Two kids use illegally purchased guns to massacre their classmates and NRA President Charlton Heston calls for a ban on trenchcoats. Somehow clothing preference, not easy access to deadly weapons, caused these kids to kill, and the only way we can prevent future atrocities is to draw up a long list and start banning.

Heston and a chorus of others would have you believe that children carry out these crimes because society allows them the freedom to be different. If we could only regulate our kids and push them all into the same box, than we'd have a world without violence, full of shiny, happy people holding hands.

To have a perfect kid, you need to merely restrict all access to any potential negative interests. This includes the Internet, music, books, television and any other human being that has a bad idea which your child might latch onto. It also means taking whatever steps necessary to ensure that your kid becomes popular, which as we all know guarantees a joyous, violence-free life.

Based on the reaction to the tragedy in Littleton, Co., you would think that any high school student unfortunate enough to be unpopular represents a similar danger to his classmates. Apparently, at any minute, these less-than-cool teens might get hopped up on Web sites, don untrendy clothes, and go on a murderous rampage because Marilyn Manson told them to. It seems, at least based on what I read in various newspapers and saw on TV, that music not sanctioned by Casey Kasem, outfits purchased from stores outside the mall and a computer with a modem lead teenagers to disaster. One of the papers here in New York even printed a list of danger signs that might indicate your child is a potential homicidal maniac.

This check-off sheet included admonitions about kids "wearing mostly black," "bringing home weird friends" and, of course, "playing violent video games." Using these standards, I'm a little nervous about just about every computer technician I've ever worked with, but I'm not overly concerned about disaffected high school kids.

Wearing a trenchcoat and not attending pep rallies does not automatically mark kids as potential killers. Every school has its outsider groups, and most of these teenagers do nothing more criminal than listening to The Cure, which although odious, remains legal.

These kids who sometimes wear black might have piercings in non-traditional places, and may also engage in other terrible activities like reading, seeing pretentious art films and finding Monty Python a little too funny. Many of them get good grades, and very few of them ever try to murder their fellow classmates.

The killers who committed these unspeakable crimes in Colorado weren't your typical high school fringe group. These kids, who hoarded weapons and talked of Hitler, were more than just alienated. They clearly had serious problems that the people around them couldn't, or didn't, want to see. We should be vigilant about identifying future problems. That does not mean sticking labels on large groupings of kids based on hysteria and ignorance.