On the day Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the two "Beltway snipers," pleaded guilty
to six shootings in Maryland in 2002, President Bush headlined a summit on
school violence in Chevy Chase, Md., not far from the scene of one of the
attacks.
School violence and street violence are part of the same picture. When I was
in school, safety focused on traffic (I was a member of the safety patrol),
not injuring yourself in shop class and making sure "spotters" ringed the
trampoline so no one got hurt. The one student who got in trouble with the
law for stabbing another student off campus was ostracized. That kind of
behavior was not to be tolerated by either adults or my classmates.
While certain inner-city schools in New York were "blackboard jungles," to
recall a Glenn Ford-Sidney Poitier film from that era, most parents and
students viewed their schools as safe. Then, metal detectors were devices
you took to the beach to locate coins and drugs were obtained at a pharmacy
with a legal prescription from a doctor. We mostly lied about sex and the
few we knew were having it wore taps on their shoes, had their hair styled a
certain way and if they were girls, took typing instead of Latin.
The school summit consisted mostly of bromides. No one has a real "solution"
to the disturbed who bring guns to school and slaughter children. There was
talk of better student-parent-teacher communication, but short of turning
schools into detainee centers, there are no guarantees that even under the
best of circumstances more shootings won't occur.
The real problem lies outside of school and in the human heart and wider
culture. Kids see violence celebrated throughout the world. Fanatics blow
themselves and others up on orders from their god and in pursuit of a
twisted view of heaven on earth. The news is filled with stories about
missing and abused women, most of whom suffer a violent death. Entertainment
programs are drenched in blood and gore. Gunfights are sometimes in slow
motion so that the viewer can watch a bullet entering and exiting a human
body, destroying tissue and splattering blood. While most who watch do not
copy such behavior, some sick people do.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 16,000 people were
murdered in the United States in 2004 (the latest year for which statistics
are available). Murder rates in 1950 and 1960 were half those in the 1980s
and '90s before declining slightly in subsequent years.
We read and hear about kids being shot and killed for a leather jacket or a
pair of high-priced sneakers. Why has human life become so cheap and why has
moral conduct eroded to the point that many commit murder without a second
thought?