On March 5, Charles Andrew Williams walked into his high school in California with his father’s gun and began shooting other students. At least, that’s what the news calls him - three names, like James Earl Ray, Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wayne Gacy.

But he’s only 15, so I’m going to call him what other students called him: Andy. Andy began by firing into the back of Brian Zuckor’s head, but it wouldn’t kill him for a few hours. Then Andy walked into the quad, firing wildly. He reloaded four times. He killed Randy Gordon by shooting him in the back.

Andy, Brian, Randy. We have all gone to school with these people. Don’t let the stern tones of the media pull this catastrophe away from our individual histories; don’t let serious anchormen with turned-down mouths place this disaster on the other side of the world. This shooting took place in our world, among our kind. Each of them - Andy, Brian, Randy - was one of us. We need to think about this; we need to wonder why it happened. We need to figure out why it happened, because the adults are missing the point.

It doesn’t matter why Andy was angry, where he got the gun or whether anybody saw this coming. It matters why Andy thought this was an acceptable way to act. It matters what Andy saw in us that made him think killing your enemies is a good way to deal with them. What matters is why Andy saw American life as cheap. These questions are important in the end.

Before the smell of smoke has cleared from a school yard, another debate on gun control begins. I’m tired of it; I no longer care about trigger locks, waiting periods or background checks. It doesn’t matter to me, because the larger issue is not how Andy got his gun. It’s the fact Andy lives in a society where people get rich manufacturing machines whose entire purpose is to end human life. Holding the Second Amendment up means nothing to me; I don’t care. We take our preciously granted reason, our will, our lives and use them to forge tools to destroy each other - and nobody even questions it.

Old men grow apoplectic over the messages of Marilyn Manson, while they endorse an industry that grows wealthy by perfecting ways to blow holes in human beings. What kind of message does that send to children? Stop worrying about the ideas in the work of a few moronic musicians and think about the ideas in the work of an entire nation.

Eminem is violent says pretty much everyone, and gives children the idea that life is cheap. I say the newspaper gives children the idea that life is cheap.

In 1991, U.S. Healthcare, an HMO, was purchased by Aetna. Leonard Abramson, the CEO, received $967 million as part of the deal - a billion dollars paid out of fear of sickness and death that went into the pocket of an executive. At the time, U.S. Healthcare spent only two-thirds of all of its incoming funds on medical care, choosing to preserve the wealth of their executives by denying medical care to its subscribers.

Lockheed Martin is currently paying people in California to drink perchlorate for six months. Perchlorate is an unquestioned poison that Lockheed manufactures as part of its rocket fuels. In conducting this study, Lockheed is trying to amass evidence of the amount of perchlorate that they can safely release into the environment. For $1,000, a hundred people are being fed 83 times the “safe” perchlorate level.

This week, GlaxoSmithKline and Merck Pharmaceuticals are suing the South African government for patent violation. The government of President Mbeki is manufacturing cheap, generic versions of drugs to treat HIV so some of the 25 million AIDS patients in Sub-Saharan Africa can be treated affordably. GlaxoSmithKline and Merck want to end this practice; they want to preserve their exclusive right to the production and sales of the drug - at prices too high for most of these people to afford.

My God, can anyone argue that life in our country is regarded as anything but cheap? I’ve just given you three companies that have a very concrete idea of life as commodity, able to be sacrificed for material gain.

But these financial concerns are shameful, and are not spoken of. What is spoken of, in proud and triumphant tones, is our control over life. We have, after all, mastered the genome, even if we’re not sure what most of it says. We have tamed the chromosome and turned nature into our lapdog. This is the kind of idiocy that leads to plagues.

Genetic engineering makes us creators of life no more than rearranging books on a shelf makes me an author. What we know is how to take existing life and manipulate it; how to plug a gene stolen from a virus into a bacterium. We created neither the gene, the virus nor the bacterium, yet we crow with pride as if we gave birth to all three. We are losing reverence for the puzzle of life, and we boast that we can recreate it at our whim; we pretend that the inevitable conclusion - that taking life is inconsequential - will never be reached.

It has been reached. We have thrust into our highest office a man who does not see the gravity of taking life. We have elected a man who stood guard over the executions of a 132 people.

Those people were convicted rapists and murderers; this I know. But it is this fact that makes their execution all the more important. How do we deal with the transgressor in our nation? How do we receive those who have trespassed against us?

With vengeance, of course; we’re obsessed with vengeance. While politicians rail against musicians and authors, they smile down on movies and music that celebrate revenge. We are the nation that worships and fears the payback, and mercy and forgiveness are seen as weakness.

It’s important, because, as everyone knows by now, Andy was wronged. Andy was bullied and tormented. But Andy lived in a society that preached that retaliation and retribution, not forgiveness and compassion, were the dearest virtues.

Charles Andrew Williams was mistreated, and he looked to us for guidance. We taught him through our actions that hurting people was an acceptable means to a personal end. We taught him through our pride that we have tamed life in the laboratory, that it is humanity’s to give and to take away. And we taught him through our bloodthirst that mercy is alien.

We look to the edges of our culture and laws to know what turned Andy into a murderer. We should be looking at our hearts.

Rishi Kundi, State News graduate columnist, can be reached at kundiris@msu.edu.