--George W. Bush

So in tonight's presidential debate, the replies to a question on gun control ended up centering around that school shooting at Columbine High School last year. Gore's take was that if laws restricting the purchase of handguns had been tougher, the two shooters might not have been able to get their hands on the things in the first place. There's an obvious flaw in that reasoning: if they hadn't gotten guns, they'd likely have stuck with their homemade pipe bombs, possibly killing even more students... but that's not what I want to get into here, especially as I pretty much agree with Gore's overall point, just not with his use of this as an example.

Bush correctly pointed out that the real problem in that particular case wasn't in the ready availability of guns, but in societal values. But, alas, he chose the wrong values to focus on. The problem, he proclaimed, was that children today were being raised without values, and without an understanding of consequences. They don't realize that killing people really does have consequences, he said, and the solution therefore was to (a) teach values, and (b) toughen juvenile crime laws, so would-be juvenile offenders would see that society won't tolerate their acting up.

Umm, Dubya? Here's a nickel; go buy yourself a clue.

I mean, the Columbine High killers fucking killed themselves. What sort of penalty could one propose that would serve as a tougher deterrent?

The governor would have it that popular culture, the Internet, and weak laws turned these kids into evil killers with no respect for human life. Gore, for his part, granted that part of the problem can be traced to (all together now), violence in the media, although he thinks tougher gun laws are also a major piece of the puzzle. But both miss the point, I think.

I'd been thinking about the whole thing earlier today, as it happens, once again mulling over the fact that, when you come right down to it, most of my sympathies lie with the killers.

Oh, their actions were wrong, of course. I don't mean to condone or justify them in any way. I'm against the death penalty in all cases, and this is certainly no exception. But in my mind, the major tragedy in Littleton wasn't that two evil, depraved killers massacred a bunch of their schoolmates; it was that two high school students were driven to destroy themselves and their oppressors in one violent burst. The problem isn't violence in the media or, heaven help us, a lack of pressure on today's kids; the problem is a school culture in which people who don't fit in find themselves put through hell every day.

Continuing to focus on stopping (or curing) the outcasts rather than finding a solution to the larger problem isn't going to get us anywhere. If, indeed, a solution exists. There are reasons why, if I ever have kids, I'm home-schooling them. No child of mine is going through what I did.

So I saw my parents and siblings, had some food, raided the freezer, then went to my brother's apartment for a haircut, then went home, in a markedly improved mood. And when visiting my family improves my mood, that's gotta be saying something frightening about where it started.

'Course, painting class is tomorrow afternoon, so I'll probably go back into a tailspin then, but I do have a plan to help reverse that, involving more of this social contact stuff. Stay tuned.