862 Chapter 32 Shocks and Responses: 1992–Present
April, he won the Democratic nomination. He chose
Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a wealthy
trial lawyer, as his running mate.
In Iraq, the situation deteriorated further. In
April the 60 Minutesnews program revealed that
American captors had tortured Iraqi captives in the
Abu Ghraib prison. Photographs of American sol-
diers, including women, taunting naked Muslim
men fueled the insurgency. Casualties mounted. The
cost of the occupation spiraled upward. Worse,
American forces failed to find any Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction.
At the Democratic convention in July, Kerry
emphasized his military service in Vietnam. “As presi-
dent,” Kerry declared, “I will fight a smarter, more
effective war on terror.” He criticized Bush for attack-
ing Iraq before capturing Osama bin Laden, who
remained at large. He also chided the president for
initiating war with insufficient international support,
and not sending enough troops to preserve order and
rebuild Iraq.
Bush mobilized conservatives and religious fun-
damentalists by proposing a constitutional amend-
ment that would define marriage as the union
between a man and a woman. Kerry endorsed gay
rights but endlessly qualified earlier statements in sup-
port of same-sex marriage.
Bush also pounced on Kerry’s war record. Some
Vietnam veterans seized on the fact that in 1971
Kerry had told a congressional committee that the
Vietnam War was wrong and immoral. How, these
veterans asked, could an antiwar activist serve as
commander-in-chief?
Republicans also portrayed Kerry as oppor-
tunistic. If Kerry and Edwards thought the war was
a mistake, why did they vote for the original war
resolution in the Senate? Kerry became entangled
in long-winded explanations. “I actually voted for
the $87 billion before I voted against it,” he said.
Bush gleefully seized on this “flip-flop” and
dubbed Kerry “Flipper.” During a debate with
Bush, Kerry conceded that he had “made a mis-
take” in explaining his position on Iraq. “But
the president made a mistake in invading Iraq.
Which is worse?”
“You know where I stand,” Bush had declared at
nearly every campaign stop, and in the end a majority
of voters stood with him. The election, one of the
most divisive in recent decades, brought 12 million
more voters to the polls than in 2000. Kerry received
57 million votes, 3 million more than Ronald Reagan
in his 1984 landslide. But Bush got over 60 million, a
record. He also prevailed in the Electoral College,
286 to 252.
Crime: Good News and Bad
The crime wave, which had assumed tsunami dimen-
sions during the 1980s, subsided during the 1990s.
By 2009, the homicide rate nationwide was 40 per-
cent below 1991. In many big cities the decline was
astonishing. In 1990, for example, 5,641 felonies
were committed in New York City’s twenty-fourth
precinct, near Central Park; in 2009 the number of
felonies there had declined to 987. Television shows
such asHill Street Blues(1981–1987) and L.A. Law
(1986–1994), which had chronicled the gritty side of
urban life during the crack epidemic of the 1980s,
gave way to Seinfeld (1989–1998), Friends
(1994–2004), Sex and the City (1998–2004), and
other shows that emphasized the vitality and cultural
diversity of city life. No longer overwhelmed with
crime, cities especially attracted young adults—the
children of parents who had fled to the suburbs.
Various explanations were offered for the drop in
crime. Some insisted that the “law and order” cam-
paigns of the previous three decades had put the
worst criminals in prison, others cited the general
health of the economy, and still others credited Roe v.
Wade(1973) and the legalization of abortion with
reducing the number of unwanted children.
But if urban crime was down, violence repeatedly
jolted the nation. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers
wearing trench coats and armed with automatic
weapons went on a rampage at Columbine High School
in Littleton, Colorado. Before shooting themselves to
death, they killed twelve students and a teacher and
wounded more than thirty. On October 2, 2006, a
thirty-two-year-old truck driver took a dozen Amish
schoolgirls hostage and shot and killed six of them. A
week earlier, in two separate incidents, a gunman took
six girls hostage at Platte Canyon High School at Bailey,
Colorado, and shot and killed one; and a fifteen-year-
old student at Weston High School in Cazenovia,
Wisconsin, shot and killed his principal.
Perhaps inspired by these attacks, a deranged
student at Virginia Tech in February 2007 bought a
.22 caliber Walther P22 pistol on the Internet. The
next month he bought a Glock 19 rapid-fire semi-
automatic pistol and acquired ammunition from
online vendors and from Wal-Mart and Dick’s
Sporting Goods. On April 16 he went to another
dorm and shot and killed a female student and the
resident advisor. After reloading, he entered Norris
Hall, an engineering building, chained all three
entry doors closed, climbed the stairs to the second
floor, and walked up and down the hallway, taking
aim at students and teachers and shooting them.
Then he put a pistol to his head and committed