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 / Updated By Daniella Silva 
 
 Following the massacre of 17 students and teachers at a Florida high school last week, a Colorado father of four wrote an open letter Tuesday claiming that the only thing that stopped him from carrying out his own bloodbath 30 years ago was his inability to get a gun. 
 
 “I was almost a school shooter,” Aaron Stark wrote in a letter shared with NBC affiliate KUSA. “I am not a school shooter because I didn't have access to guns. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But people with guns kill lots of people.” 
 
 Stark wrote that he felt like an outcast in 1996, when he attended Denver's North High School, where he was allegedly bullied and had a very chaotic childhood. 
 
 He told KUSA that he'd become enraged and harbored suicidal and homicidal feelings as a teen. He said he tried to buy a gun so he could kill his classmates and then himself. 
 
 “I was going to try and kill a lot of people and then kill myself,” he said during an emotional interview. “It was not directed at the people, it was directed at myself.” 
 
 “If I had rifle I would have been a killer but if I had love I wouldn’t have wanted a rifles,” he said, tearing up. “The only things that brought me out of it were true friendship.” 
 
 Related: Students seize control of gun debate, plan walkouts and march 
 
 Stark said he overcame that phase of emotional instability and now has a loving family. He said he was motivated to write the letter after his wife and daughter “kept saying how they could not understand what could make someone do this.” 
 
 "Sadly, I can," he wrote. "This is a hard conversation to have, but we must have it." 
 
 Stark said later on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon that “we need to have a hard look at the effect that guns have” and said in the aftermath of the shooting people needed to be looking at both mental health and gun reform. He also called for people to show more compassion to others. 
 
 Maria Reyes, Stacy Buehler and Tiffany Goldberg light candles around a cross, as they attend a candlelight memorial service for the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people, on Feb. 15 in Parkland, Florida. Joe Raedle / Getty Images 
 
 Amanda Nickerson, director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education, said the letter touched on two important themes in violence prevention: compassion and connectedness, as well as access to guns. 
 
 Related: How to help the victims of the Florida school shooting 
 
 "This is someone who can speak from a perspective of having been there and being able to reflect on what stopped him and what we can do further," she said. 
 
 "Clearly it seemed like reflecting back he was saying he didn’t have that and we know that isolation and that lack of protective factors and connectedness makes a difference," she said. 
 
 "Another very important topic is that he didn't have access to guns and to these more high capacity machine guns as well," she added. 
 
 Nickerson said it was important to have these public conversations to take away some of the stigma around mental health and illness. 
 
 "Its important to know this isn’t just a mental health issue, there're many people who suffer from mental illness that are not at all violent. The fact that he's hitting upon traumatic background, lack of connection and then his violent tendencies or access to firearms — I think those are really some of the key issues to be having in this conversation," she said. ||||| With the impact of the horrific attack on a Connecticut elementary school still fresh, a grieving nation turns to an equally grief-stricken media in the hopes of making sense of this nightmare. What they find, though, is a lamentable parade of falsehoods and half-truths. With the true villain in this story having robbed the nation of its desire for revenge, media figures and politicians alike are casting about for an antagonist. Since Sunday, a target has emerged in violent video games, and an emotional media is venting their powerless anger on the entertainment industry. But to indict entertainment, and video games in particular, is a self-serving instinct and irresponsible broadcasting. 
 
 
 
 A disturbing number of public figures have lashed out at video games since the atrocity committed at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday. A bipartisan group of legislators embraced this scapegoating on the Sunday news programs; from Democrats like Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge. 
 
 They were joined by members of the media – sadly, too many to count. 
 
 On MSNBC on Monday, Chris Jansing asked her guests what connection Adam Lanza’s interest in video games had to his murderous shooting spree. She quoted senior White House advisor David Axelrod who tweeted “shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?” Liberal contributor Goldie Taylor revealed that she refused to let her child play games until he was 14-years-old. 
 
 “Exposure to that kind of content is just simply not good for children,” Taylor said. “I think that it’s important to guard our children and keep them safe from some of these messages that are simply destructive.” She noted that music, movies, games, and even cartoons, are responsible for… something. 
 
