There are the usual reactions, the availability of guns and all the rest, but I don't think anyone deep down thinks those are the fundamental problems. Problems yes, but something else is going on and the question is what is driving it and where it might go.

I'm old enough to remember the first really "publicized" series of killings in this country, the killing spree by Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriend in the 1950's. A novelty, a one off, everyone thought. They ran pictures in Life magazine, the full treatment, a shriveled little James Dean look alike gnome who at least looked like some genetic experiment gone bad and not the boy next door.

They say one difference between boys and girls is the way they handle stress. Kids who are unusually sensitive or who experience unusual pressure tend to strike out at the world, if they are boys, and strike inward at themselves if they are girls. The "rebel" in the family is usually the more sensitive to the stresses around them, bending under pressures to which others seem oblivious.

So two kids, two young men, decide their solution to their teenage depression is suicide, a suicide where they take as many of their "tormenting" fellow students with them as they can manage. Except they don't look like Charlie Starkweather now, they look like the kid next door.

The thing that is really worrying is that these events may be like the canaries used in coal mines to warn of danger, that these are just the tip of something much larger that's hulking itself up on the horizon. There are lots of things that cause stress in this world. I think in terms of the incredible hours spent in commuting, in working, in waiting in lines, in rudeness and indifference; the loss of family and community, the fear of the different. Thomas upstairs sees the widening split between the rich and the poor. Some see guns, some see drugs, some don't see anything at all.