Not "Getting Some Guns and Doing Some Damage": Listening to Teens and Learning From a Ragtime Festival

Violent Masculinities as Tropes for School Shooters

“…For many students subjected to-or witnessing-heinous mistreatments, such subordination meant being denied the right to be treated humanely, the right to develop a sense of themselves imbued with selfesteem, and this seemed to be a gap in Lépine's education, as well. As with any setting where one is denied selfhood, Columbine was a profoundly oppressive situation for far too many students (Larkin, 2007;Tonso, 2004Tonso, , 2006a. It is not enough to identify those among the disaffected who might become shooters and take some kind of action to prevent their acting on their fantasies of revenge and retribution, schools must become humane places.…”

“…Consequently, I experienced the attack at close range and could reflect on how things went there (Tonso, 2003), but could not muster the emotional fortitude to engage in empirical study of the attack. Instead, I studied a learning setting that teens told me was the kind of place they wished their schools would emulate (Tonso, 2006a). In fact, I still find it difficult to read extended passages about the attack that come from the early "hunt" for the simplistic explanation (such as some of the illustrative material Frymer [2009] critiques in this issue).…”