The Children Strike Back
Shiflett, Dave
The Chi dr Strike lack DAVE SHIFLETT Littleton has drawn vast attention from press and experts. Their explanations of the killings are inadequate—and none has captured the author's former...
...Students were arrested in Port Huron, Michigan, in an alleged plot in which they hoped to beat the Littleton body count...
...We had large block parties, burning open fires and drinking like Vikings...
...America's parents are ready to shoot back...
...79 to 94 percent said they did on activities ranging from violence to tobacco, alcohol, and various weapons, including guns...
...Many of these media people have become advocates for our position," he says...
...This elicited much laughter, he recalls, "but they're not laughing now...
...That puts them in charge, and that is disastrous...
...43 School killings are declining steadily...
...It makes them the property of parents and gives parents a license to abuse them in any way those parents might wish...
...If adolescent boys are 'the monsters next door,' we should admit that we've been making those monsters...
...It was Grossman who initially convinced Thompson that there is a causal link between violent video games and the Paducah killing...
...Meanwhile, school shootings have been decreasing...
...The American Spectator • July 1999 Yet Coloradans are in no hurry to change this arrangement...
...Teachers weren't the only ones conveying this message...
...Cassie Bernal's case has caused much soul-searching, not only by the young...
...Lamar Alexander put the issue pretty well," he later said, "when he suggested that teacher pension funds should divest themselves of stock in these companies, because otherwise they are subsidizing their own targeting...
...He is one of two lawyers suing video-game manufacturers on behalf of three families who lost children in the 1997 school shootings in Paducah, Kentucky...
...We hope to create an illusion kids aren't buying...
...The father took the boy into a school bathroom and whipped him, after which the child's behavior showed a marked improvement...
...Live in a nice house in the suburbs...
...And so, if one takes a stand against evil, one is either paranoid, moralistic, uptight, or irrational...
...Yet statistics make for a thin blanket in the chilling aftermath 44 July 1999 • The American Spectator of Columbine, and they don't tell the full story of what is happening in schools, at least according to various experts interviewed for this story...
...In one well-publicized local case, a father was called to school after his charge showed persistent unruliness...
...I was criticized, but that's what the family wanted...
...As long as there are pied pipers to shift the blame to some bogey—CNN, makers of handguns—many of us will avoid looking at ourselves and realize we've met the enemy and it's us...
...Maybe so— though the most significant changes may be inspired by the example of three girls, two of whom are dead...
...Kids were going from one service to the next...
...But the days we lived there were very good indeed...
...In many schools, if a student brings a butter knife he gets the same punishment as if he had brought in a gun...
...If we want to say that adolescent boys are the monster next door, we should also admit that we've been making those monsters in our own basements...
...One had played on a ball team with Dylan Klebold...
...Cassie Bernal was asked if she believed in God, and after an affirmative answer was shot in the temple...
...He had also spent time with reporters and had heard the word "evil" raised from its slumber, a word falling from many tongues since Columbine, including Vice President Al Gore's...
...Raschke is none too optimistic...
...We still think we're living in a New Age utopia...
...If we said yes, we did take drugs, but it was wrong — that's one thing...
...Carneal used a shooting technique "that is totally unnatural and counter-intuitive," Thompson added...
...Neighbors werealways dropping by or entertaining...
...Valentine's Day Massacre (7), not only pierced the heart of America on April zoth, as First Lady Hillary Clinton said...
...Five were head shots, the other three were upper torso shots...
...RAISING KILLER KIDS Dan Quayle jumped back before the spotlight with his post-Columbine critique that a "legal aristocracy" has inserted barriers between children and authority figures...
...The therapy industry called for more counselors and insisted that there aren't enough anti-violence programs...
...In his weekly radio address on April 24, Clinton praised the work former Lt...
...This is a good time to be a "wacko" she says, because wackos are treated like everyone else, and vice versa...
...Some of these people were crying...
...Andrew Greeley, famed priest, best-selling novelist, and sociologist at the University of Chicago, summed up much of the indictment in a syndicated column...
...Video games, which Thompson calls murder simulators, "trained the murderer, Michael Carneal, how to kill and to enjoy killing," he argues...
...my eldest son would have been a junior the day Harris and Klebold opened fire...
...This is a crisis for the baby boom generation —my generation—which has to repent of its past moral transgressions and come to terms with its own failures...
...This really struck home...
...We really hate to make distinctions which say that one kid is really worse than any other...
...all shots found their mark...
...American politicians need to stop saying 'I didn't inhale,"' he advises...
...Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist who works with homicidal children and adults in Knoxville, Tennessee, and who calls herself a "social liberal," is in some agreement with Quayle, but she believes those barriers between kids and parents reflect generalized Boomer attitudes about authority, egalitarianism, and self-expression...
