The senseless murders at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado have the nation terrified. What scares me more are the suggested remedies for this kind of breakdown of the social order. Every time something like this happens, the first call is for restrictions on our civil liberties. Some are calling for a ban on the possession of firearms. Some are calling for censorship to prevent the influence of violent television, movies, and video games from falling on our children. Some are calling for a ban on black trenchcoats, as though apparel is the cause of violence. People are saying that we need to minimize the differences between school children by requiring them to dress alike and by segregating those whose behavior and beliefs are different from the norm.

American households have always had guns around. In the past, access was much less restricted than it is now, but this kind of incident didn't happen. When I was a little boy in the 50s, we had toy guns and played "war", both of which are now considered to be politically incorrect, but we never went on to kill our playmates. We watched cowboy movies and war movies with gun battles all of the time. There were cliques in my high school who abused outsiders, which never resulted in anything worse than a fistfight.

What is the difference between then and now? The difference that I see as being causative in the acting out of murderous rage is that the perpetrators have lost all hope of any kind of future, and so live lives without consequences. The difference is that in the past, actions always had consequences, even if the consequences were divine punishment. The new crop of killers are so nihilistic that they see murder/suicide as the ultimate chance to express their rage and escape without paying any price. If the average person gets their fifteen minutes of fame, how much more do the Littleton duo garner by their reign of terror? How else could two so-called "losers" hope to make a mark on the world that no one will ever forget?

Call it lack of hope, depression, or a failure of society, it all comes down to young men who feel that they have no future, that the best times were in the past, and that they have no reason to go on. Teenage suicide has been a problem for a long time and has gotten worse as the strictures of religious belief have faded in many young lives. In a materialistic culture like ours, those who don't excel can come to believe that they are superfluous. If you want to be noticed by the masses, you have to either be very good at something or bad enough that the media will latch onto your escapades and make you a monster.

Why did two smart kids from good homes decide that murder/suicide was their best option? It would be easy to blame guns, violent media, and high school culture. But when you think about it, most of our kids are exposed to these influences and only a vanishingly small number of them are acting out the rage we all feel at some time in our lives. I can only conclude that these two found a gaping abyss within themselves and elected to fill it with carnage. They traded their lives for a "Time" cover and the label of "Monsters". I can only hope that the posthumous fame they've acheived doesn't persuade others to follow in their bloody footsteps.

With a commentary for WCPN, this is Marc Myers.

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