This problem needs fixing

Yet another school shooting has rocked the country, this time in Illinois. What is wrong with us?

I still remember where I was when I heard about Columbine and watched the drama unfold on a TV at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center. We were all in shock and completely baffled as to how two teenagers could or would plan such an elaborate mass execution.

Since then, how many school shootings, copy cats, and other horrors have taken place, and what have we done to stop it? I'm a liberal and open-minded person but am starting to wonder if our current gun laws need to be revisited - or on the flip side - if every single person in the country needs to start packing some heat for protection.

Or is it a larger societal issue that needs to be addressed? I honestly don't know and this is not an attempt to solve it, but rather to question out loud and to wait for answers.

I do know that this generation is much different than mine, and the biggest difference is the technology.

We've become a nation of loners, staring at a computer screen, lost in an unreal world of fantasy and anonymity ... in doing so, are we stunting the nuances of human interaction that we learned as children on the playground? ... where we learned teamwork, empathy, competition, problem-solving, social skills and the art of winning and losing gracefully?

I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and the closest I ever came to "gaming" was Atari and Ms. Pac-Man! At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, shaking his fists at the kids in the neighborhood, I have to wonder if we are raising a generation of sharp-shooters and desensitized children through these realistic video games where violence and killing is the goal? I simply don't understand this form of entertainment.

I used to take note of my boyfriend playing those war games for hours on end, this near trance-like look of intensity and determination on his face. The joke always was, "I'm going upstairs to kill people." We laughed. But how funny is it?

What on earth could motivate someone to walk into a college classroom and start randomly picking off other students and then have the selfish audacity to kill himself so as not to have to deal with the repercussions?

No, you can't blame a video game or that "crazy rock 'n' roll music" for creating killers, but something is happening in the evolution of our young people because this school shooting phenomenon is fairly unique to this generation, and it deserves to be scrutinized.

In video games, everyone gets a "do over" when the game ends, life goes on, and the players go back to their regular lives. Unfortunately, for the families of too many victims, this will never be the case.

So what can we do to fix it?

Kathy Ivie is a nonprofit fundraiser who lives in East Walnut Hills.