...Kids hardly can be expected to look up to the adults responsible for such stupidity, she says...
...So did God.' Good and evil—we believe in both...
...LITTLETON DID WE KNOW Like a bright meteor in the ancient sky, Columbine has elicited diverse interpretations...
...But he did give air to a common fear: There may be lots of Klebolds and Harrises out there...
...Near my home in central Virginia, two students were arrested and accused of plotting to blow up a middle school...
...VIOLENCE—WHAT VIOLENCE...
...teach him tolerance and medicate his demons—and he still turns into a storm trooper who DAVE SHIFLETT is a writer in Midlothian, Virginia...
...Kids know they can't be disciplined...
...According to the Center for Education Statistics, one in ten reported at least one serious violent crime during the 1996-97 school year (murder, rape, or other type of sexual battery, suicide, physical attack, or fight with a weapon, or robbery...
...For all practical purposes there is no such thing as discipline...
...The animals run the zoo...
...Bill McCollum (R-Fla...
...He had seen how students had reacted to Cassie, Valeen, and Rachel...
...Which may explain why the WB network yanked the season finale of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" because of a violent scene (albeit with a monster) at a high school graduation...
...45 "A fourteen-year-old who had never used a handgun fired eight shots, and all found their mark...
...Smith believes the rules currently governing the young are basically popular...
...Even Bill Clinton has given the conservative Thompson reason to believe that his time has come...
...Since 1994, the New York Times has reported, nearly 3o states have considered similar legislation, but none have approved an amendment...
...The episode was replaced by one called "Band Candy," which was described by a television writer as one "in which all the parents start acting like kids and the kids like parents...
...The Littleton we knew was immensely different from the one presented by many commentators...
...They're very evangelical...
...Around my house, we haven't been putting the onus on suburban life...
...Bill Oudemolen, senior pastor at the Foothills Baptist Church (membership: 2,500), to see how the killings had affected his world...
...Already seriously wounded, she too answered in the affirmative, yet escaped with her life...
...He had learned by playing pointand-shoot video games...
...47...
...Parents may no longer raise their own kids, Quayle claimed, since that job has been taken over by the social engineers at the ACLU...
...We have to take responsibility for the moral mess we've created...
...Oiti "Politicians need to stop saying didn't inhale.' My generation must take the Wame for the mess we've created...
...But kids know we did these things and are lying about it, and so they'll do the same...
...Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, whose kill rate (13 deaths, not including their own) bested the Manson family (7), Richard Speck (8), and the perpetrators of the St...
...The federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, she says, allows for no more than a day suspension should a "special-ed" student punch a teacher...
...Where did he get such an idea, he was asked...
...He fired eight shots...
...Since filing the suit, Thompson has appeared on the Discovery Channel, "6o Minutes," NBC's "Today" (twice), CNN, ABC's "World News Tonight," and "NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw," among others...
...I told my wife on several occasions that we should never live in such a place again, because it was too friendly...
...He had buried student John Tomblin...
...You see this reflected in school rules...
...He holds up as Exhibit A Time magazine's "Monsters next door" cover story...
...Many teachers, she adds, are afraid to respond to unruly kids because they fear getting sued...
...Which raised a couple of panicky questions: How did we get here...
...I know it sounds odd, but when they were broadcasting the funeral I felt like we were a team...
...Huge numbers of children participated in sports and attended the rapidly expanding churches that would later host the funerals of the Columbine dead...
...He hid in a teachers' lounge while the other made tracks down a hallway through a fusillade of lead, bodies falling around him...
...As for the lack of anti-violence programs: Seventy-eight percent of schools reported having some type of formal violence-prevention or violence reduction program or effort, and 5o percent of public schools with violence-prevention programs indicated that all or almost all of their students participated in these programs...
...Finding someone optimistic that positive changes are afoot is not easy these days, yet there is hope among those who hold the popular culture largely to blame for the ill-tempered nature of modern youth and the extreme violence some of them practice...
...Thompson, while admitting his case faces sizable obstacles, is very much enjoying what he sees as a shift against the violence industry...
...That puts them in charge, and that is disastrous...
...Similarly, parents who still believe in the benevolent results of taking junior to the woodshed refrain from fear of a knock on the door from the social services department...
...David Grossman, a psychologist who has argued that violent video games "teach young people to kill with all the precision of a military training program, but none of the character training that goes along with it...
...Yet, as a fourteen-year-old obsessed with pointand-shoot video games, Michael Carneal walked into his school and opened fire...
...My generation has to admit that there is such a thing as sin, andwe need to repent...
...Colorado parents knew the real possibility of being hauled into court should they cuff an upstart child...
