I understand what you are saying about the fact that teenagers tend to be aggressive, X and that in previous times and in other places there were other ways they could be violent, sometimes in a socially acceptable way like going to war. From all the men I have talked to in my father's generation who went to war, though, they were terrified and sickened by the violence. Most gunslingers in the Old West were in their teens and early twenties, but their percentage of the entire population was very small, and I would agree that they represented the most violent faction of society.
I also realize there is lots of violence in Somalia, too. Somalia, however, represents a place where lives have been brutalized through starvation and the destruction of any civilized government at all, where children are recruited or forced into armies and go often simply because they get fed there. There is definitely crime in Ireland, but only certain SWAT-teams of the police carry guns. Policeman (garda) on the beat only have billy clubs. The citizens do not possess handguns, and the criminals among them seem to make do with knives and such for the most part, except for the kingpins of the international drug trade who live mostly in Dublin.
Even though I would agree that a certain segment of youth will always be drawn to danger, even death and destruction, as you said, I would argue that it is the sheer proliferation of weapons of mass destruction which are available to American children that causes them to kill, and be killed, in numbers vastly disproportional to children in the rest of the world. For purposes of comparison I do think it is reasonable to compare our children to children in other "civilized" countries, although at this point it might be reasonable to argue that we are headed toward levels of violence that are more like Somalia than Ireland.
I also would agree that the carefully controlled suburban life is probably a large part of the problem of American children being in despair. Increasingly, though, children in other industrialized nations face some of the same environmental factors American children do--parents working long hours and not making childrearing a priority, the pressure to succeed in school, drugs, violence in the media (especially in Japan), and the difficulties of rejection in school.
That is my whole point, in fact. The children in other countries which are most similar to the United States are not killing others and themselves in the same percentages, because they simply do not have access to guns. Homicidal and suicidal thoughts wax amd wane, and when there is not access to guns, are much more frequently not carried out. We cannot change overnight the social pathologies in America (I don't think we ever really will). What we could (but will almost certainly not) change is the accessibility of firearms.
Here are some statistics I found interesting:
In February 1997, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an "international scorecard" of youth
violence.
The study found:
The U.S. has the highest rates of childhood homicide, suicide, and firearm-related death among industrialized countries.
Since 1950 childhood homicide rates tripled and suicide rates quadrupled in the U.S., although childhood death rates
from other diseases fell.
The homicide rate for children in the U.S. was five time higher than for children in the other 25 countries combined (2.57
per 100,000 compared with 0.51)
Of the total homicides among children in the world, 73 percent, (1,464) occurred among U.S. children.
American children accounted for fifty-four percent of the nearly 600 young children who committed suicide in 1994.
Non-gun suicides were committed at about the same rate in the U.S. as in the other 25 countries.
The suicide rate for American children 14 and younger (0.55 out of every 100,000 children) is double that of the rest of
the industrialized world ((0.27).
THE OVERALL FIREARM-RELATED DEATH RATE AMONG U.S. CHILDREN AGED 15 YEARS OR LESS WAS NEARLY 12 TIMES HIGHER THAN AMONG CHILDREN IN THE OTHER 25 COUNTRIES COMBINED (emphasis mine)
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