Thursday, May 28, 1998

Oregon deaths intensify search for solutions

If Kip Kinkel's parents had been negligent or mean-spirited and abusive, it might be easier to grasp what went wrong with this 15-year-old boy who shot and killed them and then killed two teenage students at his school while injuring 22 others.

From all reports, however, the parents were good, responsible people who did all in their power to work with their son and correct his problems, and you have to wonder, then, whether President Clinton is right. On a radio broadcast, he said this shooting was no isolated incident, that Kinkel and other teens accused of killing 14 teachers and fellow students over the past year reflect a changing culture of violence on television and in movies and video games.

Actually, Kinkel could be different from the others. He is said to have thrown rocks from an overpass at cars underneath. He bragged to friends about shooting cats and stuffing firecrackers in one's mouth. Police found five fairly sophisticated bombs in his house after the shootings. Following his arrest, police reported, he grabbed a knife taped to his leg and lunged at one of the officers.

Kinkel seems to have given far more signs through a prolonged period of being deeply and dangerously disturbed than the others arrested for spraying bullets at fellow students.

But there's never been a spate of shootings quite like these in American history, and the president's point -- made by many others as well -- seems to have at least some validity. Violence has been part of the stories young people have heard throughout history, but in other eras children were not parked in front of TVs for hour after hour, day after day, while half the heroes they watched busily bloodied up the landscape as if that were the everyday way of things.

Being awash in this kind of entertainment is different from the past and surely has some effect on immature minds, especially those that may be somewhat off balance for other reasons.

Other factors no doubt include the easy availability of guns and the copy-cat phenomenon of people emulating what they have learned about from the news. It seems likely as well that other aspects of our culture, some having to do with diminished parental care, are infecting certain vulnerable young people.

The answers are far from easy, and officeholders should resist the impulse to respond immediately with a barrage of public policy proposals.

But those responsible for America's popular entertainment should look long and hard at their own practices and ask themselves in all moral seriousness what they can and cannot justify.