The New York Times has  an editorial blasting our politicians for their failure to address the “Gun Crazy” culture that it blames for the killings at Northern Illinois, Virginia Tech and Columbine High School. 

Our political leaders are not helpless. They could match public shock with prompt, concerted and effective action to make mass shootings a less frequent fact of American life. But neither party’s leaders have shown any sign of stepping up their responsibilities. The latest campus carnage barely caused a ripple in presidential politics, where conventional wisdom dictates against actively advocating more stringent gun control laws.

The “solutions” set forth in the editorial are clear:  Eliminate the “gun show” loophole, perform background checks, ban automatic weapons, etc.  These are nothing new, though they have been the bane of the RKBA supporters.  Awaiting the DC v. Heller decision, they are not likely to be nearly as worried about the Times’ view today as they were in the past.

But nowhere in the editorial is there any discussion of what is driving these individual to commit this horrific killings.  There is a disease afflicting some youth in our society, and we are ignoring it.  Instead, the Times wants to treat the overt symptoms and leave the disease unchecked.  I have argued that we should address one element of the  motivations for these high profile shows by  never revealing the identities of the killers.  That’s gone over like a lead balloon.

But the recurrence of these mass killings by otherwise ordinary kids has yet to be scrutinized by social scientists, politicians or newspaper editors.  In the post-mortem, everyone can see the unhappiness and purported mental instability the drove these people to randomly kill others.  How wonderful that we can attribute negative qualities and psychological pathologies to killers after the fact.  It may make us feel better to believe that these were sick kids, but it does nothing to help us identify the problem, or the people, before they shoot up another school.

Schools have adopted zero tolerance policies, ousting kindergartners for drawing pictures of weapons (not to mention hugging each other, because a hugger could grow up to be pathologically empathetic someday).   While this has given rise to bizarre and laughable results, except for the poor families caught up in its stupidity, it has done nothing to deal with the problem.

How many educators and social scientists have watched VH1 lately?  The shows that glorify million dollar parties for children, and suggest that the failure to have one brands a youth a total failure, are common fodder.  Could this have any impact on the depression felt by youth? 

What about the economy, where college students who have struggled for years to achieve the promise that their parents and society made, only to find that it’s empty and that they are unlikely to reach their goals of financial success.  Could this weigh heavily on their minds?

What about our consumerist society, where the desperate need for bling has reached into our high schools and colleges, and left those without to be ridiculed and marginalized.

And what about our cultural glorification of pain, with shows ranging from “Jackass” to “America’s Funniest Home Videos” have us laughing uproariously at the hurt suffered by others.  This diminishes their view that seeing pain inflicted, and therefore inflicting pain, is really such a terrible thing.

It’s not that I dispute the fact that a gun in the hands of these killers facilitated their acts.  But the gun did not cause them to kill.  By focusing their pressure on the weapon, rather than the reason, for these killings, we move no closer to recognizing and curing the disease.  Am I the only person who is concerned about this?  It seems so.