The New York Times

April 30, 1999, Friday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Page 30; Column 1; Editorial Desk
 
 

The Gaming of Violence

What Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold saw as they made their murderous way through Columbine High School last week looked nothing like the images they saw while playing the video game called Doom. Instead of heavily armed, square-chinned men and prognathous monsters roaming a fortress set in a vaguely Asiatic mountain range, the two teen-agers saw ordinary students lying prostrate in the blandly over-lit hallways and classrooms of a modern American high school. How that hideous reality compared to the fantasy of Doom in the minds of those two boys is impossible to judge.

The search for cause in the Littleton shootings continues, and much of it has come to focus on violent video games. Every human, adolescent or adult, entertains fantasies of one kind or another. What makes them fantasies is the recognition, reinforced every passing day, that the world does not bend to our wishes. But as

entertainment technology advances, it becomes easier to act out computer-simulated, virtual versions of the stereotyped fantasies our culture markets so well. Something provided a conduit of sorts between the fantasies Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold indulged and the reality they forced upon their classmates. For several reasons, suspicion points to video games.

As violent as they are, games like Doom and Doom II and Quake are also relentlessly first-person. The screen portrays the player's field of view, and the only visual token of the player's identity is the gun barrel that protrudes into the bottom of the frame. In most of these games, the setting and the violence are inherently unrealistic. What is realistic, in a nightmarish way, is the sense of rushed three-dimensional movement and the shift in skill levels that occurs as a child plays more and more. After a few hours of Doom, a child isn't virtually more skillful at pointing and shooting, he is actually more skillful. As a player improves, he is rewarded by an increase in the level of violence.

What is truly alarming is the kind of fantasy these games embody. Normally when children indulge their fantasies, they tend to animate not only themselves but also the world around them. They dramatize it and bring it to life, sharing the stage with the personae they create. That is one important step toward understanding the psychological reality of other human beings. But the fantasy embodied in video games is a narcissistic fantasy of rage. The psychology it profiles is brutally simple: an armed first-person actor in a hostile world full of completely dehumanized targets. This is a fantasy that inevitably prevents the player from personifying his assailants, which is why it has worked so well as a form of military training. The danger lies in the way video games channel and limit imagination as well as in their apparent violence.

 

On psychologically vulnerable children, it seems plain that such games must wreak a kind of havoc, reinforcing their isolation and fortifying their anger. Still, most children who play violent video games do not go on to murder their classmates. Nor, in a nation full of real guns, is banning virtual violence likely to put an end to school shootings. Oddly, those who categorically blame violent video games for the murders at Columbine High School risk making the same mistake they accuse adolescents of making -- confusing fantasy and reality. Not every fantasy, no matter how violent, is a sign of sober intent.
 

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The Times-Picayune

April 30, 1999 Friday, ORLEANS

SECTION: METRO; Pg. B7

CUTTING DOWN THE BODY COUNT

By Cookie & Steven Robers of the United Featured Syndicated

Since the Littleton tragedy, there's been a lot of simplistic talk about how to prevent another rampage by a gun-toting teenager. But that's the wrong question. Prevention is impossible. Magic formulas and silver bullets are in short supply.

There is only one reasonable goal: Reduce the chances that terror will strike again. And one way to do that is passing a set of practical measures that would help keep guns away from children. Not hunters. Not homeowners. Just kids.

Every day, 13 children are killed by guns in America. Last year, 6,000 students were expelled for bringing weapons to school. One out of five teens polled by ABC News know someone who's packed a sidearm to class, and 54 percent say getting their own gun would be no problem.

If anything, Hillary Clinton is understating the matter when she says, "It is criminal how easy it is for children in America to obtain guns."

Many of President Clinton's proposals make sense. Raise the legal age for buying a handgun from 18 to 21. Ban juveniles from possessing assault rifles. Mandate child locks on all new weapons. Require background checks for purchases at gun shows.

We strongly support a Clinton proposal to make handgun buyers wait three days. (A similar rule contained in the Brady bill has now lapsed.) Troubled kids acting on impulse can do a lot of damage to themselves and others. Unfortunately, we know. The child of a friend was allowed to walk into a gun store, plunk down his money and walk out with a weapon. He shot himself in the parking lot.

Making parents legally responsible for their children's crimes is worth considering if the law can be drawn carefully enough. It's worked on the state level. So has a proposal limiting gun purchases to one a month.

Already, Republican leaders, joined by some Democrats from gun-loving states, are blasting away at the president's plan. "I'm not convinced that that would solve the problem," says Rep. Dick Armey, the House Republican leader, and in a sense he's right.

