I avoided writing about the Columbine High School shootings for some time, primarily because I didn’t feel I had anything to add to what others had already said. I don’t have children, I’ve never even seen a gun close up, and I couldn’t provide any unique insights into what makes two teenagers commit a crime like this and then take their own lives. Every media outlet in the world seemed to have the job of beating the story to death well in hand, so I left it alone. Then, last weekend, I watched the installment of “Behind The Music” featuring Ozzy Osbourne, and I changed my mind.

Why? Well, one segment of the program describes the lawsuits brought against Ozzy by grieving parents, whose sons had allegedly killed themselves after listening to Ozzy’s song “Suicide Solution.” Never mind the fact that, according to Ozzy himself, the song actually mourns a friend of Ozzy’s who overdosed on drugs and alcohol and does not endorse suicide in any way; never mind the fact that any reasonably close reading of the lyrics backs this explanation up. The parents wanted someone to blame, so they took Ozzy to court for brainwashing their children; other parents blamed – and sued – Judas Priest for driving their kids to suicide through subliminal messaging. The reasoning behind these lawsuits seems, at best, hopelessly naÔve, and at worst like litigious money-grubbing, but mostly it seems like an attempt to avoid responsibility by laying it at the feet of someone else. On a larger scale, frivolous litigation has become the United States’ leading domestic product; Americans seem unable to accept accidents, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings as unpleasant but equally unavoidable parts of life, and many citizens in this country feel entitled to punish others for the bad things that befall them. This “I’ll make you pay for what you’ve done” attitude has in turn led to a blaming free-for-all by politicians, newsmakers, and the media itself. These days, whenever a tragedy occurs – a plane crash, or a rise in the birth rate among teenagers, or a multiple homicide at a school – the columnists and pundits fall all over themselves to condemn the force of evil du jour. Dan Quayle denounced Murphy Brown because the lead character chose to have a child out of wedlock, and claimed that the actions of a TV character would no doubt influence American women to go out and become single mothers by the score. Bob Dole decried the glorification of violence in Natural Born Killers (a film which, Dole later admitted, he had not even seen), and called on Hollywood to return to wholesome family entertainment instead of setting a bad example for today’s youth. Whenever I’ve opened a newspaper or magazine in the weeks since the incident at Columbine High, I’ve seen much the same thing: columnists blaming violence in the media; TV pundits blaming the parents; classmates blaming the cliques at school; sociologists blaming the Internet; psychologists blaming role-playing games like Doom and Quake; politicians blaming our murderous society; and nobody, not one person, daring to blame Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

I too had an unhappy adolescence. I had a few friends, but not very many, and the popular kids didn’t make their scorn a secret. I weighed too much, I didn’t dress well enough, and I got good grades, all of which pretty much assured my exclusion from the upper echelon of high-school society. The “cool” people didn’t like me, and it wounded me deeply. I did not, however, kill anyone. I ranted angrily in my journal, and I daydreamed about the day when I would make them sorry they had treated me so badly, but my ravings and fantasies did not include killing anyone, least of all myself. Of course, my parents didn’t keep firearms in the house, either, or things might have turned out differently, and when we arrive at the subject of gun control and accessibility, the blame really starts to fly thick and fast. The gun-control advocates blame the parents, and the NRA, and the legislature that failed to pass stricter gun laws. The NRA turns around and blames the parents also, and then blames law enforcement for not requiring compliance with the existing gun laws. The legislature, for its part, has some choice things to say about the parents, and it also blames the NRA for not letting it pass stricter gun laws, and then they blame the President for not authorizing expenditures for more police officers to carry out the laws already on the books, and then they promise to crack down on that tarn-fool Internet while the President stands in the Rose Garden, looking grave, and blames the parents. But what do all of these interests blame the parents for? For failing to lock up the guns. Not for failing to realize that guns and children do not mix, mind you, or for failing to recognize that their sons had begun reading (and absorbing as truth) neo-Nazi literature. Not for failing to see the plainly manifested signs of severe depression that even an untrained eye could have picked up. Not for failing to care one way or the other if they DID see. Oh, no, the parents repeatedly come to grief for FAILING TO LOCK UP THE GUNS. Excuse me, but the fact that the guns did not have locks on them did not by itself bring about the tragedy in Littleton.

