Confessions of a Would-Be School Shooter

Confessions of a Would-Be School Shooter

<p>By now the subject of Virginia Tech has been much publicized and probably hackneyed. We talk about lax gun control laws, wasted lives, disturbed young men and how we wish things like these would never happen again. In my <a href="http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/in-the-mind-of-a-murderer/">previous entry[link]</a>, I talked about how problematic Cho Seung-Hui is and the difficulty with which we tend to see the minds of these people. We always talk about things like these happening to someone else. However, as Bill Watterson once said in his great comic strip series Calvin & Hobbes, "We are all someone else to someone else." And so instead of talking about Cho from a distance and saying how crazy he was, I&#39;d like to talk about how I was probably just like him.

As I read through TIME&#39;s articles on the VTech massacre, I began reflecting on my own past and how disturbingly close I came to becoming a school shooter.

In real life, I&#39;m a very quiet person—meaning I don&#39;t speak much. If I have something to say and feel it&#39;s absolutely necessary, I have a very loud voice. Most of the time, though, I prefer to keep to myself and do not really talk. This habit caused one of my co-teachers to remark "You know, if one of us is going to become a psychopath, it would be Joey." Of course, I&#39;d just laugh and shrug off the remark. It was only today that I realized how close I was to this.

In one of my <a href="http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/08/resurrection-and-revival/">earlier posts</a> I talked about how I was so maligned by my classmates in grade school. I really hated them; there were times I&#39;d think about seeing their corpses hanging from a large weeping willow tree on campus. Seriously.

I think this started after my parents&#39; marriage was annulled, but I don&#39;t blame it entirely on them (and I presently harbor no bitterness toward them in this matter). There were a lot of events that led to certain, er, emotional imbalances I had in the past, I myself am not really sure how they add up to one another. Regardless, I was a young boy who was full of hate and I can very clearly remember that <i>at one point I really thought about shooting my classmates</i>. Dad had bought an air rifle at that time and I was beginning to learn how to use it, and I remember telling them to stop bugging me because I had a gun. Of course they mocked me even more, at which point I just kept quiet and seriously thought about blowing their brains out. How old was I then?

Ten.

The next year, I was beginning to move closer and closer toward rebellion, and my mind began to darken. I just have an eerie feeling that if the events of my life did not transpire as they have, I would have ended up walking onto campus with deadly weapons and making away with the lives of those who I saw as inferior, then myself. The difficulty in getting weapons aside, I certainly had the potential to be a school shooter.

I don&#39;t know how it happened, but God somehow dealt with the events of my life at that point and eventually brought me to Him. There were times I&#39;d still feel that I was alone against the world (I still sometimes do) but I cannot deny that it was something much more dangerous before. I wanted to lash out against a world I thought was inferior to me, a world that I felt worthy to judge, a world that oppressed me.

Later on in college, I met the very guy who I had really felt like killing several years before. We were both waiting for a cab outside the university, and since we were both going in the same direction we just decided to take the cab together. We talked a bit about how the other was doing in college, where we planned on going when we graduated, and so on. I really don&#39;t think this would have been possible had my Lord Jesus not wiped away the bitterness that so stained my soul at a young age.

When I was a child, I felt like killing children. Now that I have grown in the grace of the Lord, I feel it is my calling to help them truly live. And this would all not be possible without my God working in my life. In His death I died to myself, and in His resurrection I rose again to a new life. Thus I have come to appreciate even more what He has done for me.</p>
<blockquote>"And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." -Romans 12:2</blockquote>
<p>Teaching and not Shooting,

Your Black Lion

PS: I&#39;m going on a short hiatus starting Tuesday night until Saturday. I&#39;ll be going to Pagudpud with Martin, Arghs and Fil. Yes, I&#39;ll finally be going to the beach.

~ by J. R. R. Flores on April 23, 2007.

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Original Source: <a href="http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/confessions-of-a-would-be-school-shooter/">http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/confessions-of-a-would-be-school-shooter/</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License</a>.</p>

J. R. R. Flores

2007-06-20

Melisa Rivera

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

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