Shooter is a fictional story, but it has a specific relationship to a real story, the unfortunate, darkly prophetic event of the Columbine shooting. The primary gunman in the Columbine school shooting was a highly disturbed young man whose online blog resembles Len's diary in Shooter. The effect of the novel is that the reader must contemplate the true insanity of Len who seems to his friends to be just another lost soul in a gang of the social outcasts. There is no indication that Len will necessarily shoot anyone, but somehow, the account is chilling anyway, and deeply disturbing.
The book is about the shocking trauma and causes of one of the saddest symptoms of American disenfranchisement, the story of the young school shooter. The novel is intended to dissuade violence against others, because it highlights the damage the incident caused in the community, and it condemns the actions of the shooter, without demeaning his value as a human. The story is how in the hands of suffering children, guns can become weapons of hellish chaos.
This novel belongs to a category of stories that are intended to disturb, to instruct, and to honor the victims of senseless tragedy. One might say that Shooter is a calm, self-controlled account of real life horror.
