By Megan Williams
Youth Radio

My own thoughts on the Littleton situation are focused on where this is coming from.

All of the papers are running their usual stories on how this was "Anytown, USA." No one seems to be suggesting any answers as to why here, why now, without it sounding like some frustrated cry to an absent god. But I have a few answers.

First, I think this country has got to wake up to the fact that guns are not just an inner-city problem. To paraphrase the NRA's slogan, guns don't kill people, gun culture kills people.

Unless materials like these are easily available, how can kids amass weapons under the happily averted eyes of their parents, their classmates and society in general?

But we don't need just another lockdown, outfitting our schools like prison camps to keep out the one or two kids with guns. We need to look at the fascination our society, as a whole, has with guns. Why are we not willing to take the most obvious step to stopping tragedies like these and outlaw firearms in general?

Secondly, we need to realize that these kids were disturbed before they ever outfitted themselves for their killing spree.

I'm coming to think these crimes are the inevitable result of the suburbs, of the drive to make life as safe and insular as possible. These kids grow up in sterile, homogenous surroundings in a world built on minimizing the inevitable tensions of our society. It is a world where, I would guess, their most exhilarating experiences were playing video games and creating secret societies.

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Coming from an urban school, I remember class as a truly challenging experience. It was frightening, stressful, and confusing, but with very real and vital challenges.

Perhaps I'm only working with a stereotype, but I almost wonder if the suburbs have lost a safety valve in putting so much of a focus on safety that a kid has to take a gun in his hand to feel alive.

Finally, after all of this ranting, I would just like to disparage the media for once again jumping on goth culture as the root of all evil. It was frightening to hear the neo-Nazism these boys preach confused with goth culture as a whole.

I had friends in high school who wore black cloaks and fenced with papier mache swords at lunch. Hell, I've worn my share of melodramatic eye-liner, and I've even played the dreaded "Vampire: The Masquerade" role-playing game, and yet, somehow, I made it through without killing anyone.

Disturbed people find disturbing things to latch onto, and they take them too far. That's what disturbed people do. But most of us make it through our adolescence helped by a subculture that provides an alternative to the football player/cheerleader mold.

When a postal worker opens fire on his co-workers, the first words out of news anchors' mouths are "sociopath" and/or "psychotic." But if it's an adolescent, we look to the peer group. It's as if this is the last innocence allowed to teenagers, that we're probably not smart enough for it to be our fault.

I can't help but feel this is a wake-up call, one that our society will once again try not to hear until the gunman stands at their door. The suburbs can't save us if society is sick.

Youth Radio is a nonprofit organization based in Berkeley, California. Student-produced pieces and commentaries can be heard on KQED and KCBS in San Francisco, on National Public Radio and on the Pacifica National Network. Youth Radio also contributes to "Digital High," a service of the San Jose Mercury News, and "Youth Voices," a project of Brandeis University.