Guns and Poses
The Left’s gun-control script.

By Henry Payne, an editorial cartoonist and writer for The Detroit News, & Diane Katz, an editorial writer for The Detroit News.
March 14, 2001 9:00 a.m.

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 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.