(Written as the news was breaking...)

My nephew is currently a student at Virginia Tech. My niece is a grad. So many thoughts rushing through my head. I don't know if my nephew is safe though I have no reason to believe he isn't. Virginia Tech is an enormous school, he doesn't live on campus, he isn't an engineering student...

But the horror of it all. I actually knew someone who was present at the 1966 University of Texas massacre, which until today was the worst school shooting in U.S. history. If I remember his story correctly, he was crossing the street with a friend, part of a knot of students going to or leaving the post office. Shots rang out and people died--including the friend he was walking with. He wasn't shot but the life he'd lived up until that moment was irrevocably altered.

Why does America have school shootings? What is it in our culture that spurs people to arm themselves and slaughter students at school? Even the Amish have had their tiny schoolhouses bathed in blood. Why in the richest nation in the world are there people so desperate, bereft, isolated, and deranged that shootings like this are becoming increasingly common?

In the fall of 2001, when a sniper was terrorizing Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland, my children were locked down in their school. The sniper struck in a mall parking lot less than a half mile from campus. I can't tell you what it was like to drive by the scene of the shooting not knowing where the shooter was and attempt to retrieve my children from the school. For months, they didn't have recess, children were dropped off at the door of the school one by one and escorted in by police. A child was shot at a school in Maryland. The sniper struck at a gas station in our town as well. We never felt safe.

Here I am in Europe, watching this story unfold in Virginia, thinking hard about how the current administration has focused the nation's attention on the Other, the foreigner, the Muslim extremist. Talk to a European about visiting the U.S. and you'll hear their horror stories--having to provide bank account numbers, fill out paperwork, wait in long lines, have their laptops accessed, be fingerprinted and treated like criminals.

But who's doing the killing in America? Who's slaughtering innocents? Who's commiting domestic "acts of terrorism"? None other than our own citizens. It's laughable to think Bush was ready to pour millions of dollars into fencing the border with Mexico, as if people trying to snag low-paying jobs was our biggest domestic threat. It's a great diversionary tactic to keep us from looking at ourselves, our economy, our way of life, our thinking, and what we find acceptable.

Maybe it's time we stop demonizing the enemy without and pay attention to the enemy within.

After an event like this, the focus is always on security and emergency response; it isn't on our national mind set, our culture, our social values, support systems, or mental health and social services. 

The question that needs to be answered isn't simply "Why couldn't the police stop this shooter more quickly?" but "What might have stopped this person from shooting in the first place?"

April 16, 2007