Blame society first.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

Individual responsibility is the truly unthinkable.

An individual, or small group of individuals, commits a heinous act. The first reaction on the part of our nation's political and intellectual classes: Blame everyone else.

The Jonesboro tragedy is a case in point. A couple of kids commit an act of shocking villainy: summoning a group of their helpless schoolmates outside and shooting at them - aiming mostly, it appears, at girls. Five people are dead, 11 wounded.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee steps forward to publicly re-establish the modern moral order. He doesn't declare these kids an aberration, outside the pale of our society, deserving punishment. Instead, he declares them in essence representative of modern American society. "It makes me angry not so much at individual children that have done it as much as angry at a world in which such a thing can happen," Huckabee said the day of the shooting.

Maybe it's something in the feed at the executive mansion in Arkansas. Former Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, now president, pulled a similar moral switcheroo during his recent Africa tour of apologies. It was one thing to apologize for slavery, for which the U.S. government he represents bears active responsibility.

But Clinton went a step further: It isn't only the things we do for which we must bear blame, but the things others do. The massacres in Rwanda, seemingly the direct result of mad, bloodthirsty tribal warfare between the Hutus and Tutsis, were, Clinton declared, something for which "the international community" must "bear its share of the responsibility." Evil, then, is not the responsibility of those who practice it; rather, it is the shame of everyone who does not somehow prevent it.

There's something untoward about a mind that will do anything to avoid casting blame on those who have committed atrocities but feels free to profligately spread the blame around on social forces, or "all of us," or the international community, or inanimate objects, or the media. But that mind is everywhere; Huckabee was no aberration. A USA Today headline states it baldly: "Who's to blame for school shooting? We all are."

Even if the blame-everyone-else-first impulse makes no discernible moral sense, it makes a great deal of political sense. After all, if only the perpetrators of crimes are to blame for them, then there's nothing much for government to do but nab those perpetrators, hold a trial, and, if a guilty verdict is brought down, impose a...