Kids, Guns and Parental Responsibility

She has raked her memory, looking for signs.

Looking for some tip-off that her son, her Mitch, would--at age 13--conspire with a buddy to steal an arsenal, set up an ambush. Massacre his classmates.

She has raked her memory. She has come up empty.

“You can drive yourself crazy with the what-ifs, the should-have-knowns,” she says. “But I can sleep at night. There’s nothing I regret. There’s nothing I could have or would have done different.”

That conclusion satisfies Gretchen Woodard, mother of a boy who murdered. But it is hardly the last word.

Saturday marks the third anniversary of the shooting here at Westside Middle School. Mitch and his friend, in camouflage, killed four students and an English teacher.

The town still is groping toward an accounting.

The criminal guilt is clear: The boys are locked away in a juvenile facility until they turn 18.

But do others share responsibility?

In Jonesboro--as in Littleton, Colo., and West Paducah, Ky., and Pearl, Miss., and Santee, Calif., and on down the grim roll call of school shootings--that question hangs in the air, unsettled.

It animates a lawsuit against the parents of the killers. It’s the subtext of conversation out at Hardin’s Guns and Gear, where many men still say they see no need to lock their weapons more securely. It pierces through prom-date gossip at the high school in the clammy lurch of fear that the horror could repeat.

This fumble to assess responsibility for the shootings is not just about, not even mainly about, assigning blame. It’s about unraveling the lessons of the past to learn from them. To make sure such heartache never rips through Jonesboro again.

“There’s lots and lots you can do,” says Pam Herring, who lost her oldest daughter, Paige, in the shooting, “to protect against what you think can’t happen.”

Herring views the lawsuit brought by several of the victims’ relatives as a first step in that direction.

The suit alleges that the parents of Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden “were negligent in the training, supervision and control” of their sons. It further contends that such laxity was a “proximate cause” of the events of March 24, 1998.

The two boys stole 10 guns and 500 rounds of ammunition from Andrew’s grandfather. (The guns were chained to a rack, but the key hung on a nail right above the padlock.) They stashed the arsenal in the woods behind their school, then set off a fire alarm. As their classmates filed outside, Mitch and Andrew opened fire.

The families of the victims allege that the boys’ parents “knew or should have known” that their sons had the “character, lack of discipline and propensity” to commit such an act.

Herring believes that with all the passion of her pain. She can’t see how any boy could snap so horribly without his parents noticing how brittle he had become.

There’s no way to legislate good parenting. She knows that. There’s no way to force parents to open their eyes. But Herring hopes her lawsuit will put parents everywhere on notice that they had better tune in to their kids--and tune in well--or be prepared to explain their lapses in court.

“We need to teach our kids good judgment and moral responsibility,” her attorney, Bobby McDaniel, explains. “The way to do that is to compel it to be done. If parents don’t do it, they must pay the consequences.” McDaniel has compiled a list of “dysfunctional” behaviors that he claims should have tipped Mitch’s parents off that their son was dangerously unstable. Mitch, he alleges, was obsessed by gangs and girls and bragged about trying heroin. He angered easily and got into frequent scrapes. He was once suspended from school for two days for fighting.

Mitch’s mom knew about the suspension. But the rest of McDaniel’s list leaves her puzzled. The Mitch she knew loved barbershop quartets. He rocked his little sister to sleep on his lap each night. Her Mitch got good grades and sang with his church group at nursing homes. These were the signs she saw. They did not warn of imminent explosion.

“I do take responsibility for him. He is my son,” Woodard said. “And yet, you tell me what I could have done different.”

The parents of Andrew Golden, who was 11 at the time of the shooting, have settled their portion of the lawsuit. Terms are sealed, but one source said each of the victims’ families received about $12,000. The suit against Mitchell’s parents seeks unspecified damages. No trial date has been set.

As she waits, Woodard takes solace in the support she feels from many other families in Jonesboro.

She still lives in this farm town of 55,000. Yet she said she has received not one nasty letter or call. Not one hateful look on the street. On the contrary. It took her two months, working two hours a night, to answer every sympathetic card she received, from Arkansas and from around the world, after her son murdered five.

