Excerpted from: ERRI EMERGENCY SERVICES REPORT-EmergencyNet NEWS Service-Thursday, April 29, 1999-Vol. 3, No. 119-11:00CDT

EmergencyNet News -Opinion/Editorial

Littleton: Who's to Blame?

By: Clark Staten, Sr. Analyst and Executive Director, Emergency Response & Research Institute

Chicago, IL (EmergencyNet News) -- A majority of the funerals have been held in Littleton, Colorado. An intensive police investigation continues there. Scenes of grieving families and heroic rescuers have filled our television screens and newspapers for a week now. Apparently, if one listens to the talk shows and reads the news magazines, the time has come for the traditional finger-pointing and the placing of blame for the tragedy that took place at the Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.

The media pundits, "psyco-babblers," pro- and anti-gun forces, and dozens of other special interest groups are now out in force and ready to offer their view of who or what should be blamed for the loss of fifteen vibrant youths in Littleton. Predictably, the various kinds of experts all seem to have some "prechosen" kind of evil that is "undoubtedly" to blame for the deaths of these kids. It seems everybody has their own agenda and "ox to gore" in regard to the tragedy in Colorado.

Traditional media sources like magazines and newspapers seem to want to blame it all on the internet. They point out, probably correctly, that instructions for the construction of various kind of explosive devices can be found in obscure corners of the diverse network. Several prominent articles have pointed out that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had access to the net and even posted a hate-filled page on the World-Wide-Web. The logic follows then -- it must have been the fault of the internet. Strangely, however, the articles fail to mention that many of the same recipes for bombs have been available in bookstores for years or that they can be ordered through the mail by anyone with the price of the book.

The anti-gun crowd, as in past incidents, wants to use the Littleton incident to justify even more draconian and intrusive gun control laws. They say that it's the guns that caused this atrocity. They contend that these hand-held pieces of machinery must be taken away from everyone in order for people to be safe. After all, our government has already said people can't be trusted to spend their tax-rebates correctly, and now they say that our citizenry can't possess a firearm without using it to commit a horrendous crime. Of course, these experts know what's best, and they are only doing this to help save us from ourselves. And, somehow, the potentially more deadly explosive devices, found all over the scene in Littleton, seem to have been forgotten in the rush to ban guns.

The sociologists and psychologists want to blame the whole thing on "society." The nameless and faceless collective of who we are. It must be the proliferation of graphically violent movies, books, music, and computer games that caused these two young men to kill their classmates. Yeah, that's it -- it must be "society's fault." It's so much more politically correct and sensitive to blame "society" and let everyone take the collective blame, rather than getting to the real root of the problem.

Then, there's school security merchants that propose that we should turn our institutions of higher learning into armed camps with security measures stricter than those imposed at prisons or international airports. They want metal detectors at the doors, drug/bomb sniffing dogs, armed police or security guards everywhere, and impromptu locker searches to be held at all hours. While some of these security measures are probably warranted, one still must ask what ever happened to the idea of "academic freedom."

No one seems to want to place the blame where it belongs -- squarely on the shoulders of the two young men who plotted for a year and then conducted a bloodthirsty and twisted slaughter of their teachers and classmates. Few, if any, of the various experts and special interest groups seem to want to say out loud that it was the young assailants themselves that are to blame for the murders. Further, one must -- at some point -- look directly at the parents of these young men and ask some very serious questions about their involvement in this entire matter. So far, we have heard little from the parents of these murderers.

Somehow, both the parents and their sons seem to have escaped personal responsibility for the acts that the boys so brazenly carried out. Instead, we as a society seem to want to focus on a myriad of motivations, external causation, the weapons, or other factors, rather than accepting the fact that it was these two young men, purposefully and with malice of forethought, who snuffed out the light that was their classmates.

Although there is certainly more than enough blame to go around in this case, one must ask when we, collectively as a nation, are going to do something about the permissive attitudes and personal irresponsibility that has fostered and facilitated this horrendous incident. Sadly, we are becoming a nation of "whiners," "victims," and "excuse makers," who are all too willing to blame anything and everything...except those who are actually responsible for a crime.

Maybe the time has come for America to stand up and loudly proclaim the fact that each individual must and will be held strictly and personally responsible for his or her actions. Secondarily, it must be made clear that the parents of each and every child in this country will be held directly accountable for the conduct of their children. And finally, we must resolve that the time has come for a restoration of the family and personal values that have made this country great. To do less will surely result in additional failures like the two boys in Littleton, Colorado.

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