VIRTUAL VIOLENCE
Mark Steyn on what causes
American school shootings (not lax gun laws)
New Hampshire FOR the news shows, it gets a little easier each time. The 'Slaughter In The School- yard' graphics are on permanent stand-by; the Rolodex is bulging with telegenic anger-management experts; it's just a question of finding this week's blood-spat- tered grove of academe on the gazetteer and dispatching the Chief Massacre Corre- spondent to interview surviving students, bewildered relatives and the local cops, all of whom tend to talk like the students, rel- atives and cops they saw on TV after the last massacre, and at least one of whom can be guaranteed to say, 'We thought it couldn't happen here.'
It couldn't happen in Pearl, Mississippi, site of the school year's inaugural shoot- out last October; nor could it happen in West Paducah, Kentucky; Fayetteville, Tennessee; Jonesboro, Arkansas; or Edin- boro, Pennsylvania. This time round it was Springfield, Oregon, a town whose most famous high school alumnus hitherto had been Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ken Kesey has now been superseded by the equally alliterative Kip Kinkel, who seems to be more cuckoo than anyone in Kesey's novel. A week ago, Kip was expelled by the principal, went home, murdered his parents, returned to school the following day and opened fire on the cafeteria, killing two and injuring 22 others.
There's nothing like an American school massacre to make the rest of the world feel smug: what is it, scoff the British, with those crazy Yanks and their guns? What kind of lunatic teaches a young boy how to shoot animals when he should be inside with his computer playing Amok! or Car- nage!! like a normal kid? Charlie Clydes- dale, who lost his daughter at Dunblane, inclines to this view. 'Isn't it time the world learned to watch what they are doing with guns?' he said after the Jonesboro blood- bath. 'Have any lessons been learned since Dunblane?'
Actually, yes, one or two have. For example, last fall, when that first play- ground whacko of the Class of '98 decided to take out the high school in Pearl, an `Susan is only eight and already her private life is a mess.' assistant principal managed to retrieve his own gun from the car and 'physically immobilise' the gunman (gunkid?) until the cops showed up. The boy had already shot two students. If not for the assistant princi- pal, he might have shot another two, or four, or seven; he might have made it into double figures and up to Dunblane's body count. In Scotland, there was no assistant headmaster to save lives by shooting back. And now, thanks to the government's restrictions on gun ownership, there never will be.
So forget about guns. Americans have done their sums: more guns equals less crime. Vermont has more firearms per capita than any other state; it also has the second-lowest murder rate in the country (lower than the United Kingdom, too). Besides, America has always had guns and hunting. Granted that we Massacre of the Month commentators like to fit the partic- ular situation to our own pet peeve, it still seems perverse to fixate on the constants — the guns — rather than look at what's changed. Take this kid Kinkel. When his taste for violent cartoons, the 'music' of Marilyn Manson (who claims to be the Antichrist), throwing rocks at cars, tortur- ing animals and making pipe bombs began to get out of hand, his parents took him to the doctor. The doctor put him on Prozac.
Kip may have the makings of a defence here, or at least a lawsuit. Only the other week, a ten-year-old boy, arrested after an armed stand-off with police in which he used his three-year-old niece as a human shield, entered the novel plea of Not Guilty due to a Prozac-induced trance.' Between the millions of kids on Prozac and the millions on Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder, America's schools are becoming one huge experiment in mood suppression. 'If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we'd say they had ADD or a conduct disorder,' says Michael Guri- an, author of The Wonder of Boys. 'They are who they are and we need to love them for who they are. Let's not try to rewire them.' But, for hassled parents and busy school administrators, rewiring is the easi- est option. With half the students, you don't want to be around when the medica- tion wears off; with the other half, you don't want to be around when it kicks in. But, as it's hard to tell which is which, you're best to steer clear entirely. But the ever-swelling medicine cabinet is itself only a symptom — of how child-rear- ing is increasingly contracted out. All this year's 'kids who kill kids' come from what the media, in their fuzzy shorthand, call `the heartland'. Springfield itself was rou- tinely described on the news as a 'small town', even, though it's, technically, a city and in combination with its larger neigh- bour forms what the Federal government designates as the Eugene-Springfield Metropolitan Statistical Area, with a com- bined population of over 300,000. To those of us in municipalities a few hundred strong, Springfield seems rather large for a small town. I suppose what the big-city reporters mean by the term is that it's a nice place, with well-kept lawns and freshly painted fences: it's not the Bronx, or South-Central LA, or Chicago's Cabrini Green housing projects, or the nation's Third World capital, where the school sys- tem has collapsed and teachers feel they've come out ahead if they get through the day without being stabbed. Kip Kinkel, like his fellow boy killers, isn't the illegitimate child of a crack addict mom and jailbird dad, sleeping rough in an alley, stealing for food. So what's bugging them so much that they feel obliged to mow down their class- mates?
