School Shooting: Is the issue muscle or your mind?

What do you think causes school shootings? Do people hit a breaking point that just sends them over the edge? Or is it that they are "mental" and just missed their medication timeline? Not a lot of people go through the tragedy of school shootings, and hopefully not many will but most brush the person's actions off.

Why is it that when adults ask questions, we the teenagers, usually say 'you don't understand'? They ask us to explain and we don't know how to explain all the pressures on us. We don't know all the problems that many teenagers face everyday: bullying, abuse, depression, to name a few.

When asked, teens often just brush it off and say "Yeah everything's fine," "Just tired," or "Just a rough day at school." Many of us go through small problems but some of us also go through major events that shape our lives, making us a shell of what we used to be. Sometimes small abuses or disappointments add up until they are major, until we think that this is all there is, that they won't stop, that nobody cares. Many people think that if they talk about their problems it shows weakness.

Jackson Katz, who co-founded the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said in a 2014 interview, "Whether mass shooters suffer from personality disorders, or mental illness, this can hardly be said to trump gender. To see why not, just ask a basic question: If mental illness is the reason for most school shootings, why aren't 50 percent of these shootings done by girls and young women? Don't girls and women suffer from mental illness in roughly similar proportions to boys? If so, why are 99 percent of these shootings done by boys? The fact is that even boys with personality disorders and mental illness are products of powerful gender norms and cultural narratives that affect everybody" [EARP, JEREMY. "Fifteen Years After Columbine We're Still Asking The Wrong Questions." Voice Male 18.63 (2014): 10. MasterFILE Complete. Web. 20 Nov. 2015, and Dec. 2015Web 17]

How are these 'gender norms' and 'cultural narratives' established'? Well, think about advertising and films. Ads on TV and everywhere show men with rock hard muscle.

In many of our homes, mothers still teach their daughters to do things around the house, and our fathers teach their sons about mechanics, carpentry or other stereotypical male chores, that are sometimes accompanied by yelling and BIG Fights. But we can't forget our parents had to go through this also. If they went outside of a narrow range of allowed behaviors they would be labeled freaks, weirdos or other things.

What does being a man mean to you? Is it being able to be emotionless, being buff or just being able to lay the smack down on anyone?

In the speech Emma Watson gave about gender equality to the UN Sept. 20, 2014, she said, "I've seen men made fragile and insecure by a distorted sense of what constitutes male success. Men don't have the benefits of equality either. We don't often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that that they are and that when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence. If men don't have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won't feel compelled to be submissive. If men don't have to control, women won't have to be controlled." ["Emma Watson: Gender Equality Is Your Issue Too." HeadQuarters. UN WOMEN, 20 Sept. 2014. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.]

Men don't know how to talk about their feelings. We only know muscle. That is what we were brought up on. If we aren't as buff as the next dude we think we won't be accepted. If we can't lift as much as the next guy it's a devastating blow to our self esteem. We then do irrational things to try to gain it back. We feel this need to try to prove to everybody that we are grown up men. But we still need to be a kid or a teen. We need to focus on grades; or if that one girl will say yes when you ask her to the dance; or if you can draw that one character doing something awesome.

We will always be who we are when we are alone. Yet otherwise, Katz suggests that kids and teens today are afraid to step out of a narrow range of behaviors that constitute gender 'norms', as if they are set in stone. But stone crumbles.

So we can change this. We have that power as the next generation. We all have unique things about us. We need to take off the mask of who we think people want us to be. Be who you are: whether it be a bookworm, an artist, a video game junky or a workout fanatic. This could stop the school shootings.

When people can be themselves, they won't have to worry about not being accepted. WE, as the new generation, as Generation Z, the generation that has smoking down to eight percent, we can be who we are, who we are meant to be, rather than who society thinks we should be.