Locking up guns doesn't treat the culture's addiction to violence or give parents more time with their kids. After raising two children who survived adolescence, we heartily endorse a study at the Mayo Clinic that concluded: "the most effective way to protect young people from unhealthy or dangerous behaviors is for parents to be involved in their lives."

But in another sense, Armey is flat wrong. He's doing what the gun lobby always does -- set up a straw man for target practice and then shoot it down. No one pretends that additional gun laws will "solve the problem." But they can reduce the risks.

As Mrs. Clinton rightly insists, just because there is no "perfect set of solutions" out there, society should not feel "hopeless or helpless in the face of this tragedy."

The American public agrees. When USA Today asked voters what tactics would be "very effective in helping to stop school violence," three out of five favored "stricter gun control for teens."

Gun control is particularly popular among women voters. With Republicans already suffering from a sizable gender gap, they could pay a real political price by lining up with the National Rifle Association and opposing even the most reasonable ideas.

GOP lawmakers should listen to their female colleagues on this one. In 1993, only 23 percent of the male Republican House members backed the assault weapons ban, but two thirds of the GOP women did. And the ladies were right, morally and politically.

The NRA is still powerful and motivated, but it is losing ground. Increasingly, Americans see the private possession of firearms as a source of danger, not protection. Moreover, police organizations are now siding with the gun control forces. After all, they're the ones out there getting shot.

We were in Chicago in 1968, when the local cops were beating up antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic convention. And we were there again in 1996, when the stage of the Democratic convention was crowded with uniformed cops eager to support the party's backing of the assault weapons ban.

By kowtowing to the NRA on assault weapons and handguns, the GOP lost credibility on the law-and-order issue. And now, on the question of kids, Republicans seem intent on making that same mistake again.

The killings on the Long Island Railroad in 1993 helped push the assault weapons ban through Congress, and the schoolyard massacre at Dunblane, Scotland, prompted Great Britain to ban the private possession of all handguns.

Littleton should have the same galvanizing effect. New gun laws won't cure teen-age rage. But they could cut down the body count. And that's worth doing.

Cokie and Steven Roberts are columnist for United Feature Syndicate.
 
 

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The Houston Chronicle

April 29, 1999, Thursday 3 STAR EDITION

SECTION: A; Pg. 30

 

Time to repeal the Second Amendment?

By DON KAUL

AMONG the weapons that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold used to murder their classmates in Colorado last week was a TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun. The amazing part about that is that no one is amazed by it.

The TEC-9 is a weapon of choice for drug gangs and terrorists. It is famous for its ability to kill a lot of people quickly; that's all it's good for, really. It can disgorge itself of 32 bullets in a matter of a few seconds. Its manufacture was banned in 1994; its manufacture, but not its sale. The gun used in the Littleton, Colo., killings was traced back to a Denver gun dealer who sold it 18 months ago. The police are tracing its subsequent sales.

The point is this: A middle-class 17-year-old in a small town can, with apparent ease, get his hands on an instrument of mass murder and we are not amazed. Worse, we - a people that periodically argues about the propriety of giving federal money to the arts - are not outraged.

Have we gone crazy, or what?

The National Rifle Association keeps telling us we can't do anything about the situation, that the Second Amendment to the Constitution forbids it.

To hell with the NRA, I say. It is little more than a pimp for the gun industry. For all its professions of sympathy for the parents whose children died in the Littleton massacre, all it's really interested in is getting more guns sold. As soon as this hubbub dies down, it will again be lobbying for a loosening of the nation's pathetically weak gun control laws.

When a similar incident took place in Dunblane, Scotland, three years ago - a man shot a teacher and 16 children, ages 5 and 6, then turned the gun on himself - Britain did something about it. It debated the issue in Parliament and, despite the opposition of its NRA equivalent, passed a law banning private possession of all large-caliber handguns. When the Labor Party took over the government the following year, it extended the ban to include all handguns, regardless of caliber.

They did it because they cared. And, for all the tears of sympathy we shed, we do not.

If we cared, we would not treat the ridiculous arguments of the NRA seriously. NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre was on television last Sunday saying that Hollywood's obsession with violence, not the NRA's obsession with guns, was at fault.

Absurd. Kids in other countries are exposed to Hollywood violence, but they don't machine-gun each other. They don't have machine guns. There's a clue in there somewhere.

If we truly cared, we would not elect public officials who campaigned with NRA money, then carried that organization's water for them. We would get mad.

