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 merica
has been overtaken by an epidemic of teasing that is turning our
high schools into killing fields. Scrawny teens,
badgered beyond reason, are taking advantage of lax gun laws to
blow away their peers.
Or so we are now told.
"Many are asking if things would have been different at Santana
High if suspect Charles 'Andy' Williams hadn't been bullied," declared
MSNBC, echoing the mass media's predilection for celebrating a perpetrator's
victimhood status — no matter how horrific the crime.
"The shooting…should be the occasion for a fresh and urgent
look at the whole subject of school violence and gun control," droned
a New York Times editorial.
But whatever gun control and teasing actually have to do with a
15-year-old opening fire on his schoolmates with a pistol snatched
from his father's collection seems a rather pathetic, if not politically
opportunistic, stretch. And altogether too familiar.
Here in Flint, Mich., last March, a 6-year-old boy fatally shot
Kayla Rolland, a fellow first-grader who supposedly had taunted
him. His father in jail on drug charges and parole violations, the
boy's drug-addled mother had left him in a crackhouse run by his
19-year-old uncle. It was there that the child found the stolen,
loaded .32-caliber revolver and plotted Kayla's murder.
Like last week's Santana incident, and Columbine before it, the
killing provoked a gun-control spasm — as if another new law
would somehow have made any difference.
Television-talk show host Rosie O'Donnell and President Bill Clinton
demanded mandatory gun locks (gun-stealing crack dealers take that!),
while supporters on the Left organized the Million Mom March in
Kayla's memory. Failure to act on new gun legislation, they insisted,
would only worsen the tragedy.
Now, a year later, the first-grade killer's dysfunctional family
has almost been forgotten. But the Left continues to insist that
by failing to enact stricter gun-control legislation, Michigan
| “A
year from now, will Americans regard the Santee tragedy
as yet another gun-control failure? … Or might the media
begin to question the dangers inherent in a boy living
a continent apart from his (divorced) mother?” |
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has heartlessly ignored Kayla's death.
"The lessons of Kayla Rolland fell on deaf ears in the state Legislature,"
complains Genesee County Prosecutor Art Busch.
Eric Gorovitz, policy director of the Million Mom March, laments
the lack of new laws but says that the girl's death still inspires
his passion for gun control.
"We've got 50 years of National Rifle Association policy and extremist
rhetoric to overcome," Gorovitz says. "There is great enthusiasm
for the prospects of bringing about meaningful change, although
that might take some time."
A year from now, will Americans regard the Santee tragedy as yet
another gun-control failure? (Despite the fact that it already is
illegal for a minor to possess a gun without parental supervision,
to carry a concealed weapon or live ammunition, and to bring a gun
to school.) Or might the media begin to question the dangers inherent
in a boy living a continent apart from his (divorced) mother? Or
why his father did not or could not alleviate his son's misery.
America already has the strictest gun-control laws in its history.
Spurred by the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981
and the rampage on a Long Island commuter train in 1993, Congress
enacted waiting periods, background checks, and prohibitions on
the sale of semi-automatics. Nonetheless, the number of school shootings
increased (although youth violence is down overall).
It is the Left, then, that is deaf to the message which these incidents
send. Unwilling to pass moral judgment on the accused, they instead
are left to recycle irrelevant and wasteful policy prescriptions.
But conservative scholars have warned for years that the implosion
of the traditional family robs youth of both the moral underpinnings
and parental oversight so necessary to leading a righteous, productive
life — particularly in a culture that preaches instant gratification
and bestows Grammys on the likes of Eminem.
William J. Bennett, author of The
Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, notes that the explosion
in juvenile crime in the last thirty years closely tracks the deterioration
of family infrastructure (single-parent homes have increased threefold
since 1965). Even with the recent decline, youth crime rates remain
at levels 15 times what they were ten years ago.
Social scholar John DiIulio, recently tapped to lead President Bush's
Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, attributes this
pathology to "moral poverty," the "poverty of being without loving,
capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong."
While the Left's message clearly resonates with many Americans,
millions of others understand that the key to preventing another
Santana lies not in unending government intervention, but in the
conservative values that that once guided a nation blessedly free
of school shootings.
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