Pete Sessions: “I know you, the Senator from Arkansas, are familiar with tragedies in high schools involving our young people who create…”

“I know you, the Senator from Arkansas, are familiar with tragedies in high schools involving our young people who create havoc and take the lives of fellow students and others. The event in Colorado is the most glaring and stunning example of the kind of violence that we are apparently capable of as a nation today. As chairman the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Youth Violence, I have given an awful lot of thought to it. But I am perplexed. A few things occur to me. There is what appears to me a pattern here that would suggest how we have gotten to this point. It strikes me that an extremely small number of young people today have gotten on a very destructive path. They have headed down the road of anger and violence. They have not been acculturated with the kind of gentlemanliness and gentlewomanliness, not inculcated with religious faith and discipline, maybe a lack of values or whatever--somehow it did not take. Maybe their parents tried. Maybe they did not. But, in addition to that, they are alienated and angry.”