We would repeal the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

I happen to think that there is room for intelligent gun control within the Second Amendment, but there are those who refuse to acknowledge that. Fine. Amend the Constitution to read "Congress shall have the authority to regulate the sale and manufacture of firearms."

Is that so radical? Would that make you feel you'd suddenly awakened in a communist country? I doubt it.

Maybe it would if you're one of those wackos who thinks that your gun is the only thing standing between you and being dragged off to a forced labor camp; but if that's your worry, you don't need a gun, you need treatment.

An amendment would allow Congress to debate gun control sensibly, without having to imagine what the Founding Fathers would have thought of semiautomatic weapons.

They might be able to come up with a compromise that balanced the needs and desires of gun enthusiasts with the need of society to protect itself from these terrifyingly destructive weapons.

Whatever we try might not work. We already have 60 million handguns and 140 million other weapons in this society. It might be too late to try to limit access to guns.

But it's worth a try. Whatever it is we're doing right now isn't working either. If you don't believe me, ask the people in Littleton, Colo. They're experts on our gun policy.

As fate would have it, the NRA had scheduled its annual meeting for the week after the shootings and in Denver, near where they occurred.

Perfect. It is the best possible time and place. NRA members should have a chance to visit the graves of the lost children and, perhaps, tour Columbine High.

I'd put a sign out front: "Your NRA dollars at work."

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The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

April 22, 1999, Thursday, Home Edition

SECTION: News; Pg. 2B

This column is part of the Special Report, "Colorado School Massacre."

COLORADO SCHOOL MASSACRE;

SPECIAL REPORT;

 

It's culture that's sick, not kids

By Martha Ezzard, Staff

SOURCE: Constitution
From Columbine High School you can see the spring snow in conelike ripples across the mountain backdrop of southwest Denver. High in the meadows of the Rockies, wild columbine, the state flower that blooms in delicate pastels, is coming to life.

But a pall hovers over a school where affluent kids would normally be celebrating fresh snow for spring skiing. Except for the setting, the bodies in the school library might have been a scene from the mountains of Kosovo. Innocent victims. Random killings signaling hatred and disregard for human life.

Ironic that the Colorado killings occurred the same week of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Those horror scenes still come to mind when I hear the strains of "Oklahoma!" which used to summon up visions of waving wheat and checkered gingham.

Now it's going to be the same with that majestic, laid-back, ski-crazy place where my husband and I raised three youngsters and loved every minute of the Rocky Mountain outdoors. We bought the first house we ever owned in Littleton, two Southerners deliberately choosing the Western lifestyle for our young family.

We moved to a neighboring suburb just before our third child was born and stayed for 20 years. Our oldest daughter and her family still live there, a great place to raise kids --- horses, hiking, sledding and all. And public schools that rate among the best in the nation.

Less than an hour away from the heartbroken community, the state Legislature adjourned Wednesday in deference to a grieving public. Contrary to Colorado's reliable spring snows, the state's political climate is dramatically different from that of the past.

A two-party state ever since the Watergate election, Colorado now has two Republican senators and a conservative governor. In a legislative session local pundits say should have been dominated by growth, transportation and education issues, gun bills got the most attention. Lawmakers were bent on making it easier for folks to carry concealed weapons in public places --- zoos, movie theaters, restaurants.

Even school grounds aren't exempted in the radical measure that cleared the Senate, had the support of the governor but was tabled Wednesday.

Guns are part of the West, some say. But cowboys don't carry semiautomatics. Cowboys don't build bombs. The Littleton our family knows is a far cry from combat boots and Gothic violence.

Its historic Main Street has a rodeo atmosphere. Every July, cowpokes young and old gather for the annual Western Welcome parade, complete with country music, American flags and buffalo burgers. It's a piece of Americana that even the burgeoning growth and traffic --- similar to Atlanta's --- hasn't disturbed.

The National Rifle Association meets in Denver this weekend, and billboards along freeways feature giant pictures of Charlton Heston declaring, "The NRA needs YOU." But what's the connection? The school shootings would have occurred whether the NRA were headed for Denver or not --- and the NRA-backed gun bills aren't law yet.

The gun-toting suspects were outcasts, part of a small group of misfits. But haven't there always been those in every class in every generation? Troublemakers, bullies, weirdos who picked fights or pulled an occasional pocketknife in my time. What's changed? What turned teenage misfits into killers?

A culture that glorifies violence and has schools too big and parents too busy to spot youngsters in need of individual attention?

