Brother in Arms

“The phone call came early that morning from a friend from her home town—Springfield, Oregon. He stammered something about having bad news and hung up. Soon afterward, another friend called and told her that there had been a shooting at Thurston High School, where Kristin had gone and where her brother, Kip, was in ninth grade. ‘Is Kip hurt?’ she asked. She didn’t get an answer. Then a third friend phoned and blurted out what nobody else wanted to say: Kip was the one who had opened fire at Thurston. As Kristin would later learn, he had killed two students and injured another twenty-five.” Jennifer Gonnerman in The New Yorker with a very interesting look at What Happens to a School Shooter’s Sister? “There’s this tremendous need to be able to put us in a box with a label that’s different than the one you put on your family. Because if we’re similar that means this could have been you, too. And I think that thought makes people very uncomfortable.”