Leading off the local Fox affiliate’s newscast this evening was a story about the shootings on the Red Lake reservation. “Why?” they asked over and over again. “Why?”

They noted that Jeff Weise had been teased for his Goth clothes and his tall stature. They noted that he had recently had trouble at school. They wondered how it could be that this student might load up a shotgun and a couple revolvers, don a protective vest, and go shoot up a school.

Here’s the answer: because he was a self-important, maladjusted little boy who thought that doing something like this would make him special. And because he didn’t fit in--and tried hard to not fit in by dressing different and acting different than the rest--he thought that it was his right to take the lives of all these people. Dealing out death is the one thing that made him powerful and unique.

Except, of course, it doesn’t. Killing someone is no big trick: for all its amazing capabilities, the human body is still a fragile thing. No, taking a life isn’t a special trick at all. And unique? Hardly. Killers are a dime a dozen.

No, in his twisted, idiotic little mind, he thought he could carve out immortality and leave a message for the rest of us fools. Instead he made a complete waste of his own life, brutally ended the lives of people who had done nothing to deserve his indiscriminate violence, and will leave behind a legacy of books, magazine articles, journalists, and other professional hyperventilators who will ask, “Why?” every time the anniversary of the event rolls around.

Like the survivors and family of the Columbine tragedy, the survivors and families of the Red Lake murders will be trotted out to offer opinions and tears whenever some other self-important little prick decides to start killing people. And they’ll all start their books, newspaper articles, interviews, and newscasts with that same question: “Why?”

Why? Because sometimes people are mean and rude: they hurt feelings callously, they exclude cruelly, and they act as if they are better than others. Those others are usually the kids who either can’t or won’t fit in with the crowd. And sometimes one of those misfits starts believing that those social cruelties and sleights somehow impart the right to murder their classmates or workmates. The murders won’t make them special and unique: the murders will make them brutal and pathetic.

Why? I won’t give Jeff Weise cover by blaming his actions on the social missteps of others. He doesn’t deserve to have his actions legitimized or his memory given a status that it doesn’t deserve. Much will be made of his father (who committed suicide), his mother (who was in a nursing home with brain damage), and his schoolmates (who weren’t nice enough to him). What it all really comes down to is that a kid who tried to be different, and was treated accordingly, didn’t want to put in the hard work of living life. He picked a cowardly and quick path to solve the problem: kill to make his name known forever, and die so he didn’t have to deal with the consequences.

What a pathetic little boy.

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