Of Arms and The Boy

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We're not much for Satan these days. He's too black and white for a world of grays. But there were moments in the past school year when it became difficult not to imagine a Supreme Evil One dancing behind the eyes of the kids who decided to solve their problems with guns.

Imagine 15-year-old Kipland Kinkel in rustic Springfield, Ore., chatting with two buddies on a three-way phone call May 20--probably while his father's corpse lay on the floor, a bullet drilled through his skull. Kip said he couldn't wait to see the new South Park that night, according to Tony McCown, 15, who phoned him. "I wonder when Mom's gonna get home," he fretted. When she finally arrived, he allegedly said, "I love you, Mom," and then unloaded his weapon into her. It was around 6 p.m., and Kip presumably stayed with the bodies the rest of the night (and took in South Park, the episode in which Kenny falls into a grave and gets squashed by a tombstone). At some point, Kip apparently decided to shoot up his high school in the morning. What exactly did he think about in the darkness, as his parents' remains grew cold? To know is surely to see the face of Satan.

Religion professor Elaine Pagels' 1995 book The Origin of Satan has been floating around a nearby library in recent days, as though the people of Lane County were searching its pages for answers. "What fascinates us about Satan is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human," Pagels writes. "...In his frustrated rage he mirrors aspects of our own confrontations..."

But what calls Satan forth? Was it something about the four communities where the kid killers lived--in Springfield as in Pearl, Miss., West Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark.? If police are right, together these five boys--Kinkel, Luke Woodham of Pearl, Michael Carneal of West Paducah, and Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro--murdered 15 people and wounded 44 others. Were they simply bad seeds, genetic and spiritual misfits born without the brain chemistry that produces compassion--and, indeed, without souls?

Or was nurture to blame? Is America's gun culture at fault? Or did the kids kill because they were molested by perverts, beaten by parents, rejected by girlfriends, despised by classmates or revved up by "role-playing games, heavy-metal music, violent cartoons/TV [and] sugared cereal," as Kip himself suggested on the Internet profile he wrote well before the shooting, foreshadowing with eerie prescience the debate to follow?