Molly Ivins April 22

SEATTLE — Having abominated, since my long-ago days as a police reporter, the vulture-like nature of the media as we swoop in on someone else's tragedy, I watched with a sense of double horror accounts of Tuesday's tragedy in Littleton, Colo.

The Associated Press reported from Springfield, Ore. (the site of one of last year's school rampages): "Once again, journalists have descended upon the high school, only to be vilified by students, parents and neighbors. Some threw rocks at the media, hurled obscenities and made obscene gestures.

"'Go away!' one student yelled to reporters. 'It's like you guys are here just to make money off what's happening.'"

Yet we onlookers can no more stop watching than we can stop rubbernecking at the scene of a car wreck. And one of the effects of living in a media age is that people are unconsciously trained to respond to the media, even in the midst of crisis.

One of the oddest examples of how this works is that people being interviewed in the wake of a tornado will almost always say, "It sounded just like a train coming." They say that because they've heard it so often on television from other tornado victims that they know that's what they're supposed to say. One could just as accurately say of a tornado, "It sounded like a cattle stampede," or (if one lacks experience with stampedes) "It sounded like all hell was breaking loose."

One excuse that the media use for descending on people who have just been through some hideous experience is that many of them are, in fact, willing to talk to us. "He wanted to talk to me" is a line reporters often use. People who have just been through great trauma often do need to talk; that's because they're in shock.

"Show us your pain," we say enticingly. "Let us feel your rage and grief and loss, and let us talk to you and photograph you when you are so vulnerable you barely know your name." So we can put it on television and let strangers gawk at you. All in order to sell more deodorant and antacid.

It's a bizarre culture in many ways. And for those of us who are merely spectators, there is this odd, prurient interest we all have in these tragedies. Is it a form of voyeurism, or do we watch out of genuine empathy?

In the rest of the world (especially Europe and Japan, where the emotional impact of the school shootings is necessarily less), the reaction is one of total bafflement that Americans would let this sea of guns exist here, so pervasive that disturbed teenagers can get arms and explosives without difficulty.

But guns don't kill, right? Our murder rate is 12 times higher than any other advanced country's for some other reason, right? We just haven't been able to spot it yet.

According to a 1996 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the overall firearms-related death rate for American children under 15 is 12 times higher than that in 25 other wealthy nations combined.

True, there was at least one case of a mass school shooting in a country with strong gun-control laws. In March 1997, at Dunblane, Scotland, a madman shot 16 children and a teacher. And what was the response of the Brits? They made their gun laws even more stringent; they have not had another mass killing since. Whereas we now get them every spring, along with the daffodils.

It's always interesting to see the response of those who oppose gun control. One Texas legislator introduced a bill to lower the age for the death penalty to 11. Just the thing for a society plagued by violence.

Some blame the movies, while others blame rap music. Liberals tend to urge more outreach programs for troubled teens. Others give gratuitous advice to parents. And still others claim that if a person is going to run amok, nothing we know of can stop it. That's true. But a person who runs amok with a knife cannot kill more than a dozen and wound two dozen.

Knives don't ricochet, and people are rarely killed while cleaning their knives.

It has been observed by various experts that public high schools are the most perfect replica of the larger society it is possible to find. After high school, we go off to work or to college with people who tend to be much like ourselves. Only in high school, with all its cliques, are we regularly thrown up against people who are quite different, which is one reason why they are hotbeds of intolerance.

With the usual 20/20 hindsight, authorities have already found a depressing number of signs that these kids were about to go off. A nasty stew of computer geekiness, neo-Nazism and death rock. Tuesday was Hitler's 110th birthday. Apocalyptic fantasies and Marilyn Manson. Directions on how to build a pipe bomb on a web site. In retrospect, as we always say so unhelpfully, somebody should have noticed that these kids were a mess.

The one element here we know very little about is how computers, how the world of virtual reality and virtual community, allows what are effectively cults to flourish. Part of the problem is clearly that computers do encourage people to form their own closed communities where shared fantasies, misperceptions and prejudices are completely unchecked by fact or reality or common sense.

What used to be called "folie a deux," the madness of two, can now become the madness of dozens as members of these groups filter out all information that does not conform to their worldview. That way lies madness.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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