Killer Kids: Time For The Littlest Death Penalty?

As I’m sure nearly everyone reading this knows, two disturbed teenagers went on a killing spree yesterday (April 20th) at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing over two dozen classmates and/or faculty members and injuring roughly the same number before turning their guns on themselves. While the problem of school killings has been an increasing concern in the United States, this incident easily goes down as the most horrifying to have occurred yet.
As always, in the wake of these incidents, fingers are pointed – does media coverage of these events inspire mentally/emotionally unstable teens to perpetrate copycat crimes in other parts of the country? (Quite probably.) Are our popular media to blame? (Possibly.) Are the parents to blame? (More than I think anyone is willing or prepared to admit.) How do we stop this sort of thing from ever happening again?
That answer, even though it obviously doesn’t apply to the suicidal killers in Littleton, is simple to my mind – raise the stakes so this crime won’t seem to be such a cool or glorious thing for potential future killer kids to do.
I used this occasion to remind my lovely fianceè of just one of the reasons why I’m scared to death to have children. Sure, we could do the best job in the world of raising them…but all it takes is one or two deeply disturbed specimens to undo umpteen years of everyone’s hard work, worry and love. And that’s what happened yesterday, in at least 25 cases.
We had one gun scare during my time in high school, just one, and all it consisted of was one kid noticing that there was a rifle in the locker next to his. The office looked up the locker number, called the cops, and the police confiscated the weapon and its owner. That was about it. So even the very thought of something like this is totally new to me. I’m really hoping the two suspects’ autopsies will reveal them to have been high on something. That would package the problem so neatly, wouldn’t it? But I guess that hasn’t been the case in any of the other incidents like this…of which this is easily the worst. As was noted on CNBC last night, fewer parties sympathetic to the U.S. died in the Kosovo conflict yesterday than children died in Littleton, Colorado.
I guess, even with my emotionally harrowing high school experiences, that I just find it hard to swallow that the innate ability of teenagers to hold grudges, segregate into groups (even, in this case, groups of misfits), and hate and hurt each other…could go this far. And time of grieving or no, the authorities investigating these crimes really need to find out what the hell the children’s parents thought was going on with their kids. I mean, the two alleged perps apparently had a neo-Nazi-sympathizers’ web site, according to at least two of the networks’ news reports, pointing out April 20th as Hitler’s birthday. Were the kids’ parents so oblivious to this? Did they not care, did they have better things to do with their lives? Or were they, perhaps more disturbingly, made of the same dark stuff – not implying a family of skinheads or anything, but hateful and violent? Mind you, these are easy questions to ask in my position of not being a parent, and I know from my own childhood and adolescence how devious kids can be in hiding things from their families, but this is very troubling.
Scary as it may be, as much controversy as it would raise…I think it’s time that at least one state put a death penalty for this offense on the books. Many times while watching the live reports, I heard co-workers say “Hey, why don’t the SWAT teams go in blasting?” For obvious reasons, including the fact that other victims were still hiding in the school, they couldn’t. But less obvious was the eventuality that, even if they took out one of the killers, someone somewhere would have raised an ultra-liberal hand (and I have about as much time for ultra-liberal as I do ultra-conservative) to say “Oh, you killed our sweet babies!” – when, in fact, their sweet babies were killing their peers or their teachers.
Perhaps if that actually did happen just once, if a juvenile convicted of murdering his classmates did receive the death penalty, instead of the courts giving him federally-sponsored room and board for life, the next potential copycats might not be so enthusiastic about doing this sort of thing.
Some sort of clear message about school violence needs to be sent. If we don’t apply society’s rules and lessons during high school, what kind of message are we sending to our kids then?
The only people who truly deserve to die…are the ones who act on a belief that they deserve the power to take the life of another.