CITY      "I carry my gun on me everywhere I go," I replied with a stone cold look on my face.      When I saw the scared look in the green eyes of the most recent, narrow minded, suburbanite to make a smart remark towards me attending East High, I smirked and walked away.      Although I grew up listening to stupid, humorless, stereotypical jokes about living in the city and attending city schools, from the portion of my family who'd isolated themselves as far away from the city life as possible, I still get pissed when I hear them. Not to say that suburbanites are the only idiots who make these comments. I've got a lot of friends from the city that attend parochial schools that make comments just as ignorant, but most of the time I hear them while hanging out in the suburbs. Particularly Brighton, which is where I was asked if I carry a gun to all my classes about a month and a half ago.      The fact that people make these comments isn't what bothers me the most. The fact that the majority of people making the remark have no idea what they're talking about, is what gets to me. If I was to hear someone who'd lived in the city or attended a city school make the comment, that's one thing. They know what they're talking about. They've lived the life and that's their own opinion on it. But hearing someone who's never really been exposed to the city life make some kind of misunderstanding remark that's another thing.      You can't knock something that you know nothing about. If all that you have to support the truth of these statements is what someone's told you or what you heard on the news or even read in the paper, your argument is useless to me.      For starters everything you read in the papers isn't true. Everyone should know that the media loves to feast off of over-exaggeration and blowing things out of proportion. While attending Monroe Middle School in my seventh grade year, there were anywhere from four to six fights throughout the day one afternoon. Later that day I saw a segment on the six o'clock news talking about the "chaotic and uncontrollable riot" in school. I'm not trying to say that the four fights in school were acceptable, but certainly neither of them were chaotic or uncontrollable riots. Each of the fights had been broken up within a few minutes before anyone was injured or anything was destroyed.      So why is it that a handful of small fights in a city school can be translated into a riot, while I've yet to see a segment on the news exploiting the behavior of suburban students? I've never attended a suburban school for a whole day. But I have stayed at a few for a couple hours, and there are similarities. While the atmosphere at suburban schools may not be as hostile as at city schools, their drug scene is just as active, if not more.      I know people who buy as well as sell drugs in suburban schools, and I know people who've been robbed at gunpoint for leather jackets and jewelry in the bathroom of a suburban school.      Walking away from the group of kids I left worried as to whether I was going to "shoot the place up or not." The only thing that I could think about was how could all of these kids be so ignorant? It was a group of kids who all attended a school that's supposed to be one of the higher ranking high schools in the nation.      You would think that somewhere in the process of receiving a "top-rate" education, these kids would have their eyes opened to reality. That somewhere along the line they would realize that these statements they're making are all based on second hand information, or maybe it's out of fear. After all, people fear what they don't understand.
Marc Gentile
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