Maybe those nice towns have something to do with it. Most of them are actually suburbs or, in the preferred oxymoron of the day, 'bedroom communities': residents of Springfield drive to work in Eugene. Half a century ago, the suburbs were sold to those Americans fleeing urban decline as the natural repository of family values: all the traditional virtues of civic life, with- Out the contemporary problems of the inner city. In fact, they've turned out to be precisely the opposite: today's bedroom communities have all the contemporary problems, without the traditional virtues. It was the physical layout of post-war sub- urbia which pioneered the defining prob- lems of the age: the long-distance commute; the drifting, rootless population (20 per cent of Americans move every year); feminism, which began in part as a rebellion against the stultifying isolation of suburbia (at the time, Betty Friedan was stuck outside New York in Westchester County); the working mom; the continu- ously flickering TV; the evening meal you pick up at the drive-thru pizza-to-go joint in the mall; the no-fault divorce; and, above all, day care. Fifty-one per cent of mothers work full-time; half of those would prefer not to. Mom's wishes notwithstanding, America's children spend their first, critical, years in what are little more than holding camps. If this year's swollen phalanx of boy killers makes any- thing clear, it's that there are more and more parents who don't know their chil- dren.
Grown-ups shy away from confronting the evidence about what causes violence because they don't want to be judgmental about 'non-traditional' household arrange- ments. But, seeing Thurston High's stu- dents talking about the murder of their classmates, glassy-eyed, in dull, unexpres- sive monotones, you couldn't help wonder- ing if to teenagers the very idea of something causing violence isn't hopelessly quaint. The so-called Information Age is actually an Entertainment Age in which violence is the most routine entertainment f all: on the accelerating descent into a `virtual childhood', violence requires noth- ing so humdrum as a cause — no motiva- tion, no narrative drive, no character. I'd far rather an adolescent boy was out in the woods learning how to hunt deer and bear and wild turkey. But at least in 1911 a lad could come in and read Steele of the Royal Mounted, in which in the frozen wastes of the far north Private Philip Steele and his villainous prey agree the terms of their duel to the death and then have a gentle- manly smoke: `Do you mind a little sleep after we eat? I haven't slept a wink in three days and nights.'
`Sleep until you're ready,' urged Philip. `I don't want to fight bad eyes.'
In 1936, a young chap could come inside and read The Avenger 'He had lost his beloved wife and small daughter in the cal- lous machinations of a criminal ring which loss had impelled him to dedicate his life and his great fortune to the fighting of the underworld. The tragedy had turned his coal-black hair dead white. Also the nerve shock had paralysed his facial mus- cles in some curious way which made the dead flesh like wax; it could not move at the command of his nerves, but when his fingers moved it, it stayed in whatever place it was prodded. Thus he became a man of a thousand faces. . . . '
Even in 1963, an adolescent could curl up with Amazing Fantasy Introducing Spi- der-Man: "My fault — all my fault! If only I had stopped him when I could have! But I didn't — and now Uncle Ben is dead . . . " And a lean, silent figure slowly fades into the gathering darkness, aware at last that in this world with great power there must also come . . . great responsibility!'
But the codes of honour, duty, redemp- tion, vengeance and responsibility that drove Private Steele, the Avenger and Spi- der-Man are all gone. Reading dime novels and pulp magazines and superhero comics were all, in their way, acts of imagination. Mowing down stick figures, blips on a screen, requires no such emotional engage- ment: it's a pure sensory jolt, the thrill of action divorced from human motivation. There are no causes of violence any more: you zap the aliens because that's the game; likewise, at Pearl High School, 16-year-old Luke T. Woodham 'assassinated' a girl he'd once dated and another student because that was the game he and his pals had planned that day. Look at his accomplices at the Rankin County jail, or the two boys who shot up Jonesboro, or the students in Springfield — all with the same dead-eyed look of a blank computer screen. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an electronic whimper.
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