...What these girls did was pose the most penetrating questions a person can pose: What do you really believe in...
...It was a good day not to be living in Littleton...
...fessor and Thor is that the latter couldn't hurl thunderbolts quite so fast...
...The ones in urban schools usually have one target, and the fight is often over something very specific, often a girlfriend...
...We live in a different world after Columbine, but not that different...
...Some of this joy is vengeful in origin...
...The problem, as they see it, is that kids are being raised and schooled in an environment that reflects their parents' values...
...There was a surge in church-going after the killings...
...Thompson recently debated actor-producer Rob Reiner—whom he calls "the Meathead" after Reiner's role in "All in the Family"—who insisted this is no time to be judgmental...
...Bob Dylan you can say that again, Bob...
...The killers in the middle-class suburbs are often suicidal narcissists, and they want to take a lot of people out with them, because that gets a lot of attention...
...Thompson says he recently discovered that representatives of companies that market the point and shoot games were providing free samples to schools...
...Wrong," says Thompson...
...Here in Knoxville we had a kid who beat up a 65-year-old principal, then turned around and threatened to sue the principal for sexual harassment because he had laid a hand on him...
...Their explanations of the killings are inadequate—and none has captured the author's former home...
...Or, if a girl gives a friend a Midol, or an Alka-Seltzer, it's as if she had given away a controlled substance...
...The title of my sermon the Sunday after the killings was 'Satan planned April 20...
...School killings have decreased steadily since the 1992-1993 school year, the CDC also says, though the total of multiple-victim shootings has increased...
...Our second-grade son was being hustled to the car on a minor infraction when he turned and warned that if an untoward hand was laid on him, he would dial 911...
...The CES asked principals whether their school had "zero-tolerance" policies...
...Yet statistics make for a tl,gn blanket in the chilling aftermath of the Colorado shootings...
...Though initially enjoying strong backing, critics convinced voters that, in the words of the local ACLU chieftain, "It really denies the rights of the child...
...That's the kind of people we are...
...Littleton should be a loud wake-up call to every social engineer in the country: You have failed...
...I made the same point as the funeral for John," he says...
...Smith's words bring back a personal parenting memory from Littleton...
...A suburb like Littleton is not the best place for those of us with the habits of hermits to pitch a tent...
...If Time Warner does not stop distributing to America's youth entertainment that glorifies violence," Thompson warned a 1992 Time Warner stockholder meeting, "then eventually parents whose children are harmed thereby will sue you for damages...
...Columbine was our neighborhood high school...
...buy your kid a BMW and the other trimmings of the prosperous life...
...A neighborhood girl was wounded...
...Oudemolen says he took some flack from a Salon magazine correspondent for saying that the shooters "were gripped by the power of Satan," but overall he noted a "surprising sensitivity" and "respectfulness" on the part of the press...
...Cassie Bernal's story made its way around the world, and she quickly became a martyr...
...None is more hopeful than Miami Attorney Jack Thompson...
...That message will no doubt be well received...
...The natural, untrained instinct is to unload one's gun into a target until it hits the ground...
...On a more practical plane, what should be done...
...We live in a culture which values diversity so much it cannot draw distinctions...
...Do you believe in anything so strongly that you would die for it...
...Kids know they can't really be disciplined," says Smith...
...My family lived in Littleton between 1989 and 1995...
...Schools are certainly more violent than one would like...
...The United States Supreme Court has given the green light to a suit that alleges the movie Natural Born Killers was partly responsible for a string of killings...
...One month after Littleton, a student opened fire in a suburban Georgia school, wounding six and inspiring House Majority Whip Tom DeLay to observe that "We are in a national crisis when we have children all over the country shooting each other...
...Rachel Scott, according to recent press reports, had been shot in the leg...
...Nobody cares about them—and that is wrong...
...DeLay should know better...
...Most schools practice "zero tolerance" of weapons and drugs, and run antiviolence programs...
...Another critic of the Boomer Way is Carl Raschke, professor of religious studies at the University of Denver and author of a book on youth subcultures...
...Within a month, The American Spectator • July 1999 220 schools had been closed by bomb threats, according to one tally...
...46 July 1999 • The American Spectator "The murderer had never shot a handgun in his life," Thompson says...
...And how the hell do we get out...
...Valeen Schnurr, having witnessed that shooting, was asked the same question...
...This was news around our house, where our middle school child has served detention for chewing gum, not to mention talking in class and giving a teacher lip...
...Five were head shots, the other three were upper torso shots...
...Anti-violence programs are numerous and well-attended...
...His teacher told him, came the response...
...As of now, few have dared to call these three girls religious fanatics, though the brand of religion they practiced is typically denounced as fanatical and a threat to the highest current virtue: Tolerance...
