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The news arrived here Tuesday afternoon when Martha
decided to take a break and watch the tube in the living
room for a while. From my desk in the back of the house, I
heard her shout You (many expletives deleted) bitch,
what school is it?
Unlike me, Martha hardly ever swears at journalists on
the screen, so this sounded serious. I went to the living
room. What's the problem?
Some maniacs with guns and bombs are inside some
school in Denver,
she said, and all they show us is
bricks and roof, like we know what every school building in
the metro area looks like so that we can identify it at a
glance.
Our younger daughter, Abby, attends the University of Colorado at Denver, and for all we knew, we were looking at a building on the Auraria campus.
They must have said where they are,
Martha
muttered, but they seem to assume that everybody's been
watching for the past hour, and ...
She didn't have to finish the sentence, and even though we were 150 miles away, we got to join the legion of fearful parents for a few minutes that dismal afternoon, until finally a helicopter shot established that we weren't looking at Auraria.
We must not have been the only ones who were alarmed, because a crawler soon appeared at the bottom of the screen with the location and other pertinent information. Relieved but still horrified, we settled in for the duration.
Inevitably, the discussion, both in the media and in the
household, turns to What can be done to make sure
nothing like this ever happens again?
And the inevitable answer is Realistically,
nothing.
Consider the proposals that have been offered.
· Tighter gun laws. Much of the carnage resulted from bombs, which gun laws would not affect. Much of the shooting was done with shotguns, and shotguns will be accessible in any society that allows bird hunting.
· Looser gun laws, specifically teachers with
concealed weapons. Maybe, but by all accounts, the school
was a hell of bomb smoke, spouting sprinklers and general
confusion -- that is, the fog of battle
that can
produce casualties from friendly fire.
Armed people
inside the school might have saved lives, but they might
have made things worse, too. There's no guarantee
here.
· Metal detectors at the door. In this case, they were shooting as they entered, and what difference would a metal-detector alarm have made, or a challenge from whoever was operating the detector?
· Reducing access to information. For one thing, the Internet is impossible to censor. For another, even if the Internet didn't exist, any half-bright kid can visit the library for an afternoon and figure out how to make black powder at home in his spare time, and take it from there.
· Reducing access to potentially destructive materials. Try to imagine how our society would do that with gasoline, propane and miscellaneous stuff at the hardware store. To put this another way, society devotes billions toward drying up the supply chain (specific chemicals at that, rather than the wide range of potentially destructive items) for meth labs, and crystal meth is still widely available.
· Early identification and treatment of alienated
kids. I was one of the alienated in high school -- the
strutting jocks were the hot stuff, and the rest of us were
pretty much peons. It was the same when my daughters were
in high school. The exalted jocks represent the
school,
and their bullying gets winked at.
Colleges are by and large the same -- the highest-paid
person on the state payroll is a football coach. Nor is it
much different in the real world
-- look at whom
society exalts and where the endorsement dollars flow.
Changing this would require a social upheaval beyond
imagination. Most of us find other ways of dealing with
our alienation from such a society, but how many counselors
do we want to hire to treat kids who aren't into the
rah-rah stuff
?
And how do we differentiate between the merely
disaffected and the truly dangerous? Adolescence is a time
of exaggerated expression, when an outrageous statement
might be a warning signal,
and it might be just
posturing.
Add it up, and no answers appear. The U.S. Secret Service devotes every possible resource to the protection of the President of the United States, and I've read many statements from its agents that there are no guarantees that they could stop a suicidal and determined maniac.
Two suicidal and determined maniacs launched a reign of
terror Tuesday afternoon. Like millions of others, I would
like to take comfort in saying We can take steps to keep
this from ever happening again.
But there isn't any comfort. There's only some personal relief, and an inability to find words to express sorrow.
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