Columbine Anniversary

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Columbine Massacre.

Katie Couric noted that "the horror of Columbine still reverberates"

She was right - but not in the way she figured.

Schools today are "guarded" by practical things - metal detectors, x-rays - and things that are of no use whatsoever; "zero tolerance laws".

Government often acts in ways that are oddly human in scope - taking measures that serve no use other than to make government, and people in government, feel they've done something. Anything. It's not about whether something useful got done - it's about whether they feel like it did, and whether some government checklist was duly checked. As long as the list is checked, some government official has his or her ass covered if something does in fact go wrong.

Problem is, I can see the "Zero tolerance" rules doing vastly more harm than good. They don't teach kids that violence is wrong - merely that authority is stupid, petty and anal-retentive. Which in many ways is a good life lesson, but it's completely irrelevant to dealing with school violence.

Predictably, the teachers union's line today is that budget cuts and "No Child Left Behind" have made it harder to teach the lessons of Columbine.

It's Bush's fault, obviously.

The real lesson today? It comes from Israel. The intifada has destroyed life on a scale Harris and Klebold could not have imagined. Coincidentally (?), since terror became a fact of life in Israel thirty years ago, Israeli teachers have carried handguns in class - and are required to carry them on field trips. The intifada has struck no schools.

A teacher with a .38 and a well-placed shot or two could have ended the Columbine massacre before, or as soon as, it started.