Kids Haven’t Changed; Their Weapons Have

We may have lost our right to ask why. For the eighth time in two years, a school is bloodied, and we are sent into shock--again. There is a sameness to our questions and the focus is familiar. How have kids changed so as to be capable of such violence? Could we have seen this coming? What is it in teenage rage today that could produce such destruction?

President Clinton seeks to console and challenge. We need to teach our children, he says, “to resolve their anger with words, not weapons.” What never is put on the table is a resolve to eliminate easy access to the weapons themselves. News shows, on the evening of the Littleton, Colo., shooting, went over every conceivable angle on this tragedy--except to question the ease with which our kids can get their hands on guns.

Teenage hormones, hidden resentments, unaddressed anger and alienation born of not belonging to the “in-crowd”--all these are things that are more or less unchanging. The same disgruntled kids, 20 years ago, would have snapped, and a scuffle might have erupted in the school cafeteria. What’s new is the deadly firepower. We need to face the fact that we have no collective will to address this. Hence, we’ve lost our right to ask why.

Some weeks ago, I buried my 75th and 76th young persons killed in this gang-banging madness. There were two coffins before me at the funeral. Brothers. So lethal is the weaponry today, that one bullet traveled through one brother to the other, killing them both.

Ten years ago, I would travel to at least three hospitals a day to visit the numerous wounded from our senseless, urban gun battles. Not any more. Today, if a kid gets hit, he gets buried. And the access to such firepower remains, as many kids tell me, “just a phone call away.”

Tinkering and fine-tuning our way into gun control won’t ever translate into significant change. We can child-proof and we can increase the paperwork, and it won’t touch what happened on Tuesday. We can try to make it difficult for guns to fall into the “wrong hands,” but that won’t prevent the next Columbine.

I ask gang members, all the time, why they carry guns. To no one’s surprise, each kid answers the same way: “Protection.” I ask the kid to name a single moment when they can recall a life being saved or protected by the gun in their possession. Not once has anyone supplied me with an example. Finally, I ask the same kids, “Would there be enough hours in the day, to speak of the lives ruined or lost in this community because of a gun?” Invariably, the conversation ends in a poignant silence. Yet I know I haven’t really shaken these kids of the belief in their right to bear arms.

Unless we have the will to address the presence of and the easy access to such alarming and lethal weapons, we have no right to ask why. We must address our young people’s increasing rage, despair and alienation, but unless we significantly question the weaponry at their disposal, the body count will grow, and Littleton will not be the last town to know such agonizing pain.