Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 28, 1992 TAG: 9201280483
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
KIDS WITH GUNS IN A VIOLENT SOCIETY
AMERICA'S has always been a violent society. It took an adventuresome, rough-and-ready people to carve out settlements in the wilderness, then strike out westward and tame a rugged country.But while we tamed the country, we did not tame ourselves. Violence remains embedded in the American fabric. It finds many expressions, from domestic quarrels to mob-style shootings to random shooting in the streets. And now violence, so long a part of adult lives, is seeping down among the children, in ever deadlier forms.
A couple of generations ago, youth gangs in the asphalt jungles settled differences with fists and clubs. Then came switchblades. Next zip guns, cheap homemade weapons.
Today, young toughs tote heavy weaponry. Like grown-ups, they can choose from arsenals. By one means or another, they have access to the most sophisticated and powerful of firearms, from .45 caliber handguns whose slugs can knock a man down, to semiautomatics that can instantly riddle someone with hot lead.
Kids are carrying guns - in their neighborhoods, to school, to the malls where they hang out. Not just in the big cities considered cesspools of crime, but also in smaller communities like Roanoke and its environs.
They not only carry guns, often they use them - sometimes in almost casual fashion. Last June, a 13-year-old Southwest Roanoke boy shot a 7-year-old in the leg. Why? He said the other boy's mother had failed to pay a $25 drug debt.
A series of stories in this newspaper this weekend told how pervasive the gun culture has become. These deadly weapons aren't everywhere, of course: Pistol-packers are in a minority; more kids fear guns than possess them.
Still, national statistics suggest that one in five high-school students has carried a gun or other weapon to school. In the past five years, reports the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of minors killed by gunfire increased by nearly 86 percent. (During the same period, the number of adults dead from gunfire was up 22 percent.) Moreover, teens who kill themselves use firearms 60 percent of the time.
Few youths are surprised nowadays when their peers carry arms. More and more inner-city youth feel - or say they feel - that they must get pieces of their own for self-protection. It's a vicious circle that, absent effective counteraction, can only widen. Tomorrow it could be your kid swaggering about with a pistol in his belt - or rushed to an emergency room, life draining from gunshots fired by another child.
In a sense, guns are only a symptom. In many homes, families have broken down or barely existed; kids lack strong, authoritative adults as exemplars and teachers of constructive behavior. Violence, or the threat of it, appeals to rootless youths as a means to assert their identity, win friends and admirers, and ward off threats.
Illicit drugs also have poisoned bodies, minds and values. Selling dope is no longer limited to grown-ups; now it can buy young people flashy clothes and even cars. Youthful dealers are jealous of their lucrative clientele: Firearms help them keep off rivals. Drugs and guns go together.
But not always. The gun culture extends far beyond the drug culture. Every week, couch-potato kids sprawled before the TV watch hundreds of violent acts, usually involving guns. The message: Guns are a part of our lives, and in this world even the good guys need them. TV and movies show the shootings in slow motion and linger on the immediate bloody result, appearing to the desensitized viewer as so much ketchup. But the cameras do not dwell on the consequences - the destruction of life, the pain and loss to families and friends and neighborhoods.
Rural or small-town youngsters who sneak firearms into their elementary schools aren't drug dealers or hardened wrongdoers; they're aping their elders - children always do - and seeking their peers' attention and approval. It's like carrying a prized toy to school: Show and tell.
This is the hard thing about addressing the kids-with-guns issue. New laws are important and needed. But so is cultural change in a society that prizes power, glorifies violence, and leaves children increasingly on their own to survive in a threatening environment barraged by bad messages.