Recently, some high school students came to the middle school to give a presentation called “Bang Bang,” a piece about school shootings. However, instead of the usual depressing lecture followed by heartbreaking pictures of students who’d died in school shootings, these high schoolers did something different. Instead of putting on a play about the victims, they created one from the point of view of the shooter.
The piece was very emotional and heart-wrenching because the kids the boy had shot came back to haunt him and ask him why he’d done what he did. Finally, he revealed his feelings of loneliness and the bullying he’d suffered through. His emotions and torment spilled out from years of bottling them inside and it forced the audience to wonder how close to the edge someone can be brought before jumping.
However, though I understood why the boy felt he had to do what he did, I still cannot say I felt  empathy for him. Is it okay for someone to brutally take the lives of others simply because they had bullied him? This brings me to the point that justice may not always be moral. Did the bullies deserve to be punished and brought to justice for torturing the boy? Perhaps. But was it moral for the boy to take away their lives? To not only take away their happiness liked they’d done to him, but the happiness of their family and loved ones? Perhaps not.
What drives a person to the brink of insanity may be caused by others, but what causes that person to step off the edge may often be themselves. The boy chose to pick up a gun, loaded with five bullets, walk into the lunchroom of his school, and shoot five students. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. One cannot just simply be forgiven for choosing to end those five students’ lives. Why? Why did he choose to do it? Was it because he was sick of the pain and humiliation? Or was it because he felt alone in dealing with it?
We as humans like to believe that if we were to encounter a lost soul, a shell of a human being consumed by anguish and hate, we would recognize it. Surely, someone must have recognized in this boy the signs and could have done something before it was too late. But the fact of the matter is, most people are too absorbed in their own problems and their own battles to fight someone else’s. So tragedies like the one acted out in the play happen far too frequently.
The boy in the play shot and killed five students. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people in the Columbine Shooting. They were social outcasts and didn’t fit in with the kids at school. Feeling alone and angry with  the world, they decided to make their classmates feel what they did. To make the voices shut up for good. Perhaps the bullies deserved to be punished. But certainly, the type of justice done could not possibly have been moral. Being shot and killed at such a young age with your whole life ahead of you...nothing warrants that.