Westside story - Jonesboro, Arkansas

Two weeks after the Arkansas school shooting, some of the pieces to the puzzle of this story of juvenile crime and small-town gangs are evident; others remain missing

(in Jonesboro, Ark.) - In a broken voice, Scott Johnson talks of a respectful boy who loves sports and went to church. "My son is not a monster," he says of 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson, one of the two boys who allegedly lured classmates out of Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., on March 24 and then opened fire, killing four girls and a teacher, and wounding 10 other students.

No, not a monster, but perhaps a puzzle, certainly a paradox. How can two children be multiple murderers?

In like manner, everything about the Jonesboro tragedy seems jarring and incongruent. At a jam-packed memorial service on March 31, dedicated secularists such as Attorney General Janet Reno and Education Secretary Richard Riley stood uncomfortably as Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's words were read: "I'm more convinced than ever that the real hope for humanity is not in the laws we pass but in the Lord who provides his grace for the days when there is no adequate human answer."

Miss Reno countered with a monotone admonition: "We cannot lose faith in human goodness."

The national press, by nature uncomfortable with puzzles, has packaged the Jonesboro story as a straight piece on gun control. But it's not that simple. The guns have always been here, in rural Arkansas and everywhere else in the nation. The question remains, what has changed, and why?

The shootings came on a Tuesday just after noon. Sixth-grader Emma Pittman says she watched Andrew Golden, 11, pull a fire alarm outside a classroom at Westside Middle School. More than 200 students and teachers filed out of the building. That's when students saw Andrew "Drew" Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson open fire. Four young girls and a teacher were killed. Ten others were injured. Minutes later, the boys were captured running through the woods toward a stolen van. On the boys and in the van, police say, were at least 10 firearms, reportedly stolen from Drew Golden's grandfather.

Dead were Paige Ann Herring, 12; Natalie Brooks, 11; Brittany Varner, 11; and Stephanie Johnson, 12; as well as 32-year-old teacher Shannon Wright. The two boys last week were being held in the juvenile section of the Craighead County jail.

The Jonesboro shootings may raise deeper cultural questions than the school killings in West Paducah, Ky., last December. Michael Corneal, the 14-year-old who allegedly opened fire on a before-school prayer meeting, came across as a disturbed misfit with no history of trouble or violence. But both Drew Golden and Mitch Johnson are reported to have talked openly about violence and gang activities. As in Jonesboro itself, the warning signs were ample and evident. If Paducah was about the tragedy of something going terribly wrong in a single youth, then Jonesboro is about the tragedy of what has gone wrong in the way many American youths are raised-and why gang culture has become a threat even in small towns such as Jonesboro.

The boys

Reports suggest that last summer Mitch Johnson showed signs of trouble. Last week, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press reported an accusation that Mitch molested a little girl while he visited Minnesota last summer, according to his aunt and a former neighbor. "It happened," Mitchell Johnson's aunt, Linda Koelsch, said. "He did it." The boy was charged with inappropriately touching the girl, who was about 2 at the time, a source close to the investigation said.

After returning to Arkansas, though, Mitch attended a weeklong youth revival in September. On the first night, he walked the aisle, approached a counselor, and prayed to accept Christ as his savior. Now, six months later, Central Baptist Church youth minister Christopher Perry says he's troubled by the two vastly different images of the boy that have emerged.

"During that revival, 280 kids came forward," says the minister, who wears the proper youth minster goatee. "I've thought back, and there was nothing about Mitch's profession of faith that was any different from any of the others. I just ... all I can think of is Jesus' parable of the seeds. Some fell among rocks."

Mr. Perry says church leaders tried to be faithful in their followup after the revival, but after a month of being active in the youth group, Mitch dropped out. Some kids later told Mr. Perry that Mitch was becoming a bully. He was angry about his parents' divorce, they told the minister, and he was angry that he didn't see his father much.

But since January, Mitch had been frequenting the Bono Revival Tabernacle Pentecostal Church in Bono, the small town bordering Jonesboro where he lived with his mother and stepfather. William Holt, the pastor there, says Mitch's mother would drop her son off, and Mr. Holt would take him home. Mr. Holt spoke about Mitch's manners. "You don't find a lot of kids these days that say 'yes sir' and 'no sir,'" he said.

But his classmates tell another side of the story. Mitch talked often about gangs and violence, they say. He doodled gang symbols during class (and teachers saw this). He would pretend to shoot other kids, or stick his finger in their sides, as if he had a gun. He picked on other students. He boasted of pulling a knife on another student.

And the day before the shooting, he told classmates he had "a lotta killing to do." He told one, Melinda Henson, that "tomorrow, y'all are gonna find out if you live or die." No one related the threats to school officials or even their parents; most now say they thought he was just talking.

Some students said it might have something to do with girl trouble; some kids "go steady" at this early age, and 12-year-old Candace Porter had recently broken up with Mitch because, she says, his gang talk bothered her. Candace was one of the students wounded on that Tuesday.

Drew Golden, the other alleged shooter, was also flashing gang-related hand signs. Some kids say that of late, he had taken to bicycling around his neighborhood wearing camouflage clothes and carrying a hunting knife, which he would use to threaten other children.

Three months ago, the father of one of Drew's friends went to a school counselor. Edward Woodard, a Jonesboro electrician, said that Drew told his young son about a plan to come to school and shoot people. The counselor talked to Drew, according to Mr. Woodard, and Drew admitted the plan. But he said he'd had a nightmare about such a scenario; in the dream, Mr. Woodard says, Drew died, too, and that "scared him off his plan." School officials have not confirmed Mr. Woodard's story, but one tale has been confirmed: The night after the shooting, 11-year-old Drew Golden curled up on his bed in a juvenile lockup and cried for his mother.

Sheriff Haas has cried, too. "These are babies," he says.

The details simply aren't available about the family life of these boys. There doesn't seem to be any indication that either of the Goldens, both postmasters in nearby towns, were active in any church. Mitch Johnson's mother and stepfather would drop him off at youth group meetings and Sunday services, but ministers didn't say they attended themselves.

For now, at least, the families are being shielded from the press by law enforcement officials.

The town

Late in March, Richard Williams's big Mercury Marquis slid through the streets of downtown Jonesboro, Ark., under old oaks just beginning to bud.

"Jonesboro was and still is one of the greatest places in the country to raise your children," said the bearded, polished former pastor. "The churches are strong, the schools are strong. Really a wonderful place."

Mr. Williams's own presence belies the claims. He now works with CityTeam, a California-based Christian group that focuses on typically urban ills such as juvenile crime, homelessness, and poverty. If Jonesboro is so idyllic, why is CityTeam here?

He let out a breath and admitted, "That's a good question. Well, civic leaders in Jonesboro were thinking ahead; they saw some indications that some problems were beginning to emerge."

