Culture Watch: Adult Supervision.

We live in an age of doublespeak. "Outcome-based education" refers to educational programs that avoid, precisely, testing outcomes. So perhaps it should not be surprising that under the guise of talking about responsibility, what many are actually doing is avoiding it.

A jury in Pontiac, Michigan, recently ordered The Jenny Jones Show to pay $25 million to the family of Scott Amedure, a man murdered by Jonathan Schmitz after revealing on the show a sexual attraction for him. But Schmitz pulled the trigger on his own, and he alone should be punished for it. The appropriate punishment for the vulgarity of talk shows is declining ratings-one that viewers have inflicted on these shows since the Amedure killing.

But the promiscuous assignment of blame is not confined to that jury. In the wake of the Columbine massacre, Bill Clinton proposed to hold parents responsible for crimes committed by their children with their guns. This is fatuous: Does anyone really think that parents will become more diligent in overseeing their children because of this law? Clinton also met with entertainment-industry executives, gun makers, and many others at the White House to probe the "causes" of violence.

But of course our culture's failure to hold individuals fully responsible for their own acts is one such cause, albeit one of which this president is understandably fond. Instead of raising the age of legal gun ownership, then, lawmakers should lower the age at which juvenile criminals can be tried as adults-or at least begin treating adults as adults again.