Playground violence gone deadly

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

By Kate Mason

When I was six, a boy I didn't like tried to kiss me. I told him no, and he pinched me and had to sit in time out. On Tues., Feb. 29, when Kayla Rolland of Flint, Mich. was six, a boy she didn't like tried to kiss her. She told him no, and he shot her to death.

When I was 16, two boys at school decided to get back at some other kids whom they didn't like. They beat up the kids, and one of them needed stitches. When Kelly Fleming of Littleton, Colo. was 16, two boys at school decided to get back at some other kids whom they didn't like. They shot some of the kids, and 14 of them died.

According to Time magazine, Tom DeLay (R-TX), the Majority Whip for the U.S. House of Representatives, said recently, "Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence." He may be right. Being a kid is hard. It is awkward and scary and sometimes downright unbearable, and it makes some kids want to be violent. Maybe their parents pay too little attention to them or too much attention; maybe they don't have enough friends or maybe they have too many friends. But kids getting violent used to mean bloody noses on the playground and black eyes in the parking lot. It used to mean pinching the girl next door until she shrieked. It did not mean a bullet in the head. It did not mean unimaginable carnage.

Violence may result from an unhappy childhood or inattentive parents, but bullets come only from guns. And in America, it is almost as easy to legally buy a gun as it is to buy a pack of cigarettes. You can't buy a beer until you are 21, and you can't use a car unless you take a test to prove that you know how to use it, but you can buy a semi-automatic weapon at 18 and use it that afternoon without having to prove anything. To the dozens of other industrialized countries that don't hand out guns like chewing gum, this appears insane. Even as our politicians squabble over waiting periods and whine about their inalienable right to bear uzis, Britain and Japan find it perfectly logical that the U.S. suffers more gun deaths every year than the 15 other largest nations in the world combined, and that U.S. schools are home to an average of five multiple gun deaths a year. When 18 percent of high school students carry weapons to school, it becomes awfully easy to turn a fistfight into a shoot-out.

We cannot cure with a single law the complex medley of social and psychological ills that drive children like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to commit horrific acts, but we can reform the process that allowed them to so easily obtain the means to do it. An 18-year-old girlfriend bought some of the guns for Harris and Klebold at a gun show. The parents of a 13-year-old boy who shot his classmate in Texas and of another who did the same in New Mexico also legally bought the guns used in their sons' crimes. The parents of Kayla Rolland's killer stole a gun from a home whose residents probably obtained it legally. We can debate until the end of time whether better parenting would help reduce violence, but we cannot debate whether getting rid of guns would do this because one fact remains: without a gun, a child cannot shoot another child.

The Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms. But remember that for a while the 18th Amendment removed the right to consume alcohol. And at one time, the Constitution protected the right to own a slave. The Constitution is mutable; it has to be, because the year 2000 is different than the year 1790. In 1790, there was no such thing as an automatic weapon. In 1790, much of the country still had to hunt for their food. In 1790, we had just finished fighting the British. In 2000, we are fighting ourselves.

Perhaps it is unreasonable to outlaw guns altogether—hunters and law enforcement officers, for example, do require them. But the argument that every American should have the right to a handgun is both short-sighted and selfish. Criminals could probably obtain guns on the black market whether they are legal or not, but a pre-teen who had a bad day would not casually murder a classmate if a gun wasn't readily available. We can't insure that a parent won't leave a gun within reach of a child, but we can insure that he can't legally buy it in the first place—at least not as easily as he can now.

Americans do not like restrictions. They do not like laws that remove a liberty they formerly enjoyed, even when that liberty comes at the expense of innocent people's lives. Perhaps this mentality is what makes America great. Or perhaps it is what makes America tragically stupid.

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