It’s too easy for troubled kids to find guns

Imagine a mansion where doors open into walls and stairways lead into nowhere.

It’s a picture of insanity. It’s also the house that Sarah Winchester, the Victorian-era heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, built and built and built throughout the last 38 years of her life. A chunk of the $20 million she inherited, along with her income of $1,000 a day, went into the construction of a loopy, lonely mansion nobody in their right mind would want to inhabit.

Last month my daughters and I, with an afternoon to kill, toured the Winchester House, these days a cheerfully creepy tourist attraction in San Jose, Calif. We explored the house that Mrs. Winchester constructed, approximately 160 rooms designed to thwart the wandering spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles.

I thought of that house, with its nonsensical walls and its bizarre staircases leading nowhere last week. Walking through it felt like futility. So did reading the week’s headlines from Red Lake, Minn.

I find reading these school-shooting stories wearying, like re-treading the path of a diminutive old woman, hell-bent on crafting a testament to her own tormented brain.

I’m so tired of these stories, their datelines now starting to run together: Moses Lake, Springfield, Ore., Littleton, Colo. I visited San Diego one spring when gunshots rang in a high school there. I heard the sirens spill down the streets to Lewis and Clark High School one day. I read the stories from Lakeside High School last December.

So many troubled kids hold so many guns in their hands, yet the rest of us simply shake our heads.

Inevitably, the television cameras rush in and reporters start asking questions about school safety measures. Yes, we’re dutifully reassured: They’re working. Gun-sniffing dogs, those rat-on-the-weird-kid programs, they’re all working.

But clearly, they just skim the surface.

It’s the structure here that’s insane. There’s something fundamentally wrong when a country places so many weapons within the reach of its troubled children, yet finds so many reasons to restrict their access to the mental health treatment they need.

Compare our rates of gun ownership and homicide to that in Canada. According to the Coalition for Gun Control, Canadians own 1 million handguns; Americans 76 million. The rate of handgun-related murder in the U.S. is 14.5 times higher than that in Canada.

The stories of kids bringing guns to school won’t end until we dig deeper.

For Jeff Weise last week in Red Lake, life loomed a dark horror. His father killed himself in a standoff with police in 1997; his mother lived in a nursing home after damaging her brain in a serious car accident. He filled notebooks with drawings of people with bullet holes in their heads and Internet Web sites with hateful messages. He displayed plenty of warning signs.

He was deeply troubled, and school authorities apparently knew that. Perhaps it would have taken a miracle to reach him. But I find it hard to believe he found the help he needed in that small town in northern Minnesota.

What he did find was a .22 caliber handgun. He shot his grandfather with it and stole the man’s own guns. He wound up killing nine people, injuring seven, and then turning that handgun on himself.

Weise found a gun. They always do, these Eric Harrises, these Dylan Klebolds, these Kip Kinkels. Some seem intent on murder. Others, such as two recent Spokane kids, only want to harm themselves.

They find a gun.

They’re most likely to find it in their own homes. One study showed two-thirds of students in school-shooting incidents grabbed their guns from their own home or from a relative’s house. Even groups of responsible gun owners say not enough families lock their guns up separately from their ammunition, not enough of them hide the keys from their kids.

While this country continues to care excessively about the bottom line of gun manufacturers, we shrug over the needs of troubled kids. President Bush’s federal budget cuts this winter include trims in programs designed to bring mental health care to teens.

So the headlines march on. The kids keep spinning dark fantasies. And the gun industry cheerfully, creepily keeps producing one more weapon after another.

We’re living in a mansion haunted by spirits. Our staircases lead into ceilings, our doors open into walls.

And the headlines keep marching on.