In fact, studies showed juvenile crime in Jonesboro had jumped 471 percent from 1986 to 1995. The dropout rate was hovering stubbornly near 27 percent. And a juvenile crime task force estimated that 60 percent of the teens had experimented with drugs, while as many as 75 percent of the high-schoolers were sexually active.

Mr. Williams's long, gray car entered the more depressed areas of the city. He passed boarded storefronts and shabby warehouses, then slowed down at a downtown lot where a freshly poured concrete slab can be seen. Eventually, this will be a 15,000-square-foot youth center, to be run by CityTeam and funded by the community.

"Jonesboro isn't a sleepy little town anymore," Mr. Williams said. "The gangs are here. We have the signs spray-painted on the buildings. I remember when I was pastoring here, and I would open the Jonesboro Sun and see one or two break-ins reported in a week. Now we have 10 or more a day. That's the tip of the iceberg."

The gangs

Jonesboro Sun Publisher John Troutt has a handsome, craggy face, a tailored suit, and a serious smile that never quite reaches his eyes. And he's got a calendar chock-full of community involvement-Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce committees, and various task forces.

Mr. Troutt helped bring in CityTeam last year, but he's still reluctant to speak freely about the town's troubles. "We knew there were problems on the horizon," he slowly intones, leaning back in his chair. "In some senses, the youth seemed to be rudderless-trying to go astray. It's happening everywhere, and it's part of Jonesboro's incredible growth. We went from 30,000 in 1980 to 55,000 today. And many of us were feeling it was time to address these issues."

His reporters have been writing of serious and documentable gang activity for nearly a decade. In the late 1980s, a Chicago gang called Folk Life or Folk Nation set up shop in Jonesboro's Apartment City and other housing projects. Other gangs have come up from Little Rock.

The spread of gangs is not so much about the search for new markets as it is about gang parents' belief in the myth of small-town safety, according to the FBI. Relatives will move a gang-member child out of the city and into rural areas, in the hope of removing him from gang influences-but he often brings the gang culture along with him. Also, new kids on the block who had no real previous gang involvement will invent tales to tell their new acquaintances, gaining in the process easy, instant status.

Gang expert Steve Nawojczyk, the former county coroner in Little Rock, says there's no such thing as wannabe gang members. "If a kid believes he's in a gang, he's in a gang. I call them teenage mutant gangsters. There's no real connection with the Bloods or the Crips in L.A., but they adopt the culture from what they see in the media. I think they're even more dangerous than the connected groups, because they're out there making up their own rules."

Mr. Nawojczyk began seeing an increase in gang activity in Pulaski County (Little Rock) in the mid-1980s. "The homicide rate started to increase," he says. "And it was all kids." He began to see gang tattoos on the bodies of children he examined. Some of the spread was economic opportunism, he explains-gangs wanting easier ways to obtain guns and sell drugs-but most of it was media-influenced. The movies Colors and Boyz in the Hood, and "gangsta" rap music, were effective recruiting tools.

The granddaddies of the gangs are the L.A.-based Crips and Bloods. The Crips gang developed among black youths, too young to have participated in the Watts riots of the 1960s ("Crips" is probably a variation of "Cribs," a designation of many small street-level groups that indicated the youthfulness of the members). Once the Crips organized, opposing gangs grouped together for self-defense. They choose the color red, the opposite of the Crips' blue, and called themselves the Bloods.

Chicago's gangs formed two camps also: Folk Nation (or Folk Life) and the Vice Lords. Later, the Folk Nation gang allied itself with the Crips, and the Vice Lords joined with the Bloods. Other gangs, such as the Gangster Disciples and the Latin Kings, have made similar alliances.

In Jonesboro, Mitch Johnson had shown some sophistication, according to the reports of his friends. He was often seen writing "Crips Killer" on dirty windowpanes-that's a common tag left by Bloods gang members.

The predators

In 1996, Princeton professor John DiIulio, along with former anti-drug officials Bill Bennett and John P. Walters, published a sobering book, Body Count. The book described "the coming superpredators," juvenile offenders who could become the most conscienceless, brutal criminals in recent history, because they have grown up "fearing neither the stigma of arrest, pains of imprisonment, nor the pangs of conscience."

Mr. DiIulio states unapologetically that we face a cultural crisis: "Crime is a cultural and moral problem with cultural and moral solutions. It is traceable to human failures, the disintegration of institutions that make for decent character, that socialize and civilize. Being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach the young right from wrong."

Predictably, Body Count was criticized from the left-not least for using such words as right and wrong. A reviewer in The New York Times Book Review slammed it, maintaining that morality is secondary to economics as the cause of crime.

Worse yet to modernist eyes were the solutions offered by Mr. DiIulio and his co-authors. Churches, they argued, are what work. Mr. DiIulio arrived at that conclusion in a wonkish way, by studying statistics. He found that about half of the kids who fit in the "at risk" categories turn out just fine, with the experience that made a difference being the "religious or faith-based variable."

In fact, the list of practical recommendations in Body Count sounds like a brochure for CityTeam: a safe place to hang out after school; supervised recreation programs; tutoring; real mentoring-not just counselors to pat kids on the back and affirm them, but real adult friends; and most importantly, the compassion of Jesus Christ.

"Am I my brother's keeper? The right answer to that is yes," says CityTeam's Mr. Williams.

The aftermath

On a cloudy late March day in Jonesboro, with rain predicted, cars were lined up eight and nine deep at the Perkins restaurant. A hastily organized car wash led off a dreary Saturday, with three funerals scheduled for later in the day. Several youth groups were splashing autos and each other for donations.

Christine, a 14-year-old wearing a denim baseball cap, her long, brown pony tail emerging at the back, had the sleeves of her crisp yellow T-shirt rolled up just so. After some pushing, she admitted that she had ironed her T-shirt. For a car wash? "So?" she responded, effectively putting the issue to rest.

"It feels good to do something to help," explained the high-school student. The money will go to the Westside Middle School Crisis Assistance Fund-but what, exactly, is the fund for? "I don't know," she said. "Medical stuff, I guess. It feels good to do something."

The need to "do something" is a feeling that extends beyond Jonesboro to the rest of the state and indeed, to the rest of the nation. One result of the tragedy seems to be a revival of the national debate on the nature of juvenile crime.

"How are we to square the image of a child and the image of a killer?" asks CityTeam's Mr. Williams. "That's what troubles us. In adults, we have no trouble seeing crime as a moral decision. In children, we want to see it as pathology-we want it desperately. Does an 11-year-old know he killed somebody? Yes. But does he understand the finality of death? I don't think so-not when he's seen thousands upon thousands of deaths on TV and in the movies, and in video games.

"The difficulty for us is to understand what's going on in the mind of an 11-year-old child-but that's what he is, a child. When it was over, all he wanted to do was crawl up in his mother's lap and cry. That's not a hardened criminal-that's a child trying to grasp what he has done."

