Mt. Morris: It's all in the family
March 9, 2000
BY HENRY PAYNE
Copyright 2000 The Detroit News

DETROIT, MI - The smoke had barely cleared from the shooting of six-year old Kayla Roland in Mt. Morris, MI when Bill Clinton and his media chorus stormed the political stage and demanded the passage of new gun control laws.

'Every single day there are 13 children who die from guns in this country, so I do think we need more legislation," announced the president as he called for a summit congressional leaders, urging them to break a logjam on mandatory trigger locks and other measures.

The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today and other major media outlets ratcheted up the pressure on lawmakers, producing a drumbeat of gun control stories and editorializing that Mt. Morrris was exhibit A for stricter gun laws.

But as the facts of the Buell Elementary shooting came into focus - the six-year-old killer was essentially parentless, raising himself in a crack den populated by thieves - such words sounded increasingly irrelevant.

Yes, greater prevalence of child safety locks on guns would save the lives of youngsters who stumble across a gun at home. But the president's assumption that the characters trafficking in guns and drugs in this young boy's crackhouse environs would concern themselves with gun locks is absurd.

No, the Mt. Morris' first-grade shooter is not a poster child for gun control but a grim reminder of apocalypse now: the family dysfunction that is crippling America's inner city youth.

Since the mid-1960s, many social scholars have observed with alarm the implosion of the inner-city family (70 percent of black children today are born out of wedlock, while the rate for all familes hovers near 30 percent) and warned of the consequences of children raised
without adequate adult supervision and grounding in basic civilized values.

In 1995, Brookings Institution scholar John Dilulio warned of a generation of "super-predators", noting the growing fear of youth violence he observed among law enforcement officials. "We're talking about boys whose voices have yet to change," Philadelphia district attorney Lynne Abraham told Dilulio. " We're talking about
elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches. We're talking about kids who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the future."

William Bennett, creator of the "Index of Leading Cultural Indicators," notes that the explosion in juvenile crime in the last thirty years closely tracks the deterioration of family infrastructure (single - parent homes have increased threefold since 1965). Even as criminologists have breathed a sigh of relief as juvenile crime rates and teenage pregnancies leveled off beginning in 1997, youth crime rates remain 15 times what they were 10 years ago.

Dilulio attributes this pathology to "moral poverty," the "poverty of being without loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong."

"This moral poverty," he goes on, "explains why, despite living in desperate economic poverty, under the heavy weight of Jim Crow, and with plenty of access to free guns, the churchgoing, two-parent families of the south never experienced anything remotely like the tragic levels of homicidal youth" that plague today's inner cities.

The six-year old boy who killed Kayla Rowland is a product of this social
divestment. With his father in jail for drug abuse and parole violations, his drug-addled mother reportedly dropped him at the crackhouse run by his 19-year-old "uncle." It was there the morally impoverished child found a stolen, loaded .32 caliber revolver and plotted his classmates' murder.

Understanding this family dysfunction demands the exercise of
moral judgement, a commitment liberals are unwilling to make. Admittedly, it would be difficult for President Clinton to use his office as a bully pulpit for moral authority given the First Family's own moral
depravity. But sadly, Republicans too have failed to seize this moment to educate the public about America's greatest social problem.

While caring for children's future is surely compassionate and stumping about the importance of family is certainly conservative, "compassionate conservative" George W. Bush refuse to confront
the social pathologies on display in Mt. Morris. Instead, both he and GOP rival John McCain accepted Los Angles Times reporter Doyle McManus premise that the killing and vowed to give the issue serious thought.

Until America's leadership comes to grips with the family crisis that is gnawing at its cities foundations, we will continue to read of shocking juvenile murders and the pathetic call door gun control that follow.

It's the family, stupid.