When I still had the gun, however, I would bring it in the house every so often to clean it. To imagine myself firing it. Some days, I took it to school with me. But then I would go into the military and learn so much about guns, I would want to abandon them forever. I would read Rage and wonder why, with so much beauty in the world, men choose to ... See more

Here are even more things I think about: standing in the window of my dorm and looking down. Feeling small and afraid. Of the war. Of the world. Of how to make my way in it.

I think of the student in my writing class who wrote an essay about his school getting shot up. How he knew the kid who did it. How they all walked around afterward as if some f... See more

It took more than one slim novel to cause [the shooters] to do what they did. These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse. ... My book did not break [them] or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they... See more

None of us do. Not what makes a kid walk into a school and kill himself, not what makes him walk into a school and kill others. Not what he is thinking. Not his hopes or dreams, though we do have some idea of the forces that made him this way. In Rage, Charlie doesn’t know why he is doing what he is doing, although he knows he will regret his actio... See more

Except me, and people like me. And there were a lot of us back then. We came from small towns but wanted to go somewhere big. We felt stifled and confined and wanted to walk in the larger world, but seeing the larger world—the wars and the shootings and how all anyone could talk about was the economy—made us think that the wider world wasn’t worth ... See more