Yet I never dreamed of murdering those who sent the jibes and insults my way. I don't know that I was any less capable of evil than that young man. It is just that the idea of taking revenge by bringing a gun to school never dawned on me. Laws and mores kept movies and the 78-r.p.m. Censorship is not an easy word even to put on paper, let alone propose two cheers for.
Freedom of speech is the bedrock of a viable culture.
It is a precious liberty still denied in too many countries. Yet progress has its price. Yet that explanation doesn't quite jibe with the seemingly endless series of school shootings. The children most directly confronted by violence are those fated to grow up in the nation's ghettos and barrios, where the nightly sound of gunfire can be a sad kind of inner-city lullaby. Yet they are not the ones who go off the deep end and shoot up their schoolrooms.