Debate: School Shootings

By Glenn and Jake

There's a common saying that goes: "there's only two things in life that are certain: death and taxes." And while that may have passed for humor 200 years ago, today we need something that pushes more buttons. That's why I move to add a third certainty of life: school shootings. School shootings have become a common occurrence in modern America, like losing socks at the laundromat or being impotent from watching extreme porn, the kind that involves poop.

In this debate, Glenn and Jake are going to attempt to take each other to school and riddle the rhetorical hallways with verbal bullets. Are school shootings tragic or surprisingly positive? Find out here.

Glenn: School shootings are terrible! My mere participation in this debate is a debasement - it actually makes me feel like I’m living through such an attack right now. I have several reasons in support of my position but I will start with the strongest: each school shooting builds the drumbeat towards common-sense gun regulation. In the past year alone, each of these terrible shootings felt like pound-pound-pound of Keith Moon drumming towards the aforementioned dystopia. But instead of leading us towards an ecstatic climax of Roger Daltrey’s booming voice and Pete Townshend's guitar windhill, these shootings bring us closer to a reality where assault weapons won’t be accessible.  Thank you.

Jake: It's funny that you mention The Who, the rock and roll band, and especially Pete Townshend. The reason this is laughable is because it plays into my first point so well: if children kill each other then Pete Townshend will have less kids to fuck and/or masturbate to nude pictures of. He will have to stick to his current cache of child pornography of children who are surely dead by now.

School is boring. Shooting guns is exciting. No wonder all the kids have stopped raising their hands and instead are raising arms.

Glenn: I agree that school shootings are exciting, but just because something is exciting doesn’t make it good. Plenty of things raise the heart rate: watching your cat get run over by a truck, opening a possible acceptance letter from an unaccredited for-profit college, having sex. But, especially regarding sex, the excitement is not worth the pain caused to you and others. Many university professors argue that school shootings are fake, that the survivors are all “crisis actors” and such.  Even if they’re half right, a world where SOME people have died is not one I want to live in.

Jake: Everybody will one day die. I, for one, cannot wait for the day the Grim Reaper places HER icy hand upon my shoulder and drags me to the grave. I imagine it to be like the buried alive match between Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Undertaker, but with less heavy machinery and smoother.

I wish I were still school age. I would love to be riddled with bullets, errant or intentional, from a psychopath's gun. Nearly everybody agrees that mass shooters are mentally deficient, but until Donald Trump is elected president and puts another holocaust into action, we are just going to have to deal with the repercussions of living with the mentally ill. We might as well strap ourselves in and enjoy this wild ride.

Glenn: Recently I read (over several months, on the toilet) the book Columbine by Dave Cullen. It was the definitive account of the first school shooting in American history and it taught me a lot. For example, did you know that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren’t bullied - or at least no more than you and me in high school? Secondly, did you know that an older teen helped them get their gun? Many things went into making that school shootings, and others, a success.  But the success comes at a cost: in the past 15 years children are incredibly more likely to be suspended for jokingly threatening to kill someone or expelled just for acting out while black. These are the legacies of school shootings - a legacy we need to shoot dead.

Jake: I vividly remember a time, back when I was a youth in tight pink shorts, when baseball was America's past time. Now the bats have been replaced by guns and the balls have been switched out for bullets. Or, perhaps more accurately, it's like an automatic ball pitcher at a batting cage is an automatic assault rifle and the balls are still bullets. The point being: baseball is boring as shit and school shootings are exciting. Sure, they both involve math, but you can shoot anybody who tells you about it during a school shooting.

Going to school was boring when we were kids, up until Columbine happened, then it was suspenseful because you might die. We went from living that Jim Jarmusch life to Alfred Hitchcock. And The Birds is more fun to watch than Broken Flowers.