we are no closer to understanding, predicting or preventing school shootings than we ever have been.

My son was a senior in high school in Colorado Springs in April of 1999 when the Columbine shootings occurred. Josh was a good kid, but long before the shootings I routinely went through his room when he was out, looking for signs of anything that might indicate a problem. We got along well and he didn’t exhibit any behavior that would indicate he was doing anything wrong, but I felt my responsibility to protect him trumped his right to privacy. I had my eyes peeled for anything that might indicate he was into drugs, alcohol or sex. Those were the things I figured were the likeliest to get him into trouble and I was ready to deal with any of them if they’d turned up.

Fortunately, I never found anything worse than a collection of soda cans, candy wrappers and dirty socks under his bed with the occasional print out of some garden variety porn under the mattress. This, I chose to ignore. It was pretty tame and since he hadn’t run the printer cartridge out of ink with repeated use, I figured I’d save us both the embarrassment.

When Columbine happened, we, like the rest of the world were stunned. Like every kid brought up in the era of cable TV and video games, Josh spent most the time when he was at home in his room. He wasn’t brooding. He was usually on the phone, doing homework, watching TV or playing games. Back then, I was still better on a computer than he was, so it was pretty easy to track his activity, and I did. We talked to him about how things were going at school and the answer was always the same. Things were fine. Does any teenage kid really have a different response?

We talked for a long time when he got home from school on April 20, 1999. We asked him if he was picked on at all and he just laughed and swore he wasn’t. He had friends and a social life, was involved in sports and although he was always a little heavy, he didn’t seem to have any problem with girls. We asked him about the other kids. Did he ever pick on anyone? Were there kids that he could imagine might lose it and do something like the kids at Columbine? Josh said he never picked on anyone and in our hearts, we knew it to be true. Josh had always been very compassionate with others. He said there was a group of Goth kids at school that called themselves “the people under the stairs.” People didn’t really pick on them, but they were weird and they tended to isolate themselves. He said he couldn’t imagine even those kids doing anything that crazy. We made him promise to tell a teacher and us if he ever suspected anybody at school was having serious problems and and we made him promise to step in and stop it if he saw anyone picking on another kid. He was a senior and he could do that. Fortunately, there was only another month of school left.

I read everything I could find about the two Columbine shooters. They’d been in trouble for breaking and entering into a van more than a year before, but that didn't seem too alarming by itself. It didn’t make sense that they built the pipe bombs in one of their garages. How did no one notice that? They had a radical website with threats published that would have been a red flag to any adult who saw it. They came from upper middle class, two parent homes and there were a lot of students who fit the outcast role far better than either of these two. One of them had been through anger management therapy and was on anti-depressants. They seemed more motivated to be famous, “bigger than Timothy McVeigh” as opposed to truly seeking revenge on their oppressors. Based on the creation of videotapes before his crime, the Virginia Tech murderer also seemed more intent on notoriety than revenge.

So I keep asking myself, why has this phenomenon become so prevalent over the last decade? Are guns really much more available than they ever were? In this era of reality TV, has the desire to be famous become so overwhelming that it can and does push an unstable kid over the edge and into mass murder and suicide? Are kids with emotional issues going undiagnosed and untreated? Has the overexposure to violent images in movies, television and video games somehow made it unreal? What about books about terrorism, suicide and murder? Music with violent lyrics?

All of these things and combinations of them have been blamed many times. The only thing I keep coming back to in my mind is that with all of these kids, there were signs and there were threats that people knew about.

The Columbine kids had access to guns at home, but the ones they used were obtained illegally, so changes in gun laws wouldn’t have mattered in that case. Violent imagery in music, videos and games? I personally don’t like it and I think it must numb kids to sex and violence to a degree, but I don’t believe it can drive an otherwise well adjusted kid to violence and murder. Books? No, I don’t believe they have the power to alter a kid’s otherwise healthy psyche either.

I’m not a mental health expert, but I understand a little about adolescent isolation, depression and suicidal tendencies. We live in a world that’s full of far more activities than it’s ever been. Between two career households, after school activities, kids rooms outfitted like private apartments and kids (and adults) spending far more time communicating with strangers on the internet than with the real people in their own homes, I can understand how a kid with problems can start down a dangerous path and not come back.

If I had to flash back to pre-Columbine 1999 and my son was back in school here’s what I’d do:

1. Make time every single day to sit down and talk with him, even if he didn’t want to, even if it meant to dropping the inclination to nag him about grades or cleaning his room. When he lived at home, we always sat down to dinner together and that was always a good time to gauge things. If we were in a phase where we absolutely couldn’t talk without fighting (this happened for a couple of months when he turned 15), I’d connect him with a trusted relative or close friend he could talk with to make sure I was getting a true sense of what was going on in his life.
2. I’d invade his privacy and especially his computer activities all over again.
3. I would talk to him about depression and anxiety and all the typical mental illnesses that are so common in our culture so he would understand they are treatable and nothing to be ashamed of.
4. I would not have any firearms in the house. Even kids raised with gun safety and education are a bundle of emotions and hormones and those kids have friends that will come over whether you’re home or not. Why tempt fate?

There is a final possibility about these kids that I hesitate to mention, but I will. Some people, including kids are sociopaths. Just as a child subject to unspeakable abuse can come through it and grow up to be a well adjusted adult, a child given the best chances in life can sometimes be dangerous and destructive. I don't know that there is anything beyond vigilance and attempting treatment that can be done.

I am clearly no expert and my parenting experience is limited. I would like to hear what you think can be done to try to deal with this terrifying problem. I expect a lot of people will disagree my ideas and opinions and I hope you do. Maybe you believe the media has a much greater impact than I do, maybe you believe a teenager has a right to privacy or that firearms shouldn’t be removed from the house or that they should be banned entirely.

What are your thoughts?