Kids who 'drift off' concern president

News Staff

President Clinton, in one of three wide-ranging interviews conducted over the past eight years by Rolling Stone, talked extensively this fall about the tragedy at Columbine High School.

Here are excerpts from the Dec. 28 issue of Rolling Stone:

Rolling Stone: What did you do when you heard the news about Columbine?

Bill Clinton: I called the local officials and the school officials from the Oval Office. You know, that was only the most recent and the most grotesque of a whole series of highly visible school shootings that we had — and a number of them in the South. One of them, in Jonesboro, Ark., that was in my home state — where I knew some of the people who were involved, who run the school, and in the country and city. There was one in Pearl, Miss., and there was one in Oregon.

I thought a lot of things. No. 1: How'd those kids get all those guns? And how could they have had that kind of arsenal without their parents knowing? And I thought, after I read a little bit about it: How did they get so lost, without anybody finding them before they went over the edge?

We had a spate of killings associated with a kind of darkness on the Net.

RS: What do you mean, ''darkness on the Net''?

BC: Well, I mean, those kids were apparently into some sort of a satanic thing. There were, earlier, a number of kids who killed themselves who were into talking to each other about some kind of destruction. I worried then — I'm worried now — about the people in our society, particularly children, that just drift off. Maybe one of those kids could have been saved if somebody had been there to help, and then all those other children would still be alive.