School Violence On the morning of April 20, 1999, students of Columbine High School pulled themselves out of bed, and brushed their teeth while still half asleep and feeling groggy. They ate their breakfast and headed out for another boring day at school. None would have ever thought that day that would change their whole life, or that their world would be flipped upside-down. Parents woke up to send their kids to school without any final goodbyes, thinking that their kids would be in a safe place. School is a place where students are supposed to be safe, after-all, they are only there to learn. Students are surrounded by adults with whom the government has entrusted many children’s lives to. Yet massacres like the on in Columbine did not only occur once but many other times after that. Students were attacked by other students at their schools. Many lives have been lost this way, yet nothing is being done to change the situation. The issue is not that the teachers or principal were not able to stop the shooting from happening. The problem is that no one is doing anything to prevent them from occurring. The only way of preventing these massacres is to detect the problems these students have before they get to a point of no return. If teachers were trained counselors, there would be a better chance of stopping these crimes from happening and students would be safer at school. Teachers should also start taking more responsibility for their students’ actions and communicate with counselors and parents about how students interacts at school, teachers need to learn if there is anything the students are doing that is setting off red flags, what can be done to help them. The right actions need to be taken in order to keep students safe at school. Students that commit these crimes don’t just wake up one day and decide to go to school and shoot everyone they run into. In The Mass Murder Problem, Hillshafer states that people who commit these crimes have an decline of mental over a year or more(Hillshafer 26). According to the American School Board Journal, “ Students methodically plot in advance, and shooters frequently tell their friends and others of their plans” (Vail 19). Harris and Klebold, the shooters at Columbine, are a great example of this. They planned, told a few people some of which some were their friends, and the made tapes warning people of the crime they planned on committing (Vail 19). It seems that these students that shoot their classmates have bigger problems in their lives that would make them be so cold as to murder someone they know. It has been discovered that in many instances where a student goes on a shooting rampage at their school. More often than not they have problems at home and go as far as writing dangerous messages to their teachers on in their class work. In The Mass Murder Problem it states that authorities usually discover that these mass murderers have a mental instability and extreme beliefs (Hillshafer 26). A huge controversy has been around for many years now, and that is how much are violent video games contributing to these murders? In an article called Roots of Rampage it states that in search for answer as to why people commit these crimes they had to also examine the persons social world (Newman 6). Some would say that violent video games have a lot to do with people becoming violent and aggressive. It could contribute to a person thinking that they can go out a shoot people because they can do it on a daily basis on the TV, but to every person that is a murderer and plays violent video games you can count many more that also play the same video games and are not violent, aggressive, or become murderers. Who these people associate with and how, share deep feelings with, and what they do on their own time. These are all things that could also contribute to someone’s behavior, or at least hint at what kind of a person they are destined to become. There is “the code of silence,”