NIU Shooting

On Valentines Day in 2008, Steven Kazmierczak, a former honors student at Northern Illinois University, shot and killed 5 students at NIU before killing himself. Those who remember him say he was an award winning student and was very intelligent. There is no clear motive as to why he went to the school and killed those kids, for he left no note and his laptop’s hard drive had been wiped. But few knew that after high school, his parents had sent Steven to a psychiatric treatment center for teens, where he lived for a year while getting therapy and medication for what was only described as "unruly" behavior. A few weeks before the shooting, he stopped taking his medication and began experiencing erratic behavior. In 2001, Steven joined the army only to be discharged 6 months later for an undisclosed reason.

Sadly, this is not a new happening. I didn’t even hear about it until I was looking through the national news online. It has become very rare for school shootings to become national news unless hostages are taken. Several school shootings happen every year, but we never hear about them unless they are in our area, and even then we might not. It is almost as if school shootings are “old news” and that no one cares about them anymore.

Something must be done! School shootings are not “old news”. Schools are doing little to prevent them and have almost no plans for if they happen in their school. Kids that are bullied are dismissed and nothing is done to protect them from those that are mean to them. There is also very little seriousness taken by teachers when students threaten to kill each other. This has happened in my math class. There is one kid that no one else likes because he’s rude, he butts into others conversations, his opinion must always be known, he lies, and he doesn’t shower. I admit, I don’t like him and don’t talk to him, but I have never called him names or hurt him in anyway.

So one day while we had a substitute teacher, the other kids got tired of his butting in and lying so they were poking fun at him, making yo’ mama jokes, nothing too terrible. So he turns to this other boy and says that he was going to shoot his head off. The substitute didn’t take it seriously, even though everyone else in the class was freaking out. So after class, I waited until everyone was gone and made sure she wrote a note to our teacher. The next day, our teacher said that it was nothing to worry about, everyone was just kidding, and we shouldn’t take him seriously. The kid making threats was never punished because he blamed it on anger controlling issues.

Events such as this need to be taken seriously by everyone! Even if he did have anger issues, what if the next time he can’t control his anger he really hurts someone? And there have been other times he as threatened others and he has gone unpunished. He is a school shooting just waiting to happen but none of the adults in my school seem to believe those who report him. I’m sure this is the situation in many schools, with many different kids. Something needs to be done to prevent school shootings.

But in all of this, there is someone trying to help. There is a group that does presentations in schools across the nation called Rachel’s Challenge. They try to convey the message that one of the girls killed at Columbine, Rachel Scott, tried to live her life by. They have reports of receiving e-mails from students who have seen their presentation who were planning to kill themselves or others. I want to take the time to thank them for trying to help those who can’t find help elsewhere. If you are a student and have not had Rachel’s Challenge come to your school, please request to a school official to have them come. You never know what they could do for someone.

NIU news article: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4300903&page=1
Rachel's Challenge web site: http://www.rachelschallenge.com/