There's been remarkably little call-even in Arkansas, which national media reports repeatedly note in ominous tones is "a Southern state"-for toughening the juvenile laws. Gov. Mike Huckabee has set up a commission to review the laws (one of his appointees is Mr. Nawojczyk), but he's said firmly that a knee-jerk reaction would be a mistake. The problem is the "culture of violence," he contends, and that sickness can't be remedied solely by locking up children.

In the end, he says, what went wrong in Jonesboro is that caring adults were not close enough to these children to see the warning signs, and in particular to show them the way of Christ. "That's what every kid needs-that's the vision," he says. "If people can't see it now, I guess they'll never see it."

 ARCHIVE FROM: http://www.worldmag.com/
April 11, 1998
Volume 13
Number 14

DO YOU KNOW? 

# "The profile of a potentially violent student 
#"The definition of school violence 
#"School violence prevention steps 
#"Warning signs for school violence 
#"Pre-event strategies 
#"Working with law enforcement before an event 
#"Working with emergency services during an event

What should you do if and when an event occurs? There have been numerous tragedies in America's schools.   Be prepared for school violence events in your community. Lessons learned in high profile cases including Littleton respond appropriately to a potential school violence event.  This knowledge could save lives in your agency and your community! We've all witnessed Padukah, Jonesboro, Springfield and Littleton. We hope there won't be a "next time", but you need
 to be prepared!

From:  http://theword.hunter.cuny.edu/

 Soapbox
It Will Happen Again, and Guns and the NRA Are Not the Blame
by Helen Klauck

When I first heard about the shootings that took place in an ordinary high school, I was dumbstruck and sat numb, listening for more details. When they came, and as time went on, the "experts" paraded across the TV screens, with the post-psychobabble of where-had-they-gone-awry?-angst and Monday-morning quarterbacking.

I'm sorry to sound cutting here, but didn't the hand-wringing come after Jonesboro, Ark.? And Springfield, Ore.? And Pearl, Miss.? And West Padukah, Kentucky? And San Ysidio, Ca.? In 1984. I was a young, feisty 18; I'm a young, feisty, mom of 32 now. The finger pointing, blame-shifting, laying this at someone's doorstep has begun. I'm not trying to take away from these parents' pain and anguish over the merciless deaths their children had to undergo or the emotional chasms the survivors have found themselves in. I'd like to let some of the air out of the sails of these arguments, and give you, Online Reader, another perspective from a Christian's point of view.

First, as much as this has outraged you and me, unfortunately, atrocities the world over happen every day. We just don't hear about all of them. Countless children die via abortions and abandonment all the time, too. Where's the outrage over this?

The NRA, planning for a gun convention over the April 23-25 weekend, cut its get-together to one day out of respect for the victims. And blaming the NRA for the guns in the first place has begun. It isn't at fault, though. Neither is the Internet, the Oliver Stone movie, "Natural Born Killers," Marilyn Mansion,or violence in the media. All these may have collectively influenced the already-poisoned minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. To solely blame the gun industry, Charlton Heston and the NRA, I believe, is intellectually lazy and looking for an easy scapegoat. All the gun laws in the world will not prevent a tragedy as we saw on April 20, because you can't legislate against madness. Nor can you try to understand insanity. You'll only become confused; hence why it may be called insanity.

I do believe, though, that if someone had held a gun to these two savages, perhaps the carnage may've been less.

If I'm called a fiend for defending the Fourth Amendment, so be it. More laws only are more intrusive for those who try to live moral, decent lives and for those who use guns for recreational purposes. I did when I was a teen. Does this make me a criminal? No.

I believe we're asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking, Why did this happen, maybe we should be wondering, Why is this happening now when it hadn't happened years ago?

When I went to high school, I wasn't part of a clique. If I knew then what I know now, I'd probably win a Nobel or a Pulitzer prize. Or had become a famous geneticist. But I was teased, and I kicked some major butt, too. Did it ever dawn on me to go completely freakazoid on my fellow students? No. Why? Because I had God in my life and parents who basically gave a damn about me.

I question the parental skills of the Harris and Klebold families. Why not? Someone has to. I'd notice if my kid dressed in Goth, had weird friends, and let his grades take a nosedive. Didn't they care? Where were the parents' concern? And where are their apologies for their irresponsibility and carelessness to the victims' families now?

In the age of political correctness, parenting has been degraded to dysfunctional buddying, with no limitations on the children whatsoever. Too impeding, the politically correct say. Yeah, well, if you let your kids do whatever they want, chaos reigns.

How many more victims of madness do we need to get the point? I'm fed up with the current pop psyche of tolerance, free love, don't you dare tell your child no, you'll only stymie their growth, and don't mention God, because he'll only control you.

People want answers for something as senseless as this was. I do, too. But, the only answer may be is that there is evil in the world, it happens, and no one can control that.

But, in the words of vintage Paul Harvey, "To leave out the law of the LORD, is to remove the law of the land." I say this because I'm ticked off over this and that all this can be avoided if we wanted it to. I say this because it needs to be said, politically correct or not. And, if what I wrote here tweaked your nerves, good. It's been a pleasure.

Helen Klauck is a media studies major in the Department of Film and Media Studies.Soapboxis an occasional column she will be writing.

On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Jim Giglio wrote:
[snip]
> 
> By contrast with T.C. Williams, the Columbine principal was unaware until after the 
> shooting that such a thing as the "trenchcoat" group even existed. And judging by his 
> responses to an interview on Dateline, he was also blissfully oblivious to the arrogant 
> behavior of a sizable fraction of the school's athletes toward the "geeks." This guy 
> should be fired.

IIRC, this is the exact same problem that preceeded the Padukah KY incident.  People, 
students and adults, had in fact complained about the prayer circel often.  Those complaints 
were ignored.

It would have been as simple as moving the thing from the one place where it was sure to 
intrude into every students entrance to the school.

[snip]
-- 
John M. Price, PhD                                     jmprice@c...
Life: Chemistry, but with feeling!   |   Comoderator: sci.psychology.psychotherapy.moderated 
         Atheist# 683

When it comes to our society, this command definitely hits home. Just mention the names of Padukah, Kentucky, and Columbine High School and you realize that we , as a society have a problem.

FAST-FACT: DYING YOUNG Among elementary and middle school children, homicide is now the third leading cause of death. The equivalent of one classroom full of children is killed by guns every two days. Between 1979 and 1991 firearms took the lives of 50,000 children, about the same as the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. --Washington Post Weekly, Feb 28, 1994

In a Kenosha, Wisconsin, McDonald's, Dion Terres opened fire with a .44 caliber magnum, killing two middle aged customers and injuring a college student; he then turned the gun on himself. In a suburban Kansas City mall theater, a 15 year old pumped four bullets into his estranged mother's brain. In California, housewife Sopehia White sauntered into the Corona Regional Medical Center and shot two nurses with a .38 caliber pistol. In a Topeka, Kansas, courtroom, a convicted drug dealer gunned down five people before killing himself with explosives.

