OPinions
Society to blame for

Rick SMITH

society has never been more blatantly displayed
than during the aftermath of the April 20 high
school shootings in Littleton, Colorado.

Two student “outcasts,” Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,
went on a shooting rampage killing 15 of their fellow
classmates and wounding many more. One’ teen girl
emerging from the shooting spoke of how she begged for
her life. After some careful consideration the killers
decided to spare her. She asked the pair why they were
killing everyone and Harris responded that it was because
they (the jocks) had been mean to them (in other words
they had been teased and bullied). Another witness
reported hearing Klebold and Harris saying, “there better
not be any jocks in here or theyre dead!” “Jocks” inter-
viewed by CNN after the fact confirmed that they had
teased the pair regularly and they provided all kinds of
juvenile justifications for their actions.

Despite their declared target, students of all sorts were
killed. In the heat or psychosis of the moment they
apparently lost their ability to discriminate. Over a hun-
dred rounds of ammunition were fired and somewhere in
the neighbourhood of 30 pipe bombs were planted. What
could cause such powerful and merciless anger in youths
so very young?

Unlike the mass media, I find the death of the two
killers just as tragic as the death of their victims. These
were two very young men with long lives in front of
them. Something extreme must have driven them to
throw it all away in a fit of vengeance. In the wake of
this tragedy it didn’t take long for allegedly intelligent
people to start saying incredibly stupid things. It began
with Bill Clinton making the statement that “we need to
teach our children that violence is an unacceptable way
of solving problems.” Meanwhile, Clinton continued drop-
ping bombs on Yugoslavia as a way of solving his prob-
lems. Clinton even endorsed attempts at putting Milosevic
to death without a trial (the Yugoslavian presidential
palace was bombed) and then denied that he had done
so. The hypocrisy of his actions made his statements ring
utterly empty. The less we hear and see of Bill Clinton,
the better off the world will be. Clinton is the antithesis

T= ignorance and the lack of foresight of modern

Littleton Massacre ©

of moral leadership and is undoubtedly one of the sleazi-
est characters ever to take the oath of office in American
history.

Dr. Joyce Brothers, whom one would assume would be
an intelligent person (since she holds a PhD), appeared
on CNN talking about things like teaching children “anger
management” and increasing security in schools. She said
these troubled teens should have been counselled before
the incident took place, and suggested that these meas-
ures might have prevented the massacre. In her apparent
ignorance she failed to address the obvious cause of the
incident. How could a doctor of psychology be so utterly
blind?

All kinds of “solutions” have been put forward to solve
the increasing problem of school shootings. The list of
possible solutions includes: counselling troubled teens,
stiffer gun control laws, increased security in schools,
stricter controls on violence displayed on TV and in
movies, and many more. All of these solutions are what
we shall call “damage control” or dealing with effects
rather than causes. None of the allegedly intelligent
experts brought forward even once suggested eliminating
the cause of the problem.

If you have a dragon running around causing fires the
solution is not just to follow it around putting out the
fires, or to build firewalls so that the fire doesn’t spread.
At some point you must conclude that the dragon, the
cause of the fires, must be neutralized; otherwise, the fire
will eventually spread and engulf the entire community
just as it did in Littleton.

The solutions put forward by Dr. Brothers and others
are merely exercises in fire fighting and control. We
should be more interested in fire prevention.

What we saw in Littleton were two outcast teens who
were constantly subjected to ridicule and bullying by big-
ger, stronger students. This situation is repeated daily in
schools all across North America and has been going on
for a long time. Strangely, we have never seriously looked
at eliminating the problem.

We, apparently, have decided that it is beyond our
ability to control. We can send a probe to Mars that wilt
land on the planet, pick up rocks, examine their chemical
structure, and send the results back to earth, but we
can’t stop bullying in our schools? Apparently, we can't