School Shootings in US History Why do people resort to gun violence? This question has taken off in recent years, especially following the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary. It's hard to say exactly why people resort to gun violence, mainly because most shooters are usually killed themselves or are shot by police officers at the crime scene, so we don't have the chance to interrogate them and figure out what they were. actually thinking. The shooters we are able to capture and interrogate are usually so mentally absent that it is difficult to understand what exactly they were thinking. There are numerous probable causes for school shootings, some more plausible than others. People believe that everything from video games to mental disorders, from bullying to attention, and many others, could be the main reason why people decide to shoot up schools. You can't point to one thing and decide that's why the shooter attacked, usually it will be several factors influencing the shooter who will end up cracking and thinking that gun violence is perfectly acceptable. School shootings have been a part of American history since the 1700s, when four Lenape Indians entered a school in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, and killed the teacher and up to 10 children (Epstein, 2012). Since that day, school shootings have become an almost regular occurrence. This school year alone we have already reached eleven shootings (Hefling, 2014). Perhaps even more astonishingly, since the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, just fourteen months ago, America has had 44 school shootings, totaling 28 horrific deaths, in just fourteen months (Dimon, 2014) . Since that December day, approximately 1,500 state firearms...... middle of paper ......y. Publicly hurting others shows everyone how much they were hurting themselves. Basically all the media platforms in our society, such as television, video games, music, the Internet, movies, have the potential to wear away the humanity, or in a certain sense, the innocence of teenagers. This allows them to view violence as potentially acceptable, or at least desensitize them, to some extent, to the true extent of murder and violence. They see it as an easy way to get attention. People always want to point fingers when these tragedies happen, they want to find a scapegoat and try to blame the events on someone else. All teenagers want attention, and when they feel neglected or angry at the world for not getting attention, they see violence as a great way to get what they've always felt they deserved, regardless of whose toes they have to step on to get it...