Ticking time bomb or future King?

I just sat down to write something that I thought would be therapeutic about an event that took place when I was fourteen. Something that, as I'm finding in therapy, has affected me far more than I gave it credit for doing. I thought if I wrote it out just for myself, and wrote out an "alternate ending," I would feel better. I still plan to do that, but then a thought occurred to me. If an adult writes a fictional piece about people killing others for any reason, sometimes revenge, other times for sheer joy, no one blinks. Some adults make a rather lucrative living off violently slaughtering fictional innocents in ways far more terrifying than via a shooting spree. If Stephen King wrote about a high schooler going on a killing spree, it would be a best seller. (It is possible that he already wrote about this. Wasn't Apt Pupil about that? I'm sorry Mr. King, I haven't read all your stuff. I'm more of a Koontz girl. But I love your movies and think you're awesome. Although I'm a little bitter about that damn clown.)

However, teenagers, frustrated with the social pressures and ridiculous games played out in high schools across the country, are not permitted this same freedom of creative expression. If a senior English Lit student writes about slaughtering his classmates, he's yanked out of school, expelled at best, and arrested at worse. It is assumed that he is mentally unbalanced, plotting another Columbine. He needs to be removed, studied, possibly sent far away for the protection of the other children. He is immediately guilty of harboring a desire to turn his fiction into reality.

Where is the logic in that? Where is the logic in denying a creative student an outlet for all that teenage angst intensified by adolescent hormones? Have there been actual scientific studies stating that if a teenager writes about murdering his classmates, he'll actually go out and do it? I'd like to see some hard, unbiased data on this. I'm pretty sure all across the country, teenagers are scribbling in their journals (do they still even use paper journals anymore?) about flaying the homecoming queen or castrating the quarterback. If every kid who wrote or thought about it actually did it, we wouldn't have very many high schools now would we? So where is the logic? Preemptive strike maybe? The US seems to be very fond of preemptively striking against other countries, so it shouldn't be surprising they'd do it to even the youngest of their citizens.

When I was a senior in high school, several years before Columbine turned the school system into a place of paranoia and over-reaction, I wrote a story in which another student I did not like was brutally impaled by a hockey stick. I handed it in to my teacher (a Catholic nun). She wasn't thrilled, she told me I shouldn't harbor such feelings of hatred, but that was the end of it. I still received a good grade for the quality of the writing. I did not go on to kill anyone. I never would, except possibly in self defense. I grew up to be a pretty good person, or at least I think so. I shudder to think what would have become of me if I handed that in today.

I feel for teens today, I really do. As obnoxious as they can be (I'm sure I was just as bad), it has to be more than a little disconcerting to know that if you write or say the wrong thing, even if it's just an innocent creative writing exercise, your entire school career can be destroyed. But don't despair, just keep your mouths shut and your pens still until you graduate. Then, suddenly, you're no longer a threat to society if you write about killing the prom queen.