 On Fox & Friends on Monday, legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. delivered an offensively sermonizing renunciation of entertainment producers and videogame makers who are “clinging to guns economically.” 
 
 “They are glamorizing guns in this country. They are the scourge in terms of these guns,” Johnson Jr. said of game and filmmakers. “Guns can kill if people have evil intentions, but don’t tell our children that it’s acceptable to mow down people in malls, in churches, in schools, on the street – they don’t know better. They know what they’re taught. And we’re teaching them wrong.” 
 
 “Death should not be the byproduct of our entertainment,” Johnson Jr. concluded. 
 
 Johnson Jr. cites a study which purports to show prolonged exposure to violent video games over the course of three straight days made the subjects show “increases in aggressive behavior and hostile expectations.” But Johnson Jr. is guilty of cherry-picking data to support his conclusion. A 2009 study showed that video games which focus on driving make the subjects more aggressive than violent games in where the player is primarily shooting at targets. Another study showed that just thinking about violent video games can make males more aggressive. Given the ever-expanding target demographic for games, gun violence should be on the rise. In fact, the opposite is occurring. 
 
 Violent crime, and gun crime in particular, has decreased as videogame playing has increased. Are the two conditions related – that is unlikely. Myriad factors are responsible for the decrease in violent crime; videogame proliferation is probably not among them. Likewise, there is no causal link between being a videogame player and exhibiting violent tendencies. 
 
 The Economist tackled this subject in 2005, and the wisdom they committed to print still pertains: It’s the classic struggle of the old versus the new that has video games in policymakers’ crosshairs: 
 
 “The opposition to gaming springs largely from the neophobia that has pitted the old against the entertainments of the young for centuries. Most gamers are under 40, and most critics are non-games-playing over-40s.” 
 
 The horror that unfolded in Connecticut on Friday was an unspeakable atrocity. It was not, as some have said, a tragedy. Tragedies are so often beyond control, but gun violence is not an inevitable consequence of living in a free society. Politicians feel the need to do something — anything — in the wake of such a disaster to assuage the inevitable public cries for action. Media figures, however, have a different responsibility. Theirs mission is not to advocate but to inform – unfortunately, that kind of responsible broadcasting is fast becoming an anachronism on cable news. 
 
 It is unlikely that any reasonable law would have prevented this attack without negatively impacting millions of law-abiding citizens. No amount of reverence for an almighty God would have made this killer think twice about his actions. No movie or videogame drove Lanza to murder 20 first graders in cold blood. 
 
 Broadcasters used to feel it was their mission to speak these cold truths to their audiences when disaster struck, lest the electorate reach for emotionally-driven and overreaching remedies to jarring events. Today, broadcasters pull on emotional triggers and further aggravate their viewers with baseless scapegoating. I do not know if there is an immediate solution to that condition. Now that is a tragedy. 
 
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– After the Parkland school shooting, Colorado father of four Aaron Stark listened as his wife and daughter discussed the massacre of 17 people. "They could not understand what could make someone do this. Sadly, I can," Stark writes in a letter to KUSA. "I was almost a school shooter." It's a confession perhaps as hard to hear as it is for Stark to air publicly. But it's a conversation that must be had, Stark says. He tells KUSA a violent childhood and years of bullying led him to consider murder and suicide in 1996. "I was going to try to kill a lot of people and then kill myself," he says, per NBC News. It had nothing to do with "the media, or video games, or music." Rather, "I felt like I had nothing at all in life to look forward to and ... nothing to lose." But though he tried to find a gun, he wasn't able to, in part because of an assault weapons ban in place from 1994 to 2004. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But people with guns kill lots of people," Stark writes. "Do we really need to have assault weapons?" he adds in an interview with MSNBC. But this issue is bigger than guns alone, says Stark, noting one kind act—a friend baking him a pie—kept him from committing suicide. Acknowledging "a severe lack of love" took a toll on his mental health, Stark now says "compassion is the only real way we can stop this." Something as simple as "a kind word, a hug, saying 'Hey how are you' … could literally save someone's life," Stark tells MSNBC. "When you're in the worst state and you think that no one cares, having someone actually care can make an entire world of difference."