TEEN-SHOOTING FOCUS SKIPS BITTER WOES

Soul-searching over the many incidents of students taking firearms to schools and killing and injuring dozens of people is to be expected. But the unfortunate result of focusing on school shootings is to detract attention from the fact that student-age youngsters shoot each other every day throughout the nation. But because most shootings don't occur on school property, there is scant notice.

How can this be? Why is it that every incident involving a firearm at a school is prone to get national attention?

Blame the news media. That seems to be the No. 1 reason given by Americans who are beginning to realize that all the attention to school shootings is producing a warped view of the violence among young people. There is something to be said for this argument, considering the herd instinct of most news media to trumpet the latest news fad. A few years ago it was militia organizations and their sinister aims. Just recently, there has been a burst of attention to brutal killings of blacks at the hands of whites -- again, something that happens every day -- without any accompanying frenzy over blacks killing blacks or blacks killing whites or whites killing whites. Some major news organizations have themselves made news in recent days by announcing they are going to treat school shootings differently from now on, having realized that their disproportionate coverage has had no good effect.

Blame the parents. That's a common theme of self-proclaimed experts who think there has to be a concrete reason for everything that goes wrong in society. Yes, parents have a responsibility for their children. And, yes, the family structure is a shambles in far too many cases. But how, then, do you explain violent crimes committed by teen-agers who have had strong parental involvement in their lives, seeming good home situations and exposure to well-grounded value systems? By focusing on school shootings, these issues are all but neglected, particular when they are applied to all those other shootings that don't occur at schools.

Blame the gun laws. Consider this: Most of the guns used by students in the recent rash of school shootings came from the locked gun cabinets of law-abiding parents who kept firearms for sport or personal safety. That is a clear-cut right of the U.S. Constitution. There are those, however, who would thwart such rights in a misdirected effort to stop the school shootings. If parents were suddenly forced to give up their legal firearms, wouldn't students resort to the same illegal options as many of their counterparts who kill away from school?

Blame the breakdown of society. Yes, there are some breaks and definitely some huge cracks in today's society. But there also are thousands -- no, millions -- of God-fearing families who are raising children to respect good values, children who are likely to succeed in life. Unfortunately, we hear less and less about them as more and more attention is paid to the handful who take firearms to school.

Perspective. That's something missing from the news media's coverage of school shootings. Students are still more likely to die in a school bus accident or a sports injury than from a bullet fired in a school hallway. Far more students are likely to be injured on a football field than by a wild shot from a rifle at school.

And if we are going to focus on the deaths of teen-agers at the hands of other teen-agers, then let's be honest enough to look at all those killings, not just those at school. Only then will we begin to understand the scope of the problem and starting finding ways to deal with it.