AFTER LITTLETON: NO QUICK OR EASY ANSWERS

After the initial shock of the deaths at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., a predictable aftermath is beginning to sweep across the land. Meanwhile, a dropout returned Wednesday to his high school campus in Taber, Alberta, and shot two 17-year-olds, killing one of them. The Canadian story was barely mentioned by U.S. media.

That appears to be one of the aftereffects of senseless tragedy: We humans can endure only so much, so we either start to accept aberrant actions as normal, even acceptable, or we choose to ignore the pain and suffering whenever possible.

Take a look around the world. While U.S. forces participate in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, there are dozens of situations elsewhere involving civil wars and mass killings, starvation due to government ineptness and suffering due to the lack of medical care.

The predictable aftermath of the Littleton deaths has two prongs. One is the clamor for laws to prevent future high school rampages. The other is to fix blame -- and invent appropriate government guidelines -- on movies, video games and the lyrics of music favored by teen-agers.

The first prong is doomed before any concrete action is taken. Most of the cries for stiffer federal and state laws are the stuff of headline-making. The president gets his 30 seconds on national TV news and the appropriate headline in newspapers for suggesting a whole potful of laws, most aimed at taking away rights of law-abiding citizens. Never mind that most of these proposed laws will never be passed or even receive serious consideration. Bill Clinton and other attention-seeking politicians will achieve their ends simply by saying the words.

As letter writers and Speak Out callers to this newspaper already have observed, the more our nation dreams up new laws to prevent violence, the more violence we endure. There are plenty of laws on the books to punish many times over anyone convicted of walking into a school and shooting students and teachers at random.

So the talk turns to the reason for this kind of violence and how to prevent it.

We've heard a great deal in the past week about the influences of movies, video games and popular music. But their purveyors rebuff any effort to restrict their wares and refuse to accept responsibility.

There isn't so much a need for government restrictions on movie scripts and song lyrics -- censorship at its worst -- as there is a need for the makers of violent movies and pro-violence songs to acknowledge they are catering to the lowest form of commercialism and, in the process, dulling our senses to the needless dying and suffering so widespread in our society today.

Then there are the parents.

Why weren't the parents of the two shooters in Littleton more observant? Why didn't they take steps to prevent their sons' participation in a group clearly bent on violence? These are the questions being raised by people who know next to nothing about the parents of the two killers, parents whose sons are dead.

Wouldn't any parent like to think he or she has the answer to all the questions and accusations about responsibility? But we don't. Instead, we would like to think we have a good relationship with our children, are able to talk to them about their fears and problems, can provide direction and values that they will accept, and show love and affection in such abundant quantities that our sons, our daughters would never resort to killing to get attention.

If we are honest, is that an accurate description of most parenting today? Thankfully, it is in large part for most parents. But not all. Not by a long shot. And even the parents who are trying know they have no ironclad guarantee their sons or daughters won't do something tragic even if it involved the steering wheel of a shiny new car rather than a rifle.

There are no quick fixes. But those who question themselves rather than others are closer to good answers.