It's possible that the two murderous heathens who killed twelve students, one teacher and themselves at Columbine High School a few weeks ago were confused, bisexual neo-Nazi malcontents. It's possible that some societal dynamic aroused a killer instinct in their brains that demanded indulgence. It's even possible that early psychiatric intervention might have averted the bloodbath in Littleton, Colorado.
And pigs may learn to fly, but don't bother sending me that copy of the Porcine Air prospectus just yet. Every awful incident - the L.A. riots, the Littleton massacre, you name it - is immediately followed by pleas for "understanding." If we can only get inside the brain of the thug, the reasoning goes, we can put the kibosh on Bad Things. It's all in our heads, y'know.
Maybe the would-be psycho monitors are right. Maybe enough Ritalin, enough Prozac, enough electroshock therapy will solve the world's problems. Perhaps a Presidential Commission to study putting the entire population of the U.S. in restraints is in order. Only for sixteen hours of the day, naturally - we have to spend the other eight working to cover the costs of enforcement.
Of course, such ideas are brought to us by the same gang that came up with gun control laws, the efficacy of which can be judged by the size of the pile of corpses at Columbine High School. This gang - which travels under various false monikers such as "the progressives," and "the liberals" - subscribes, at its most basic level, to the philosophy of Man as Automaton: the notion that environment and government policy combine to exert total control over the actions of the individual. Secular Calvinism, so to speak.
I'm of a somewhat different mind. "Your weapon is only a tool - it is a hard heart that kills," as the Drill Instructor in the late, great Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket opines.
Can policy affect attitudes? You betcha. Does our environment play a large part in shaping our world view? No doubt about it. But of the hundreds of students of Columbine High School, all functioning under identical government edicts and living in similar environments, only two elected to enter the building one day, guns blazing. So much for predestination.
Let me state this again: Hundreds of students. Similar environments. Identical laws. Yet this school was a fractious melting pot of jocks, cheerleaders, eggheads, dweebs wearing black trench coats and walking around looking depressed, nerds, stoners, loners, "average kids," outcasts, brilliant scholars, the academically challenged - and two killers. How could this be?
Psychology and psychiatry are not - at this time - competent to crawl inside the individual mind and ferret out the Bad Things. Personally, I hope they never will be. I don't want to live in a world of robots. I'd prefer a world in which each individual deals with his or her own Bad Things; and I'd prefer to live in a world where, when someone decides that their Bad Things are sufficient cause to justify homicide, I am free to defend myself and my loved ones.
Ultimately, life is a balance between alternatives, from which we are free to choose. The Bad Things in our brains can be channeled into any one of them. Edgar Allan Poe's Bad Things won him enduring fame, while Klebold and Harris's have won them brief infamy. The difference, I think, may lie in those external environmental and policy factors. Poe was not presented with a holding pen full of disarmed victims on which to avenge his nightmares. He was not coddled by a society that demands "understanding" for thugs. Had he chosen to act out his fantasies, he would be a footnote in a report on crime statistics in the 19th century instead of a member of the literary pantheon.
The secular Calvinists would have us believe that a few more laws and a few more psychotherapy couches will solve the problem of crazed gunmen. Laying aside any of the implications that such an agenda bears for freedom, I still find their theories wanting. We have trod the path of government controls, gun regulation and child socialization for over a century, and the results are not, in the eyes of most evaluators, acceptable. It's time for a return to free will and full responsibility, sans the fixation on "understanding" the sewers of the criminal intellect.