Several years ago our nation was appalled by the violence that was taking place in Yougoslavia In one year's time some 500 people died because of the unrest. But during that same period of time in the United States, there were 3 times that many murdered in Los Angeles County. 376 Americans died in the gulf War, but over 1500 people were killed in New York City during that same time span.

And it's not just an American Problem.

STREET KIDS MURDERED DAILY IN RIO An average of one street child a day is murdered in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.

As high as the murder rate is in the United States, it is 15 times higher in Colombia. The leading cause of death among adults there is homicide, with 80 people dying a violent death each day, according to 1991 statistics. Murder is so commonplace in Colombia that it rarely makes the evening news. "Colombia's culture of death" by David Miller. World, Jan 16, 1993

Comment From the Web (Page no longer available)

Hey--did you know? America has suffered from an incredible lapse in morals over the past few decades. I'm not kidding! Just look at all of the violence on television!

I've been hearing that America is falling in a moral downward spiral for several years now, and I'm willing to wager that this perceived problem has been decried for much longer. Never mind that all crime, and especially violent crime, is in a downward spiral of its own.

"Let's get God back in our lives." Maybe--just maybe--if we all went to church on Sunday, bad things wouldn't happen! Normally, I would pay these words the respect that they are owed; religious tolerance and all that. Looking at the recent school shootings, as I'm sure you'll soon agree, one begins to wonder if these concerned Americans aren't simply taking the opportunity to voice their own agenda.

There's one thing that sticks out about the communities where these shootings happen. Padukah--wasn't the target of that town's shooting a prayer group? Columbine, Jonesborough--correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these suburbs in which Christianity thrives? Didn't Cassie Bernall die for her belief that there is a God? Face it: these are Christian communities. God is already in their lives. The shootings may have been committed by someone who doesn't care for Christianity, but short of a Spanish Inquisition, we have no way of insuring everyone in a community has "God in their lives."

Recall that I mentioned the overall decline in crime and violent crime; where do you suppose those declines matter the most? Poor neighbourhoods, very likely inner-city ghettos that WASPs¹, as responsible Americans, try so desparately to ignore in their Suburban havens. Reality soon set in for Suburbanites: they aren't Tolkien Elves, and they haven't sailed off into the Western Havens where only good things exist. Shootouts at schools, those "very bad things" that once existed only in the inner-city, have moved to those very same refuges that the bourgeoise have lived in for generations. "It couldn't happen here," people say. Well, it could and it did.

I can't help but be reminded of American indifference to slaughter in Rwanda. When it comes to the whites in Kosovo, though, oh yes--we're on the ball. Our shooting tragedies pale in comparison, and yet they are a microcosm of one dominant aspect of American thought; and the more I hear, the more I realize that God has nothing to do with it.

(Page no long available)

School violence response expands

With the arrest Friday of an 18-year-old Florida teenager for allegedly threatening Columbine students and with a recent school shooting in Fort Gibson, Okla. that injured several children, Gill believes there needs to be a place where young people who endure such tragedy can share their experiences.

"We do feel there's a need for these kids to connect with one another," Gill said.

In fact, groups of students have made smaller-scale initiatives on their own. For example, students from Littleton, Co., visited those in Conyers, Ga., where a shooting came close on the heels of the one at their school, he said.

Gill wants to create the same kind of contact and dialogue but include students from schools where the largest shootings have occurred -- Padukah, Ky.; Pearl, Miss.; Springfield, Or.; and Jonesboro, Ark.; as well as Conyers, Littleton, and now Fort Gibson.

He has conducted three similar camps at the Ferncliff Camp and Conference Center in Little Rock, Ark., for survivors of a 1998 shooting at a school in Jonesboro in which nearly a dozen students were wounded and five people lost their lives.

One of the big questions for students and their parents at those camps was, "Where do we go from here?" Gill said.

"We began -- at the encouragement of the parents and the kids -- moving into leadership skills. They said basically, 'Let's begin to move from being victims to being leaders and healers of others. You know, we don't want to come to camp every year and just remember what happened on the tragedy day.' Their idea was let's reach out to others and learn how to help others through the unique experience we've had, instead of just burying it. Let's take a tragedy and turn it into a triumph, which was the theme of our first camp."

In that vein, participants helped Arkansas tornado survivors at their second camp and, this summer, packed health kits for Church World Service.

It helped the survivors to realize that "some people deal with tragedy every day and let's look at the bigger picture. It helps you gain perspective on your own tragedy when you realize that you're not alone," Gill said.

Indeed, that would be one of the main purposes of a national camp: to help survivors realize that they are not alone.

Many of the Jonesboro survivors were in middle school and have several more years of school remaining. Those students can be there for others, like the students in Fort Gibson, Gill said.

That kind of bonding and potential for healing is what Gill would hope to accomplish with a national camp, but he says he doesn't have any preconceived notions about the format and would like the students to determine it for themselves.

There will be a curriculum for the weeklong camp, but it will be flexible, he said.

"Maybe from this camp, which now looks like it will happen -- I'm making more and more contacts into these communities -- a peer-to-peer network will emerge.

"It wouldn't surprise me at all for them to say at the end of the week, 'Let's form some kind of a way of staying in touch with each other and figure out what it is we could do both for healing...and maybe for prevention. Maybe there's things we can do...maybe there's something we can write together. Maybe there's something we can put on together that would be helpful to schools that are looking to prevent this kind of thing.' "

Putting together such a retreat is not as simple as deciding to have one, however.

There is the challenge of bringing together groups with different experiences, Gill said. Some of the schools are urban. Others are rural. Some students are middle schoolers. Others are in high school. Some schools are big, others small.

And Gill has met with some resistance to his idea from the various communities affected by school shootings. In some of the places, many people -- clergy, school officials, and parents -- are just tired of talking about it and tell him they just want to move on.

"Our response is: We understand how you can feel that way. But we also feel that we want to talk about it in a way that does move us on. And that's what we're trying to orchestrate here. Maybe they just don't understand quite what we have in mind."

Gill first learned the value of retreats to disaster survivors as a staffer for Heifer Project International, when he helped organize a retreat after the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

"People want to connect with other people who've been through similar experiences," he said.

"We see the need for 'connectionalism' in this," Gill said. So far, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have committed financial support to the national retreat, and more support may be forthcoming since many additional denominations have helped fund smaller-scale camps in the past.

National denominations and communities alike are looking for resources to help young people "struggling to say, 'What if this happens to us?' or, 'What is the Christian response to preparing our young people for this?' or just dealing with the fact that we're now living in a world where disaster doesn't necessarily mean Mother Nature," he said.

Return to:
Public Violence Disaster Response

* In a 1995 survey, 10 percent of high school students reported carrying a weapon on school property in the past month, and 8 percent of high school students had been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property (Sickmund et al., 1997). 

* More than half of the nation's schools experienced some crime during the 1996-97 school year, and one in 10 reported a serious violent crime such as rape, robbery, or fights involving a weapon. In 1996, there were 10,000 reported physical attacks or fights with weapons in schools, 7,000 reported robberies, and 4,000 reported rapes and sexual assaults (Heaviside et al., 1998). 

