JOHN KASS: School shooters are a symptom of a culture that is ill.

I know two Greek-American kids who brought shotguns to high school.

My brother Peter and me.

There were two 12-gauge shotguns. We were going hunting. . . .

The wave of school shootings dating back to Columbine are telling us something, but we don’t want to understand, because understanding might make us guilty, and get in the way of our true American pastime: seeking instant gratification.

When Peter and I brought our guns to school, we weren’t threats. We didn’t have Twitter or Facebook.

We were just two boys with a good pointing dog on a cool morning in autumn.

We locked the shotguns in the trunk in the school parking lot and parked in the shade. We left our pointer, Jason, in the car with a bowl of water in his dog cage, with the windows half open.

Then we went to class to be marked as “present” before we ditched and drove to some fields near Kankakee to hunt pheasants.

“We didn’t think about killing anybody,” said Pete.

I’ve got some related thoughts here.