(derekbaker)

Let the Scapegoating Begin

On the new, nightly "freeSpeech" segment on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric -- and why does Bob Schieffer get to speak there once a week, anyway? -- Monday's op-ed was by Brian Rohrbaugh, whose son Dan was killed at Columbine at 1999. They asked him speak, to give perspective from a parent's viewpoint following the horrible massacre that occurred in Amish Pennsylvania. Mr. Rohrbaugh chose to blame his son's death (and the death of those girls in Pennsylvania) on the following:

• The public school system "expelling God" and replacing him with evolution


• Abortion


• An apparent rise in acceptability for suicide. (I suppose he's referring to euthanasia?)

Basically, he says the entire Columbine murders, and subsequent such school murders, are the fault of, I guess, liberals. You know, the whole "culture of death" argument.

I could be wrong. I'm not sure how the scientific theory of evolution follows from this argument, anyway, except perhaps as his evidence that God has been "expelled" from school. But he's obviously staking a side in the culture wars, and blaming the other side for his son's death.

I've known grief, and I'm sure it affected my reasoning. And I know he's had the time to think about this, so that his rationale -- necessarily edited down for a network news broadcast, which probably forced a more simplistic statement than he might have otherwise have been able to make -- isn't a casual response to an immediate event.

I have to say, however: he's wrong.

Those may or may not be problems. (I would agree that, if suicide is starting to be regarded as an "acceptable action," as he says, there's a problem.) But they aren't what killed his son. What killed his son was a guy with a gun.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 fellow students and a teacher, as well as themselves, at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. Why they did it is the source of much speculation. How they did it is pretty clear: two 9mm firearms and two 12-gauge shotguns, which they sawed the barrels and butts off of. All in all, they committed several felony violations of state and federal gun laws even before they'd fired a shot.

And those gun laws did nothing to protect the students of Columbine. Gun laws did nothing to protect those girls in Pennsylvania, either.

But let's not ask the question about how these people were killed. That would threaten some people's interpretation of the Second Amendment -- despite the fact that Harris and Klebold in Colorodo, or Roberts in Pennsylvania, were not members of any kind of well-regulated militia. Instead, let's just ask why it happened, and keep asking, and keep asking ... until the next time there's a school massacre, and we continue to not ask that question.

Technorati Profile

Labels: issues

---