House sense

The call in Congress came swiftly at the deaths of 14 people at Columbine High School last April: The nation must get to the heart of the problem that led two Colorado students to open fire on their classmates. The House last week concluded its effort, and it is not encouraging.

The problem with basing legislation on tragedies such as the Columbine shooting is in coming to agreement on its cause. Why did Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold plan this horrific event? What enabled it to happen? The nation does not and may never fully know.

Guns are to blame, concluded one side; no, violent movies, said the other. The evident solution to these scourges to the nation’s youth was to kill legislation that would have restricted one or both and allow for the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools. The implication that another Littleton tragedy could be effectively stopped by the government, through a school system bulletin board, is a strange one for this Congress. Yet, strange, seemingly contradictory, actions are entirely in keeping with the House recently.

At the start of the debate, for instance, the House split the gun question away from the overall juvenile justice proposal and passed the latter. Guns and movies have drawn most of the attention during this debate, but if Congress wanted to do something truly meaningless to mark the deaths in Colorado, it could not have chosen better than its juvenile justice plan, which consists, essentially, of a pot of federal money and a handful of new ways to increase punishment for younger and younger lawbreakers. Under the proposal, students who even intended to bring a gun to school could face five years. And new federal sentencing laws will further restrict the ability of judges to help these children, especially as the plan allows juveniles as young as 14 to be tried as adults.

How this helps stop another Littleton is anybody’s guess. It is as if Congress, concerned about the cost of medicine, simply got tougher with sickness and declared a new threshold for disease. Rep. John Baldacci said he opposed the bill because it missed the point. There were plenty of punitive measures but nothing for prevention; no resources for Big Brothers or Big Sisters or Boys and Girls Clubs. We need to have gun-safety laws but also programs that give kids positive influences in their lives.

Rep. Baldacci’s observations, however, suggest that complex problems may demand complex solutions, and that simply increasing the range and depths of punishment for children is not enough. Nothing Congress has done this session suggests that it is able to contemplate such a thought.