Deadly aims
THE RAMPAGE that left 10 dead around Red Lake High School in Minnesota on Monday has this in common with the Columbine massacre in 1999 and with the school shootings in Jonesboro, Ark., and Paducah, Ky.: troubled adolescents with easy access to guns and not enough access to mental health care. Now, while the funeral bells in Bemidji County are still tolling, more communities need to drop their resistance to psychological counseling in schools, and government must adequately fund these life-saving services.
As in all these cases, the question of causality is a tangled fabric of public policy and private demons. Because Red Lake is part of an Indian reservation, the jurisdictional and cultural questions are even more complex. But there is no dispute that more needs to be done to prevent the volatile combination of adolescent rage and deadly weapons.
Jeff Weise was a disturbed, alienated teenager who police say killed his grandfather and then used his guns to kill his classmates, a security guard, and a teacher before taking his own life. Minnesota does not have a law requiring that guns be kept in a locked cabinet in the home, but such a law might not have prevented a determined Weise from getting guns by other means. The nation is awash in guns.
The United States has the highest rates of gun deaths among minors, including suicides, of all the industrialized countries. And yet President Bush's budgets have never included funding for the school-based mental health counseling grants that are authorized in the No Child Left Behind Act. This is due in part to budget constraints, but some conservatives also oppose school counseling as a matter of ideology, believing such problems ought to be handled by families alone.
Schools are a natural place for intervening with troubled children. As the National Association of School Psychologists notes, not every community has a mental health clinic or psychiatric hospital, but every community has a school. At a minimum, schools should be equipped with a crisis intervention plan, with training in threat assessment to help adults evaluate the difference between empty boasting and deadly danger.
Congress is moving in the wrong direction on firearms, as well. A bill to immunize gun sellers from civil liability has 53 sponsors in the Senate. Yet lawmakers will not give serious consideration to bills that would require unlicensed dealers at gun shows to conduct background checks on buyers.
Congress spent much of this week in a show of concern for ''the culture of life" in the sad case of Terri Schiavo. Meanwhile, 30,000 lives a year are lost to preventable gun violence. Where are the midnight vigils and emergency legislation for them?
