(UPDATED) The hits, they just keep on comin.' Used to be it was career criminals who killed, and plots for mass shootings at suburban high schools were unimaginable. Everything has changed. All too many male teens and 20-somethings in U.S. cities, AND suburbs and exurbs, now come of age having internalized gun violence as a means of everyday score settling or reputation enhancement. It's not the guns, and anyone who says so has their head in the sand.

Youths are "going off," or ready to go off, for the flimsiest of reasons. Recently, I saw a young tough driving by the promenade on Alki Beach in West Seattle. He had a fierce-looking pit bull leaning out his car window barking loudly and angrily. A man with children looked at the scene and wrinkled his brow in disapproval. The youngblood was heard to darkly mutter in response, "I'm going to f*** you up; going to f*** you up, man." Luckily, nothing happened.

Yo: "Mean Muggin" can get you iced.

How has it come to this? Let's start with a a report from Ground Zero, via the Oakland Tribune.

OAKLAND - Ninety-four homicide victims were added to Oakland's roster of the dead in 2005. The tally was six more than in 2004, but the faces of both victims and suspects changed little from previous years, and neither did the reasons and attempts to explain why people kill. As upsetting as the deaths are for relatives and friends of the victims, more sobering is why police believe some suspects are more apt to pull a trigger or thrust a knife, beyond the traditional reasons of poverty, social breakdown and greed. Most -- 29 -- of 51 arrested suspects in 2005 were 18 to 25 years old. Veteran officers said many lacked morals and were simply trying to make names for themselves by exhibiting violent behavior they learned from others. "The biggest problem we have is their behavior didn't start (recently)"' said homicide unit commander Lt. Jim Emery. "It started years ago when these young guys were developing, and it got to the point today where they feel it's all right to kill somebody. They don't value life, some of these young guys."

...Officer Jason Andersen, who works as a field investigator for the homicide unit, has arrested more than 30 murder suspects in his 15-year career, most of them 18 to 25 years old. He believes drug use -- especially Ecstasy -- peer pressure and exposure to violence, both personally witnessed or seen in the media, play a role in a killer's makeup. That and a lack of positive upbringing and no respect for authority, whether it be law enforcement, parents or teachers. "Some of these kids are pretty much raising themselves and learning on the street," Andersen said. "They're trying to make names for themselves." Retired Officer Margaret Dixon, who headed the department's Police Activities League program for many years and still volunteers there, has been a mentor to thousands of young people. She agrees younger, violent offenders are usually exhibiting "behavior that is learned,"' whether from family members or others. "They are doing what they have been seeing. No one has intervened."

The Washington Post reports today that two 15-year-old boys from rough-and-tumble Prince George's County, Maryland outside Washington, D.C. have been arrested for the stabbing death of man in Arlington County, Virginia. Officials say the two are "among the youngest suspects" ever charged with homocide in the state. In addition, they are believed to have committed numerous robberies in the county, and to be tied a group of adults responsible for an organized robbery ring there.

The unhinged anger and aggression among young U.S. males isn't confined to underclass communities, and street gangs. No motive was given in this report on a Chapel Hill, North Carolina high school student: the 17-year-old entered school with a gun, took a teacher and another student hostage. The gun went off twice though it was not aimed at anyone, he fled into the woods and was later captured.

A clear yearly trend now is school massacre plots inspired by the deadly Columbine incident. The plans for copy-cat school killings are usually, but not always uncovered before things get out of hand. Even the home of Santa Claus - North Pole, Alaska - isn't immune. Get this:

The arrests of six boys accused of planning a campus massacre has gripped this small Alaska town with an unsettling epiphany — if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. "We thought we were in a bubble," said Cindy Slingerland as she waited outside the school with her husband, Mark, for their 13-year-old daughter, Jenny. "Nothing ever happens here. This is by far the biggest scare for my children."

The town of North Pole, dubbed Santa Claus' headquarters, has a main road called Santa Claus Lane where light poles are curved and striped like candy canes. Main attractions include Santa Claus House, a Christmas theme store open year round. The town is also a destination for thousands of letters sent to Santa each Christmas.

The seventh-graders, all around 13 years old, are suspected of scheming to take guns and knives to the town's middle school and kill students they felt picked on them as well as teachers they did not like. Police say the boys planned to knock out the school's power and telephone systems, giving them time for the slayings, then escape from the town of 1,600 about 14 miles (23 kilometers) southeast of Fairbanks.

USA Today reports of five southeast Kansas teens arrested last week on Columbine's anniversary, after a posting on the popular MySpace.com web site revealed their plans to disable the school's security cameras and launch a shooting spree. They were reportedly planning to don trenchcoats, similar to the black leather dusters worn by the Columbine misfits on their day of infamy.

