Tim Wildmon
AFA president
June 1999 – By the time you read this, the shock from the Littleton, Colorado, high school killings will be fading.
In the past few years we have witnessed a series of similar events from the South, East, North, and West. This is not a regional problem as some social scientists have suggested by citing the “southern gun culture.” This is a national phenomenon. Violence among our youth. What causes it? What to do about it? How to prevent it? These are questions Americans are asking.
The worst thing I ever remember seeing on the campus of Tupelo High in 1980 was outside on the patio during lunch. We were all sitting around talking when just a few yards away one guy came up behind another guy and bashed him over the head with a board. Everyone was stunned, girls started screaming and someone rushed to the office to get help.
The guy had to leave school for the hospital and have his head stitched back together but he survived. The one who did the bashing ran away, but later got expelled from school. Someone told me that the boy who committed the violence was constantly being teased and taunted by his victim for different things. Mostly it was because he was an oddball.
Ours was a big high school with some 1,300 students, but we didn’t have metal detectors and, other than a few fistfights during the year, there was no talk of knives, guns or violence.
My, how things have changed in 20 years. The day after the Columbine High School murders I told my two school-aged kids that if they ever heard that one of their fellow students had a gun, knife, or any kind of weapon, they need to tell their teachers immediately. I couldn’t believe I was telling my third and fourth graders such things. But even that would not have helped in Littleton. These teens had plotted and planned this killing spree, and even to bomb their own school.
What causes violence and other forms of anti-social behavior among our youth? There are many and varied reasons I believe. I’ll list just a few.
1. The breakdown of the family, including divorce. By and large, today’s American adults don’t care about the vows they make at the church altar. They are just words of tradition without meaning.
2. The power of the mass media – especially the entertainment media, such as violent and dark television shows, movies, music, magazines, video and Internet games. What we think about is what we become.
3. Parents don’t spend enough time with their children. To mold and shape a child or teenager’s character, you absolutely must spend a lot of time together.
4. Some people are mentally unstable and insecure and looking for something to make them feel powerful or to gain attention, something that gives them identity – like gangs.
5. America – as a people – no longer fears or reveres God.
I could add several more reasons. And these are just my observations and opinions, not those of any university study or network polling agency. But I think they make sense. And to some extent we are always going to see evil things happening in our world. Always have and always will. However, we’ve never seen this level of violence among so many young people in America.
When I was a kid my mom and dad were the two people I admired the most. That’s the way it is with most children. Why? Because I knew they loved and cared for me. When my parents talked I listened. They taught me right from wrong and the Golden Rule. They spent time with me. They took me to church. They prayed with me. They didn’t divorce or abandon me. All of these things, in turn, made me want to please them.
I know I am oversimplifying matters here somewhat but I strongly believe these parental ingredients lead to healthy children. As good a home environment as some children have in the country, they still have to live in the greater society. We all do. This is one of the reasons why the “if you don’t like it just turn it off” philosophy doesn’t work. This is what we at AFA have been told by critics for years about almost every issue we’ve addressed. “If you don’t like pornography don’t look at it.” Never mind that most rapists and sex criminals are addicted to pornography. Or, “If you don’t like the violence on television don’t watch it.” What we’ve said to the television networks, advertising community and our critics is, “You may have a right to broadcast sex, violence, and crudity but you also have a responsibility for how your programming impacts people.” In the case of Columbine, using this same logic, we could reason, “If you don’t like being shot at, don’t go to school.”
That’s not good enough.
We Americans are all in this together. We must try harder as parents. And it should start with the household of God, to borrow a phrase from the Bible. There are no new worlds left to sail to and start a new country. This is it. We must take action now to overcome the evils that lead kids to pick up guns and kill other kids. 
