We'll be sorting out the details of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado for days and weeks to come. Much of the reactionary spin will be familiar. We've got to get rid of guns, they'll say. As if the dead-eyed, cold-blooded teen killers in this case had somehow legally obtained and carried their weapons to school.

Then there will be those who blame society -- the culture. Certainly there's something here. America has become desensitized to violence. Certainly the entertainment media bear some responsibility. Certainly the video games, the hideous rap music, the TV and the movies have some effect.Those who contribute to the pop culture need to reflect on what they produce. Garbage in, garbage out, goes the old saying.

But this is still America. There is no place in America for confiscating guns from law-abiding people, and there is no place for government-imposed censorship. It doesn't work. It's un-American. And it doesn't address the real root problems -- the kind that trigger Columbine High massacres.

The real problem is that in America we have forgotten the concepts of personal responsibility, individual rights and the sanctity of life. In fact, it's not a matter of forgetting. There has been a wholesale effort to obliterate these values from the soul of our nation.

We forbid kids from praying at school. We teach them that they evolved spontaneously from single-cell organisms in the swamp. We immerse them in a grossly polluted moral ecosystem. We break up their families. We tell them there are no absolutes, no right and wrong, ultimate truth.

It's just amazing with that recipe that there aren't more Columbine Highs. And, tragically, I think there will be, unless America wakes up and recognizes how we have betrayed our children -- cheated them, deceived them, broken their hearts. We'll find out in the days ahead, I predict, that the perpetrators of this ghastly slaughter had an "us-against-them" mentality. They were part of a gang -- a misunderstood, oppressed minority of cast-outs.

One of America's strengths has been its ability to bring diverse groups and individuals together around a creed. We were a melting pot where people of different faiths, colors and ethnic backgrounds could come together and share a common dream.

In recent years, our political and cultural establishments have attacked that concept. They have shattered the idea that this is even a worthy goal. Today, our rights don't descend to us as individuals created in God's image, but rather are earned by the amount of social pressure various groups can exert on the power structure.

This is wrong. This is not what America is about.

I wonder if anyone ever told those tortured minds that carried out this crime that God loved them. I can't believe they ever heard that message. I'll be surprised if we find out they were first in their Sunday school classes.

The tragedy at Columbine is evidence that we're in a war. I'm not talking about what's going on in Serbia. I'm talking about what's going on all around us -- an invisible war raging in the heavens and on earth. It's a titanic battle of good vs. evil.

"Oh, don't start on that religious stuff, Farah," some will respond.

But how can anyone deny it when we are faced with this kind of stark and chilling evidence? How else can we explain Columbine?

This is a spiritual war fought by powerful forces. That doesn't diminish the role of personal responsibility. Far from it. Each and every one of us -- including our children -- have to decide which side we're on in this epic struggle. There is no middle ground. There are no neutrals. There is no safe haven or sanctuary -- it's a war that will affect and consume us all. You can pretend it's not happening, but that won't make it go away.

In a great new movie out there now called "The Matrix," the central character is asked if he really wants to discover the truth about his world. That movie is a metaphor for the raging battle I am discussing here -- the war inside our souls and the war of powers and principalities in this world.

That's the question each of us must ask ourselves in reflecting on Columbine High -- and a thousand other tragedies occurring in this world every day.

It was enough to bring tears to any 12-year-old's eyes. His pride and joy, a new £200 mountain bike, the Christmas present his parents had saved hard for, was gone: stolen from his own back garden by a gang of jealous youths. But Dean Pope had another reaction: if you can't beat ’em, join ’em. He turned to his mother Val and said words that broke her heart: "I might as well turn to [stealing], too."

A few months later Val Pope got a call from the local police to say her son had been arrested with a gang of other youngsters caught on a shopping spree with stolen credit cards. It was the start of a teenage life of crime that led to arson charges, jail and only ended in remorse last March when his younger brother Daniel, 14, died in a car crash, joyriding, following his big brother's example.

The Pope family's case is tragic, but hardly unique. Statistics for England and Wales reveal a staggering increase in crimes committed by young people including, more than ever, girls as well as boys, many of them under 14.

The figures make harrowing reading. One in five young men has committed a violent offence by the time they reach the age of 25. The figure for women is one in 20, but that is little cause for comfort. The number of violent offences committed by girls aged 10 to 17 has doubled since 1981, while the perpetrators of nearly 8% of all violent crimes committed by women are aged between 10 and 13. Among under-25s, 17% said they had at one stage carried a weapon, either in self-defense, or with intent to cause harm. Criminals under 18 are now responsible for 28% of all violent crimes, 40% of burglaries, 11% of drug offences and 33% of criminal damage offences.

