And the beat goes on in Illinois...
I personally think it's due, in a perverse way, to a LACK of violence in our society. People grow up in a very sanitized environment and never tend to see real physical consequences to actions. We also tend to lack any sort of real physical power over our world--we're awash in a modern universe controlled by abstracts and mental constructs with seeming life of their own. Couple this with a tendency to consider violence to be a ghastly, alien thing, rather than an inherent part of our human nature, and you've got alienated individuals who see violence as their particular mark and right--and with a cultural pattern of mass violence in reaction to feelings of alienation--and blammo, school shootings.
