After the latest school shooting left four dead, the Hartford Courant ran this call to drop arms.

Once upon a time, parents had little to fear when they sent their children to school, beyond occasional BB guns and bullies. A shooting spree by a rampaging student would have been unthinkable. So much for fairy tales and happy endings. In just 15 months, there have been eight unrelated school shootings in which people have died or been injured. What's doubly horrific about the Wild West scene acted out in an Oregon high school cafeteria Thursday is that violence of unspeakable magnitude has become less and less shocking. Though still highly unusual, savagery by children - in this case, 15-year-old Kipland P. Kinkel - has become a fact of life. After allegedly killing his parents, the gun-toting boy sprayed bullets randomly among his classmates, apparently in retaliation for having been suspended the day before. Two died and 18 others were wounded, some critically, before his classmates courageously tackled him. How did we get to this frightening state where guns are as easy to obtain as candy bars? Are violence and death so embedded in the culture that our children think of them as an acceptable way to solve even trivial problems? There is no simple explanation for the youth-violence crisis. It's Hydra-headed. Guns, certainly, are at its center. Without them, anger and bad judgment could not combine in an instantly deadly cocktail. Take guns out of the picture and the consequences wouldn't be as dire and irreversible. There would be time for rashness to cool, for second thoughts, and for bystanders to intervene. Also complicit in this schoolyard scourge is the routine infusion of mayhem via television, popular music, video games and on the news. Children throughout the ages have played war games and doted on toy guns. Make-believe cowboy and Indian shoot'em-ups were even considered healthy outlets for aggression. But today's technology has blurred the lines between fantasy and reality in an unprecedented way. You can't turn on television for five minutes without seeing a gun or some other weapon. And in the average American home, the box is on for at least five hours a day. Cruelty perpetrated by adults on adults is a major entertainment theme that's hard for children to avoid. Many get a perpetual infusion of violence without real blood or consequences. How many more massacres will it take before it becomes clear that the nation faces a crisis? This multifaceted crisis should be treated as seriously as the threat of war. The commander in chief should move it to the forefront of national domestic policy discussions.