I've been wanting to write for sometime about what happened in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999, but the words just wouldn't come. I didn't want to take on the pain of a tragedy that wasn't mine, reveling in it like I've seen so many people do (ahemRosie O'Donnell), turning it in to MY tragedy thereby getting some sick perverted enjoyment out of it. I couldn't put into words my frustration at what happened, my questions as to what the fuck is going on in this country, my sadness at the loss of so many innocent kids that will never get to experience adulthood.Today, I stumbled across an article by Michael Ventura, a brilliant writer who is syndicated in newspapers across the country. I hope I'm not infringing on any copyright laws by quoting him, but he seemed to be able to put into words what I was feeling. I've always been pretty anti-gun, which makes me practically the antichrist in Texas. Gun supporters (of whom my stepfather is one) always give us the tired claim "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Yeah, and people kill people with guns! A gun is an inanimate object, you dumb fucking redneck. And it's also a prety effective killing device. I don't hear many stories about death by Beanie Baby on the evening news, but I certainly hear about a gun-related homicide on a daily basis. Ventura states in his article "One set of numbers says it all, as reported in The New York Times: "In 1996, handguns were used to murder 2 people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Great Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany, and 9,390 in the United States." England, where guns are illegal, has an extremely low homicide and crime rate. I felt safer living in London, a city of over 12 million people than I do in smalltown Texas.
And these lunatic gun supporters refuse to place the blame for the Littleton shootings where it belongs--on our gun culture. They blame things like video games. I've never seen a video game kill anyone. Ventura writes "The bodies of the children in Colorado were still warm -- literally -- when various gun advocates went before the cameras to say such an event need not and should not mean that our gun laws must be changed. Several suggested that the massacre wouldn't have happened if teachers and guards had been armed. Their solution is more guns!"
The blame for what drove Eric and Dylan, and all the other kids who have done this or are plotting right now to do this (because it will happen again, don't believe for a second it won't) lies with our fucked up gun culture and our fucked up adults who refuse to take responsibility for the images they present their children with.
"Some kids can't bear being lied to on such a massive scale. And some, a very few, do awful things. At which the rest of us pretend to be shocked. But we're not really shocked. We're revealed. We sell these children the means to insulate and corrupt themselves, and we market the means by which they can kill themselves and each other, and then we blame the kids for our terror when a few are driven mad by this virulent mixture of our lies and of what we've enticed our children to buy."(ibid).
I think America's problem is that we are too young of a country to be able to responsibly handle the economic and military might we've ammassed in such a short period of time. This country has got a big problem, and kids going into schools and shooting up their classmates is only one small symptom. "The only countries with yearly casualty rates that approach or exceed ours are Third World countries in states of civil war. How can we justify ourselves? How can we call ourselves "great"? How can we see American civilization as anything but demented and out of control when compared to any place but a Third World country ravaged by poverty and internecine strife?...every voice of government and the media joins in a shrill chorus constantly repeating that we are the greatest nation in history. Would we need to boast so often, every day, so many times a day, if we really believed it?" (ibid)
What's it going to take to make us wake up and smell the coffee? A massive stock market crash? Another Great Depression? A nuclear war? It's so fucking depressing.