Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink swears videotapes of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold do not hold the key to what happened in the country’s worst school massacre.
If two homicidal teens’ ramblings teach no lessons, America’s kids are in trouble.
Still, Mink’s decision to keep from the public the “basement tapes,” recorded in the weeks before the 1999 attack, is as understandable as it is disappointing.
The sheriff, backed by FBI analysts, argued that letting everyone watch a pair of maniacs calmly describe a plot that killed 12 classmates and a teacher would only inspire more adolescent violence.
The saddest commentary on today’s children and society is the difficulty finding experts to refute this conclusion.
It is hard to imagine any Columbine victim’s family or survivor finding closure in the tapes, said Martha Wadsworth, a professor of child development at the University of Denver.
What Wadsworth can envision “is a kid with a pretty big dose of violence in his life and problems he doesn’t know how to solve” who finds inspiration in a normal-looking pair of white, upper-middle class, suburban kids from two-parent, heterosexual families talking about high school murder the way other students might discuss homework.
Those of us who think free speech trains citizens to distinguish right from wrong and crazy from sane want to protest. Truth will out, we would like to shout. At this point, no child could possibly mistake Klebold and Harris for role models or martyrs.
Then, we choke on the evidence.
“There is no one-to-one correspondence of kids seeing violence and going out and doing violent things,” Wads worth said. “It’s a diet approach.
“People who see more violence see it as viable. They actually think it will work.”
Research shows that by 18, American children will have seen roughly 200,000 acts of violence on TV. A 2002 article in the journal Science reported “a significant association” between the amount of television watched by teens and “aggressive acts against others.” Maybe that’s because researchers found 75 percent of violent TV scenes showed no punishment or condemnation of violence.
Every year since Columbine, police across the country have arrested at least one would-be copycat. There also have been other school shootings. The only argument denizens of free speech might make is that showing the basement tapes could not make things worse.
I’m not sure how many defenders of the First Amendment truly believe it.
Even The Denver Post, which brought the lawsuit to make the Columbine records public, doesn’t want the basement tapes posted all over the Internet. The newspaper wants the tapes available for public viewing – but not copying – under the sheriff’s supervision.
Mark Silverstein, legal director of the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, doesn’t think it can work that way.
“For documents,” he said, “we have taken the position that look-only policies violate the Colorado open records act, which allows people to look and copy.”
Faced with an all-or-none situation, the question becomes: What have kids learned from Harris and Klebold? The answer seems to be vigilance as much as revulsion. Teens seem more likely now to report to authorities other kids’ weird behavior. But the bullying, rejection and stress that contribute to teenagers’ fear, alienation and rage are alive and well.
Journalists who have seen the basement tapes say all of those issues come through clearly in the recordings. Mink said the same thing Monday when he announced that he would not release the tapes.
What isn’t seen on-camera is the futility of the solution Harris and Klebold chose. For that, Americans must rely on the judgment of their children. We must have faith that our kids will understand that the struggles of adolescence are neither insurmountable nor interminable and are certainly never settled with blood.
After Columbine, we may never have that faith.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com