There's something else. Troubled kids have always acted out. Now they can do it in a deadly and permanent way. They can get semiautomatics, mimic violent movies, click on the Internet and learn bomb-making.

You never know when tragedy will mark a turning point. Conservative state Rep. Gary McPherson announced after the shootings that he was tabling his bill to bar local governments from having gun control restrictions.

There's a feeling we should all be doing something. Kids aren't more violent or sick or weird than they used to be. Our culture is. Our politics are.

Our Sunday Reader columnist

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The Houston Chronicle

April 25, 1999, Sunday 2 STAR EDITION

SECTION: A; Pg. 1

 Killers gave off warning signals, but no one paid attention

By JIM HENDERSON
 

LITTLETON, Colo. - In the end, no one knew them.

Eric Veik, who worked with them on video projects, thought he did.

"They were just two normal people who dressed a little different and talked a little different," he said.

On Tuesday, they dressed in black and spoke in the icy dialect of madness.

"Peekaboo," Eric Harris said, leaning over a desk in the Columbine High School library and shooting a cowering classmate in the neck point-blank with a TEC-9

semiautomatic handgun.

Joe Stair, a Columbine High graduate who organized the "Trenchcoat Mafia" at the school a few years ago, thought he knew them.

"They were very nice people," he said.

Nice. One of them - witnesses hiding under tables couldn't be sure if it was Harris or Dylan Klebold - politely asked 17-year-old Cassie Bernall, "Do you believe in

God?" When she replied, "Yes," she was shot to death.

Officers in the district attorney's juvenile diversion office, who oversaw their passage through a "diversion" program after they were arrested for breaking into a car last year, thought they knew them.

"Eric is a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life," a diversion officer wrote after Harris and Klebold completed a community service and counseling program. "Dylan is a bright young man who has a great deal of potential. He should do well in life."

Two months after that report was written, Harris, 18, and Klebold, 17, apparently shot themselves in the head after slaughtering 12 fellow students and a teacher during a four-hour rampage with homemade bombs, shotguns, rifles and handguns through the corridors and classrooms of their suburban high school.

For days, the question lay over the neighborhoods of Littleton like the thick, wet snow that blew down from the Rockies: How was it possible that no one knew them - not the parents in whose houses they assembled dozens of pipe and propane bombs; not the teachers in whose classes they wrote dark stories and poems of death and mayhem and made videos of violence; not their classmates and fellow members of the "Trenchcoat Mafia," who had access to Harris' apocalyptic and prophetic Web site; not the neighbor who heard them in the garage, crushing glass for use as shrapnel in pipe bombs; not the police, who had received a report that Harris had threatened to kill a fellow student and used his Web site to encourage others to kill the young man.

For 18 months or more, the warning signs might have been written in neon, but few who encountered Harris and Klebold saw them, or recognized them, or were able to interpret them.

"This stuff should have been picked up . . . it could have been dealt with very easily," said Jeff Freed, an Evergreen educator and author of Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World. It is a description he believes applied to Harris and Klebold - children who are intelligent, creative, moody, sensitive, who are unable to "fit in"

with their peers and often do poorly in school because they learn differently than others.

"This clashes mightily with the traditional way schools teach," he said, "and that school (Columbine) is one of the most traditional that I know. It is very typical that no one saw the signs. They (teachers and counselors) are not trained to deal with kids who learn differently. The system sucks."

Littleton is a typical affluent, predominantly white suburb, he said, that is unaccustomed to dealing with behavior that falls outside the norm. And, in the past week, some parents and teachers have portrayed the school administration as well as the police as turning away from unpleasant signs, of ignoring evidence that aberrant behavior existed at Columbine.

Like most high school student bodies, Columbine's is divided into cliques - jocks, preppies, stoners, geeks, musicians and others - but they are viewed as harmless expressions of common interests.

The "Trenchcoat Mafia" - 12 to 15 teens by most accounts - were the outcasts who fit nowhere else. They frequently adopted the dress style of the "Goth" culture - white face powder, black lipstick, black eye shadow, long black coats, combat boots, berets - that set them even further apart from the other students, who often ridiculed their clothing and their activities.

They were especially tormented by the jocks, Columbine students said, and that led to confrontations in the hallways and at football games.

Friends said Harris and Klebold often talked of getting revenge on the athletes and began to talk of blowing up the school, but no one took them seriously.

Almost no one.