* From 1989 to 1995, the percentage of students victimized by violent crime increased from 3.4 percent to 4.2 percent (Chandler et al., 1998). 

* Violence (not confined to school violence alone) is the second leading cause of death for America's students (Prothrow-Stith, 1994). Concern about school violence is widespread, although perceptions of the problem vary among different populations. 

In a 1996 study, 72 percent of the general public considered the presence of drugs and violence in schools to be the most serious problem affecting education. Among teachers, however, only 47 percent viewed drugs and violence as their top concern. Teachers cited school funding, class size, and low academic standards as more significant issues than school violence (Farkas, Johnson, Friedman, & Bers, 1996; Rossman & Morley, 1996). 

Perceptions of violence are significant because feeling unsafe is not conducive to learn- ing or to teaching. Out of fear, some students avoid specific places at school, such as restrooms or certain hallways. (Bastion & Taylor, 1991). A small percentage of high school students (4.4 percent) have missed at least a day of class because they felt unsafe (Centers for Disease Control, 1995). Worrying about becoming a victim causes some students to carry a weapon or to become victimizers themselves (Kimweli & Anderman, 1997). 

In schools with a high incidence of violence, teachers may hesitate to confront misbehaving students out of concern for their own safety (Kenney & Watson, 1996). Students who know their teachers fear them are less likely to show respect and more likely to be insolent and insubordinate, making good teaching almost impossible (Noguera, 1996). 

Clearly, there is much work to be done.

From: Preventing School Violence

BY LORI LEIBOVICH | When two teenagers opened fire last Tuesday at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school, the hunt for answers began almost immediately. What motivated Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, to don camouflage, pull a fire alarm, then lay in wait until their classmates tumbled out of school before gunning them down? Four girls and one teacher were killed in the cross-fire and several students were injured. 

Though reports suggest that violence at schools is not on the rise, recent high-profile killings at schools in Pearl, Miss., and West Padukah, Ky., have highlighted the scourge of kids and guns and suggest that adolescents -- and not just in the inner city -- are seeking revenge, maybe even thrills, with firearms. 

Blame has already been leveled at our violent, gun-riddled society, a place where, increasingly, children settle playground scores with guns, not fists. But what about the boys themselves? What is going on in the brain of a child who decides to shoot his classmates in cold blood? What are the psychological stirrings inside a young killer? 

Salon spoke with Alvin Poussaint, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of several books, including "Different and Wonderful: Raising Black Children in a Race Conscious Society" and "Faith of our Fathers: African American Men Reflect on Fatherhood." 

People are blaming our violent society for this crime. But couldn't this tragedy simply be about one kid's brain chemistry? 

All of it would be speculation without knowing the history of these kids and what kind of life they had. We've gotten little snitches of this in the news. There are some general things that I could say. There was a leader and a follower. We know that the older boy had a lot of anger and a lot of it focused on girls. We know he had actually verbalized to other children that he wanted to kill people. 

What causes a kid to blow his classmates away? 

You would think they'd been socialized to know you don't kill people, that they go to church and they learn "Thou shalt not kill." So you have to wonder what else is being taught or what isn't being taught in their homes. And what else influences them, in terms of valuing life.  

What is at issue here is whether a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old understand what killing means, whether it really registers that the people are going to be dead. 

But ultimately, isn't this crime the fault of the boys, not that of society? 

They committed the act. They're to blame for it. And they are responsible for it. We expect children to be responsible. We don't expect children to kill. And if they kill they should be punished. I think it would be very wrong to spin any theory that excuses these boys' behavior. You can blame the families too. But the children have to take responsibility.

There was almost a game-like quality to the killing, with the kids dressing up in fatigues, then hiding in the bushes like snipers. 

That's the part that is most scary to me. In America, violence is considered fun to kids -- they play video games where they chop people's heads off and blood gushes and it's fun, it's entertainment. It's like a game. And I think that is in some of the psychology of these kids -- this "let's go out there and kill like on television." It's fun for them, and they don't quite understand they are killing people and those people won't come back next week for the next episode. 

How do we make kids understand what killing really means? 

Parents have to counter what comes through the media by saying violence is not fun, it's not funny; that violence is an unacceptable way to negotiate conflict. You have to tell them not to play with guns. Parents who have guns, those who hunt, really have to secure those guns. The fact that the Arkansas kids knew where the guns were means they were easy to get. Those guns were not secure in my opinion. In the South and in the cities guns are too easy to get. Kids fantasize, they
wonder, "What is it like to shoot?" 

People have the idea that children are more violent today than ever before. Is it that they are more violent or do they simply have access to more violent tools? 

Society has changed -- with the divorce rate going up and dual career couples and kids spending time in front of the TV -- kids don't get the same kind of childhood coaching and guidance that they used to. Everybody's rushing, everyone is busy. When you take surveys, children complain that their parents don't spend enough time with them and parents complain that they don't have enough time to spend with kids. Things are fractured. Plus, they are being bombarded with so much
information via the media and are exposed to things they're not ready to handle. 

For example? 

Violence, sexuality, adult subjects like AIDS. You talk to 8-year-olds and they are familiar with adult material! There are parents who take their 6-year-olds to see R-rated movies with violence and graphic sex in them. What kind of effect is this going to have on kids? 

What about the fact that these boys specifically targeted girls. Can we assume then that this is a misogynist crime? 

It is not unusual for boys in this age group to have antagonistic relationships with girls. The older boy felt rejected by a girl. So his anger was personal but then generalized all girls. He saw girls, more than boys, as the villain. We got snatches in the media that he was upset about the breakup of his family, that he missed his dad.  If he blamed his mother, who knows what he was acting out? But you would need someone to do a history of him, to analyze him. 

How should children who kill be rehabilitated? 

I don't know and nobody knows. But on juvenile statutes, they will be let out at age 18 and they may have some very loose screws up there that made them commit such an act. Rehabilitation is not a pure science. The fact that these kids are young, well, they certainly can mature and recognize that they were wrong, but you always have to wonder that someone who did something like that might do it again. 

How would you have counseled kids like these -- ones that express anger, rage and the desire to kill? 

I would get in touch with the parents. I would find out whether the kid had access to weapons. I would tell the parents that the weapons needed to be secured. And I would say that the boy needed to see a counselor. That's what I would have done. 

SALON | March 30, 1998 

Two white, adolescent, financially comfortable, suburban high school boys go to school one day with guns and bombs. They point them at classmates. They pull their triggers. The guns go bang. Again and again, casually, laughingly. Then, bringing the barrels to their heads, they blow their brains out onto the clean tile floor.

And all the anchors furrow their brows, consulting experts, discussing warning signs, school security, "are your children safe?" Asking, again and again, why?

