Gina Tron knows what it feels like to be a high school outsider, someone who knows the thrill of infamy and the craving to make waves.
Tron was an almost-school-shooter and recently wrote about the infamy awarded to shooters, the reasoning behind a manifesto and what we can do to prevent other troubled teens from taking violent action:
Although I had no desire to go on a killing spree at all, I began to sort of enjoy it. I started to identify with mass murderers, probably because I thought I was the same as them: a loser destined to be secluded from society. But more importantly, I felt that being suspected as a villain gave me power. I was no longer a quiet nobody. I was infamous. People paid attention to what I did. I now had a stage. Teachers and adults feared me, and some kids my age, though they claimed to dislike me, were curious about me. There was something about my situation being plastered on television that made it feel like I was more than just a human. I may have been a loser, but I did something. The notoriety was as addictive as it was isolating. And there was something so uniquely American about the whole thing.