Hindsight from The New Gun Week June 1, 1998
Are We Asking the Right Questions?
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The May 21 school shooting in Springfield, OR, has opened a wider public debate about guns and the recent spate of youthful school-house violence.
Actually, this is a debate that is never put aside for very long. The people who hate guns and want to remove them all from American society are always quick to wade into the fresh blood, stand before the cameras and repeat their anti-gun mantras.
At times, it may seem like the only significant discussion has to do with whether or not to blame guns, gunowners and the right to keep and bear arms. But not this time.
People-gunowners and non-gunowners alike-are horrified by the mass killings. They are afraid for their own children's lives, and disturbed by what they feel is a trend that grows increasingly more common and more random: no one knows where it will happen again and whose children will be next.
Most Americans are also disturbed by the broader significance of these horrible events, wondering what is happening to our society all of a sudden. They realize that the federal Gun Free School Zones Act, coupled with similar state statutes, has not helped reduce the deadly violence. Some think these laws have actually made it worse, going on to suggest that the laws be amended to allow teachers and school officials to be armed. In at least two incidents, the suspects were stopped and apprehended by armed bystanders.
The closed-minded anti-gun commentators ridicule these suggestions, as might be expected. After all, what is a knee-jerk reaction worth if there is no jerk.
Others, however, are looking elsewhere for answers. Many realize that guns have always been common in the cities, towns and countryside of America, but not the current level of teen criminality. There are prominent voices raised which lay blame at the feet of the National Education Association, the movie and television industry, "liberal" school policies, the government, and the news media. Americans seem to be asking different questions, and looking for better answers.
Wittingly or unwittingly, the suspect in the Thurston High School cafeteria shootings, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel, has presented the world with a much more complex view of juvenile violence than have other junior criminals.
Kinkel had been suspended from school on May 20 for having a handgun in his locker. That pistol proved to have been stolen by another boy and purchased by Kinkel. However, police did not place him in custody. They sent him home.
The next day, he returned to school armed with a .22 caliber rifle, .22 caliber target pistol and a 9mm pistol, plus a military-style knife. He is reported to have fired 51 shots-mostly from the rifle-into the cafeteria crowded with some 400 students until he was tackled by a high-school wrestler, Jake Ryker already wounded by the rifle fire, and subdued by other students. (See comments from the Ryker family in the Page 1 skyline story.) Kinkel is accused of killing 17-year-old Mikael Nickolauson outright, and 16-year-old Ben Walker, who died the next day from head wounds. He also is charged with wounding 19 other students.
When police went to his house, they found the bodies of two adults, who proved to be Kinkel's parents. He had reportedly shot and killed them before he went to Thurston High School and shot his fellow students.
Police also found explosive devices which Kinkel had made, and as news of each of these discoveries became public, an even more horrifying portrait of the shooter emerged.
Kinkel had deeper problems and had been receiving psychiatric counseling. According to family friends, Kinkel's father has purchased the .22 rifle for him as a gift in an effort to channel the boy's fascination with guns into a more constructive and traditional channel. Kip Kinkel is also reported to have tortured and killed household animals, and to have flown into rages and threatened people with violence.
He is now in custody, charged with four counts of murder, and several of aggravated assault, as well as violations of the Gun Free School Zones Act. He will be tried as an adult but, because of his age, will not be subject to the death penalty. President Clinton expressed his outrage and condolences to the victims, their families and the whole Springfield, OR, community. Attorney General Janet Reno announced that a special panel would probe the event and issue recommendations.
Meanwhile, the families of the dead and wounded grieved and tried to understand what had happened. One of their children was charged with murdering his mother and father in the very home they shared and traveling to school to murder and maim his classmates, other young people who were also close to him. The guns didn't make him do it. They were merely the tools of his mayhem.
Something else made these killings happen, and Americans still need to find the answers by asking the right questions.
Less noticed in the mass of stories about the Oregon shooting was the suicide of a teenage boy on a San Bernadino, CA, high school campus. According to Associated Press on May 22, another student saw the young man raise a .38 caliber handgun to his temple and pull the trigger.
Two days before the Oregon shooting, an 18-year-old honor student allegedly opened fire in a parking lot at Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, TN, killing a classmate who was dating his ex-girlfriend. The shooting took place three days before graduation.
On May 21, a 15-year-old girl was shot in the leg in a Jersey Village, TX, high school classroom and a 17-year-old student was arrested. She was shot with a .38 caliber revolver smuggled into the school in another student's backpack.Copycats Foiled
If anyone doubts that there is a copycat element to some of the shootings, consider that in St. Charles, MO, three sixth-grade boys were foiled in a plot to kill fellow students on the last day of school in a plan modeled after the Jonesboro, AR, school ambush. A sheriff's department officer who regularly made visits to the school as part of an anti-drug program was credited with helping to uncover the plot. Police in St. Charles described the plot to reporters on the same day as the Oregon shooting.
In a front page notice to readers on May 22, the Chicago Sun-Times said that it was keeping the Oregon school shooting off Page One in an effort to avoid provoking copycats and frightening young readers. The Sun-Times devoted all of its tabloid-size Pages Two and Three to the story. However, the notice made it clear that the editors were concerned about the copycat phenomenon.
"Following the series of school shootings nationwide, we see a danger that prominent reports of each successive incident could be contributing to the phenomenon," the Sun-Times said. "We do not wish to encourage any unstable teenager to think of shooting as a way out of adolescent torments." The Chicago Tribune, however, featured the shooting prominently on its front page.
Other commentators have also focused on the copycat question, including a former FBI profiler who appeared on a CNN show related to the Oregon shootings. He was not the only one to say that the magnitude of the coverage by the media, especially television, contributed to the problem. He claimed that studies of teenage suicides proved that there was a "copycat" surge in suicide that could be linked to highly publicized reports of other suicides.
During the discussion which followed, he stressed that he was not promoting censorship, only recommending restraint in how the reports where treated, particularly on television. He said he believed the news could be reported without hours of continuous and infinitely detailed coverage of such events.
The debate over guns is not going to go away. Neither is the soul searching over the trend to ever more deadly teen and school violence.
Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, told reporters after the Springfield shooting that a combined team of Justice and Education Department experts have been studying the problem in the wake of other such crimes. He suggested that the solution was to encourage local communities to "move to the kind of zero tolerance for guns on campus that we've (Clinton Administration) long advocated."
McCurry and others like him are thus sending a signal, but it appears to be the wrong one.
It is not zero tolerance of guns which is needed, but zero tolerance for criminal violence.
His remarks suggest that the government experts studying the problem are asking the wrong questions, while Americans as a whole are asking deeper questions that are more likely to cut to the core of the problem.
The New Gun Week is published three times a month by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on the 1st, 10th, and 20th. Hindsight is a commentary written by SAF President and Gun Week Executive Editor Joseph P. Tartaro. This commentary may be reprinted so long as credit is given to the author and the publication. For more information or to subscribe, write Gun Week, PO Box 488, Buffalo, NY 14209, or call 716-885-6408 Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, or inquire on Compuserve to John Krull, Production manager-JohnSAF@Compuserve.com or gunweeksaf@broadviewnet.netAlso, check out the New Gun Week at http://www.GunWeek.com