“You bring up a child the best you think you can,” a construction worker in town explains. “But once that child is out of your reach, you can’t control him.”

That sentiment echoes throughout Jonesboro. Yet probe deeper, and an uneasy ambivalence about parental responsibility emerges.

On the one hand, person after person agrees: Parents can do everything right and still, some kids just go haywire.

On the other hand, person after person declares: Not my kids. They won’t go bad.

Many parents and grandparents, for instance, say they see no need to lock up their guns. Or even to keep all their weapons unloaded. Raise children well and discipline them hard, they assert, and such precautions are unnecessary.

“It all starts at the home. I’m not worried about my kids,” says farmer Paul Hicks, a father of three who keeps his guns in a glass display case that he admits a child could easily break into. Hicks trusts the power of parenting. That’s clear. And he trusts he’s doing it right. Yet a note of ambivalence emerges when talk turns to the lawsuit. Should a parent pay for his child’s crimes? “I’ll stay neutral,” he says. “You never know. I might be in that same situation some day. You just don’t know.”

Bruce West agrees: You just don’t know. He didn’t.

He was driving back to Jonesboro from a turkey hunt when the radio popped out news of the mayhem at Westside. His first thought: One of his two teenage sons might be involved. Not a victim, but the shooter. “I thought, ‘Oh my God. I hope it’s not my son.’ ”

It was not. But the scare, the flare of fear, got West thinking about his own responsibility as a parent. He went out and bought a $1,500 gun safe. A steel safe, a big one, bolted to the wall and secured with a combination lock. He stores all his weapons in there--all except a loaded handgun, which he keeps handy (though well hidden, he insists) for protection.

“My boy, he knows right from wrong. He catches that leather strap on his behind. But he’s still a boy,” says West, a rice and soybean farmer. “You don’t have full control.”

His buddies, sipping beer in the smoke-choked Moose Lodge, might agree in theory. Yet they haven’t joined West in buying gun safes. “Hell, no,” retired farmer Jack Hill barks, to general approval. Why bother? “If parents spank their kids’ butts and teach them right, the guns will be used, not abused.”

That confidence alarms some of the students who lived through the Westside shooting.

For the horror of that spring morning shadows them even now.

They flinch when they hear balloons pop. They check under their beds, fearing an ambush, before they lie down to sleep. Reflexively, they look for the exit every time they walk into a room. On Paige Herring’s birthday earlier this month--she would have been 15--they bought her wind chimes as a present. They hung them at her grave.

“You can’t just get over it,” says Holly Jo Parks, a 10th-grader. “We deal with it every day.”

To help them deal, a dozen or so students have formed a group they call Save Our Schools. They write skits about violence and give talks to other students. They try, always, to push a message of civic responsibility: You may not have been able to stop the last tragedy, but perhaps you can prevent the next. Stop bullying. Stop teasing. Start listening to other students. Pay attention. Report threats.

To their frustration, however, the students say they’ve seen few lasting changes at school. The seniors still pick on the freshmen. And many parents, teachers and students choose not to talk about the killings, counseling instead that it’s time to move on.

That silence sounds a lot--too much--like complacency to this Save Our Schools group. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” 16-year-old Jamie Clevenger says, “if it happened again.”

Herring agrees, with a shudder.

It could happen again in Jonesboro. It will happen again in America. We can put the shooters in jail. But nothing will change, she says, until the parents, the gun owners, the teachers, the friends--the whole community, here in Jonesboro and everywhere else--assesses and accepts responsibility.

“People are not storing their guns safely. People are not taking threats seriously. People are not listening to their kids,” she says. “Why is this still going on? How many will have to die before people start to take it seriously?”

Herring’s eyes are wet.

She has talked for an hour about accountability. She has cast much blame. She is not quite through. She looks at a photo of her daughter, Paige Ann, gunned down a few days after turning 12. She cannot absolve herself.

“I never told her,” Herring says, her voice low, “if guns were fired at her, hit the ground. I feel bad. I never told her that. Who would have thought?”