Isn't it obvious? How many times do we have to be beaten over the heads with such nightmares, to finally see their cause? There is a problem with the mainstream of our culture. Violence, ostracism, suicide, drug abuse, are products of it, not spontaneously generated aberrations. The majority of the news media, preoccupied with looking mystified over the question, fail to find any real answer.

The psychologists and the sociologists scramble to find blame-bites easily digestable to the average American news-consumer. The 40-year-old homemaker and the balding father estranged from their pierced teenage girl find it easy to blame that music with the curse words in the lyrics for her incomprehensible behavior. Violent sports, the Internet, videogames, television are all held up as causes of our expulsion from the American cultural Eden of every parents' youth. Again and again we are told that teenagers are impressionable and should be protected from such influences. There is great comfort to parents in this attitude. They can deal with an impressionable creature, because that is a child. There is nothing frightening about it, no original thought, no maturity and independence, no rebellion, no questioning of lessons or rejection of values. "Because I said so" is enough. The scary rap music, the outlandish baggy clothes, the inscrutable Internet, the violent videogames, the sex on TV are all easy scapegoats for any behavior outside of the Brady Bunch normative, if we believe in this impressionability.

But what if receptiveness to entertainment isn't the problem? We've all grown up with unprecedented amounts of stimulus beamed into our heads from every side - surely we've become able to differentiate and filter - how else could we survive, believing every commercial, acting on every Hollywood murder?

So what caused Littleton and Jonesboro? The automatic TV response is "we may never know." What they really mean is "we don't want to know." The cause is in our sick culture; not Marilyn Manson and alternative Internet chatrooms, but the mainstream culture of malls, proms, Jeep Grand Cherokees, social elitism, apathy, popularity, thinness, sitcoms, flair pants, acquisition, suburban housing developments, stifled creativity, and suffocating consumerism. These are the distractions from the true paths to meaning and happiness. And if you reject these distractions, you are ostracized. It is a white, financially comfortable, apathetic suburban culture absolutely devoid of substance. Kids don't know their own parents, working jobs nine to five that they're too numb from Prozac and alchohol to know are killing them. They don't know their own friends, a group of people so concerned with looking good in each others' eyes that they never let their guard down enough to actually understand each other.

The impossible pain of estrangement, the boredom and frustration, the absolute void at the center of mainstream adolescent American life can be covered up in two ways. The first is with tight clothes and cars, cliques and makeup, five percent body fat and fashionable drug use. These are the popular ones, the ones so dead to their own realities that they can smile with orthodontically correct teeth in the face of such a nothingness.

The second is with a contrarian approach, a fetish with the macabre, an antisocial attitude. I am not talking about true nonconformism or individuality. I am talking about the people whose attitude is based entirely on a bitterness to the mainstream, arising from envy, fueled by frustration. They are slaves to the culture they reject, taking every popular action and reversing it. These are the people that kill for boredom. This is the defeat of the soul, the extinguishing of the last spark of human potentials. It is the genocide mentality, the video game mentality. It's a game. And what I am saying is that we are the cause.

This is a culture in which we are reduced to the disgusting, impossible position of consumer, hungry voids with tentacles of money, drawing products to us in selfish, vicious greed. We're told we'll find happiness this way. Some people totally buy into the mindset, and spend their lives in pursuit of material. The majority don't quite believe it, but figure there's nothing to be done, and play along for now.

What are they waiting for? What are we waiting for? Someone else to do it? The rapture? The next program to come on or the channel to change? Awakening? Death? Godot?

We deny meaning to those most hungry for it; the young. We offer expensive placebos from birth; the sugar pills of electronic babysitters, Nintendos, inane escapist hero cartoons. Our children graduate to the happiness substitutes of popularity, cars, clothes, fashionable promiscuity - denial of the void. Alternately, if they are rejected by this structure, they become enamored of the lack of meaning, and celebrate it. Some go as far as suicide. Some go as far as murder. And what we fail to see is the cold, mechanical, logical progression, the direct connection between the alien laughter at Columbine High School and the most familiar mainstream.

What is to be done? Reject the corporate ideology. Reject every-man-for-himselfism. Reject competition with others, the scramble to get ahead, the inhuman structures of the market economy. Get to know your kids, and I don't mean some psycho-babble one-time bonding session. Make friends, not allies. Look for truth, beauty, love and happiness at their divine human sources, not in the passing saccharine taste of the malls. Stop waiting for someone to tell you to do it.

This is the clearest, most potent manifestation of everything that is withering and plastic in our society. It is the logical extension of a thousand cultural mentalities that we cherish, uphold and perpetuate in everyday practice. Here is the evidence of our brokenness. The wrong reaction, the nightmare response, the insult to the dead, the final numbed ignorance, would be to deny the problem or shift the blame. Armed guards and metal detectors, censorship of music and literature are laughable faced with these problems. Fighting fascism with fascism will not work.

"Why did this happen" is chanted on the prime time news. "How could it happen here?" echoes from the identical walls in suburbia. I sit here wondering, how could it not?

Fearing Education

Fear. In today's American public school systems, students are now forced into fearing for 
their lives every time they enter the institution of learning. It is ridiculous. School is suppose 
to be the safest place possible for a child, but not anymore. As an outbreak of school 
shootings has taken place within the past two years, students all over the country must 
evaluate their safety in schools. This evaluation has challenged them with a dilemma of an 
ever growing terror that has captured the nation.

As the student body and the faculty of Columbine High School in Littleton,Colorado are 
coping with the loss of their twelve peers and teacher, schools all over the nation are taking extra precautions to ensure that such a shooting will not take place at their school. Being a high school student, I have a first-hand account of what it feels like to go to school everyday fearing the worst, for my high school, North Hagerstown High School is also burdened by the threats and fear.

Recently threats about bombs and shootings have been passed along throughout the public schools of Washington County, Maryland. However it is not just this county, but the country. 
It is unfortunate that some students are copycatting the situation in Littleton to play games 
with the emotions of the country, but that incident seemed to spark a wave of fear. Students 
in school are now paranoid that some insane person is going to jump out of the hallway bathroom carrying a semi-automatic weapon ready to shoot anything that walks.

Since Columbine's tragedy, my friends and I have been discussing this issue frequently. We 
all agree that this situation is somewhat ludicrous, but we also agree that it is real. As 
absurd as it may sound, my friends and I have been spending our lunch periods planning 
escape routes just in case. I have heard students say that they would jump out the nearest window if necessary even if it is the second story window. I have also heard some of my 
peers say that if this situation presented itself upon them, then they would "play dead". 
They actually suggested bringing in packets of ketchup and squirting it all over themselves 
to fool the gunmen into believing that they were already shot, and if they did not have 
ketchup then they would rub an already shot student's blood on themselves. I, on the other 
hand thought both plans were ridiculous, not to mention morbid. These comments surprised 
me because it dawned on me how if this situation ever happened, the students would take drastic measures to get out of the building, not to mention how situation brought up the "imaginative" side of the students.

