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I have
often prayed that I will never again need to write of a schoolyard shooting. In
one sense I suppose I don’t, since I choose my own topics. The urge comes from
elsewhere.
I find writing
therapeutic, as if putting thoughts to paper somehow solidifies them, to be
grasped and observed, as one might with a stone found on the beach. Held to the
sun and turned in all directions I can explore every angle and aspect, each dark
flaw, each glint of light.
When
the phenomenon of gang violence first burst onto the public consciousness,
seemingly a million years ago, every incident in any part of the country was
national news. It was the same later with drive-by shootings, then carjackings;
now they don’t always make headlines even in our hometowns. We care, but
familiarity has dampened our shock.
Not so
with school shootings. There is something so intrinsically wrong with kids
killing kids that the calluses just won’t form. Each incident hits as if
there’d never been another: a teen murders students in prayer in Kentucky; an
11-year-old helps kill five at a middle school in Arkansas; a boy slays his
parents, then classmates, in Oregon; two middle-class kids wreak unfathomable
carnage in Colorado. How, we ask, could it possibly get worse?
The
answer never seems more than a headline away. The latest is from Mount Morris
Township, Michigan, where a six-year old boy was taken into custody after
shooting a classmate. First-grader Kayla Rolland died a half-hour later of a
single wound to the neck. She was also six.
I can
barely type the words. I don’t want them to congeal, to be held or examined. I
don’t even want to read them.
As pat
as it may sound, the grief of the family of that little girl is beyond
imagination. Some will try to put to words the unspeakable anguish nonetheless,
hoping to fence it, control it, stash it away. It’s a doomed effort. Children
aren’t supposed to be murdered. They aren’t supposed to murder.
This
is the first time I can recall having compassion for a killer. The unidentified
child has been living with his mother and uncle in a dwelling that might
charitably be described as a dump. The yard is said to be clotted with trash
and mud, while ragged curtains and plastic bags fight to conceal broken
windows. A rusted car sits on the lawn.
The house is
reportedly frequented by drug users who come to loiter, use, and barter guns for
drugs. The uncle the boy lived with was arrested the night of the shooting on
charges of receiving stolen property; his father (who now says he wants custody)
is serving time for a parole violation.
One story says the
boy himself was once suspended from school for stabbing a girl with a pencil.
He is believed by authorities to have found the stolen pistol used in the
shooting in a vacant room of his house. Searchers found drugs and another
stolen weapon in the residence.
You don’t have to
have read me long to know I’m not big on fuzzy, feel-good, no-bad-kids
psychobabble. But how on this green earth is a child raised that way supposed
to turn out? I don’t excuse adult criminals or older children, who at least
understand they can be seriously punished, squishy as their notion of right and
wrong may be. The average six-year-old, though, can barely form the intent to
brush his teeth much less commit an act of this magnitude.
I have no idea how
to punish a child that small for a crime this big. I do have some thoughts for
the demagogues who would write gun laws in Kayla Rolland’s blood, as if the scum
responsible for her killer wouldn’t dare break one more, but that will keep for
another day.
For now we can
only hug our children and pray. Each day brings its own peril and promise; may
we not harden to either.
© 1997 – 2002 Brent Morrison
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