In Gary Keck's essay, "There Are No Lessons To Be Learned From Littleton", he is explaining how the school shootings occured and why no one should follow suite in repeating the mistakes made in Littleton.
Keck is trying to inform us that by putting these horrific occurences on the news it could lead to more shootings in our schools. He does not try to speculate how or why the shootings happened, he just try's to grab our attention by listing how some of these things could have contributed to the shootings. "Particular violent events are heavily covered by the news media precisely because they are unusual and thus unrepresentative of broader categories of crime and violence."
The news is watched mostly by adults, but lately more and more children have been watching the news. If parents spoke to their children after the broadcasting then perhaps they could inform them of why someone might have done that, and why they should never think of doing something like. Its not to say that all students will have these violent tendencies but just to make sure parents should avoid having the children in the room when they are going to watch the news especially when they see the clip of what is going to be shown.
I can't imagine what is going through the students mind when they decided that a shooting would be the best way to get their point across. How would you tell your children about this occurence? And what steps are you willing to take to make sure that they never have to witness the events on the news, knowing that you can't protect them forever even if we wanted to.
Younger students (elementary school) are less connected through social networking strategies and tv viewing is perhaps a bit more monitored by adult caregivers which would then allow you an opportunity to talk about such events before they are witnessed on TV. And although I can't imagine middle school-aged children turning on the news for pleasure they are deeply entrenched in their use of facebook, cell phones and email so they'd hear and see pictures of such horrific events from 'someone' else. And, when children do discuss such an event - and hopefully with an adult - they want to know "Why?" And unfortunately there'd be no answer. I don't think you can protect them from everything terrible that happens in the world but perhaps it does give us opportunities to talk about things such as bullying on the school yard, ostracizing students who are different, acceptance of cultural differences, kindness, etc. - things that are relevant to them. Maybe making a difference at such early ages would change the outcome of events such as those described by Kleck in "There Are No Lessons To Be Learned From Littleton."
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