| In Springfield, Oregon this past
week fifteen year-old Kip Kinkel was arraigned in court, charged with murdering two
classmates and wounding twenty others in a cafeteria shooting rampage. It appears likely
that the young man had murdered his parents as well.
This is the latest in a string of a half dozen
similar nightmares that have taken place across the nation during the 1997-98 school year,
including Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Jonesboro, Arkansas; West Paducah, Kentucky; and Pearl,
Mississippi. All involved young killers with guns and without self restraint. Nearly
everyone agrees that we have moved beyond the realm of mere coincidence, that there is
some connection between these horrible events. But that’s where the agreement ends.
As parents grieved last month in Jonesboro,
television commentator Katie Couric suggested that the shootings were rooted in a gun and
hunting culture. She was not alone in this, and it’s easy to see why. Each of this
year’s tragedies took place in regions where legal gun ownership is commonplace, and
where youngsters are often taught about firearms.
But if the blame lay solely with "gun
culture," one should expect this sort of violence to have happened all along in
American history. Generations of American youths have grown up around guns without feeling
at all compelled to commit multiple murder. To the contrary, most young people who train
today in the shooting sports learn excellence and discipline as they do in any sport. Kim
Rhode of El Monte, California has practiced with firearms since she was in grade school.
If guns really do cause violence, Kim should be in serious trouble with the law by now.
Instead, at seventeen she became the youngest woman in Olympic history to win a gold medal
in a shooting sport.
If guns themselves don’t cause criminal
behavior, another popular explanation is the long-term effects of violent television,
movies, and video games. In his May 23 radio address, President Clinton said the recent
shootings are "symptoms of a changing culture that desensitizes our children to
violence, where most teenagers have seen hundreds or even thousands of murders on
television and in movies and in video games before they graduate from high school, where
too many young people seem unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their actions,
and where all too often everyday conflicts are resolved not with words but with weapons,
which, even when illegal to possess by children, are all too easy to get."
But however debased our popular culture might have
become—and debased it certainly is —this explanation is as unsatisfying as the
first: Only a tiny fraction of the millions of children exposed to TV violence go on to
imitate the mayhem they have seen portrayed by Hollywood actors.
Both explanations fail because they try to pin the
blame for violence on something outside the individual—they deny that a young man is
ultimately responsible for his own actions. Blaming anything or anyone but the perpetrator
himself has become the order of the day. Perhaps the most extreme example of this was the
infamous "twinkie defense" employed by the murderer of San Francisco Mayor
Moscone. The accused could not be held responsible, his attorney argued, because he had
consumed junk food. Since that trial we have grown used to hearing that every action, good
or evil, is not based on free will, but is the result of some exterior cause, whether too
much TV, a bad family life, or access to a weapon. This is the result of a long-term
philosophical shift away from the idea of human free will, and the results of that shift
have now come home to roost with the children of the baby boom generation.
The good news is that we are finally recognizing the
terrible consequences of this philosophy, as we see firsthand the results of a generation
of moral neglect of our young people. Appalled by the lack of standards in public schools,
parents are increasingly placing their children in private academies or church-sponsored
schools where responsibility and morality can legally be taught. Some small colleges are
quietly pursuing curricula which pay homage to the classics, politically correct or not.
It took us a generation to trash the truth, and we will struggle just as long in coming to
our moral senses as a nation.
In the meantime we can pass a law to
ban more guns, or place new ratings codes on TV, movies, and video games. But the former
will only serve to redefine as criminals millions of previously law-abiding citizens, and
the latter will do nothing to change what consumers want to buy. What law can remedy fatal
character defects? By banning the culture of guns and hunting we will not stop teen
murderers. But by rebuilding a culture of loving, moral guidance for our children we will.
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© 1998 The Claremont Institute |
