An opinion piece by The Christian Science Monitor today on the Columbine massacre ten years ago and how it ties into high school and college sports has a pretty good point, even if it reaches a little thin.

I totally agree that sports are not life and life is not sports in our schools, and that is increasingly highlighted by the fact that every other country in the world has far better educated young people than America. This isn’t to imply that we are the stupidest bunch out there, but other countries, like Japan and Germany, place far more importance in one’s education and job placement than athletics. Our culture and society is so interwoven with sports however that I don’t think it’s entirely possible for America to ever be on the top of academics, considering just how economically huge sports complexes, sports teams, and media coverage have gotten even in just the past couple decades, waking up tomorrow and telling the nation you want to convert everyone to science isn’t going to happen.

I cannot feel though as if a lot of this is also perpetuated by the same scaremongers who keep telling us our children are all obese and should exercise more. Growing up, sports and physical activity were what your parents and your school forced you to do as part of their idea of the type of balanced life you should be leading. Needless to say this did not stop me from getting a Saturday detention for skipping gym several times a lot. But Gym Class really got to be a pain in the ass in middle and high school, for the exact reasons this CSM article states, your athletic ability is judged more harshly by your peers, and those who underperform or don’t even participate, are pushed down in the social pecking order of your classmates. It seems silly, but this was how high school was for me in the modern generation, and will continue to be as long as we continue to be pushed by the previous generations to become something they wanted for themselves. The result, in rare cases, is kids who go to extreme measures to prove that the upper social order of a high school class, is not invulnerable to the harshest of realities, death.

So on this memorial of one of the worst school shootings in America, we continue to remember what happened that day, but before you lay blame to guns, violent media, and twisted personalities, it took more than that to cause those two boys to commit that massacre, and the truth may be something not everyone can so readily accept when it means they might have just as much fault as the weapons and motives that were used to kill those innocent lives.

tl;dr: guns don’t kill people, misguided souls led by misguided views perpetuated by misguided intentions supported by misguided beliefs kill people