In the end, none of the scapegoats chased to and fro by the media commentators brought about the tragedy in Littleton, and if they did contribute, they didn’t do so on their own. Role-playing games had, I suspect, very little to do with it, as little as the films of Quentin Tarantino or the so-called senseless violence on television. (For the real senseless violence, get a load of local newscasters mangling the English language sometime.) The media generally exclude themselves from the indictment, even though “news” these days generally means “the most sensationally sordid and gory stories from the wire,” but much though the lower-level pundits enjoy accusing those higher up of over-reporting stories like Columbine and causing copycat incidents, the media doesn’t really bear the blame either. Senators and community advocates love the sound of their own voices as they reproach Hollywood, or the music industry, for sexualizing America’s children too early and numbing them to the power of violence. But they forget that art generally reflects a society’s ills, rather than creating them where they don’t exist. In other words, the creators of blockbuster action movies didn’t think up explosions and machine-gun fire out of thin air. Explosions and machine-gun fire existed before, and the dangers inherent in explosions and machine-gun fire should not prevent filmmakers from depicting them. Filmmakers (or RPG programmers, or whoever) do not, and should not, bear the burden of teaching children that killing is wrong. That responsibility lies with the children’s parents, and with our society. Obviously, small children blur the lines between art and reality – I started bawling when my mom took me to see Bambi – but older children can distinguish between what they see on TV and what happens in their lives. Their parents might need to help them by supervising their pop-cultural intake and discussing particularly disturbing images with them, but again, we can’t hold Jerry Bruckheimer liable if they fail to do so.

I understand the impulse to blame others when things go wrong. I myself love blaming others – few things give me more pleasure than, say, breaking a dish in the kitchen and then storming into the next room with my hands on my hips and snapping, “Look what you made me do!” at the Biscuit as he innocently watches television – and I do it well. Blaming a third party or a force beyond our control for pain in our lives lets us get a handle on that pain. It makes it easier to understand misfortune and catastrophe if we know whence it came; calamity seems a lot less scary if it doesn’t appear random when it strikes. Blaming outside influences for people’s behavior has the same effect, neutralizing evil by assigning it elsewhere, because we don’t want to believe that people sometimes hurt other people for no good reason at all. But we have taken blaming to a ridiculous extreme in the case of Columbine. The Internet did not “make” these boys shoot other people or themselves. Doom did not “make” them build a bomb and rig the school for detonation. The presence of guns, or cliques, or buildings blowing up on the History Channel, did not make them do these things either. I do blame their parents, to a certain extent; my parents knew my every move, and I hated that, but if my mother found out that I had posted fascist hate propaganda on my Web site, she would literally have punted me for a thirty-nine-yard field goal, not to mention asking, “You’re wearing THAT? To school. [sigh] Fine,” about my black trenchcoat, and stuffing me into intense therapy immediately, and I don’t understand why the Harrises and Klebolds didn’t do exactly that. But their parents presumably told them to stay away from the gun cabinet, and their parents presumably did NOT tell them to go on a killing spree. If we blame anyone, we should blame Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, first and last. They built the bombs. They opened fire. They killed themselves. We have no evidence to suggest that they did not know the difference between right and wrong – on the contrary, everything points to the conclusion that they reveled in their actions’ very wrongness. I have as much trouble as the next person acknowledging that things just get fucked up sometimes, that planes sometimes blow up in the air, that genuinely lovely people get cancer and die in their prime of life, that men will beat on women or that teenagers will snap and spray their peers with bullets. Blaming, at first glance, seems like a healthy response to inconceivable tragedy or evil. But it doesn’t help. It won’t bring back those that died.

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