New School Shooting This Morning

Just weeks after Littleton, there's been another school shooting -- this time in Conyers, Georgia, where a sophomore student shot and injured (none-fatally) six students. The suspect profile is familiar. Classmates describe him as a "normal" kid with plenty of friends, and no associations with any particular "groups". These shootings will almost surely re-spark, at least in part, the post-Littleton hysteria, including the media notion that computer gamers and people who wear dark clothing are mass murderers. Here's some perspective. This week, the FBI announced that crime is dropping like a rock, to its lowest levels in half a century. Says a leading criminologist: "For most of our kids, school is the safest place to be."

America is a surreal country. Congress won't pass laws to keep machine guns out of the hands of emotionally disturbed teenagers, but everybody from Al Gore to school principals are pushing V-Chips, ratings systems and filitering software. Three weeks after the Littleton tragedy (and today, the Conyers, Georgia shootings), and the great video, Goth, pop culture, teen violence and computer game hysteria that followed, the FBI announced that crime in the United States dropped sharply last year, to its lowest levels in half a century. (http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/crime-decline.html. and/or http://www.bestplaces.net/html/crime.html)

Unless you've been living on Venus, you've got every reason to be stunned. We are truly trapped in a parallel universe, caught between what the media tells us, and what is true.

According to the bureau, the number of violent and property crimes each fell 7 per cent in l998. This was the largest annual decline since crime began to decrease substantially in l992, said the FBI, and the sharpest rate of decline since the l950's.

Although the statistics were briefly noted in papers like The New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post, they were not on the front pages, or even included at all on most national TV news broadcasts.

The fact that American kids, the primary global users of new media, are among the safest people on the planet, and are extremely unlikely to harm one anothe, wasn't deemed to be much of a story, not even after weeks of being told that geeks, Webheads and oddballs may be in danger of being turned into mass murderers by violence-saturated games and cultural programming.

In the context of the post-Littleton panic, these findings were shocking - even outrageous. After the Columbine shootings, a Gallup poll found that 80 per cent of the people surveyed believe the Internet is partly to blame for the Colorado massacres in particular, and violence among the young in general.

TV was a close second. So the discovery that there really isn't much violence, and the rate of violence that does exist is dropping like a rock, might seem discordant, even incomprehensible.

It turns out that many of the stampeding, unthinking journalists looking for simple-minded explanations of nightmares like the killings at Columbine High School are a much bigger menace to civic understanding and public welfare than anything on the Net.

So are the waves of instant experts, therapists, educators, academics and counselors who paraded across TV screens for days talking about the repetitive nature of computer gaming violence, violent cartoons and TV shows, and over-analyzed films like "The Matrix", which stylishly present and romanticize violence and killing.

Criminologists were, as usual, puzzled by the FBI figures. They offered various theories, including a decline in drug use, more jobs in underclass and inner-city neighborhoods, a higher jail population, and newer law enforcement strategies like community policing.

Professor James Alan Fox, dean of the college of criminal justice at Northwestern University, said the crime drop is so sharp there appears to be a kind of contagion effect. "The more crime drops, the more lawfulness becomes the norm, as opposed to lawlessness," he said.

Professor Fox said the seven-year drop in crime, the longest uninterrupted decline since the l950's, underscored at least one critical point: that school violence like the recent massacre in Littleton, Colorado, are "a statistical aberration." Since the drop occurs at a time of perhaps the biggest growth of pop and screen culture in American history, that convergence ought to put to undermine persistent efforts to scapegoat popular culture and screen technology when it comes to violence.

But if media history is any indication, it won't. Simplistic images, instant analysis, one-dimension reporting has characterized the media's explorations of violence and culture all the way back to rock and roll.

It's mind-boggling that newspapers could report these new statistics statistics with a straight and unapologetic face. Countless American parents and teachers now believe potential mass murderers are in their classrooms -- Doom-playing geeks, Goths, and by kids trawling the Net for bombs and hate literature.

