Assuming what I read was correct (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong), Kinkel (sp?) had easy access to a few dozen people who were all bunched together in a fairly large mass. (Group prayer, perhaps?) I don't recall the exact details of the case, but assuming the kid were close enough, head shots would probably not be too hard to achieve.
As I said above, anyone who's familiar with the details may feel free to back me up or...ummm, shoot me down.
Okay. I've been reading a lot of people's stories and thought that it was time that I got involved.
I think we can all pretty much agree that high school was/is/will be the worst time of our lives. I know it was for me. However, unlike most of the people who have posted, I wasn't beaten up. No one spat on me. I didn't really even catch that much flak from people (in public, anyway). The shooting has caused me to rethink those years, and quite honestly, the only thing I can come up with is people not liking me, but being too scared to show it. I'm a pretty big guy, and the fact that I didn't have a lot of social skills caused me to become someone that a lot of girls feared. (More in a sec.) I wore NIN, KMFDM, Pig, etc. shirts. I spoke out in class whenever I could and tried to engage in debate (not arguments, mind you) whenever possible. I guess all of this caused people to have mixed feelings about me. On the surface, I was mostly liked, and maybe a few really did like me, but I heard so many rumors about myself through friends that I just became numb to it eventually. Most were bullshit, but some (ex. stalking rumors) were from things I did that were blown WAY out of proportion. I was numb to most of the rumors and even laughed at some of them, but these, combined with my hating my lack of social skills, caused me to beat myself up during the last couple of years of school.
The only time I was ever scrutinized by "The Man (TM)" was when a teacher was worried about some attitudes I expressed in a paper I wrote. The guidance counselor (also the football coach, by the way) was a pretty nice guy and understood that I wasn't about to go on a killing spree, so he let me go. Other than that, most teachers and administrators really liked me.
My senior year, I heard all the stories from graduates about college being so much better. I bought into it. My last few days in school were really depressing, but I got through them relatively unscathed. Overall, high school blew, but I had been active and tried to make a difference. I was now ready to move on to bigger and better things than my what my Bible Belt town offered.
When I got to college last fall, I expected my life to get infinitely better. I thought I'd have friends everywhere and would finally achieve inner happiness.
Life has gotten worse for me, to be honest. Sure, I'm actually learning in my classes, and that's the important thing. However, I think I'm feeling more pressure to conform now to whatever belief than when I was in high school. That wasn't supposed to be the case. Perhaps I'm just not active in the right areas, but I can't stand a lot of the people I work with on extracurricular stuff. Hell, maybe my standards are too high, but I don't think of myself as even having a friend here. Sure, there are some people I talk to, but I haven't been to one social event all year where I didn't want to just go home and work on a program or read or write a story or do whatever. Everything I've done this year that wasn't part of an invitation by someone I work with has been done by myself. (I don't always mind that, mind you, but it would be nice to have someone I could, say, go to the movies or record store with.)
Who's to blame for all this? Myself. As much as I try to blame the people around me, or fool myself into thinking I'm emotionally stable, I'm purposely carrying around a lot of emotional baggage from my childhood and high school years. I'm also just plain being stubborn about certain things. I'm changing certain things about myself, but like I said, I'm stubborn and these changes will take awhile to fully implement.
What's the moral of this story? College is what you make of it, just like high school. College will probably change you in many ways, but if you don't want to change or you don't change in the "right" ways, you could easily be more miserable at college than back at high school. (At least I had people back in high school that I could talk to when I was depressed that were actually there and not just Internet friends.)
Despite what I've said, I wouldn't say college has been worse than high school. It certainly hasn't been a lot better, though, and I just want people to know that going to college won't guarantee you loads of friends and whatnot. You're going to have to put some effort into it and/or get lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming what I read was correct (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong), Kinkel (sp?) had easy access to a few dozen people who were all bunched together in a fairly large mass. (Group prayer, perhaps?) I don't recall the exact details of the case, but assuming the kid were close enough, head shots would probably not be too hard to achieve.
As I said above, anyone who's familiar with the details may feel free to back me up or...ummm, shoot me down.
Okay. I've been reading a lot of people's stories and thought that it was time that I got involved.
I think we can all pretty much agree that high school was/is/will be the worst time of our lives. I know it was for me. However, unlike most of the people who have posted, I wasn't beaten up. No one spat on me. I didn't really even catch that much flak from people (in public, anyway). The shooting has caused me to rethink those years, and quite honestly, the only thing I can come up with is people not liking me, but being too scared to show it. I'm a pretty big guy, and the fact that I didn't have a lot of social skills caused me to become someone that a lot of girls feared. (More in a sec.) I wore NIN, KMFDM, Pig, etc. shirts. I spoke out in class whenever I could and tried to engage in debate (not arguments, mind you) whenever possible. I guess all of this caused people to have mixed feelings about me. On the surface, I was mostly liked, and maybe a few really did like me, but I heard so many rumors about myself through friends that I just became numb to it eventually. Most were bullshit, but some (ex. stalking rumors) were from things I did that were blown WAY out of proportion. I was numb to most of the rumors and even laughed at some of them, but these, combined with my hating my lack of social skills, caused me to beat myself up during the last couple of years of school.
The only time I was ever scrutinized by "The Man (TM)" was when a teacher was worried about some attitudes I expressed in a paper I wrote. The guidance counselor (also the football coach, by the way) was a pretty nice guy and understood that I wasn't about to go on a killing spree, so he let me go. Other than that, most teachers and administrators really liked me.
My senior year, I heard all the stories from graduates about college being so much better. I bought into it. My last few days in school were really depressing, but I got through them relatively unscathed. Overall, high school blew, but I had been active and tried to make a difference. I was now ready to move on to bigger and better things than my what my Bible Belt town offered.
When I got to college last fall, I expected my life to get infinitely better. I thought I'd have friends everywhere and would finally achieve inner happiness.
Life has gotten worse for me, to be honest. Sure, I'm actually learning in my classes, and that's the important thing. However, I think I'm feeling more pressure to conform now to whatever belief than when I was in high school. That wasn't supposed to be the case. Perhaps I'm just not active in the right areas, but I can't stand a lot of the people I work with on extracurricular stuff. Hell, maybe my standards are too high, but I don't think of myself as even having a friend here. Sure, there are some people I talk to, but I haven't been to one social event all year where I didn't want to just go home and work on a program or read or write a story or do whatever. Everything I've done this year that wasn't part of an invitation by someone I work with has been done by myself. (I don't always mind that, mind you, but it would be nice to have someone I could, say, go to the movies or record store with.)
Who's to blame for all this? Myself. As much as I try to blame the people around me, or fool myself into thinking I'm emotionally stable, I'm purposely carrying around a lot of emotional baggage from my childhood and high school years. I'm also just plain being stubborn about certain things. I'm changing certain things about myself, but like I said, I'm stubborn and these changes will take awhile to fully implement.
What's the moral of this story? College is what you make of it, just like high school. College will probably change you in many ways, but if you don't want to change or you don't change in the "right" ways, you could easily be more miserable at college than back at high school. (At least I had people back in high school that I could talk to when I was depressed that were actually there and not just Internet friends.)
Despite what I've said, I wouldn't say college has been worse than high school. It certainly hasn't been a lot better, though, and I just want people to know that going to college won't guarantee you loads of friends and whatnot. You're going to have to put some effort into it and/or get lucky.
Thanks for reading.