Tuesday, March 31, 1998

Rural South's not to blame for shootings

Last week's dreadful shooting spree in Jonesboro, Ark., has naturally enough spurred a search for causes. How could it happen that two boys, one just 11 years old and the other 13, could dress up in camouflage fatigues and fire semiautomatic hunting rifles into a crowd at their school, killing four girls and a teacher and wounding 15 others?

One proffered answer - and a spurious one - is that it all has something to do with peculiarities of rural Southern culture.

This thesis derives principally from the fact that two other recent, highly publicized shootings involving teen-agers also took place in rural parts of the South, one in Mississippi and another in Kentucky. In news accounts, criminology professors and other experts have said guns are more readily available to youngsters in the rural South than other parts of the country, largely because hunting is so much a part of life there. One professor has gone so far as to suggest that many Southerners remain rebellious, even to the point of violence.

The thesis about the rural South is done in by statistics, however. It's reported, for instance, that of 2,109 arrests of young people on homicide charges in 1996, just 93 took place in rural areas around the whole country, much less rural areas in the South alone. It happens to be an easily verifiable fact that most cases of teens killing people take place in large cities.

What's more, not even 10 percent of rural schools experienced any crime at all in a survey several years ago. City schools? Some 60 percent of them were scenes of criminal activity, according to a news story.

About American culture

The issue here is not what's transpiring in one section of the country. It isn't what small-town Southern culture has wrought. The issue is what American culture is bringing about.

The thought might be uncomfortable to many, for instance, but is it possible that the breakdown of the American family has something to do with rendering youthful violence more likely? One of the youths arrested in Jonesboro, who had moved from Minnesota (not exactly a Southern state) to Arkansas with his mother a few years ago, was said to have been distraught by his parents' divorce.

Any number of factors are no doubt at play in the commission of violent acts by young people. The constant drumbeat of violence on TV - America's favorite baby-sitter - may also contribute, and the reach of TV into virtually every home in the land may be one reason why rural areas are less immune to youthful violence than once they were.

It's an evasion, though, and a dangerous one, to think that the horror of kids killing kids is the unholy preserve of rural Southerners. Americans need to look squarely at the national culture, including aspects of it that they may ordinarily endorse as at least acceptable, if they want to make headway toward the truth.