Have you ever heard of February 9th, 2000? There’s no reason why you should have. For most of the world, it was an uneventful day. But for the Owens family, it was the day their six-year-old son became a killer after taking a .32 caliber pistol to his elementary and using it to shoot and kill 6-year-old Kayla Rolland. Here’s another date: June 4th, 1936. This was the time of one of the first school killings, when Wesley Crow shot and killed his Lehigh University English instructor, C. Wesley Phy. Crow went to Phy's office and demanded that Mr. Phy change his grade to a passing mark. When Phy would not, Crow shot him and promptly committed suicide.

How about May 28th, 1975? This was the time of the Centennial Secondary School shooting. Michael Slobodian, 16, killed a teacher and student and wounded 13 others at Brampton Centennial Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario, before shooting himself.

January 29th, 1979: Brenda Spencer, 17, got a rifle for Christmas and used it to shoot into an elementary school across the street from her home in San Diego, California. Eight children and a police officer were injured, and two men lost their lives protecting the kids.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold gained infamy for killing 13 people at Columbine High School and then themselves on April 20th, 1999. This shooting, though it was not the first, led to widespread panic across America; schools were fitted with metal detectors, guards were allowed to search students and their belongings and those deemed a threat were sent to psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors. There is still a major problem, however: it keeps happening.

The newspaper reads like an Iraqi military press briefing, except that the armed plots and attacks are taking place in what should be the happiest, most content places on earth. In their video diaries, Klebold and Harris openly declared that they hoped to "kick-start a revolution". We are quite literally at war with our own children.

No doubt another group of students will become permanently unable to finish their education, and we will, sadly enough, still find ourselves no closer to concrete solutions on how to prevent another tragedy of this kind from happening again. But we can't stop trying to find the answers and making sure everything that can be done to keep our schools safe is being done.

Is the casual acceptance of violence in how we entertain ourselves –with thousands of fictional characters being murdered every day on television shows, in movies, in video games – desensitizing us to what those guns actually do, and promoting these school shootings? We can't deny that young people are steeped in a popular culture that often glorifies violence.

However, blaming the media for society's problems does nothing to solve them. The media doesn't give the guns used to kill students and wound others. The media didn't fail to find out why these children hold enough anger inside of them to commit such a crime. And most young people know reality, and how to distinguish between the glamorous violence in the media and the sickening horror of a death in real life.

No doubt the next shootings will again open the debate over what we do about a society that is awash with guns. An idea that has been bandied about lately is to introduce legislation to ensure that guns are kept only in the right hands. But who is to decide what hands are right?

It is a simple fact that we can never decide whose hands are the right hands. As outdated as it may be, the right of a person to own a gun is not at fault. Indeed, citizens of Switzerland are required to keep a gun in the home, and school-related violence is almost non-existent there.

So why do these tragedies occur mostly in America? The problem is education. Every day people are inundated with the message that violence is cool, and has no negative effects. This is not to say that the media should be blamed, as they are simply trying to make a profit. What is being said is that we should have more messages that point out the horror of death.

There is another solution, too: eliminate the cause. The main reason that school shootings occur is bullying. What if we were to make kids see that cruelty and bullying can lead to death? What if we were to have a society that cared?

Here’s a situation to think about: a boy is in the lunchroom struggling to carry five books, his lunch tray, several papers, and a poster that he has to present in the class directly after lunch. An awkward looking, pizza-faced kid, he has on pants that are a little too short, a shirt that’s five years out of style, and peers at the world from behind thick, blocky glasses that rest under a horribly messy haircut. As he staggers to a table, swaying and weaving so nothing will slide off the pile precariously perched in his arms, he is dreading the inevitable. He will drop something, he knows it. But wait – there’s the table! He’ll make it! With a sigh of relief, he makes a final rush, praying that nobody trips him this time. Yes! He did it! The boy’s things slide onto the table, and he steps back, directly onto a puddle of someone’s spilt chocolate milk. As his feet fly out from underneath him, the boy makes a desperate grab for the table, only succeeding in tipping the table’s contents on top of him. In an amazingly short time, the boy is buried underneath an avalanche of books, papers, nachos, and week-old pizza that’s beginning to need a shave. He struggles to his feet, unrecognizable underneath layers of schoolwork and $3.00 meals that “are a healthy way to get through the day,” if you believed the talking pink rhinoceros on the posters around the school. A tear rolls down his cheek, mingling with the salsa that is beginning to soak through his collar, and the school explodes into cruel laughter.

Now think: what if this scene did not result in laughter? Sure, there would be some, but what if somebody went and helped the boy; either by carrying something beforehand, or attempting to help afterwards. It is so simple if you think about it, and realize that just a few moments of kindness can save lives.