Massacre in suburban Denver
BY DAVE CULLEN
(04/21/99)

Once upon a time the emphasis of public education was socialization. The whole purpose of kindergarten was explained as such, and we were told it was necessary. But, from the time I left elementary school, some 18 years ago, public schools have whittled away programs that were deemed nonessential.

Our focus on the three R's seems to have obscured the goal of introducing the humanities to growing minds. Philosophy, where large ideas are introduced and discussed, seems to be left until after a disaster hits. Perhaps if the young men of Littleton could have spoken their ideas in a classroom, where other kids could have responded in a vigorous discussion, they might have heard how extreme their ideas were -- how disrespectful towards humanity, how disrespectful towards their own lives and their own self-worth.

Can we afford to leave civics to the last semester option of a senior's curriculum? Can we afford to eliminate "liberal" from our children's education?

-- Metis Black
Colorado Springs, Colo.

The violence in Littleton raises one question with me: When are you guys going to do something about your gun laws? How can kids have access to the kind of guns that can create this havoc? Is the money behind the National Rifle Association more important than the lives of innocent men, women and children?

Wake up America, your children need you!

-- Sue Moran
Oak Flats, Australia

Among the many disturbing things about this massacre is the overwhelming and unspoken complicity between parents, students and the media to deflect all responsibility for the attack onto the killers, their families and gun lobbyists. By no means do I support what these boys did, but it is frustrating to see interviews with precisely the kind of kids the killers were supposed to be targeting claiming that the killers were "freaks," "weird," etc., basically reinforcing the kind of exclusionary attitudes the killers were striking out against. I think it's foolish and dangerous to be so blinded by the criminality of the so-called Trench Coat Mafia's actions that we ignore what role students, or even faculty and staff, at Columbine High School may have had in pushing these kids over the edge. As I watched the almost continuous coverage last night, I kept wondering when we were going to hear an objective evaluation of what these kids were like on every other day, what kind of students they were. It turns out they weren't a discipline problem and that they were smart and computer savvy. They played fantasy baseball. They were depressed. They kept to themselves. By several accounts they felt they had been treated badly and used this as an excuse for their rampage. But I never heard any student asked about what the killers had (or hadn't) suffered in terms of taunting, bullying, etc. Before we train our students to be watchdogs, to report anyone who doesn't wear a Gap uniform or who doesn't otherwise fit in, let's teach children to practice some self-restraint and to curb their childish impulse to deride and denigrate their peers.

-- Michael Mejia

I just read the piece on the shooting -- it is tragic. And while my complaint is not nearly as important as what those people are going through, I am enraged by the use of the term "right-wing beliefs" in your article. Though I do understand that those were words uttered by a small-town sheriff, Salon's reporting it -- twice -- in its short article was an outrage.

I consider myself a conservative Republican, on the right end of "right-wing beliefs." I am probably more moderate than some but I take serious offense to the statement that these monsters who committed this crime, were of the same beliefs as myself and many others.

What is "right-wing" about being armed to the teeth and murdering innocent people? Your article felt compelled to mention it, but failed to ever explain what was meant by it.

-- Kristi Burgess

One of the distressing things about Tuesday's school killings, as well as in previous incidents, is that fellow students knew about the perpetrators' behaviors beforehand, but ignored the troubled youths and went about their own business until those troubled students "snapped." As parents and concerned adults, we wonder why they didn't say something to somebody; maybe this could have been prevented.

We can all point fingers at who or what in society is at fault for making kids act out this way. Yes, it is most likely a mixture: lack of parenting, violence in film and television, Gothic influences in music, drugs, child abuse -- the list goes on. But what can be done right now to help our children?

I'm a safety officer for a hospital in Palm Springs, Calif. The state mandates that all employers with more than 250 employees create and implement a written safety program; one of the stipulations is that businesses must create a means of anonymous communication for their employees to use without fear of reprisal. In my hospital, we meet that by having a safety hot line, where employees can report problems anonymously 24 hours a day.

Why doesn't the federal government create emergency legislation mandating that a 24-hour telephone hot line be installed in every junior high and high school throughout the country, with which children can call and report things anonymously? School administrators could monitor the hot lines each day, so they can investigate these problems before they become another tragedy. It's time we did something constructive besides analyze.