But it is not just a native disease. Across Europe there is a spreading epidemic of juvenile crime, evidence of a continent-wide youth underclass growing up outside the law.

Last week the Parisian transport system was brought to a standstill by a strike, sparked not by pay disputes but by the soaring number of attacks on staff, most of them from teenagers. Violence against staff on the Metro and buses rose by a third last year. One bus driver was badly beaten, then stabbed in the leg and stomach after refusing to drop a teenage passenger off between stops.

The Parisian public has been horrified by a spate of gruesome murders carried out by teenage girls. At 19, Florence Rey killed four people in a bungled robbery and car chase. Veronique Herbert, 18, seduced a 16-year-old Tunisian immigrant, then she and her 17-year-old boyfriend stabbed him 39 times--just for fun.

In Germany juvenile crime rose 10% over the past year.

In Russia the crime situation has reached pandemic proportions. The collapse of communism taught a new generation that everything their parents believed in was wrong. Now the crisis in the country's fledgling capitalist economy has further inculcated an attitude of "every man for himself," except that it starts a lot younger.

Interior ministry figures show that crimes committed by minors rose 10 times over the past seven years. In 1996 there were 70,000 crimes committed by 14- and 15-year-olds. By last year, that figure had risen to 87,000.

Even in stereotypically staid Sweden the average age of male criminals has dropped over the past decade from 20 to 15.

A lack of parental control is an intrinsic part of the problem. On a Thursday night 10 days ago, on the streets of Speke, outside Liverpool, a gangly, 5ft 3in 12-year-old was the ringleader of a gang of 10 youths in tracksuits and Reebok trainers, roaming the streets in search of trouble. He stole a car, and with a few hooting pals drove at a speed he later boasted was 140mph, shaking off a police chase before setting light to the vehicle on wasteland.

In the past year he has cost his mother £500 in fines and is not just unrepentant, but arrogant: "She tries to keep me in, but she can't. What can she do? I started getting into trouble when I was about 11, robbing cars. Me mates were all doing it."

The media bears part of the blame too. Rami, a young Tunisian robber, is open about his inspiration: "We have seen films showing how easy it is. You just have to go in and pick up the money. It was easy, too." Before a recent robbery he had watched Menace II Society, a brutal, bloody tale of black teenage gangsters in America, glorifying fast cars, easy money and the psychology of violence. Florence Rey, the young Parisian convicted of murder, admitted to being fascinated by the controversial Hollywood blockbuster Natural Born Killers.

Consumerism is part of the cancer; the wages of sin are sneakers and CDs. Technological advance and Europe's relative affluence have spawned only more toys to inspire envy. The media and marketing cult of youth has focused on one narrow age band--between 15 and 25--squeezing all human aspirations into it, with the old deemed irrelevant and children seen only as consumers.

The 1950s are now seen as the decade that invented the teenager. The 1990s may be judged as the decade that witnessed another, more sinister phenomenon: childhood's end.

Just as the U.S. State Department warns travelers about foreign lands, the U.S. is also the subject of warnings.

Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office tells its citizens that "crimes of violence are common" in the U.S., while Canadians are cautioned by their Department of Foreign Affairs that criminals in Florida attack "with little or no provocation."

More than 20 percent of Mexico City residents have been victims of crime this year, according to a university study. The Autonomous Metropolitan University said its survey of 1,660 Mexico City residents showed that 22 percent of the estimated 9 million residents of the Mexican capital were victims of theft or another crime from January to July. Crime has soared since a peso devaluation in December 1994 and a subsequent economic crisis forced thousands out of work. The university survey said the most frequent crimes were street robberies at 22 percent; theft in public transport, 20 percent; and auto theft, theft while in cars and armed attack, each at 8 percent.

Madaline Fennell has been hit, kicked and spit at as a teacher in a public school in Omaha, Nebraska. Her assailants: first-graders. "I have had students who would fly off the handle at the drop of the hat, throw chairs and throw tables—these are 5-year-olds—because they didn't get their way," said Mary E. Pier, a teacher in Aberdeen, Washington. Like other teachers, she's having to spend progressively more time helping children learn social skills that used to be taught at home, church or in the neighborhood.

A message of violent solutions is creeping in more often and earlier. Speech and hearing specialist Lou Ann Smith said "just shoot him" was the advice one second-grader immediately gave to another when he told of a mild insult. She asked why. "Well, they wouldn't do it again," was the response. "I'm noticing it more and younger, and that's scary," the veteran of 33 years of teaching said.

One in 10 American public schools experienced serious violence such as rape or robbery last year, said a first-of-its-kind survey released by the White House. For all public schools nationwide that translates to an estimated total of 11,000 physical attacks or fights in which a weapon was used; 7,000 robberies; and 4,000 rapes or other kinds of sexual assault.