weekly blog

Last week while I was at the gym, I was watching the news while exercising. The breaking story was about a shooting in an Ohio school. The story then went on to talk about the several shootings in Ohio school systems. When I was watching this, deviance definitely came to mind on the part of the shooters, and the victims. Taking or attempting to take away anyone’s life is deviant and a right to punishment. However, murder and attempted murder has become a common thing. Every day people are killed. However, there is something that usually provokes the murderer or attempted murderer, unless they suffer from insanity, which would be pathological deviance. It is my belief, maybe because I have never had to be involved in shootings, no one just shoots people for fun. Again maybe this is a naive perspective, but it is still my belief. Especially when looking at high school students. Not all groups of students are excepting. There are gangs at a lot of high schools with scores to settle, and always a group of the “oddballs.” However, let’s face it everyone has their odd moments. The students that are not accepted into social groups and are made fun of can only take so much. In instances of gangs, people often have scores to settle. Not accepting people for who they are and not forgiving people for things, are deviant. Violence is so normal these days that it is difficult to decipher whether it is wrong, deviant, or not. There are several kinds of violence, which include social-structural violence, and physical. Both are detrimental to others and deviant. Basically, there are always two sides to deviance. In this case, it is the students that oppress, or make fun of other students, and the students that take revenge/rebel.
The saddest part of this is people get so caught up in the actions that they forget to look at causes and what might have provoked the shooters. For a few days the news will focus on what happened and how it might have started, and then the parents sometimes get blamed. Then the topic of a ban on guns comes up. However, I have learned one thing from all of the shootings that have occurred in the United States, there is usually something to provoke the shooter, which is wrong, the shooter shoots, which is wrong, and guns do not shoot on their own.