Monday's shooting rampage by a teen-ager in northern Minnesota points to the limitations of how American society currently deals with an epidemic of dysfunctional youth and violence, says a Duke University legal scholar and author of the book "Fixing Columbine: The Challenge to American Liberalism."
"Adding metal detectors in schools, profiling suspicious students, enacting anti-bullying policies and changing curricula to protect the school community and to teach children rewarding and responsible values are all positive steps," says Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a professor at DukeLawSchool. "But that is only a partial solution."
School systems across the country, including the high school where Monday's shooting occurred, have adopted such changes in the six years since the ColumbineHigh School shooting in Littleton, Colo., she says.
"The problem of emotionally dysfunctional children who would hurt themselves and others is bigger than just the school environment," Coleman says. It is often the result of being raised in a culture that holds violence as an appropriate solution to adversity and violent figures as appropriate role models.
The onset of anxiety disorders and depression in our children is often the result of insufficient or ineffective nurturing and care by the child's parents and the larger community, she says. Many parents either work long hours during which their children are in part being babysat by television, video games and the Internet or -- as in the case of Minnesota shooter Jeff Wiese -- they are literally absent.
"The Supreme Court has said that it is not the role of the First Amendment to protect children from the negative impacts of violent and antisocial media. Rather, it has insisted that it is parents' job to filter what children see and how they internalize it," she says. "This Norman Rockwell image just doesn't hold up in the real lives of many American families."
Remedying this problem will be difficult, Coleman acknowledges. All of the obvious ones are costly to other deeply held values.
"Imagining a child-friendly First Amendment, which would make it more difficult for adults to access violent and anti-social speech as a way to protect children, is anathema to those who believe that an inviolate First Amendment is necessary to a free society," she says. "Imagining restrictions on parents rights which would assure they function in ways tailored to solving our current rates of youth dysfunction is both anathema to those who believe in individual adult liberties, and impossible to reconcile with the current economic situation in which many families find themselves."
It is also difficult to imagine that the government will step in with the money needed to protect the emotional health of even our most at-risk children.
"If we don't commit to some of these changes, it is difficult to see how we can reverse what are truly alarming rates of childhood anxiety disorder, depression and suicide," Coleman says. "Yesterday's shooting at RedLakeHigh School, just like the shootings at Columbine, are an important manifestation of this phenomenon."
Coleman, who teaches courses in children and the law at DukeLawSchool, is the author of numerous articles about the ways in which culture -- both domestic and foreign -- affects how women and children are treated in the law. "Fixing Columbine" was published in 2002 by Carolina Academic Press.