-- Debbie Miller

"We called it 'Littlefun'"
BY JEFF STARK
(04/21/99)

The mainstream television talking heads act like they've never been to high school. Geeky and awkward kids have always been tormented by their more popular classmates. I know because I was one of them. Though I had easy access to my parent's firearms, I never once thought of using them to kill my tormentors. As with Jeff's friends who listened to German metal, dressed weird and floated outside the mainstream, something called a moral center was present inside of me to prevent such a thing. The two kids in Colorado lacked that moral center. All the laws against guns, video games, violent movies and the Internet will ever fill that void.

-- Brian Bingham

Like Jeff Stark, I spent many a day wandering the hills and fields around the Columbine area in Colorado. I probably passed him several times in Columbine's halls before he graduated.

But unlike Stark, I stayed in Littleton. I married a 1994 Columbine graduate, and bought a house less than two miles from Columbine to raise my two kids. While I would never call Columbine an exciting place, I never felt the wanderlust that many people do. I stayed precisely because of the quiet atmosphere and nearby amenities. "Littlefun" maybe, but safe.

That safety was an illusion; the quiet atmosphere was shattered Tuesday morning. I had no abstract feeling about "Wow, that's my old high school. Finally something has happened there." My first thought was "What do you mean that there's shooting at the high school? That can't be happening." While Stark may not care to call it home, for thousands of families it is. I would have preferred that the nation never know about Littleton and Columbine.

Maybe for Stark and the rest of the world this is a sad but ultimately unimportant bit of news trivia, but for this community we have to live with the scars for years to come. Every time I drive past the school and my 4-year-old smiles and says, "That's Mommy and Daddy's school," I will remember the deaths of 12 young students, an extraordinary teacher and two boys who fell through the cracks. Stark is probably right about us never knowing why it happened, but that won't stop me from trying to teach my kids that violence is never the way to turn. They will know that even in a boring suburban stain like Columbine, you can still learn something. The key difference is they will learn about it from a killing ground -- not through smoked glass from 50 stories up.

-- Dustin Duncan

Kneejerk Mafia
BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK
(04/22/99)

I share Poniewozik's belief that mainstream media have clumsily speculated on what the Internet might have had to do with these killings. But there's a similar kneejerkism to his column. Every time the Internet is mentioned in connection with anything evil, the online press (of which I'm a part, as a longtime editor and contributor at Wired News) are quick to mock their unsavvy brethren, noting that the Internet is "just another communications medium," or some such. But of course for years now the online press has trumpeted the wonders of this mere medium, and not just its commercial possibilities. We've talked endlessly about how it gives us access to information previously unavailable or difficult to find; and about what a glorious community-builder it is, how it allows people of like interests to find each other -- particularly people who are outside the mainstream. Gays, geeks, goofs, nobody's alone when they've got the Net.

But as wonderful as this development is -- and I've shared in its wonders -- there may in fact be dangers that come along with it. The Internet isn't responsible for evil and never will be. But with the Internet, it probably is easier for disturbed people -- including troubled teens -- to find allies in evil, to find kinship in whatever thinking leads to this sort of tragedy. And it probably is easier to find out how to find a gun, or make a bomb. Can or will laws protect us from these dangers? I doubt it. But denying the truth about the Internet sure won't, either.

-- Pete Danko
Applegate Valley, Ore.

Poniewozik's thesis that reports are targeting the Internet as a principal cause of this event is not supported even by the evidence he cites. He is much more on target when he describes the "bizarre potpourri of signifiers" the press has experimented with in its search for an explanation. This time, at least, the Internet is pretty far down the list.

Thanks to NBC we can now add the killers' alleged obsession with the computer game Doom. That hypothesis was used Wednesday evening to justify showing Doom demons being blown to bits by automatic weapons, all seen disturbingly from the shooter's point of view.

What strikes me is the lack of superficial similarities between the boys accused of the Colorado killings and the boys in Arkansas last year (no Goths they), or the Kentucky boy before that. A search for meaning to be found in dress or ideology or musical taste seems silly when the details change so much from case to case.

Of course, the one true common thread that runs through all the school rampage cases is the use of firearms. The arsenal in Littleton included sawed-off shotguns and a semiautomatic rifle. The easy availability of weapons to everyone, including children, is a necessary condition for these killings. We should be worrying less about the supposed deeper causes and do something about the obvious one.

-- Paul Turner
Chicago