Kids Who Kill: by Mike Huckabee

I didn't know he wrote this book.

Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence

We believe that healthcare-related issues will be a -- if not the--central focus of the 2008 presidential election. For that reason, this blog is primarily devoted to collecting, organizing and analyzing Gov. Mike Huckabee's ideas and qualifications for dealing with these issues at a national level. We do, however, allow current events to drive some of the content you find here.

Today is such a day. The recent shootings by 16-year-old student Jeff Weise at Red Lake High School in Bemidji, Minnesota reminded us that Gov. Mike Huckabee has thought a lot about youth violence.

It was just 7 years ago (March 24, 1998) in Jonesboro, Arkansas that two boys, Andrew Golden, 13, and his 11-year-old cousin, Mitchell Johnson, shot 15 other students and a teacher at Westside Middle School, killing four.

The Jonesboro incident followed another horrifying incident that occurred just 4 years earlier. Three second-graders were found beaten to death in a water-filled ditch, at least one of them sexually mutilated, in the tiny town of West Memphis, Arkansas. Three teenagers, Damien Echols, Jessie Miskelley and Jason Baldwin were tried and convicted in the murders.

The 1993 West Memphis incident, combined with school shootings in Pearl, MS and Norwalk, CA got the Governor thinking about youth violence. He began working on a book, eventually titled Kids Who Kill:Confronting Our Culture of Violence (Broadman & Holman, 1998) even before the Jonesboro shootings.

In the wake of such high profile crimes, gun control advocates always come out of the woodwork and criminal law changes are always debated. In his book, however, Gov. Huckabee argues that legislation is not the answer. He believes that such crimes by children are the result of a "demoralization of America" and asks that we all take a look at ourselves and our families for the answer.

"Violence, infidelity, mayhem, perversity, gore, betrayal, lust and disrespect have all been sanctified in music, television, movies and video games as necessary complements of a culture of self-fulfillment, self-absorption and self-realization," he says. "As we refuse to stand for morality, we easily fall into serving immorality."

To support this belief, Gov. Huckabee cites a number of disturbing statistics. Pornography, a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. and Canada, enjoys higher sales than McDonald's. (Jerry Kirk, The Mind Polluters). Promiscuity continues to rise as only 31 percent of American women and 20 percent of American men wait until marriage to have sexual relations; 43 percent of teens under the age of 17 have initiated sexual activity; and more than half of American marriages end in divorce after seven years or less. (New York Newsday, Feb. 2, 1988).

Experts agree. Iris Shakleford, a former middle school teacher and student of youth violence, says school violence comes down to the family. "I associate most everything with the home. Everything begins at home," she says. "The break down of the family could mean there's no one there to give support for that child. If there's no one there to do that, they don't feel home is a safe haven. That's when they turn to other groups or other people." The eighth grade teacher also notes a "total lack of parenting" in many school violence cases.