Pop quiz: what are two of the most covered stories in our country’s media today? Give up? The answers are the Virginia Tech massacre and the war in Iraq.

There’s no doubt that these two issues deserve to be spotlighted because of their obvious impact on our nation and its people. However, most would agree that a lot of the coverage related to these issues is redundant. By digging a little deeper, though, you’ll realize that there’s more to be told.

The issue of war and the Virginia Tech massacre may seem, at first, completely unrelated outside of their prevalence in news headlines and on television. Upon a closer look, there’s a connection that’s a little harder to uncover. In fact, I wouldn’t have realized this relationship myself had it not been revealed to me by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a recent conversation.

Here’s some food for thought. The entree: more people have been killed by handguns since 1968 than all the American casualties in every war we’ve been involved in until now. The dessert: the number of student victims lost in the Virginia Tech massacre is the same number of teen victims we lose to gun violence in our country every four days.

That may be a little hard to swallow. These are the kinds of statistics that we sometimes don’t want to know, because we’d rather be in denial about the state of violence among our country’s adolescents than to know the extent to which their lives are being lost every day.

Knowledge of such daunting statistics isn’t all that necessary. Any of us, who has been in a public school or nightclub lately, knows about teen gun violence all too well. From hearing threats tossed around at lunch about who’ll be waiting in the parking lot and what they’ll be “packing,” to being on the lookout for rising tensions in a club, most teens and young adults know the severity of teen violence.

If the knowledge is out there, why does teen violence continue? Is it because there’s something particularly cool about taking a life in order to handle a conflict? Or, maybe it has more to do with pride or reputation? Does the prospect of spending life in jail strike one as a desirable future? In any case, it is clear that, sooner rather than later, attention should be paid to gun violence among teens. That is, unless we’re waiting for more school massacres to arise.

If we want our nation to remain undefiled in the next decade, it may be wise of us to keep each other alive today. As cliche as it may sound, the future lies in our hands. We’ll be the ones filling government offices, CEO seats, and media positions. But not if we aren’t around for long enough to do it. The only voices that will be heard in our future are those voices that are still around to speak. After all the shooting and killing is done, who will be left to speak for our country?

Full-blown massacres on college campuses may warrant extensive coverage, because they involve so many deaths occurring at once. But is it any less significant that we’re idly sitting back as teenagers pick each other off one at a time? Waiting for climactic gunning events to discuss teen violence should not be the strategy of our nation. The young lives we lose every day deserve attention and solutions, as well.

You must be logged in to comment.