One common thread in the apparently disconnected series of killings in widely scattered places over the last 18 months is that the assailant is young, white, male, and from a suburban or small town background. Pacific News Service asked four contributors to YO! (Youth Outlook), themselves white, to give their views on this situation. Kate O'Brien, 16, lives on her own in San Francisco. Fourth of four parts.

"If you are backed into an alley, you have the right to defend yourself,"

-- William F. Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator

If you are born a white man, you are already several notches above the rest. Your people have profited from the enslavement and persecution of nearly every other race, and will continue to do so. You might grow up believing everything will be handed to you, or that you will only need to do a minimal amount of work.

This is at least the common assumption of the middle and upper classes. If it is true, what does the young white male have to get angry about?

People act out violently when they feel powerless. Rage is a last resort when the buttons have been pushed too hard and too many times. Men, who are by nature more aggressive, might suffer especially from violent impulses in desperate situations -- and their power is in fact being taken from them, at least on a surface level.

Whites are no longer the majority everywhere in America. The white race does not dominate in cities in New York, Texas, and California. This could be intimidating to someone who is used to dominating everything everywhere. Measures such as affirmative action only add to the fear that something is being take from you -- even if it is something intangible, like dignity. Imagine a white man who has the skills and training needed for a particular occupation, is turned down, and sees the job given to a black woman. He feels like a failure.

These "outbursts" are not as recent as they seem to be. I think this rage has been churning within the culture for quite some time. In fact, whenever any animal feels threatened it lashes out. Only now, more and more people have access to bombs or guns, so the explosion is a little bigger -- but it's still the same thing. We are still animals, and we do still act out our animal instincts, quite frequently.

On top of that there is the guilt factor. Nobody likes to feel that they've done something wrong, or that they should be ashamed of what they've done or what they prosper from. As a white male, you also receive little to no sympathy from anybody else. As a man you are provided few safe outlets for expression, not that most men have ever been encouraged to talk about their feelings anyway. If an adolescent male finds himself depressed or upset he is told to bury himself in his studies, or better yet go play a nice clean game of football. That, in and of itself, is enough to bottle up and explode sooner or later.

We seem to forget time after time, that if you let things sit out, they don't go away, they spoil. And then you're left with what we have here. The violence is not new, it's been there since the beginning of time. It's just that somebody pushed the envelope over the edge. Again.