\"The freaking shooters are more sympathetic than the jocks they shoot at. That isn\'t supposed to happen.\" Maybe not, but I think it\'s a good thing that it did. The point is to explore actual people and the triggers that cause such a tragedy. The author wanted to raise awareness and tell people that school shooters aren\'t necessarily just plain crazy people. Such an assumption would imply that nothing can really be done to stop shootings. By exploring their pain and the triggers, by making them sympathetic, the author is telling us that if society had treated them differently, they wouldn\'t have done this. It\'s not really necessary to flesh-out the jocks that much- we don\'t care why they treated the shooters poorly; we just care about the results of their doing so. It\'s not just an anti-gun Aesop-it\'s an Aesop about treating people decently and trying to prevent these psychological problems in the first place.
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Preachy and Annoying
I set out to like this book, thinking it'd be a good, creepy read about one of the most terryfiying crimes in modern society. I instead got a preachy tale that got so bad and infuriating that it was almost painful to read at points. I'm sorry, but it was hard not to get angry when anti-gun statistics are printed in bold at the bottom of every mother lovin' page. Okay, we get, the author is anti-gun! Please move on! Beyond just contrasting with my own views on gun ownership, which is a massive understatment, there's isn't a whole lot of character depth. The freaking shooters are more sympathetic than the jocks they shoot at. That isn't supposed to happen. You cannot spend the whole book detailing why the shooters aren't two dimensiional, mustache twirling villians, treat the jocks as exactly that, and expect our sympathies to suddenly switch over. The jocks have NO redeeming qualities that would make us want them to have any other fate than to get their asses blown off by the people whose lives they've got out of their way to make a living hell.