Hard facts about local threats of violence by teens against their fellow students have been hard to come by. Maybe there aren’t any facts; maybe it was all smoke and mirrors, boasts by adolescents who dreamed of having more power than they actually possessed.

In the absence of facts, we’ve been listening to students’ feelings. They’re frightened, because they know how much damage one person with an automatic weapon can do, and how difficult it is to protect a-gainst that possibility. They’re angry — "pissed" is a frequently used word. They feel betrayed that their own peers would plot against them. They’re confused about why administrators and police waited so long to act on a threat students now say they’ve known about for a long, long time.

They’re not as innocent as they once were. Being locked into a room and massacred is not an image that our children should have in their heads. Yes, they’ve heard it all before, but not about themselves. It’s almost too horrifying to think about, and yet, now, they have to. We all do.

There are some others, though, who understand how it might happen. They understand how resentment can build against kids who seem to be privileged, who seem to get away with stunts because they’re somebody important’s son or daughter or a valuable athlete. They understand that students outside of the mainstream have a different experience in high school.

He’s not a bad kid; he gets picked on a lot by the jocks, they say of one of the suspects.

Not all the jocks, one teenager corrects. It really pisses me off when kids get lumped together — guilt by association — all the jocks, all the skateboarders, all the band kids ...

Being "picked on" seems to be a common thread running through school shootings.

It’s a rhetorical question, but the answer, today, seems obvious. You’d reach a point beyond which you just couldn’t take it any more. You’d get a gun. You’d build a bomb. You’d make threats. If nobody stopped you, you might carry them out.

Not most of us, one student chides. Some kids would do that. It’s not many, just a few. He points out that on the other end of the spectrum are students who grow introverted and depressed, sometimes to the point of suicide.

But one is all it takes.

That’s not what "good kids" would do, of course. Good kids would stay out of situations in which conflict was likely. They’d turn the other cheek. They’d be role models.

But there’s that one hall where they all hang out ...

They’d do the responsible thing and tell their teachers that they weren’t being treated fairly.

Good kids, if they heard of a plot such as the one publicized this week, would tell someone.

Sometimes that’s a risk worth taking.

Their sense of impotence is not an excuse for anything, certainly not for violence, but it’s a symptom that may have been ignored for too long. Some students believe that we — adults, the "them" in the "us v. them" dichotomy — have been negligent in addressing the cause of school violence today.

That’s a dangerous perception, because when teenagers believe no one is looking out for them, they’re more likely to take matters into their own hands. They don’t care about due process. When they believe they have nothing to lose ...

It becomes obvious, if one speaks with enough students, that there’s a perception, held by a significant number of teens, that life at MCHS isn’t fair. They speak frequently about those who "get away with" infractions that perhaps shouldn’t be ignored, just because they have a useful talent. That’s shouldn’t be a surprise to us; we’ve heard it before. Now we’re hearing it about ourselves.

Perceptions aren’t always closely related to reality, and in the real world, important people sometimes do get away with many wrongs, including murder. But it seems obvious, looking at a long list of school shootings perpetrated by people who felt very keenly the injustice of their school social systems, that we need to deal with the perceptions as well as the realities. We can’t believe they’ll go away if we ignore them; they’ve already blown up in too many people’s faces.

That’s not going to be a popular position, but we ought to have learned by now that addressing the symptom without probing for the cause is a short-term solution at best. What is it about American schools, that they keep spawning such rage? Glossing over the painful, messy, hormonal, embarrassing realities of adolescence, holding up some students as perfect while (perhaps inadvertently) making others feel like second class citizens, valuing some contributions while downplaying others — those tendencies are undoubtedly a big part of the problem.

We owe it to our children to be honest. Situations can be addressed openly without naming names, particularly when everyone at MCHS knows exactly who’s involved.