What the hell is wrong with the world?

In area where 5 died, guns aren't the issue

reprinted from The Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/27/98

"...the deadly [Jonesboro, Arkansas] school attack, in which four students and a teacher were killed, has not shaken Jonesboro's belief in the right to own firearms.

"'This is a part of the country where it's unusual if a child doesn't grow up going out with dad and grandad to go hunting, and maybe using some powerful weapons,' said Bill Hunter, an Arkansas State Police spokesman...

"'The problem is not guns,' said local criminal-defense attorney David Rees, dismissing suggestions that tighter firearms laws could have prevented the killings...

"Gun-control advocates from outside 'don't understand things quite like we do,' said Rees, who went hunting with his dad at age 6 and today has six guns of his own...'Hunting in the South is a bonding experience.'...

"The 11-year old [Andrew] Golden [one of the two boys accused in the schoolyard slaughter] was a practiced marksman whose father was a gun enthusiast. The boy had been taught to shoot from age 6; he recently killed his first duck.

"The boy owns a shotgun, two rifles, and a crossbow, his grandfather said..."

All across the country, people are looking for answers to the question "Why?" Why did two boys, one eleven, the other thirteen, lie in ambush and murder four schoolmates and a teacher after pulling a false fire alarm to lure the unsuspecting targets out into the open.

Why? I'll tell you why.

How can an eleven-year-old boy "own" three firearms? This child, who won't be old enough to drive for five years, won't be old enough to get married for six years, won't be old enough to vote for seven years, and won't be old enough to drink until the year 2008, is able to "own" a total of four deadly weapons???

Granted, the legal ownership of the weapons may have been held by someone else -- Golden's grandfather, for example. But, the grandfather himself spoke of the boy owning the guns -- whether or not the legal paperwork was in the boy's name seems irrelevant. As far as the family was concerned, they felt that it was perfectly acceptable to begin teaching a boy to shoot a gun at age six, and by eleven, well, he certainly had the maturity to own three firearms and a crossbow.

ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR FUCKING MINDS??? What in the world would possess someone to think that it's a good idea to begin teaching someone to fire a weapon, with the intent to kill, at the tender age of six??

Our society has rules. Rules about children, rules that we need. Children are not permitted the full rights in our society that adults are: the rights to vote, to drive, to drink, etc. Children don't have the emotional, physical, or mental development to make these adult decisions.

But, in Arkansas, most jurisdictions allow children as young as ten to handle firearms with parental permission, and these laws are rarely, if ever enforced for children younger than ten. The schools themselves sanction the marriage of kids and guns; Westside Middle School, site of the massacre, allows students to take four "hunting days" as excused absences from school each year. I'll say it again: ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR FUCKING MINDS???

In a ballot box, the worst possible mistake a child could make would be a vote for Pat Buchanan -- not a directly life-threatening decision. However, even without malicious intent, an armed child could easily kill or maim another person, or himself.

The bottom line is that children should NOT be using guns. Period. If we don't even trust children under 17 to have the maturity to attend an R-rated movie, or watch "South Park" on TV, why in the world would we place a deadly weapon in their hands, and teach them to kill?? It's simply unjustifiable, and every father or grandfather who has ever taught a child to shoot a gun has blood on his hands this week.

These two Jonesboro children are not quite right in the heads; that much is apparent. Thousands of children all over this country, mostly young boys, learn to hunt every year, and very few turn into murderers. However, by teaching children how to kill, and giving them the implements to do so, we give emotionally-troubled kids like Golden, and the other boy, thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson, the means to inflict their emotional problems on society, with devastatingly tragic results: Britthney Varner and Natalie Brooks will never see the seventh grade; Stephanie Johnson and Paige Ann Herring will never see thirteen candles on a birthday cake; and teacher Shannon Wright leaves behind a husband without a wife, and a three-year old son without a mother.

Obviously, Golden's and Johnson's families never taught their sons to use weapons with the thought that these weapons might someday be turned against another human being. The families of these children are as devastated as the families of those who were murdered.

And yet, when you teach a boy to shoot from age six, before he even has a firm grasp on the concepts of life and death, and you celebrate the killing of animals as sport, and you praise the child for killing his "first duck," as Golden did recently, and your entire culture revolves around guns, and hunting, what do you expect? You expect a six-year old, a nine-year old, an eleven- or a thirteen-year old to clearly differentiate in their minds between killing a deer and killing a twelve-year old girl?

These boys couldn't make that distinction. They flushed their classmates out of Westside Middle School just like they were flushing geese out of a creek. Wearing camouflage clothing and lying in a wooded area adjacent to the school, they began peering through their scoped rifles and, as they had done dozens of time before, began hunting.

Only this time, their quarry wasn't mounted on the wall of the den; they were buried in wooden boxes.