What now?

Massacre at Columbine raises hard questions

One stunned parent had thought until Tuesday that her daughter attended the perfect school. One student, her trust shattered to the core, cried out: "School is supposed to be a safe place!" This horror was not meant to happen anywhere, and certainly not at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

In the hours after two young men, apparently on a suicidal mission of revenge, murdered or seriously injured dozens of people in the halls and classrooms of Columbine, the public response was instinctive and immediate. It was an affirmation of good in the face of evil, and it was expressed in action rather than words. People lined up for hours to give blood. Mourners gathered in churches. Counselors and friends rushed to support the survivors. And well beyond Columbine, in Boulder Valley and elsewhere, citizens planned to gather in public forums to talk about the safety of their own children in their own local schools.

You will be far from alone if you bring few certainties to the public forum. This is a time for all of us to step back, to doubt our preconceptions about the public schools and to pause in the middle of emotionally charged debates on other issues. It was consistent with that spirit, we think, when the sponsors of two controversial gun bills decided on Wednesday to put the measures aside for this legislative session. We're grateful to state Reps. Doug Dean and Gary McPherson for recognizing, as McPherson put it, that "now is not the time" to debate legislation on relaxing the state's gun laws.

Now is the time to ask hard questions about the safety of children in local schools, knowing from the start that there is no foolproof way for any school, anywhere, to prevent something like the massacre at Columbine. Schools can't be run like penitentiaries, or even airports. But it's past time for concerted action at every level, from private homes to the federal government, to keep guns out of the hands of troubled young people. And it's time to look closely at a question that will haunt us long after the Columbine massacre: How can schools and the public work more closely together to identify problems before they explode into tragedies?

So many of the details from Columbine are the stuff of nightmares. Two young men laughed and whooped in triumph as they gunned down other students in cold blood. At times they sought revenge against African-Americans or "jocks"; at other times they shot any human being in sight. It all took place inside a school, but the killing was so indiscriminate, and sprang from such hatred, that it transcended the category of "school violence" and invited comparison with acts of terrorism.

These young outcasts hated the classmates who taunted them. Over time the hatred grew into a set of beliefs, however crazed and incoherent, in which Nazism and Satanism played a part. The beliefs weren't hidden from anyone who cared to look at the Web sites they visited, the swastikas they sometimes wore, or even some of their classroom projects.

We would not suggest that anyone could have predicted the massacre on Tuesday. But if schools are to be as safe as they can be, someone has to spot trouble before it happens — and these young men were trouble waiting to happen. Whatever the school or the source of the problem, parents have to be alert — all day, every day — to warning signs. Teachers — who often know the potential troublemakers as well as anyone — must have the freedom to respond as their consciences and their professional standards dictate.

These are not issues to be raised only in hindsight about Columbine, but about the safety of children in this community, here and now. There is no perfect school, and what happened in Littleton could have happened anywhere. The only defense — not foolproof, but essential — is the vigilance of a concerned community.