Let's look at the social recreational violence that took place a lot at a place i went to long ago - middle school. It was then called junior high, but for three years from grade seven to grade nine, i was stuck in a world of major league social violence in a survival of the fittest mechanism. Since kids grow at different rates in puberty and girls grow faster than boys, my life went from being a fat roly-poly bug kid to being last to grow up, bouncing between bullies catching the brunt of the 'wow, see what i can do' philosophy that kids use when they find that their growth spurt made them bigger than somebody else. Back in the day - we were allowed to fight it out and adults only interferred when it became both mean and chronic.
I finally needed to hide inside. That was when chess became my sport of play choice and i left the playground battles to others more fit than i. It may in fact be why i missed out on biology - i was into linear thinking indoors and not into dealing with most other people who didn't share my interests outdoors. Was i a geek, sure, but geeks were fewer and farther between and not a social organization in and of themselves. I learned to get beaten up and dust off and keep going. It wasn't the end of the world.
Nowadays - school will not tolerate any violence or meanness of any sort, on paper, while officially giving a blind eye to the day-to-day social conditions of middle school. Serious lord of the flies stuff. Kids who are bounced out in the social forays are isolated and quit on themselves. Rural areas do not have the critical mass of access to people of different types for kids to recognize that the problem is in societal behaviors, not individual behaviors - as everything pushes conformitity to the unrealistic ideal of the perfect human - which every kid assumes they are via the miracle of life. So kids quit on themselves early. From then on in, it is always behind and playing catch-up.
Worse yet, is that adult society is now playing a very perverse form of blind man's bluff. People feel they have to be noticed and the more outrageous they choose to act, the more permissible it is to laugh at the fool and take advantage of his naivity. But when the fool has been mistaught and is taken advantage of by guile, then 'houston, we have a problem'. Information is so readily available, that what is taken as truth is neither vetted against what is truth, nor of what truth apperared to be in the past. The mechanisms of life appear the same, but the subtle nuance has changed to the point where you, as the individual, really don't know how to act with regard to the given situation. You get mixed signals on pain and pleasure, on right and wrong, on real and false, on everything - and when you break, the lemming inside takes over and you do what you are expected to do by the group you happen to be running with at the time.
What does this have to do with violence? Perhaps if kids on the middle school playground were allowed to fight it out and pick their battles and develop action behind their belief, to demonstrate that they can deal with violence, then as adults we would be able to deal with more things that come barrelling down at us, rather than abdicate responsibity, along with fixing blame and hoping it all goes away. I am not pro violence, but no-tolerance banning of violence in school leads to the public and media response we see happening from this week's school shooting. There is a place for violence in the world, so let's learn how to define the problems of violence and deal with them, rather than continuing to be surprised by every next incident.
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