Crime Childhood's End

By LANCE MORROW

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut had a fantasy that time and gravity could be reversed, and that the bombs rained down upon Europe in World War II could reassemble themselves. The billions of blasted fragments would magically recombine, rescinding the destruction they had done. The bombs, made whole again, would float up into the bomb bays of the planes that had dropped them, and the planes would fly backward, back home, where the bombs would be disassembled and all their metals and explosive powders redeposited in the earth so they would be harmless and all the death would be repealed.

If reality went in for such special effects, some grace might try to freeze in midair the bullets blazing around America -- might slide them back up the gun barrels they came from, and then might drop the guns, especially the guns American youths are using to kill each other, into someplace like the Mindanao Deep.

But that is metaphysics of a sentimental kind. The bullets remain in the bodies, and the dead stay dead. James Sinkler was trying to impress that raw fact upon his younger brother Tyrone, who was 16 years old. "I told him last week. I told him the week before," James Sinkler says. "Life is not like the movies. When you die, you don't come back. Life is so precious."

On the day last week that Tyrone Sinkler and his friend Ian Moore, 17, were shot to death in a corridor of their Brooklyn high school, New York City Mayor David Dinkins was on his way to lecture the students about self-esteem. The mayor would speak under a banner bearing some words of Martin Luther King Jr.: "The choice today is not between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence." It was a gun, of course, that dispatched Martin Luther King to nonexistence nearly 24 years ago.

Tyrone Sinkler and Ian Moore were standing in a hall of Thomas Jefferson High School, not far from the mayor's security detail. Another student, named Khalil Sumpter, who is 15, allegedly pulled out a .38-cal. revolver and shot Tyrone and Ian at point-blank range. Sumpter had apparently had fistfights with the other boys for weeks. All three had arrest records for robbery and mugging.

Thomas Jefferson High is a stolid red-orange-brick block of building set down in an East New York neighborhood of boarded-up row houses. In the past four years, 70 students have been killed, shot, stabbed or permanently injured on the school grounds. According to a report prepared for the New York state assembly and quoted by the New York Daily News, 50% of the 1,900 students have some kind of puncture wound on their body at any given time. "T.J." has a "grieving room," where the students can seek peace and quiet and counseling when these things happen. The school maintains a burial fund to help families with the expenses.

America has always had a gun culture. Now gun violence has metastasized in a new way among the young. The gun becomes neighborhood logic, rite of passage, administrator, avenger, instrument of impulse and rough justice. When guns reach critical mass, they take on a malignant life of their own.

Gun violence is spreading like AIDS, not just in New York City but in Los Angeles and Houston and Boston and other cities as well. In the past four years, arrests for homicides among juveniles have gone up 93%, compared with a 16% increase among adults. The children of the baby boomers are arriving at the crime-prone teen years, and too many of them are packing firearms. Criminologists predict more increases in homicides in the next few years.

Why? Guns, above all -- their availability, their seductiveness. They become a fetish of manhood and power in a world that has given the young neither self-discipline nor much to hope for. Children have trouble expressing themselves. Guns are definitively articulate.

Absurdly easy to buy, guns become a teenage consumer's accessory -- a Raven P-25 pistol or a Smith & Wesson .38, like the one Sumpter allegedly used. That gun was stolen from the car of a campus police officer in New Jersey, police said. "Around here," James Sinkler says, "kids carry guns like other people carry cigarettes." Taking a life in medieval England was the King's prerogative. Now every kid a king.

A drug dealer needs a beeper and a gun. Kids who are not actually dealers pack a gun to pretend that they are. A gun makes a man-child dangerous and commands respect. As the cartoon figure He-Man says, "I have the power!" A firefight may be set off by a drug turf war or, as with Tyrone and Ian, some lesser thing. Children kill children over earrings and jackets and tennis shoes.

Guns have a sort of irresistible black magic about them. A good gun has such lovely heft, a densely sinister weight in the hand. The brain is wired to the trigger finger and fires on impulse. The finger twitches, and -- blam! -- the life across a distance -- poof! -- disintegrates: an existence powdered. The finger did it on a whim. The desacralization of life, a society of emotional disconnection: killing is a kind of dream-sequence video. Conscience is disconnected from trigger finger. Child is disconnected from future. Bullet is ; disconnected from gun muzzle and, once fired, can never be recalled.

With reporting by Sophfronia Scott Gregory and Priscilla Painton/New York