Asked for their view of the killings in a suburban Colorado high school, San Francisco teens agree on a diagnosis that places much of the blame on the suburban setting. Without claiming any particular virtue for themselves, they do think that the city offers outlets and opportunities that might ease the pressure of being young. PNS commentator Katherine Cowy Kim, a 27 year old writer in San Francisco, is an editor of YO! (Youth Outlook), a monthly newspaper by and about young people published by Pacific News Service.

SAN FRANCISCO -- To city teenagers, the suburbs are a barren land where nothing is distinctive and the kids are "just normal" and "goody two-shoes."

Parents shop at Costco and the kids look like clones -- "square" and "not street-smart," Vanessa Goodrich, 16, a native San Franciscan, says of her suburban peers.

Without regular exposure to violence and no outlets for anger or creativity, these city kids think suburban kids are more likely to explode than the so-called juvenile "predators" in the city.

At a YO! Youth Outlook workshop focusing on the latest school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, Matt Fowler, 16, rhymes about life in Suburbia.

"Repressed to dull stupidity.
To MTV or poverty
Left out of the world of diversity
Don't have the balls to live in the city
Wanna live in the hot country
cheap and oh so pretty."

Josue Rojas, 19, was born in El Salvador and moved to San Francisco when he was two. He jokes, "Someone throw those kids a book," but adds in all seriousness, "It's because they watched Terminator Two and listen to Iron Maiden."

Patrick Hermes, 16, considers the suburbs a wasteland. "There's nothing to do there," he says. "Kids probably just go to school, come home and watch TV." In contrast, says Hermes, the city has everything a young person could want -- poetry slams, bookstores, concerts. But in the suburbs, it's just "houses and gas stations."

Oscar Acosta, 19, adds, "Mom makes them lunch, dinner... It's rich white people in their own little world." He doesn't like the people in the suburbs, nor would he want to move there. "They think they're all better, that they don't have any problems, that everything can be fixed with money."

All the city kids talked about suburban "parents" and families. "Jocks and geeks go home to their mothers and fathers," says Rojas. "Gangsters and graffiti kids in the city are seeking out families."

The shooting in Littleton was the seventh incident in a year and a half involving angry white boys, guns, schools, suburbs and death.

Teresa Rondone, 14, thinks guns in cities are different. "People here have guns to protect themselves from robbers," she says. "People there have guns to hunt. They grow up with guns. They like guns."

Inner cities and kids of color are often blamed for the rise of violence in the nation. But these urban kids defend themselves. "Mainstream white America is quick to blame the problems they make," points out Charles Jones, 20. "Who makes Doom? Who distributes Doom?"

Rojas adds that shootings at city schools don't get nationwide coverage. "My school had five shootings in one semester," he explained. "It's because we're not from the heartland... because the kids weren't white."

He adds that suburban kids, who don't see the bums on their doorsteps, the junkies on their blocks, naively romanticize urban life. "Kids in the suburbs try too hard to be city kids," Rojas says. "They end up doing something stupid that city kids would never do. They go overboard."

"Drop off a kid from the suburbs in Hunter's Point," Royal Toliver, 18, adds, shaking her head. "It'd be like taking an innocent bystander and putting them in the pen. They just wouldn't be able to handle it."

Susana Palma, 17, who has lived in both city and suburb, has a clear picture of suburban kids. "Druggies. Alcoholics. They do good in school, but they're rowdy little kids who have a lot of sex. They party all the time and they get away with it. They're neat and nice and they live in a house in an all-white area."

Asked to pick one reason why these shooting sprees keep happening in the suburbs, Hermes says without hesitation, "They were bored."

And all the young people in the room nodded. "Yeah, they were just bored."