A Look at Terror with My Daughter.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Discussing the Columbine High School massacre - Brief Article

My ten-year-old usually flees the living room as soon as Peter Jennings appears: "I hate the news! It's so boring."

But not on April 22. She stood away from the set as if it were emitting something lethal. Though her back was against the wall, her intense, probing eyes were locked on the screen. She was riveted, just like millions of other kids that night who were trying to make sense of the enormity of the tragedy at Columbine High School.

Once the news was over, she didn't want to talk; she wanted to go off to her room to play and read. But I knew a talk was coming. And I knew the last thing she needed was some patently obvious "tell-them-violence-is-wrong" chat, as suggested by our President. She already knows this.

So I expected her to take us elsewhere, which she did. She and I lay in her bed with the lights out and talked for an hour about how these boys got the idea to do what they did. How could they want to do this, and then actually decide to do it? And like most of us--especially pundits and newscasters, it seems--she at first wanted a simple, single-cause explanation. But she was eager to consider various factors that might, together, have produced such a horror.

My daughter, like so many kids interviewed in the wake of the killings, thought it quite important that these boys had been made fun of in school--she understands the pain of ostracism, the enormous pressure to conform. She also thought their obsession with Hitler and war was telling.

What did I think made them do it, she wanted to know.

I didn't have a complete answer. But I did talk about what it means to have a society where it's very easy to get guns. I did mention the media, awash with violent movies, video games, and television shows. Computer and video games, in particular, that require you to enact murders with your own hands--yes, just a quick click, not unlike a trigger pull--may restructure some people's individual psychology in quite powerful ways so it becomes easier to do unspeakable things in the real world when you've rehearsed them so many times in a simulated one.

I think I had a good talk with my daughter, the little gem I send off to school every day assuming she'll be OK, hoping she won't be afraid, and praying she won't get hurt. When my daughter finally went to bed that night, she insisted on having the hall light left on. She never has the hall light left on.

But I failed to link her concerns about the importance of friends and the pain of being...