Anyone who doubts the real presence of evil in the world, (as a distinct force, and not just the absence of good or charity) needs only to look in the news. Some would claim that the similarities between violent shooting sprees are the effect of disturbed individuals copying each other. I would beg to differ for a variety on reasons, including the timing of this incident. The story below is based mostly on second-hand information, about things that I can't verify. The incident is more important in this context for the questions it raised than for the potential outcome that was adverted.
One of the few people I knew going into high school had some pretty strange friends, who I got to know from hanging out with him. They in turn knew some even stranger people, who would occasionally end up each lunch at the same table, or things like that. There are just some people I wouldn't go out of my way to associate with, because I find it hard to relate to their choices. High school can be a rough transition, and people find a variety of approaches to fit into the new environment. So there was this one guy, trying to look tough in this leather biker attire, with skulls and such. It looked ridiculous, because he was a scrawny little kid underneath. We talked a couple of times over lunch and we took the same bus, and he definitely made me uncomfortable, but I was polite enough to passively converse, or at least listen. He definitely had trouble fitting in, which got worse as the year progressed.
In April I guess he started making violent threats, but I didn't hear about that until later. Many of the people he was threatening were those "mutual friends" that I had met him through. My understanding of the story is that it had happened enough over a couple weeks for the school administration to know about it, but nothing had been done in response, besides possibly talking to him.
And then Columbine happened. So then they followed up on those threats, and it was discovered that he wasn't just bluffing, but had been stockpiling a collection of weapons and ammo. I heard they came and arrested him during class, and needless to say, we never saw him at school again.
I have always been conscious of the fact that the tragedy at Columbine probably prevented me from having to experience something similar. In college, I became friends with a girl who was there that day, but I never told her about that connection, since I wasn't sure where that fell on the sensitivity scale. ("You went through something intensely traumatic, but on the positive side, it prevented it from happening somewhere else.") I have no idea how that would be received, so I just never went there.
But that incident caused me to think a lot about what I would do in a situation like that. I eventually came to the realization that I feared lacking courage more than I feared dying, in a situation like that. That is what got me past an obsessive fear of mortality that had plagued me for years. For a long time, I heard very little about any reactions in those situations besides panic and fleeing, which was discouraging. Does everyone else have the same over-riding fear of death that I had until age 14? In the recent shooting in Aurora, there were a number of stories of guys who died protecting those around them, which gives me a bit more faith in the human race. I hope that I would be able to react in a way that, at the very least, makes the situation better, and not worse. If I can bring it to a conclusion, so much the better.
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