A ninth-grader at Red Lake High School on the Red Lake, Minnesota Indian reservation, described by another student as having a "video game brain," is in custody after threats of massive gun violence drove students last week from the school, where eight died in a student massacre-suicide last year.

Washington State has seen a spate of recent incidents involving unmasked teen plots to kill or maim school classmates. The Seattle Times reports today:

...this week...Pierce County sheriff's deputies arrested a 16-year-old Puyallup boy who they say had crafted an elaborate plot to open fire on his classmates today before taking his own life. The boy, who has been charged with attempted first-degree assault, had made detailed plans to use his stepfather's .22-caliber rifle, a handgun and a homemade pipe bomb to launch his assault, according to detectives. As school officials in Washington and elsewhere have learned in recent years, that sort of plot is not isolated. On Monday, the same day Pierce County authorities announced the arrest of the Puyallup boy, another 16-year-old boy was charged with third-degree malicious explosion of a substance. Orting police said the boy fashioned a bomb from a glass bottle, tape, bottle rockets and a flaming firework and brought the device to Orting Middle School on April 18 to intimidate another student who had been dating a girl he liked. He set off the device hoping to intimidate the other student, but no one was injured.

Within the past few weeks, a junior-high-school teen in Kitsap County was investigated for allegedly planning to bring weapons to school; and on the Key Peninsula in Pierce County, three middle-school boys were charged last week with plotting to open fire on classmates after prompting a school lockdown.

The article goes on to quote school officials stressing the need for school personnel to be vigilant for warning signs of teens gone 'round the bend. Indeed. But that doesn't address root causes, and neither does the naive statist impulse toward anti-bullying legislation (passed in Washington state in 2004).

Another now-common variation on deadly teen mayhem occurs outside of school, involving two or more teens inflicting a fatal beating on an adult man. A recent post of mine titled "Teen Boys Gone Wild: A Modern Day Malady," details several such cases, where the victims were homeless. This brief NYT report datelined Wayne, Michigan, tells of three teens who will be charged as adults and face life imprisonment for the beating death of a man in the middle of an intersection during a robbery that netted them all of three dollars.

The new violent anger is expressed not only in deadly beatings by teens, and the mass killing plots of teens, it is also manifested in adult behavior such as the U.S. workplace massacres of the last 15-20 years, plus the burgeoning of road rage, air rage, and what I suppose could be called e-mail rage. Like this guy in Colorado, who didn't like a state legislator's comments against the border patrol group The Minutemen, and so e-mailed him sugggesting the fellow should be lynched. A small news item to be sure, but a sign of where we're at.

Several factors seem important in trying to better understand this barely-contained societal breakdown. First, our popular culture is suffused with the trivilization and commodification of violence and pornography, which serve as a dehumanizing influence, loosening inhibitions on abasement and disposal of our fellow man. Second, teens fetishize but poorly understand the pursuit of "individualism," so that if so permitted, they will confuse freedom from authority with the development of character and capabilities. Third, clueless parents are disengaged from their children's lives, and the often-poisonous social environments allowed to fester in public high schools. Fourth, adult role-modelling also legitimizes a lack of social restraint.

Parents, do your job. As columnist Peter Bronson writes, that was the message delivered, again last week in another well-received address by Bill Cosby, this time in Cincinnati, where 12 were murdered in March alone. Bronson also notes:

...the message from another speaker, Hamilton County Coroner O'dell Owens, was as sharp as a scalpel: "I speak for the dead," he said. "And the dead say to me now, 'No more, no more, no more.' Say it to your young children."

Why is it that the school shootings and school mass-shooting plots - many if not most of them in suburban, ex-urban or small-town locales - always seem to occur in public schools, not private schools? A lot of it goes back to public school parents who are either dangerously uninvolved in their kids' lives; or contentious, litigious and unwilling to accept responsibility for the conduct of their children.

When private school parents plunk down their tuition payments each month, they know there's another price they and their children must pay: adherence to an old-fashioned code of conduct.

Odd that you have to pay for the benefit of being held to a higher standard, isn't it?

Which is to say that one large part of the solution to school violence, and the larger challenge of socializing U.S. teens to greater expectations, is broader implementation of state laws permitting public charter schools and school vouchers, both of which funnel students into environments where academic and behavorial standards are typically far more stringent than in most public schools.

TECHNORATI TAGS: TEEN VIOLENCE, MURDER, DEATH THREATS, PLOTS, COLUMBINE, PUYALLUP, KEY PENINSULA, ORTING, RED LAKE, MINNESOTA, NORTH POLE, ALASKA, KANSAS, CINCINNATI, OAKLAND, WAYNE, MICHIGAN, ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, PARENTING, BILL COSBY

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at April 26, 2006 12:46 PM

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