Word: jonesboro
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Juvenile mass murderers. Fledgling psychopaths. Among the experts, the search for a new vocabulary is well under way. Psychologists are wary of speculating about specific causes in the Jonesboro killings--violence at home? A history of serious mental disturbance?--until a fuller picture emerges of the two boys and their circumstances. But on the question of how the larger ground is prepared, meaning the psychological terrain that might make a kid capable of killing, the professionals share the assumptions of most parents. These days Mom and Dad are not always home much. The extended family of the past is gone...
...great many households, work, divorce or both have removed parents for much of the day. Mitchell Johnson, the older boy accused in Jonesboro, didn't see a lot of his father, who split from his mother in 1994. When the grownups are out, or even when one is there but not mindful, children are left to the mercies of a peer culture shaped by the media, the ultimate in crazed nannies. Armed with video-game joysticks and TV remotes--a funny word, with its false promise that it keeps you at a distance from whatever excitements it bounces you through...
...that remains is for their world to be bristling with real firearms, which it often is. In a nation in which a third of all households have at least one gun, even an 11-year-old like Andrew Golden, the younger boy accused in Jonesboro, knows where to get one. Jonesboro is hunting country, so people there bridle at any suggestion that the simple availability of guns, especially long guns, had anything to do with the killings. But child-development experts say that for kids who never develop an internal brake on their own aggression, the pop-pop culture...
...ironies of the Jonesboro massacre is that people looking for a refuge from stress and violence often try to escape to places very much like Jonesboro. But most of the recent school shootings have occurred in rural areas. The psychic stresses of the 1990s are not so easy to evade--not when so many of them, from TV to being a latchkey child, are right in the home. There they can easily act on any kid who believes that "the world has wronged me"--a sentiment spoken from the darkest part of the human heart. And no place in America...
...seems grotesque to think of the Jonesboro slaughter in terms of play. But that is a way to approach the otherwise mystifying spectacle of children gunning down children. First of all, play is not necessarily innocent. Nor is childhood. The innocence of children (which was the unspoken premise of much horrified commentary last week about the Arkansas shootings) is an adult myth. The reality is children's extreme vulnerability; their storms of anger and irrationality and their dramatically imaginative lives, which conjure monsters and heroes and set them in motion--whole Iliads. Those imaginations sometimes indulge crazy fantasies of revenge...