We have blamed everything for the destructive rampages that have occurred in our nation’s schools, and now we will hear similar blame being slung around about Virginia Tech. It goes through the same stages every time. First, our media conveys shock and sympathy for those affected by the tragedy. Then, we immediately proceed to minute-by-minute coverage of things that suggest more possible things to blame. We snatch onto those nice little details – he wrote violent stories, he had mental health difficulties – we grab onto them in desperate affirmation that only somebody abnormal could do something like this.

Since nobody has ever bothered to come out and say it, I guess I should. School, and the people in it, are so dysfunctional and hypocritical that they make people volatile.

“There is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence,” according to the U.S. Secret Service’s 2002 study on school shootings, titled “The Safe School Initiative,” wherein school shootings from 1974 to 2000 were investigated. The report goes on to say that there is no set of traits that describe all or even most of the attackers in these crimes. They come from neglectful foster homes and from loving families, they have been “A” students and in danger of dropping out, they are isolated loners and somewhat popular, according to the study. Two-thirds of them had never been in any sort of disciplinary trouble at school.

We are looking in the wrong place. We are casting the blame in the wrong direction, because it is too painful to say what is obvious – that the difference between a student and a student who kills lots of other students is very small, because they are both dealing with the same arbitrary, artificial, intractable, nonsensical hierarchy every single day with no way out and no foreseeable end in sight. Certainly Cho Seung-Hui had issues, and so did Klebold and Harris when they attacked their high school. They lived in houses with both of their parents, had access to good education and had never wanted for food or shelter or luxury. In a lot of fundamental ways, they are exactly like I am – middle class, fairly privileged, fed up with listening to teachers and peers talk. What separates me from them is only that I’m never going to kill anybody because … well, because it’s wrong, I guess.

Until school administrators start firing teachers for having sex with their students, until high schools get rid of cameras and metal detectors and security guards and drug-sniffing dogs that remind students of how little they are trusted, until we stop splashing the school colors everywhere and fostering a feeling of exclusion in students who don’t feel much loyalty to an institution that drags them out of bed at 6 a.m. and then punishes them for falling asleep in class – until those and many other things come about, there are going to be people fed up enough to meticulously plot out murders.

Education reform has been touted by many politicians and activists who say it is a good investment for the future.

I say human lives depend on it.