America has satiated the dwindling attention spans of its children with lowest common denominator shit in books, movies and education and has produced, surprise, a nation full of fucking morons. These stupid fucking morons form the dominant social class in America. They have well-developed herding instincts, are very susceptible to peer pressure, and have a sense of justice the central principle of which is "if anything bad happens, it's certainly not my fault" with the more recent addition of "and I should be heavily compensated for that". In schools, these morons decree that everyone should be as conformist as they possibly can, so when you get the odd smart, dumb, black, gay, non-blonde-cheerleader person in a school who doesn't want to follow the crowd in every way, that person finds their life miserable. As a result, the nonconformists frequently find they want to kill all the fucking morons. This is a justified and sensible feeling; the fucking morons are contributing nothing to their world, and are also hurting them mentally, emotionally and sometimes physically.

Precisely two years ago on this date (just a coincidence), two kids who were probably just insane made use of another one of America's big blind spots, and grabbed a load of guns and high explosives and killed rather a lot of the stupid fucking morons at their school. Now, I don't know the morons involved, so I don't know if they were bad people, but I can see why the insane kids thought a few of the dumb fucks deserved to die. I sympathize with the parents of the specific stupid fucking moron kids who get shot, but they were stupid fucking morons. They are the people who created the problems the high school shooters have. I have far more sympathy for the parents of the kids who do the shootings -- and usually suicide afterwards -- because their kids were not the root of the problem.

But America collectively doesn't get this. Instead it says, "Oh no, where have all these evil, evil kids in black trenchcoats suddenly come from? How can we protect our innocent babies from them? Aha! It is the Evil Internet Thing that is causing this, that evil thing we don't understand. Let us ban it, shut it down! Then our schools will be safe! Let's find all the kids who aren't happy cheerleaders and kick them out! That will help too! Then we'll grab our guns, lock the front door and barricade ourselves in, and sue the government for compensation." The rock-hard belief that it couldn't possibly be their fault, for ruining the childhoods of non-conformists, means they try even harder to get these kids to conform, kicking them out of school if they give even a hint that they may not be happy, hearty, cheerleading types. The result of this greater pressure is obvious: unusual kids will suppress themselves even more, so more of them will snap, and there will be more school shootings, not less. And that's happened. There have been more than a dozen shootings since Columbine. Has this complete failure of the conform-more, pray-harder policy not registered in the heads of any Americans?

IT GETS ME SO FUCKING ANGRY! I'm biased here, of course I'm biased. I was "different" in school. I was smarter, didn't enjoy sports, hated the routine violence and tribal rituals that composed most of my school's social life, and I iced the cake in my last two years of school by realizing I was gay, in a homophobic school. I was in turn physically, mentally and emotionally abused by my unthinking, stupid fucking moron classmates, and if I'd lived in a country dumb enough to leave loaded assault rifles lying around, I can't say I wouldn't have snipered a few of the more irritating assholes. And I probably wouldn't have been sorry, because the hard truth is that they deserve to be punished for making my life miserable, and more generally the lives of anyone who doesn't conform.

This is an instinctive, gut reaction from someone who was powerless at the time and wants retroactive revenge. This argument is a rational justification of an irrational impulse; I'm aware of that. But until America starts telling the fucking cheerleaders to stop being such arrogant pricks instead of kicking the unhappy kids out of school, my sympathy for school shootings is zero. Let them die, and maybe when the body count is high enough they'll rethink their strategy.