The faculty and the administration of North have done what they can to ensure the student's safety, but despite their efforts, the students still have doubts. In some ways students can even see some of the fears of the teachers. As far as I know, there have been a lot more closed and locked doors during class time than there were before.

This issue is obviously a sensitive matter. Within the past two years many school shootings have taken place, yet it takes Columbine to finally instill fear into the public school systems of America. What caused this sudden out pour of concern? It seems that when there were shootings in Padukah, Kentucky, Pearl, Mississippi, and so on, the school systems did not 
react as meticulously as they are currently. Maybe it is because of the number of lives lost. Maybe it is the idea that two young men would be as so audacious as to plan to murder hundreds of innocent people. Maybe it is the media hype around all the angst and confusion 
of the tragedy in Littleton. Maybe it is the issue of violence in the media. Maybe it is the controversial issue of teens and guns. Whatever it may be though, all of those aspects played 
a role into the slight reformation of American public schools.

The public has criticized the NRA (National Rifle Association), violence in the media, and 
even the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but everyone must realize that it was not just one factor that contributed to Columbine's crisis or the other shootings within the last 
two years. The reasons for such actions taken by those students were based on everything 
from the media to how the students in school treated them to how their current mental state was at the time. Blaming their actions solely on one factor is not reasonable.

An issue that has not been frequently addressed as a cause for the two young men's actions is the fact that the student body of Columbine rejected them. High school is never a good place 
to show true individuality for it has two results: popularity or rejection. Most of the time the results are rejection, such as in their case. Does this justify the heinous actions of the two young men? No. But it influenced them in such a way that it caused harm to the entire nation. 
I can say that since this tragedy, my peers have been expressing their concerns on how not to get shot by being amicable to everyone. They realize that poking fun at another hurts that person and in turn could hurt them back.

When the school day is finally over and everyone is safe, a breath of relief can be heard throughout the nation. It is a tragedy when students are more concerned with jumping out the nearest window instead of who they are going to take to prom. Since Columbine's tragedy however, it is all we think about, and it will be a fear that present and future students will deal with for the rest of their careers in education.

Written by Loan V.

FROM: FEARING EDUCATION

The National Institute of Mental Health has sponsored research to document the incidence and prevalence of most childhood and adolescent psychiatric disorders with greater precision and reliability (Doll, 1996). Results of these studies show that a typical school of 1000 students could be expected to have between 180 to 220 students with diagnosable psychiatric disorders. (The reader is referred to Doll, 1996 for a complete review of the research findings). The most frequent disorders are anxiety disorders, conduct disorders, oppositional defiant disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorders. In secondary schools the most notable problems are depression and 
suicidal behaviors.

As noted by Doll, "The numbers alone are overwhelming." (1996, p. 29) She states that a school psychologist working under the recommended NASP ratio of one school psychologist for every 1,000 students (NASP, 1992) 
would have to see a different student every day of the school year in order to meet every student with a 
diagnosable mental health condition. However, nationally, we know that the current ratio of school psychologists to students is 1:2500 (Carlson, Paavola and Talley, 1995). Therefore, it would take two and a half years for that same school psychologist to meet with all students with diagnosable conditions.

However, Huebner (1993) has shown in recent surveys that less than one fifth of a typical school psychologist's 
week is spent in direct intervention activities. Conversely, over two-thirds of their time is spent in classifying and placing students with mild handicapping conditions into special education programs (Reschly, 1988). To extrapolate again from these findings, if time is still spent in the same manner and if the school psychologist to student ratios continue, this would mean that it would take 12.5 years to meet just once with all these students.

We know from our most recent epidemiological research that one in every five students in America's public schools have significant mental health needs (e.g., Costello, 1989; Valez, Johnson & Cohen, 1989). Therefore a school psychologist with a case load of 2500 students has on average 500 students with a diagnosable psychiatric condition and a great number of these youths need some type of mental health intervention. In what may be considered a 
gross understatement, Doll concludes, "It is unlikely, then, that school psychologists are presently addressing a significant proportion of the needs identified in these epidemiological studies (1996, p. 29).

The great majority of students with mental health needs do not receive treatment (Pfeiffer & Reddy, 1998). We 
find that less than 1% are identified as behaviorally or emotionally disturbed and placed in special education 
classes (Werthamer-Larsson, 1994). Also, more than half of all public schools do not offer mental health services 
for students, instead these schools rely on community health providers (e.g., Kazdin, 1988; Knitzer, 1993) and of those, only 3% of students receive mental health services from practitioners in the community. This creates an alarming gap of 17% between those students receiving and those students needing mental health services (Pfeiffer 
& Reddy, 1998).

 The Cost of Not Treating the Emotional Needs of Our Nations Children is Staggering

For example, estimates of dropout rates for students with behavioral or emotional disorders are as high as 55% compared to the national average of 12% (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1993; Pfeiffer & Reddy, 
1998) It should be well known that students with untreated, under-treated, or ineffectively treated emotional or behavioral disorders experience a wide range of poor outcomes. These include: lower grades, higher absenteeism and retention, lowered rates of employment and little success finding meaningful work after leaving school. There 
is also a higher likelihood of involvement with welfare, criminal justice, adult mental health and public health 
systems (e.g., Allen & Pfeiffer, 1991; Knitzer, 1993; Pfeiffer & Reddy, 1998; Saxe, Cross & Silverman, 1988).

Violence

Gun related violence takes the lives of at least 25 children every three days - the equivalent of a classroom of children disappearing every third day (Children's Defense Fund, 1993). In 1990 alone, guns were used to kill 222 children under the age of 10 and 6,795 young people under the age of 25. Another 30 children are injured every day by guns (Children's Defense Fund, 1993). There are approximately 5,000 gun deaths of children under the age of 18 each year in America. There is a gun in every third home and almost every adolescent can obtain a gun in a few hours.

A gun is more likely to kill a loved one through accidents, homicides, or suicides than to be used to defend a home from an intruder. Approximately 60% of all youth suicides involve a gun. In Miami-Dade County alone, 145 
students died by their own hands between 1980 and 1994. (Zenere & Lazarus, 1997).

In 1985 there were approximately 19,000 homicides in the United States and between 10% and 20% were 
witnessed by at least one child (Pynoos, 1990). Violence in some communities and schools is so common that 
many inner city children have actually observed a murder or report knowing someone who had been murdered (Keane, 1996).

