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A lot of kids say stuff like that? Yes, they do, and we're not listening very well. Most public schools spend little effort evaluating the mental health of their students, even though every student gets inoculated against measles. Meantime, says James Garbarino, author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them, "the number of kids who need help has shot up significantly." In California there's only one counselor--to say nothing of a trained psychologist--for every 1,000 students.
Some parents, even when they try to pay attention, may not be hearing. Betty Ford--no, not that one--is president of the Parent Teachers Association in a Westchester, Calif., middle school and works hard to catch cues of brewing trouble. Last week, she says, she made a special effort to tune in to her 14-year-old, Adam, as he told her about a recent paint-ball game. "I didn't give a rat's a__," she admits, "but I listened."
There is surely some connection between the fact that parents spend 40% less time with their kids now than 30 years ago, and the violence that some of them commit. We are paying for our prosperity in ways difficult to quantify. Inner cities have actually learned better how to prevent violence at schools, if only out of fear. The Los Angeles school district hasn't had to deal with a serious shooting incident since 1984. In the entire city of San Francisco, which has half a dozen programs designed to identify students early who may be prone to violence, only two kids brought guns to school last year. But those lessons were learned hard. Joy Turner, whose 19-year-old son was gunned down in inner-city Los Angeles, now spends free time working with young killers to help them understand what they have done to their victims' families. Says she: "What's been real for those of us in the inner city is now real in the suburbs. Violence is like a movie: it's coming to a theater near you."
And vigilance is finally creeping into the suburbs. A frightening plot against a school was halted earlier this month in Port Huron, Mich., where authorities say a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old and two 14-year-olds, all boys, had been concocting a conspiracy to outdo Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The Michigan boys planned to take a gun from one of their fathers, use it to hold up a gun store for more weaponry, and then descend on Holland Woods Middle School to rape some of the girls and shoot many classmates. They had drawn up a list of 154 targets and stolen a building plan from the custodian's office.
The plan seems too cartoonish to have become reality, and the boys were probably too young to pull it off. Anything seems possible after Columbine, but should it? The Port Huron boys were all caught within a day of a classmate's report to an assistant principal.
It's hard to imagine that most schools won't become at least as careful as Holland Woods. The debate America had last month over whether metal detectors and sniffing dogs are effective is now virtually irrelevant: expect them in a school near you, starting this September.