Education 101: Keep Killing out of Yearbooks

PETA is appealing to Nebraska’s Broken Bow Public Schools to reverse its decision to allow pictures of students posing with dead animals and the weapons they used to kill them in its high school yearbook. Besides just being a repulsive idea, glamorizing killing would be particularly egregious coming on the heels of the recent deadly rampage at a Washington high school.

Time after time, when young people are involved in school shootings, they have a history of abusing animals. Jaylen Fryberg’s social media accounts depict him hunting and posing with animals he had killed. Jared Michael Padgett, a 15-year-old high school freshman who described his interest in hunting rabbits, shot and killed a fellow student and shot a teacher before killing himself earlier this year. And of course, there are Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who had bragged to friends about mutilating animals before shooting and killing 12 classmates and one teacher at Columbine High School. The list goes on and on.

School officials should be doing everything in their power to stop violence, rather than condoning it. Broken Bow High School should be telling students that all killing is wrong, no matter whom the victim is.