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                                                                                NATION, Page 22

CRIME

Childhood's End


Tutored in casual violence, teens now settle grudges with guns.
A double murder in a Brooklyn school is the latest lesson in
mortality.

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Sophfronia Scott Gregory and
Priscilla Painton/New York


    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harmless and all the death would be repealed.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.