Firearms violence problem complicated
COMMENTARY
Sebastian Moleski

Did you know that three years ago a 6-year-old boy shot one of his classmates in an elementary school? The boy found the gun while staying in his uncle’s house and took it to school the next morning.

When I heard about that, many questions started to float in my mind: Where were the parents? Why didn’t they check what their son was bringing to school? How can a 6-year-old boy have access to a weapon?

This Saturday, some of these questions were answered in what proved to be a controversial movie production.

It turned out that the mother left for work at 6 a.m. that day as she had done for weeks. She was a single parent forced by Michigan’s welfare-to-work program to take a job 40 miles away from home. After spending 12-hour shifts at two jobs at a mall in one of the richest neighborhoods in the country, she didn’t have any energy left to take care of her son.

The tragedy of this event is the complexity of the situation. Why did the boy decide to take a gun to school? And why did he decide to shoot the little girl? In our pursuit to find answers to these questions we rush to assign blame to single factors. Some said it was because of lax gun control laws. Others said the parent’s negligence was to blame. Even others say it’s Hollywood’s and the media’s fault.

Once we’ve gotten comfortable with the scapegoat we’ve found, we start looking for justice. Three years earlier, an 11-year-old boy was charged and sentenced for murder. A new Michigan state law had allowed for suspects of all ages to be tried for high crimes. The voices that cried again for revenge and retribution this time were few but loud. Seeing the boy hanged from the highest pole would give them comfort that the criminal justice system was still working, that no criminal would go unpunished.

The county prosecutor disagreed. He understood that of all the people to blame for this tragedy, the boy himself was not one of them. He argued that a 6-year-old doesn’t have the capacity to understand and take responsibility for what he’s doing.

But the incident started other questions, too. Why is it that gun-related crimes are 30 times higher in the U.S. than in all other Western nations? What is it about Americans that makes them turn violent? Or do they, even?

Politicians are always looking for easy solutions to complex problems. So do the people who elect them. “Gun crime’s up? Toughen the gun laws.” But I can’t stop thinking that’s not the solution. Maybe a larger approach is necessary. Maybe we need to think about how violence is presented to every one of us every day on TV, the theaters and the radio. Maybe we need to rethink how fear of the other person has influenced our lives.

If this made you think at all, have a look at the movie I watched last Saturday. It’s called “Bowling for Columbine.”

Sebastian Moleski is a sophomore international economics major from Berlin, Germany.