In all likelihood, the perpetrator of the Santana High School shootings will be mandatorily tried as an adult, and face a life sentence. Harsh punishment, after the fact is no substitute for sensible gun control. What we need now is a ban on handguns, which have very little use for hunters and are involved in a dispoportionate amount of street crime. I am becoming increasingly concerned that the wall of media attention attendant upon school shootings serves to give kids involved in them far too much attention, and also makes grownups more fearful of kids and schools than they ought to be. This year's graduating class will take less drugs, drink less beer, have fewer unwanted pregnancies, be more likely to believe in God and practice their religion, than my graduating high school class in 1977.
Kids have to do spectacular feats to get on television, or spectacular crimes.
There's something terribly wrong with that equation. I think you ask an incredibly important question. We're living in a society more concerned with creating a V-Chip to edit children's television when their parents are not around than to create a flexible work schedule for parents to simply be around their children so children are not raised by television. That exemplifies a society with deeply misplaced societal priorities. The common theme in many of these shootings is that the assailant feels aggrieved for being mis-treated by his peers.