School shooting confirmed

It appears that I now have a link to an article about the fatal school shooting that happened recently. The victim was a 15-year-old boy, and it happened in February in Oxnard, California:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89190872

(I received a link to the same article on MSNBC's site, but I refuse to link directly to MSNBC, following its poor edit of Michelle Obama's speech.)

I'm not even sure what to say about this story. That there's been relatively little coverage just goes to show that school violence is actually getting more overt than before, so when there is a shooting, it's just not big news like it used to be.

It is believed that the victim was killed because he was gay. He had been harassed repeatedly at school prior to the shooting. It's part of the issue of students all over the country being assailed daily for a variety of reasons. When I hear of someone being attacked at school, I have to look at it from the angle that there's only one kind of people, and that's people. And people are getting injured or killed for nothing.

Other victims are attacked for different reasons. I don't want to categorize each incident based on the motivation, but one thing is clear: School harassment is wrong for any reason - and it's the duty of a blog like this to bravely expose the evil of school harassment.

Another point that has to be made: Investigating the school where the shooting occurred, I learned it has mandatory uniforms - despite being a public school. California law requires public schools to allow students to opt out of uniforms, but I could find nothing in the school's policy giving students the ability to opt out. The liars who claim uniforms are a panacea to school violence can kindly pipe down now.

Even more ironically, the school's website - in an attempt to provide justification for uniforms - features a brief video clip of a kid extracting a zillion guns out of his non-uniform trousers. I'm pretty sure this is the same clip that was made infamous by 'Bowling For Columbine', so it's hard to see how the school expects to be taken seriously.

So a school that had uniforms and claimed it was to stop kids from bringing in guns is now the site of one of the most notorious school shootings in years. No surprise, because discipline always does seem to suffer when schools squander most of their resources enforcing Nazi dress codes instead of actually trying to keep students safe.