At what age do young criminals deserve adult consequences?

Last week's fatal shooting in a first-grade classroom in Mount Morris, Mich., should be a wakeup call for law enforcers and lawmakers alike. The killer's youth is shocking, of course; at six, he is the youngest student yet to be implicated in a school shooting. But it is not that fact alone that makes the Michigan case significant. It is the unique reaction of Michigan authorities to this unprecedented situation that should be examined for real clues to solving America's persistent problem with school violence.

Michigan prosecutors decided not to file charges against the shooter. By convention, a six-year-old child is not criminally responsible for his actions because he allegedly cannot form the intent to kill that is necessary for a criminal prosecution. After being interrogated by the police, the young killer calmly began to draw pictures. "I think I did something naughty" was the best moral evaluation of his actions he could produce.

Moreover, this particular child had been neglected in ways that made his crime, if not excusable, at least comprehensible. Abandoned by his drug-addicted mother, he was living with an uncle in what investigators have dubbed a crack house. Without even a bed to sleep on, the boy was living in an environment of drug abuse, violence and emotional neglect.

The facts of the Michigan case leave little room for debate over what should have been done with the young killer. Most of us readily accept the authorities' decision not to prosecute the boy. Many of us may even feel sympathy toward a child who has suffered so much. But what would we think of, say, a 19-year-old in similar circumstances?

A six-year-old who seems unfazed after his interrogation "doesn't really understand what he's done." A 19-year-old who reacts the same way is "remorseless." We tend to forgive the Michigan shooter because of his deplorable situation at home, implying that we believe Locke's assertion that a child is a "blank slate" at birth, to be morally shaped by his environment. At six, the blank-slate excuse seems to work. At 19, it intuitively doesn't. Why? There is an assumption that something happens in the intervening 13 years between six and 19 that somehow socializes a child, gifting him with a moral consciousness and therefore full criminal responsibility for his actions.

That is the assumption that we need to question if we seriously want to address school violence. It is only because of his tragic outburst that the Michigan killer gained attention from authorities when he did. Neighbors and school officials acknowledge that the boy had exhibited violent behavior before the shooting. Others knew about the unsavory situation in which he lived.

Suppose that this child had continued to live his underprivileged life for 13 more years without incident. Suppose he did not have access to a gun at six, but did at 19. Eventually, it's likely he would have committed the same crime, for the same reasons — but in that case, he would not have been treated with sympathy. He would have been indicted for murder.

The idea to take away from this imaginative exercise is that law enforcement should not simply be a matter of crime and punishment, especially when young people are the criminals. Prevention should be the goal of any policy toward school violence. And we cannot prevent school shootings perpetrated by children of whatever age without a full understanding of the factors that make a child a killer.

To curb America's rash of school shootings before it gets any worse, we need to do more than investigate high school "trenchcoat mafias" or kids who search the Internet for instructions on how to make a pipe bomb. We need to do more than drill students and teachers in what to do in the event of a school shooting, or put child safety locks on every gun sold in America. After all, if a child is emotionally desperate enough to kill another child, he will burst out in violence sooner or later, no matter what stops we place on his access to guns or bombs. The trick is to reach him before he gets that desperate. That means observing children as young as six, or younger, for the factors we know can create a killer.

If a troubled child makes it to age 19 before he murders a classmate, we all share some responsibility for his action. Naturally, there are many good, practical reasons not to absolve a legal adult of criminal responsibility for murder. But there are also many good, practical reasons not to throw up our hands and wait for the crime to happen before we take action against — or for — the criminal. Melissa Waage is a politics major from Johnson City, Tenn. She can be reached at mrwaage@princeton.edu.