School E.C.C. Adult-Ed Youth Dept. Yet another shocking school slaughter has left the United States stunned and groping for a reason why. The bloody afternoon last week placed Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, forever in history's book of infamy alongside Jonesboro and Springfield. It inevitably has produced a flood of agonized questions without answers. As usual, Americans are reluctant to face the obvious - bloody violence is fostered by a culture that allows children to be armed.
Rebellion is the mark of youth as the millennia-old cliche goes.
It is a lot easier to make rebellion count when it is done with bombs and bullets. After the massacre of children in a Scottish village school by an adult terrorist, Britain introduced some of the world's most Draconian anti-arms legislation, making it virtually impossible for any British citizen outside the armed forces to get anywhere near a firearm of any sort. There is no guarantee that such laws will prevent another madman from carrying out another massacre in the future, but it most certainly prevents disturbed or psychotic teenagers turning loose on their schoolmates with an arsenal of weapons. British or European schools are not immune from the nihilist violence of the times, but most fights between pupils still end in time-honored fisticuffs, not in mass murder. That right has now become a tyranny in itself.