Kids in droves report their computers being turned off, taken away, or their time online curtailed after Littleton. The sale of blocking and filtering softwares have gone through the roof. Clueless politicians like Al Gore continue to push the utterly useless V-Chip as a response to school shootings, rather than present any substantive ideas to deal with the undeniable link between emotionally disturbed kids and the availability of lethal weapons. Or to look at the sometimes alienating structure of schools.

"For most of our kids, school is the safest place to be, " Fox said. He said that violence in school is far lower than violence in the home, in many children's neighborhoods or in areas around schools.

The FBI statistics measure serious crimes including the violent crimes of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault and the property crimes of burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson. Rape and aggravated assault had both dropped 5 per cent while burglary and arson each had fallen 7 per cent. Only larceny, which includes petty theft like shoplifting and pickpocketing, showed no decrease.

The declines in crime were generally highest in the nation's largest cities.

Neither the FBI report nor the media coverage of it, addressed the central question of why, if screen driven violence (computers, movies, TV) turns kids into killers, crime amongst the young would be dropping so sharply even as computer use is going through the roof.

The answer is that journalism is too lazy to even try and get at the truth about violence. Hundreds of reporters will spend nearly a year pursuing the President's sex life, but hardly any seem to have the time to bring us any coherent, rational or useful information about why some of our kids butcher their classmates.

Perhaps it's too much trouble to bother, when you can blame hip-hop, "Pulp Fiction," Doom and Quake?

There is some useful information available for those who want to know more about violence, even if little of it comes from the media. You might try Lawrence M. Friedman's "Crime and Punishment in American History" (Basic Books), a class study of criminal history in the United States.

Friedman, a law professor at Stanford who studied crime from pre-Colonial times to now, found that it hasn't changed all that much in more than 200 years. There's always been a relatively high level of violence in America, he found. In part, that's because the country never seems to want to take any of the Draconian steps that might reduce violence - strict gun control, weakening constitutional rights, chopping off the hands of robbers.

And because at least some of the circumstances surrounding crime, democracy and capitalism may be immutable. Crime in America, says Friedman, has always been committed mostly by young men at the bottom of the social and economic heap. As long as there are some, there will be some crime.

Crime, Friedman writes, is essentially political, and so are theories about what causes it. "Some people blame crime on poverty, on social disorganization, on injustice in society; others reject these theories. There are economic theories, psychological theories, psychoanalytical theories, cultural theories, genetic theories, and so on. We can label some of them right-wing or left-wing or middle-wing or multi-wing. None of the theories can be proven (or disproven). Probably no one big, sweeping theory is ever going to work. Nobody is likely to discover the cause of "crime"; people are much too complicated for them."

But modern media -- especially the cable TV variety -- is profoundly simple-minded. Fortunately, the search for the root causes of violence go beyond the shallow institutions of the press.

Scientists and geneticists, for example, are beginning to explore the biological causes of crime as well as sociologists and criminologists. In "The Biology of Violence," (The Free Press, $US 25), Dr. Debra Niehoff suggests society has been looking in the wrong places when it comes to understanding violence.

Our society has looked in many places for the answer to the problem of violence, she writes. "We have dissected the family and the community, scrutinized the media, and searched our schools. We have probed for deficiencies in our moral values and debated the hazards of guns. We have charted incomes, counted jobs and weighed attitudes."

We have, she says, looked everywhere but inside ourselves.

"Why do people hurt each other?" asks Neihoff. "This book looks for an answer to that question in a novel but thoroughly logical place: the brain."

Aggression, says Niehoff, may be a social, biological behavior having little to do with outside circumstances like income and video games.

Friedman concluded that some levels of violence are inevitable in a gun-crammed country with low tolerance for repressive governmental authority. Niehoff suggests there is at least some biologial determinism in aggression.

The FBI statistics suggest that violence is as mysterious and little understood as it is cyclical. But there's no confusion about the direction in which its been going - down.

When it comes to violence, the truth is definitely out there. But don't expect journalists, talk-show experts or educators to go look for it.