Nowadays the campus violence problem becomes a hot topic which arouses more and more people to be concerned about campus gun shooting.
People in the world have heard and seen this kind of tragedy over and over in the news. The Safety of United States schools was seriously questioned by the world when in the news all we heard about was there was another shooting in an American high school or university. According to “School Shooting Statistics” which I searched from “Top10 Crimes” website, there are more than 40 shootings on American campus from 1996 – 2009.The gun shooting on American campus is a serious problem that is worth thinking about, because all the parents hope their children can be safe in school and everyone in the world wants a happy and complete family.
Before I came here, I couldn’t help to think can I be safe here, because I was scared by the news which were reported. I plan to study in America for a few years. Safety is the thing my parents care about the most. Both my parents and I hope I can live in a peaceful campus, which is why gun shooting problems really interested me to investigate about.I want to know why gun shootings happened frequently on American campus.
Who should be responsible for those tragedies? What the society, school and parents can do to prevent tragic shootings from happening? The United States is a country which advocates liberty. No other country puts as much emphasis on “freedom” as the United States. Anyone has the right to speak and write without fear of persecution, to demand political change, to parade against what they are unsatisfied with, to worship God or any other religions, etc. They have the freedom to do what they want to do, including buy guns.
Guns may be a method of self-protection, but they are also a guaranteed way to end a life, because the person who was shot in vital areas will die quickly. The lethality of a gun is much higher than a knife or rod. It is commonly known that prevention is better than too late to deal with. Gun control is a serious problem for the USA government and school authorities. I know that USA does have a gun law that controls the sale and usage of firearms, but the problem is why is the law not always effective?How and when can the USA government make gun laws more effective o reduce shooting in schools? In addition, except the gun laws, what can the school authorities do to reinforce the management of guns on campus? The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 shocked the nation.
It was the worst mass shooting in modern U. S. history. Seung-Hui Cho, 23, male, who had a history of psychiatric problems, killed two fellow students in a dormitory on April 16, then took a detour to mail a hate-filled video of himself to NBC News, then shot dead 30 students and professors in a classroom building before killing himself.This tragic shooting was a good example to let people think about the underlying problems in society, school and family.
Campus gun shooting is a wake-up call for Hollywood to regulate violence in movies, and it is a wake-up call to parents to better screen what movies and TV programs their children watch. I read an essay about the bad influence of television. It said that “By the time children reach school, they have spent one-third of their waking hours in front of the television”. We should realize that children are exposed to violence.They watch hours of murders, fights and crimes every week without parents’ supervision.
What effects that mass media will bring to children? Why the violence scenes are always so popular and attractive? How does the media represent the perpetrators of shootings? Does this will encourage more shootings? In addition, gun shooting is also a wake-up call to the video game industry to re-evaluate the amount of violence in games. Violence video games became a primary cause of rising violence among young people.Seung-Hui Cho, who is the shooter in Virginia Tech shooting event, according to the report, his favorite video game is CounterStrike which is a first-person shooter game where players choose to be terrorists or counter-terrorists and complete different objectives. In this video game, players will gain the knowledge about firearms and shooting skills. Why some students are admitted to violence video games? What kind of feeling those games can bring to them? Will those games lead young people to commit mass murder in the real world?In the essay Moral Disagreement which is written by Kwame Anthony Appiah, it claims that “people everywhere have ideas about the responsibility to their children”.
However, some of the parents, especially the homicides’ parents didn’t pay much attention to their children. They seldom care about their children’s life and their spiritual world. This kind of dereliction of duty also happened with school authorities. They didn’t realize that mental problems are important for students and they cannot be ignored.The school and family care are really important for students.
Most of the gunmen had mental problems. The school and family didn’t pay much attention to those children, didn’t give enough care and love to them, didn’t have good communication with them, didn’t find their mental problems earlier or didn’t take action to help them solve their mental problems. These things make children think their life is a disaster and they feel lonely and depressed. They might think it is unfair to let them have this kind of life and will hate any good things in their lives.We should realize that the children today are more vulnerable. They cannot stand some small failures.
When they feel bad or frustrated, they might even do something extreme. Let us turn our sights toward Seung-Hui Cho again. After this event, his mother said, “I knew that I didn’t know my son well, but I didn’t know how little I knew him until this happened”. According to his friends and professors, Seung-Hui Cho was a sullen loner.
He always sat by himself whenever possible and was very quiet.He didn't like talking to anyone or making eye contact with people. The plays he wrote was always like something out of a nightmare with really twisted, macabre violence plot. He railed against “rich kids”, “debauchery” and “deceitful charlatans” on the campus.
He seldom contacted his family. I was wondering why the school, teachers and parents didn’t take action to help him when they found he was abnormal. If they took actions earlier, if they gave him more care, this tragedy maybe wouldn’t have happened.It is worth mentioning that on the Virginia Tech campus memorial, there are hundreds people that continue to visit the 33 stones arrayed in an arc, where the stone for killer Seung-Hui Cho is decked with just as many flowers and trinkets as those for the people he killed as well as handwritten notes forgiving him for his sickness and offering sympathy for his family.
This scene moved the world. Why did people do that? I think it was not just because people felt sympathy for him and his family, those people wanted to appeal to schools and parents to give their children more care to prevent similar tragedies.They showed their care to Seung-Hui Cho who had never felt that during his lifetime. People didn’t think this tragedy was his entire fault. Everyone needs others’ care and love, even the one who was or intended to be a killer.
Of course, we don’t want to hear and see the American campus shooting tragedy over and over in the news. As what I said above, if the society can provide a good environment for children, if the schools, teachers and parents can be more responsible and care more about their children, they can provide a peaceful and wonderful world for the young who are the future of the world.