...The only people benefiting are the unhinged...
...We've gravitated to mindless questions about after-school recreation and locks on guns," says Raschke...
...Adults need to stop saying 'I was responsible when I was young.' We weren't...
...Children were in the streets and at the door at all hours...
...We still cling to the 6o's idea that behavior once considered antisocial is instead revolutionary and liberating...
...Nor have we put much stock in many of the other Columbine-stirred certainties, especially the insistence that suburbs are under siege by bloodthirsty teenagers— a group Rep...
...CULTURAL MEATHEADS It is now much more respectable to draw a link between violent entertainment and violent acts, Thompson believes...
...Two boys from the old neighborhood were in the cafeteria when a fellow student stumbled in and screamed that he had been shot...
...And there is also a great deal of disciplining going on, at least of a certain type...
...He pulled the trigger at one target, only once, and then moved to the next target, pulled the trigger instantly, and moved on to the next target...
...The federal government has played a role in creating this environment, claims Smith...
...America's parents have finally figured out that Hollywood and these game manufacturers have been targeting their children...
...These kids are narcissists, and their narcissism is made much worse by a lack of coherent and consistent guidelines and discipline...
...Columbine was the culture war's Pearl Harbor," he declares...
...Yet one assumes that their heroism for principle, and especially the inspirational effect it has had on youthful religious believers, will not be forgiven in all quarters...
...Thompson —who alleges that the film The Basketball Diaries contributed to the Paducah killings—is buoyed by the court decision...
...Such arguments seem to me wrong on every count...
...Driving in those kid-choked neighborhoods was like driving through wildebeest herds...
...Many commentators have sucked the marrow from their thumbs describing the alleged problems of suburban life: alienation among the youthful cohorts, the hellishness of life on a cul de sac, the absence of children playing in the streets, neighbors who don't know one another...
...I called the Rev...
...Thompson is doing more than that...
...Many modern parents, as Smith says, believe a belting constitutes child abuse, and Coloradans are no different, having defeated a "parents' rights" ballot measure that would have given parents the right "to direct and control the upbringing, education, values and discipline of their children...
...There is more crime in urban schools, but things are improving there, too...
...The place was Clement Park, now famous as site of that huge memorial to the shooting victims...
...The school does not dare to expel a student or even to impose anything more than the most general rules of civilized behavior, and for all practical purposes, teachers and administrators are peripheral if not irrelevant to the school's social order...
...Proceed, doctor...
...The father, however, was convicted of child abuse, and his fate stood as a warning to all other parents...
...This is phenomenal marksmanship...
...As chief executive Jamie Kellner noted, "Our decision is also born out of a deep sense of responsibility to the WB's loyal young audience...
...But that utopia is an illusion...
...The stories of the other girls are catching up...
...We don't recognize evil as evil, can't say dark is dark...
...This is the attitude a lot of kids have: 'In the end, nobody can really do anything to me...
...But it seems that fellows like Raschke are enjoying a wider audience in the days since Columbine, which he calls "a watershed event whose true epochal nature is not being properly understood...
...When asked if she believed in God, she answered that she did, and was shot through the head...
...They also unleashed a series of events making it clear that some of the nation's children are taking mom and pop's old "Question Authority" bumperstickers a bit too seriously...
...The difference between the pro"The killers in middle-class suburbs are often suicidal narcissists, and their narcissism is made much worse by a lack of guidelines...
...If a special-ed kid beats up the principal, his punishment is about the same...
...has now famously described as "the most violent criminals on the face of the Earth...
...GONE TO A BETTER PLACE Will Columbine change America...
...Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, for example, have stressed the culture's culpability...
...This is exactly the time we need to be pointing fingers...
...But according to the Centers for Disease Control, less that one percent of all homicides among school-aged children (5-19 years of age) occur in or around school grounds or on the way to and from school...
...Like McCollum, politician after politician, commentator after commentator, talk-show host after talk-show host insisted on a societal meltdown...
...There are a lot of killer kids out there," she warns...
...They too have been unnerved by Littleton...
...42 July 1999 The American Spectator happily slaughters schoolmates and hopes to land a hijacked jetliner in the Trump Tower...
...Come mothers and fathers throughout the land Don't criticize what you can't understand Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly aging...
...The American Spectator • July 1999 Oudemolen, it should be said, is not a man to water down his Christianity...
...We still don't get it...
...School violence has been decreasing and the number of perpetrators is but a handful of the 53 million of America's school-aged population...
...A few years ago I went to a funeral service at his church for a family friend, a mid-thirties mother of three, at which Oudemolen preached that the deceased would not come back even if she could, because she was in a better place...
Vol. 32 • July 1999 • No. 7
