Saturday, May 30, 1998

Guns and revenge have seductive power

By Lauren R. Stanley / Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- In Springfield, Ore., families and friends are in shock and mourning over the shootings that took place there last week. A 15-year-old boy is charged with taking a gun to school and killing two students while wounding 22 others.

Kipland P. "Kip" Kinkel also is charged with murdering his parents, and faces more charges after police found five bombs at his home.

Now a whole nation is left to ask, Why?

Why did this young man, or for that matter, why does ANYone, ever open fire and randomly shoot people?

There is no simple answer to the question, in this shooting or in any of the school shootings that seem to happen with increasing frequency.

But I think I know at least a part of the answer.

Because I know both the seductive power of guns, and I know the seductive power of acting out fantasies of revenge.

When I was a college journalist, I covered the Army ROTC on campus. Part of my job was to go on "manuevers" and "war games" with the students. During the two years I reported on the ROTC, I was allowed to fire the weapons the students were using.

That's when I discovered how seductive guns can be. There-3/4s so much power in them, power that has the potential to seduce a person in ways that are both startling and alarming. Take aim, squeeze the trigger, and BANG! Someone or something is hit. If you practice long enough, you almost always can hit the target.

A couple of years after college, I went out target shooting with some friends. We plunked away at targets, then set up cans and shot them full of holes, too. For a few hours one afternoon, we fired our rifles and exclaimed with glee whenever we shot particularly well.

Again, I felt the seductive nature of guns, and I marveled anew at how it powerful felt to be shooting things.

That was the last time I fired a weapon.

Because that day, I realized how seductive it was to have life-and-death power over something, simply because I had a gun and could aim it fairly well.

I was scared of that power, and vowed never again to succumb to the seduction.

When I heard about the shootings in Oregon, I remembered how it felt to have a gun in my hands. And I wondered, Is that part of what drove this young man to kill people?

Did the power of the weapon seduce him?

Then I read more stories about Kinkel, about how frustrated he claimed to be with other folks, and how he allegedly told students he had a "hit list" of people he "wanted to get."

And I thought about the seductive nature of acting out our little fantasies of revenge. I remembered a recent incident where I had done just that over something that had really frustrated me.

I was only playing a computer game, to be sure, but that game -- which lasted all of five minutes -- sure made me feel better.

Because I had gotten my revenge.

The incident started when my parents flew in for a visit. The airline on which they were flying quite simply "lost" the flight, and for 90 minutes, I ran all over the airport with a friend of mine, trying to find my parents.

For those 90 minutes, I was a very frustrated and worried daughter, angry at both the airline and the airport, neither of which was user-friendly.

Later that evening, my friend was playing a computer game. I was so frustrated, I asked him to put in a certain game that has to do with this particular airport, a game in which terrorists are running rampant, and my job, as the player, is to shoot as many of them as possible.

I was so frustrated by the afternoon's events that all I wanted to do was get my revenge on the airport.

So I pointed the computer's gun at the screen, shot a whole bunch of people, and felt a whole lot better.

I had been seduced by the power of revenge.

Now, in light of the shootings in Oregon, I have vowed never again to succumb to the power of even acting out fantasies of revenge.

And I wonder, did that power of revenge seduce Kinkel?

There is a world of difference between "shooting" and "killing" people in a computer game and shooting and killing people in a high school cafeteria.

And not everyone who plays computer games or who owns and fires guns goes out and does what Kinkel is charged with doing: Murdering people.

But both guns and revenge are highly seductive. And sometimes, it can be hard to resist the seduction.

Like so many others right now who are trying to figure out why this awful event took place, I am left to wonder: Would these killings, and all the others like them, have taken place if guns had not been so easily available? Would Kinkel and all those others who have acted out their fantasies of revenge by using real guns and real bullets have injured people if it had been harder for them to get those guns and bullets?

Taken on their own, guns and revenge are each extremely powerful. Mixed together, they are lethal.

So why are the former so readily available?

I don't know why Kinkel acted as he did last week in a small town in Oregon. I can't explain these shootings, or any of the other thousands of shootings that take place every day in this country.

But I think I know some small part of the reason.

Because I know both the seductive power of guns, and I know the seductive power of acting out fantasies of revenge.

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(The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley, a former assistant news editor for the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, is the associate rector at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Burke, Va. Readers may write to Stanley care of Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, 790 National Press Building, Washington, D.C., 20045.)

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(c) 1998, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.