Charles Brown wrote: <<It is despicable how the media is downplaying the racism. One local headline is "Group hated athletes the most ". It starts out: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris hurled insults at Jews, blacks and Hispanics... But they REALLY hated the athletes, who had power and popularity - everything they didn't. (end quote) . The text itself has he word "really" in all caps. We in the Black community, veteran scientists of the vast media phenomenon of covering up racism and constantly nurturing in the minds of the masses a sense that racism is not that big of a problem in U.S. society, read this as "white people, don't get to thinking that these kids' main problem and motive was racism. The main thing was they hated athletes". Yea, right, a big social problem in U.S. history and society, the hate of atheletes. Did you realize that America once enslaved athletes ? That Hitler hated athletes more than Jews ? All the typically prevaricating news coverage is saturated with "damage control" to prevent people from connecting their horror at the crime to a horror at racism in general. I hope Chomsky and Parenti publish books on this media coverup of racism phenomenon alone.>> I've thought of that, too. It is also notable (but seldom mentioned in the media) that all the school shooters have been male, as are most serial or mass killers. Maybe it is just taken for granted that men shoot up while women seldom do so, so reporters feel it is not worth mentioning, thus naturalizing the violent socialization of males. I wonder, though, if in some cases the hatred of people of color and resentment against the jocks (the perceived rulers of American high school hierarchy) may not go together. Fascism has had a lot to do with the rage of the middling sorts (against the imagined power of 'Jewish capital' as well as 'subhuman' races). The same goes for the typical small-holder mentality of many white Americans who position themselves as being squeezed by the Government (or the UN, in the case of militia types) from above and by the Blacks and Latinos from below. Gun culture, I think, feeds off the myth of 'self-reliance' of white American men. Yoshie