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What do the Columbine High School shootings dominate the national agenda, more than a month later?
After all, the murder of children is no novelty in this country. The latest statistics at hand are from 1996. That year, 2,543 Americans of school age (5-19) were murdered. That's 49 children every week, or more than three Littleton massacres.
My memory doesn't seem to be improving with age, but I cannot recall that in 1996 any Denver television station canceled a violent network movie out of sensitivity to the families of victims. Nor did any gun trade organizations halt their propaganda campaigns. Nor did the U.S. Senate agree to form a National Commission on Character development. Nor did the President of the United States more than momentarily divert his attention from buxom interns.
Yet all this and much more is happening now. There must be a reason.
Part of it may be racial. Of those 2,543 American children murdered in 1996, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that 53.8 percent were African-Americans, who comprise only 12.6 percent of the population.
As long as so much of the death toll came from minorities in inner cities, mainstream America could pretty well ignore it.
Nor did anybody much care about shootings in the boondocks. About 20 years ago, when I was managing editor of the local daily, a kid took a pistol to school here. On his way home, he shot another kid in the leg.
Today it might be national news, but then, the local reporter couldn't even sell the story to the Associated Press for the $3 that such items normally fetched -- the editor in Denver said it wasn't news when rural kids shot each other.
After the 1990 census, the Census Bureau announced that for the first time, more Americans lived in suburban areas than in either cities or rural zones. The Columbine High School shootings hit most Americans where they lived.
Figuring out just where they lived was a difficult matter for the media. The high school served no city or town; it sits in unincorporated Jefferson County. It got its mail from Littleton, the seat of Arapaho County. It sat amid boulevards and cul-de-sacs in the land of generic big-box franchises -- that is, it was the best habitation zone that most Americans can reasonably aspire to.
This sort of development was supposed to be the solution to many problems, among them deadly violence. For the past 50 years, Americans have been trying to get out of the city, with its well-known pathologies. We've been urged to flee the hinterland, where rednecks drive around in pickups with gun racks, and besides, there isn't much opportunity and the schools are decrepit.
The advertisements tell us to move to these wonderful suburbs with their low crime rates and excellent schools.
So when it turns out that the solution -- one promoted all these years by the road builders, land developers, national retailers and other campaign contributors -- isn't really a solution, mainstream America gets alarmed.
After all, many journalists and pundits live in these places. Our senators and representatives often abide in such zones of Virginia and Maryland. And if they no longer feel that their children are safe at school, then America has a problem -- a problem it didn't have when it was only other people's children that got shot.
Thus the rush to provide solutions now. All manner of existing gun laws were violated in the Columbine High School shootings, but we're supposed to believe that more laws will prevent future tragedies. Gory entertainment has been around since the Iliad, but we're supposed to believe that collecting money from Oliver Stone will be a solution.
Bomb-making instructions were easy to find long before
there was an Internet, but we're supposed to believe that
censorship will keep such information away from curious
children. Perhaps most preposterously, we're supposed to
believe Attorney General Janet Reno when she professes that
something can be done about America's culture of
violence.
This is a nation born of violent and bloody revolution.
It expanded with violent and bloody wars waged against
Indians and Mexicans. The central event in our history,
the Civil War, was unrefined cruelty,
in the words
of one of its leading generals. We invented the atomic
bomb. Our national epic, the winning of the West,
is a pageant of bullets and blood.
The culture of violence
is American culture.
Like it or not, that's who we are and what we do. Why did
anyone ever think that the fabrication of endless American
suburbs would change that?
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