School shootings, because of their rare and tragic
qualities, lead to a mass media craze. Once the shooters are identified, the
media looks to provide the public with insight into the mindset and motivations
of the killers.?

All of us on school campuses are frightened that this could
one day happen at our school.? So we, along with the media, hypothesize.
We want to understand why this happened in order to prevent it in the future.
In retrospect, we see the warning signs, but before the shooting, no one could
predict that these ?warning signs? would lead to a school shooting. We also
want to understand who would do this, so we can identify this type of person
before the shooting occurs. Because of this, inaccurate stereotypes are
formed.??

In 1999, two young boys arrived at their high school in
Colorado with an execution plan for their fellow students. They went on a
shooting rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 23 others.
Then they killed themselves. This incident ? the Columbine massacre ? led to
widespread hysteria.?

Why were these young students driven to commit this horrible
act? How did no one see this coming? Who is to blame??

In the media, the students were portrayed as bullied
outcasts who were part of a group called ?the Trenchcoat Mafia,? associated
with goth subculture. Some said these students were reacting to the years of
bullying with anger and hate. Others blamed the attacks on mental illness.
These portrayals, accurate or not, stereotyped the profile of a school shooter.??

Eight years later, a disturbed young man at Virginia Tech
went on a shooting rampage, killing 27 students and five teachers and wounding
many more. Then he killed himself.

The media portrayed the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, as an angry
loner. He was also said to have a history of mental illness and stalking. We
viewed horrific video recordings that showed Cho as an irate and troubled young
man, reinforcing our preconceived notions about school shooters.

The haunting but unanswerable questions raised by these incidents
are again in our minds: Why was this student driven to commit this horrible
act? How did no one see this coming? Who is to blame?

Just last week, a former student entered Northern Illinois
University and began a shooting rampage, killing five and then killing himself.

Stephen Kazmierczak, the shooter, was an outstanding student
who had no record of previous violent incidents. According to his girlfriend in
an interview with CNN, Kazmierczak was a friendly and loving person. She also
rebutted the idea traveling through the media that he was violent because he
went off of his medication.

This case does not fit the stereotype.

When a tragedy occurs, we tend to look for answers to
unanswerable questions. We also feel the need to place blame on someone, whether
it is on the shooter?s parents, the bullies, friends who did not come forward
with the warning signs, or campus administration and police who did not see the
warning signs. The media feeds into our fears and makes an effort to create
hypotheses to explain these shootings. We must keep in mind that these are only
ideas, not facts.

The stereotypical school shooter ? reclusive, dressed in all
black, spewing hatred for the world ? is a myth. These may be characteristics
of some shooters, but not all. School shootings are unpredictable, and the
perpetrators in these incidents do not fit a certain mold. We may never
eliminate these kinds of mindless, random massacres, but we must reject the
media?s simplistic search for some non-existent unifying profile.??

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Marissa Rubin ([email protected]) is a sophomore
majoring in journalism and political science.