Kip Kinkel was a 'normal' teenager from a loving and successful family in Oregon.
He lived with his parents and his sister on the edge of a forest in a large log cabin named 'Shambala' and attended school at Thurston High.
His parent's were completely against violence of any sort, and actively brought their children up in this belief. Kip's father taught him gunmanship with the intention of instilling a healthy respect for firearms.
Unfortunately, Kip's brain was wired incorrectly. Instead of shunning violence, as his parents had intended, he became fascinated by it.
He bought, stole and acquired a large arsenal of knives, guns and ammunition; this in the same year his parents became increasingly concerned over his behaviour and had him prescribed the anti-depressants Prozac and Ritalin, and were sending him to Anger Management Counselling sessions.
A small sample of Kip's behaviour in that year goes like this;
Kip told his friend, Destry Saul, that he "...wanted to put a bomb under the bleachers at a pep rally and block the doorway so students couldn't get out...". He was a joker and a boaster, so Destry didn't take him seriously.
Destry dismissed the next threat, too. "If I ever get really mad, I'd go and hit the cafeteria with my .22 (rifle)," Kip was said to have told him. "I have lots more rounds for my .22 than my 9 (mm pistol) and I'll save one for myself." "Sure," Destry said. "Whatever."
Destry also said after the event, "He wanted to go into the Army so he'd know what it was like to kill somebody. But I never thought he'd do something like this."
Neither did another friend, Mike Joseph, though he was worried that Kip seemed angry a lot. One day he asked Kip why he was poring over a knife catalog. He replied, "When I snap, I want the firepower to kill people."
Kip was caught making pipe bombs and setting off firecrackers in cats' mouths. Not to worry, everyone said, probably just a phase.
He boasted about his butterfly knife; about wanting to get a hook knife, held easily in the fist"...so you can punch and gouge your enemy at the same time."
On Jan. 4, 1997, local police charged him with throwing rocks at cars from an overpass.
In a literature class a School, when it was Kinkel's turn to share from his journal, he routinely stood in the front of the room and read about his plans to "kill everybody."
Students recounted how, in the same semester, Kinkel delivered a well-organized, authoritative talk on how to make a bomb. He illustrated it with a detailed picture he had drawn of an explosive connected to a clock.
Others recalled regularly seeing Kinkel and a friend walking along rural Deerhorn Road toting a 20-gauge sawed-off shotgun and a .22 rifle, shooting at birds and ground animals.
In his middle school yearbook, Kinkel's classmates voted him "Most likely to start World War III."
On his Internet service account, Kinkel described his hobbies as "Role-playing games, heavy metal music, violent cartoons/TV, sugared cereal, throwing rocks at cars and EC (horror) Comics." For an occupation, he wrote: "Student, surfing the Web for info on how to build bombs."
After being suspended from school for stealing his father's old military service pistol and hiding it in his locker, Kip murdered his parents. He then came back to school the next day armed with knives, a .22 rifle, sawed-off shotgun, 9mm pistol and explosive devices, walked into the canteen and let loose with 51 bullets. He shot and killed 2 of his fellow students, and injured 25 more before being wrestled to the floor.
Kip is now serving 111 (that's one hundred and eleven) years for murder.
So you see, you can apply all the zero tolerance rules and anger management classes and chemicals you like, but as long as there are crazy madmen who want to kill people and guns readily available, they'll have no effect at all.
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