IN COLD BLOOD: CHILDREN KILLING CHILDREN
by Lou Torok At first I hardly noticed. A fresh-faced kid who hardly shaved passed me in the prison yard. And then my head yanked around because the boy could have passed for a twelve-year-old student in elementary school. "What the hell is happening?" I asked the friend with whom I was walking.
--were filling up with more than just a few 17- and 18-year-olds sentenced as adults to long prison sentences for violent crimes including murder.
Not too long ago, it was rare to ever see a kid in an adult prison. They certainly were seldom tried as adults. But as we near the 21st century there is suddenly an avalanche of children and immature adults being sentenced to prison sentences that would keep them behind bars well into middle age and sometimes beyond.
Suddenly, the next door neighbor's kid-the one who sings in the choir, the one who baby sits faithfully, the one who is so quiet and polite--grabs the headlines in a violent confrontation sometimes ending in murder over a trivial dispute or imagined wrong. We might all well wonder, "What the hell is happening?"
The preacher will explain it simplistically as "the work of the Devil." Conservative politicians cluck and blame it on liberal politics. Teachers believe it is because of slashing school tax budgets and the resultant lowering of teaching standards and overcrowded classrooms.
Parents who think they know their own children but really don't spend much time with them blame it on the influence of their neighbor's kid. Sociologists think they can find something drastically wrong in the early childhood development years to account for such violence. Everybody has a simplistic shoot-from-the-hip explanation when something goes wrong in the life of the "model" student. Could any of these folks be right? Could they all be wrong? Or was there something we are just not getting that might explain this rash of teenage acting-out violence?
Parents who sit their infants in front of a TV set for hour after droning hour do not see any connection with what the child is absorbing about human behavior and future actions. Nobody seems to be listening to the experts that early exposure to violence on TV and in the home--as parents and siblings resolve family disputes with violence--really has any bearing on the erupting epidemic of teen violence.
A career military officer recently noted in an article in a Christian magazine that he could take any fresh-faced innocent child of ten and return it to its parents in four years as a killing machine capable of all kinds of violence including murder without remorse.
The key to changing any normal person, including a child, into a remorseless murderer was not a secret in the military. It is called "desensitization." And it works. Our armed forces have become expert at taking peace-loving teenagers and teaching them to overcome their natural aversion to killing another human being. Take a look at the numbers. In previous wars, our fighting men had a killing rate of 15% and sometimes less. In modern warfare, that number has been increased to an efficient 90 percent.
What works for the military is killing our children.
--LOU TOROK, BOX 6/109237, LaGrange, KY 40031