Cheryl Lucas, a teacher at Columbine, said she and a few others had warned administrators that Harris and Klebold had a potential for violence.  That suspicion was based on the classroom stories the two wrote about hate and death. Some teachers knew about the Web site where Harris had posted messages such as, "I live in Denver. . . . I would love to kill almost all of its residents," and "God, I can't wait till I can kill you people. I don't care if I live or die in the shootout.

All I want to do is kill as many of you as I can."

Apparently no one in the school administration took Lucas' warnings seriously, not even after one parent turned over to school officials printouts of Harris' Web page, which not only talked about killing, but gave detailed instructions for making pipe bombs.

"As long as their threats are general enough, nothing much can be done," Lucas said in one local newspaper.

A year ago, Harris also came to the attention of the local police after he threw a chunk of ice through the windshield of a former friend, Brooks Brown. After Brown complained to Harris' parents, Harris began threatening him and urged, on his Web page, that anyone wanting to kill should consider killing Brown.

Brown's parents contacted the police three times, but apparently no action was taken. The district attorney said the complaint never reached his office. It could not be determined if school officials ever learned of the threat.

Even if they did, said another parent, they probably would have done nothing.

Steve Greene, the father of a Columbine student who was harassed and threatened by one particular jock for a year and a half, said he could not get school administrators to take action until he threatened a lawsuit and pressed criminal charges against the athlete, whom he identified only as Rocky.

The harassment, he said, was based on the fact that his son is Jewish.

"This kid held him down on the basketball court and threatened to set him on fire," Greene said. "He reported it to a teacher and nothing was done. They accused him of lying, of making it up. That kid made my son's life a living hell for a year and a half and it only stopped when I went to the school board and threatened to sue for discrimination.

"I'm not surprised everyone ignored what was going on with these kids (Harris and Klebold)."

In the past year, students at the school said, Harris and Klebold had drifted further into their own eerie world. They began speaking to each other in German, wearing swastikas and steeping themselves in Nazi literature.

"Are you guys Nazis or what?" a female classmate once asked Klebold.

"Heil, Hitler," he answered.

But, the most graphic sign that the two young men were being propelled into violent tragedy was a video they made as a class project. Eric Veik, who helped produce the video, turned over a copy to investigators the day after the shooting.

Standing on a grassy knoll overlooking Clement Park adjacent to the school, teary-eyed and surrounded by reporters, he would not reveal the contents and said only that it could have been interpreted as having some bearing on Tuesday's massacre.

The next day, however, another student came forward with details that the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office had declined to confirm.

Chris Reilly, a junior, said he had seen the video. It showed two teen-agers, played by Harris and Klebold, walking down the halls of the school firing weapons at jocks, who were portrayed by Harris' and Klebold's friends.

"It was disturbing to everyone who saw it," Reilly said.

Did the teacher see it? Garrett Talocco refused to comment when contacted by the Rocky Mountain News. Did anyone in the administration know about it? District spokeswoman Kay Pride would not comment.

Given the sizable warning signs, could anyone have guessed where Harris and Klebold were headed? Were they a pair of stealth loners who evaded the normal radar, or were they such outcasts that no one really wanted to know them?

It was not the first episode of violence involving members of the "Trenchcoat Mafia." In 1997, Columbine senior Robert Craig, said to have been a member of the group, killed his stepfather and then shot himself to death, yet the group never showed up on the screens of school administrators or law enforcement agencies.

"We had no knowledge of this group until today," Jefferson County schools Superintendent Jane Hammond said shortly after the shootings.

"I'd never heard of the 'Trenchcoat Mafia,' " said Sheriff John Stone.

As the weekend arrived and Littleton was preparing to bury the first of the slain students, the answers were as elusive as ever.

They had been Little League ball players. They had been bright students who explained Shakespeare to their peers. They worked part time in a pizza parlor. They played computer video games and drank cream soda.

Then they spent a weekend making bombs and preparing sawed-off shotguns and semiautomatic pistols and carbine rifles.

No one knows why.

They only know that among Harris' last messages posted on his Web site was one that said: "Do not blame anyone else. This is the way we wanted to go out."

GRAPHIC: Mugs: 1. Eric Harris (p.25); 2. Dylan Klebold (p.25); Photos: 3. Footpaths mark a trail in the snow to the home of Eric Harris in Littleton, Colo., two days after he and friend Dylan Klebold killed 13 people at the suburban Denver high school before killing themselves (p.25); 4. A picture of Jesus stands in a make-shift memorial to the dead students at Clement Park near Columbine High School in Littleton (p.25); 5. People streamed Through the park last week as snow buried flowers (p.25); 3-5. Smiley N. Pool / Chronicle

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