Word: littleton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Clinton has gotten into the act, proposing new general restrictions on fertilizer purchases, after it was learned that the killers made homemade pipe bombs. Never mind the plentiful cases where Marilyn Manson, Doom and fertilizer have not been accessories to violence; generalizations and extrapolations from the particular circumstances in Littleton have become the order...
Admittedly, this column only adds to the stream of post-Littleton opinion pieces, but my purpose here isn't to try to explain the events but rather to encourage us to examine the instincts that may draw us to these pundits. The sort of knee-jerk analysis practiced in the past two weeks simultaneously gratifies and disturbs many of us. On the one hand, many of us have a powerful instinct to both seek and supply grand, sweeping and satisfying answers in the wake of tragedy. Immediately following a dramatic national or local event, at the time of greatest emotional...
This is not to say that all generalities are bad, of course. Tocqueville made a critical distinction between the kind of generalization and rule-making that "results from the slow, detailed and conscientious labor of the mind" and the more pernicious kind used by the Littleton pundits, that "springs up at once from the first quick exercise of the wits and begets only very superficial and uncertain notions...
Since the tragic events in Littleton, Colo., two weeks ago, pundits have chosen to either draw lessons from the horrors there or to avoid sweeping statements of meaning altogether. Many have argued that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are either tragic anomalies or prescient hallmarks of a lost generation...
...carnage at Littleton this week had resonance for the San Carlos neighborhood of San Diego, Calif. Twenty years ago, Brenda Spencer was a teenager with a gun and a target: the elementary school across the road. Today she is serving the 20th year of a 25-years-to-life sentence and will be eligible for a parole hearing in 2001. TIME's Feb. 12, 1979, report...