EDITOR’S NOTE: The epidemic of school shootings nationwide leaves copious amounts of victims in its wake. With much of the attention focused on details of bullet wounds and gun calibers, lost in the shuffle are our nation’s fear-stricken parents. And PNS editor Catherine Cowy Kim wonders who’s looking out for them. Kim, 29, is mother of a 3-year-old boy and co-editor of YO! Youth Outlook, a publication by and about Bay Area teens published by Pacific News Service.

BY KATHERINE COWY KIM PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE

I fear Charles Andrew Williams, "Andy", the sweet-faced, scrawny boy who shot his classmates in Santee, California. As a mother, I see in him my worst nightmares—that he will shoot my boy and leave him bleeding in a corridor. Or less dramatically, that my son may end up suffering like this boy-shooter—angry and scowling, mocked and miserable.

I grew up with these tormented boys (who didn’t?). I went to public elementary, middle and high school with them. There was the boy across the street who poured gasoline on neighbors’ lawns and lit them on fire—the "Pyro Freak" who was later put on Ritalin. There was "Fat Albert," who in retrospect, was not fat at all, just not lithe and agile enough. And then the German boy, brilliant and introspective, whose only unfortunate mistake was arriving in the middle of a school year. He was forever dubbed "The New Boy."

Ridicule and school go hand in hand. Where there is a campus, there is no denying there will be cruelty among the cliques, popular kids and freaks. Sixty years ago, in a dusty schoolyard in Seoul, Korea, my father was both perpetrator and victim of beatings. "Over what?" I asked him. "Whatever," he replied. As a child, I remember aching walks home from the bus stop beside my bruised brother, who was hit by public school boys for being a "Chink." When my parents whisked him off to boarding school (to be among more enlightened and civilized boys), he was hazed incessantly. Why? Because the stripes on his Oxford shirt were the wrong width.

More than three years ago, I started editing a youth newspaper. In the first days on the new job, the office was abuzz with a school shooting in Pearl, MS. Sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham stabbed his mother, then went down to his school and shot nine students. Two months later, in West Paducah, KY, three students were killed by a 14-year-old gunman. Three months after that, two boys, only 13 and 11 years old, killed four classmates in Jonesboro, AR. School shootings became common. Columbine was epochal.

Back in the day, the greatest fear was that these losers would hang themselves, slit their wrists, sit in the garage with Daddy’s car running. Now they’re running around schools with assault rifles, black .22-calibers, and bombs. Columbine highlighted the change from angst to rage.

Boys have more rage than girls. I see teenage boys—doesn’t matter what race—brimming with anger, itching to fight, needing to prove. I listen to them talk tough about sluts and ball and six-packs. I used to think it was the rage that I feared, because it was visceral and physical, brought blood and pain. But when rage mixed with boredom, there was a much greater evil at bay.

"I don’t know why you guys care," a 20-year-old writer commented the day after the Santana High School shootings. "I’m so desensitized."

There was something different about the Columbine boys. They were smart, swift and methodical. They were also very dark, with spectres of Neo-Nazi propaganda and hatred towards their tormentors. I was curious to see the picture of the latest shooter—was he an evil soul?

He was a boy.

He had just broken up with a girlfriend. He had just brought a water gun filled with piss on school grounds. He had just been beaten up at the skate park.

I’m sure he harbored rage this past week. Probably also played a video game, drank a Coke, kicked around on his board. Watched TV and smoked some weed.

Sadder than his anger, more important than being jaded, he was simply an afterthought of a kid—a dork who was never taken seriously, even after telling people he was going to shoot his classmates. He was called "the butt of all jokes."

I watch my son in his schoolyard, urging him in my head, from my seat on the bench, to "hit back," or "get the ball, get the ball." I wonder who—the teachers, his friends, the girls—likes him. I can kiss him on the lips, have quiet-time talks and let him wear pink, but it won’t make a difference as to how other kids treat him.

"Awkward" and "pathetic" is how Charles Andrew William’s is described. An invisible child, every mother’s fear.

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