There is little doubt that what happened in Littleton could happen anywhere. Without a doubt it will happen again. Why? Sheriff John Stone, Jefferson County, Colorado, said it very well. He told the viewing audience that the media spends so much time publicizing these events that some of the young people watching it will surely try to copy it where they live. And then there's the issue of wide spread violence on television and in the movies. The media and Hollywood really don't want to hear that, and some consumers don't want to either.
If no one is willing to attack the problem at it's source, then what can society do to solve the problem? More gun control? Legislate away the right to own firearms? What would be next, our Fourth Amendment Rights (gun confiscation), then our First Amendment Rights (policing the Internet)? Would these measures really solve the problem?
For just a moment, let's decend into the mind of a typical young person of today. Let us do that by first understanding the two most basic urges that rule all of our lives: life and death.
"Each of these urges is so inclusive that the two of them cover the full range of human motivation. The life urge, or libido, and the death urge, or mortido, are fundamentally opposed to each other. This opposition causes much inner conflict and apparently controdictory behavior. For instance, some things about the [TEACHER] are likable, but at the same time he is hated for other qualities. Or we want to have our own way, yet wish to retain the friendship of [OTHER STUDENTS] who want a different way" (Psychology, Human Relations and Motivation, Donald A. Laird, Ph.D., Sc.D.; Eleanor Laird, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, New York).
According to the authors, Freud believed that in some the desire to live is stronger than in others. He says,
"In Benjamin Franklin the life urge was stronger; in Hitler the death urge predominated. In most of us both opposed tendencies are easily found, and they live a kind of tug-of-war existence."
I have a strong idea that the rule "Monkey See, Monkey Do," plays a major part in how children enact these basic, primal urges. In other words, they enact these urges in ways that is acceptable and common to society. The act of exploding bombs and firing weapons is an all-to-common event on our modern day television sets. Because we watch and enjoy these violent programs ourselves, to our children we obviously endorse them.
Society's children are not stupid, although some of them may act like it sometimes. They know that something is wrong here and they feel the need to do something about it.
For example, Donald and Eleanor Laird point out, "These urges, combined with biological needs and psychological wants, make people feel they need to do something, through they may not know what that something is. The [TEACHER] cannot give motives to [STUDENTS]. He has to learn what motives are; then he can develop situations that more or less satisfy these motives and restore equilibrium within the individual [STUDENTS]."
Obviously, if we want to know the actual cause of why these two young men walked into Columbine Senior High School and killed 15 people, we will have to first acknowledge that their desire for destruction, mortido, was higher than their desire for life, libido. Once we come to this point, we begin to see that the cause is not really the availability of guns.
Another consideration, aside from the actual cause of the problem, if these boys were able to obtain gunpowder with which to manufacture pipe bombs, then you can rest assure that obtaining guns would have been a cinch. This would be true even if guns were not available to the general public, for gunpowder has been federally controlled and removed from public availability for many years now.
Instead, the problem appears to be much more complex than that. To come to the right solution will require time, effort and much study. Although the author is a firm believer in simplicity, simple answers for complex problems will not always work. Please read on....
Copyright©1999
Allan B. Colombo
