I began searching several statistical studies that would hopefully shed a little light on what caused the two trench-coated kids in Colorado to make waste of a perfectly good school that was populated for the most party by perfectly good young boys and girls. It didn’t take long to find some of the answers.
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by Jack Stapleton, Jr. — The day following the horrible school-shooting disaster near Denver, one of our state’s better known political figures called to give me his boiler-plated ideas on how to stop young people from killing other young people. When he had finished his agenda for curing one of America’s most disturbing challenges, he inquired what solutions I was going to include in a column that, he ventured, I would surely write.
I had earlier decided that readers had already been exposed to as much of my fallacious logic and reasoning as a human being could stand. But the politician’s challenge stood out like a beacon. If the First Amendment gives free speech to a man who lives and breathes politics and his chances for re-election, maybe it should also include a newspaper columnist, even if he had already digressed beyond reader tolerance following the Paducah and Jonesboro tragedies.
My caller’s challenging question was: “How can we get better control over these young hoodlums so they won’t go around shooting everyone?”
My response was not what the politician had expected. My response was that the “young hoodlums” he referred to were produced by parents who, over an amazingly brief period of time, have managed to convert today’s environment into one almost certain to produce young punks brandishing and firing weapons of nearly mass destruction at any and all targets.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to blame the parents for what happened at Littleton?” the caller asked sarcastically.
“No, I don’t believe the parents of the two young shooters are entirely responsible. But the father and mother make up a part of today’s society, and they have helped create an almost unbelievably negative society in an unbelievably short period of time,” I answered.
I assured the politician that I would check some of the pertinent statistics on Colorado before I wrote a column. The caller ended the dialogue, saying he felt certain nothing I would find in any statistical survey would shed light on the needless slaughter. And he hung up the phone, sounding as if he were sorry he had called. That made it unanimous.
True to my promise, I began searching several statistical studies that would hopefully shed a little light on what caused the two trench-coated kids to make waste of a perfectly good school that was populated for the most party by perfectly good young boys and girls. It didn’t take long to find some of the answers.
Three years ago, the number of out-of-wedlock births in beautiful Colorado reached 24,454, which was 33.3 percent of all births recorded in the state in 1996. Putting it another way, one- third of children born in that state were illegitimate.
Statistic number two is almost as telling. Colorado saw 13,989 abortions in 1996, a total comparable to 14 percent of all births that year. I have long favored the right of choice for women. But I believe when that choice is to destroy a potential human being, there are consequences, not only for the mother and the father, if known, but for society as a whole. Additionally, I believe that when the abortion rate reaches as high as 14 percent of all children conceived, the effect is to denigrate human life.
The Colorado shootings represented a disregard for human life to such a degree that society must begin to consider the ramifications for both our legal and moral environment, aiming for steps we can take to create sanctity where Littletons are not only unthinkable but unknown.
A third statistic on Colorado: the state’s divorce rate more than doubled from 1960 to 1996, starting at 11,320 when Jack Kennedy was elected president to 25,438 when Bill Clinton was re- elected. More than 14 percent of all Colorado marriages last for only 12 months or less.
Finally, more children die in Colorado from homicides and suicides than are killed in accidental deaths, the largest cause of death of children up to 18 years of age. The kids of Littleton, described as a middle-class community, obviously find themselves right in the middle of a very violent society in which death, when envisioned, is more often than not a violent occurrence.
What I have described is pretty much the environment for many of our kids today. There are more Littletons out there. I pray your community isn’t next.
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