It has been estimated that as many as 100,000 weapons are carried to school by children each day (Department of Justice, 1997). A recent Gallup poll found that in the past year one teen in five had a friend who was attacked by someone who was wielding a knife or gun, 7% had been assaulted, 14% had their property vandalized and 24% 
lived in a state of fear at school. The Justice Department found that two percent of students reported experiencing one or more violent crimes and seven percent reported at least one property crime during the first half of 1989. 
The most common types of violence were simple assault: pushing, shoving, grabbing and slapping. In 1992 nine percent of 8^th graders, ten percent of 10^th graders and six percent of 12^th graders reported that they had brought 
a weapon to school at least once during the previous month (National Education Goals Report)

Teachers told Louis Harris that 64 percent of in-school violence takes place in the hallways or stairways, 16 
percent in lunchrooms, 12 percent in the classrooms and 15 percent in the bathrooms. Students believe more 
violence takes place in the classroom and athletic areas then teachers report. The Justice Department (1997) 
reports that six percent of students avoid some place in or around their school because of the potential that 
someone might attack them. School restrooms were listed most often as a place to avoid and hallways were second. More than two-thirds of students don't feel completely safe going to and from school. Eight percent of urban junior and senior high school students missed at least one day of classes a month because they were afraid to go to school. Three percent reported that they were afraid most of the time (School Crime and Violence).

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that 160,000 children miss school daily because of fear of violence. Some 14,000 young people are attacked on school property every day and that each day 6,250 teachers are threatened 
and 260 teachers are assaulted.

 FROM: FASP PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
The Unmet Needs of Children

OVERREACTING TO VIDEOGAME VIOLENCE

     ROAHN WYNAR
     TEXAN COLUMNIST

   I conducted a quick survey among graduate students working in Robert Lee Moore Hall 
   regarding violent videogames, especially Doom and its remarkably superior sequel, 
   Doom II. The purpose of this survey was to determine if, as hyper-reactionaries claim,
   violent videogames with graphic action have a detrimental effect on intellectual and 
   emotional development. In the wake of the Columbine incident, some are calling for 
   tighter controls on these games.
        
   The working hypothesis of conservative pundits is that if we take away imaginary guns 
   from kids, then we won't actually have to take away their real guns. Liberal pundits, 
   going one step further, want to take both real and imaginary guns away from not only 
   kids but everybody else as well.

     The survey question was: When watching a mutant creature being ripped apart by rapid bursts of bullets 
     from your high-rate-of-fire chain gun, what is going through your mind? A) Is there another horrible mutant 
     creature just around the corner? B) Is the mutant monster just a diversion while an even more exotic and evil
     creature is attacking me from behind? C) Should I reload? D) How has it come to pass that only violence 
     seems to work with these obviously intelligent, sentient aliens? What other avenues of discourse are 
     available that can bring about mutual advantage to both our species and peace in this region of the galaxy?
     Admittedly "D" was not the top answer, but it is true that the  storyline -- the "videogame libretto" as it 
     were -- is very important to players.

     Obviously the real threat to young people's psychological well-being is the wide availability of cheat codes. 
     Cheat codes make kids think that life is easy. Just set the world to "unlimited ammo, all weapons, walk 
     through walls." The false sense of self-esteem created by using cheat codes will eventually buckle with 
     potentially catastrophic consequences. It would be interesting to know if Kleibold or Harris used cheat codes. 
     I suspect they did.

     It is strange how, regarding censorship, liberal and conservative viewpoints converge. One reason not to vote 
     for Al Gore is that his wife, Tipper, will feel empowered to push her plan of mandatory ratings for pop music, 
     and certainly videogames are on her mind. Conservatives who have already proven themselves willing to 
     censor science that does not conform to their fantasy about the world will happily put violent videogames in 
     the pornography section.

     The bottom line is that our schools are safe despite the fact that each morning lots of suburban white boys 
     show up after just having destroyed a battalion or two of bad guys, one by one, the night before. Millions of 
     people play these games, two run off on a shooting spree and pundits declare that videogames are "eating 
     away the soul of our society."

     Last week I was watching a 10-year-old named Louie, playing a much more graphic videogame, called Myth: 
     The Fallen Lords (which has a sequel as well, Myth II: Soulblighter). It is produced by a company called 
     Bungie, that literally prides itself on gore. ["Bon Carnage!" is the salutation they offer visitors to their web 
     page]  "Lookit the piles of bodies and blood!" he exclaimed to me gleefully, as though the key element of the
     game was not to destroy the enemy, but to actually create stacks of bodies.

     Unlike a first-person shooter, which has only one guy and one weapon at a time, Myth involves taking tactical
     command of a variety of troops. To win at Myth requires facility with many of the elements of warfare: Troop
     massing, reconnaissance and combined arms tactics. Dozens of your troops are mercilessly slaughtered as 
     they patrol around the map under your inevitably incompetent command.

     "Knowhat?" said Louie, "a person's heart pumps enough blood in one day to lift an elevator like 100 floors!" 
     He said this as his squad of warriors was getting obliterated by some undead giants. Louie was focused 
     intently on the action. "If that's true, I guess the blood should actually spurt even further."

     You might think that this would have been a good time to check the room for hacksaws, pipe fragments,
     gunpowder residue and swastika posters, but instead I offered a piece of advice based on my own long and 
     varied experience as a youngster. "Charging up a hill against undead giants never works. You have to coax 
     them down and hit them from a distance with your Warlock's fireballs."

     Wynar is a physics graduate student.

    Responses:
      Like too many other people reacting to the Littleton incident you're asking the wrong questions and 
      responding to the wrong "crises".

      Buried at the core of the video violence and gun control debates is a complex shift in the way our culture has
      changed.  The best analysis I've heard on the topic came from Lt. Col David Grossman, a West Point 
      psychology prof and Army Ranger who specializes in studying human response to use of deadly force. 
      Specifically, his job for many years has been to understand how the military can quickly train good, moral 
      soldiers to overcome their natural resistance to killing other humans.

      He wrote a book called "On Killing" that has taken the law enforcement and military training world by storm. 
      It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Additionally Calibre Press (one of the big police training companies) is 
      now selling an audiotape of one of his lectures.  I will spin you a copy of the tape if you want to hear it.  As
      someone who normally questions all the psuedoscience out there I think you'd appreciate it.  His conclusions 
      are drawn from supportable data, and experimentation, not just opinion.

      When I'm not working as a research engineer I run a firearms training school here in town.  Our staff includes
      civilians and law enforcement personnel (including 2 APD SWAT team members).  In teaching about 1000
      students personally, particularly beginners, I've acquired a fair amount of insight into the effects the media 
      has on people's perceptions of guns and violence. In the pre-TV years, most Americans were socialized to 
      guns through hands on experience: target shooting and hunting, typically supervised by family members.  A
      child's first hunt, or first firearm, served as symbolic recognition of the child's maturity and responsibility by 
      the parents. Through hunting, the child learned, first hand, about what is involved in pointing a firearm at 
      another creature, making the conscious decision to end its life, and living with the consequences.  That child's
      exposure to violence as "entertainment" was limited:  violence is better suited to visual media, and dialogue, 
      not action, made up most radio programs. Movies were, at best, viewed for a few hours a week, not 4-6 hours 
      per day.

      Entertainment heroes, especially those in Western and war movies, were shown using deadly force within the
      bounds of a moral code - the same code that society upholds with its laws.  The attitude of entertainment 
      heroes regarding guns more closely reflected the attitudes of the gun-owning populace too.