RESIST URGE TO OVERREACT TO TRAGEDY.

Byline: ERIC MOSES 

IN reacting to tragedies like the Littleton, Colo., school massacre, we ought to restrain ourselves sometimes.

We don't have to jump all over the presumed causes: rock and techno music, Gothic clothing, video games, kids who tease other kids, parents, and the film industry.

For if we do, we assign blame in much the same way as the kids who shot up the school. And then we ridicule those who ridiculed. So who's better off?

What got me was the report last week that an El Camino Real High School student had his jacket confiscated by school officials because in some manner it resembled the trench coats worn by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the suicidal teens who killed 12 classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School.

``It was a long black coat,'' El Camino Real Principal Ronald Bauer said. ``It could have been a Navy pea coat.''

El Camino has a very ``lax'' dress code, said Bauer. As long as the students wear nothing that is too revealing and is in good taste, it's OK to wear to school.

``Typically we would not disallow a black coat,'' the principal said.

That is until the Colorado massacre. Bauer and other administrators hastily drafted an impromptu ban on such outerwear in the tragedy's wake.

So when the boy, whose age and grade Bauer did not know, wore the coat to school two days after the Columbine shootings, a dean pulled him into his office and telephoned the teen's mother.

``This was not a show of force,'' Bauer said. ``It was done humanistically. It was done (out of) concern of the student and sending an appropriate message that we had some feelings about the seriousness of the incident with the deaths of all the (Columbine) students.''

It's hard to argue with genuine intentions. But if there was no threat to other students, why didn't school officials simply tell the student the jacket was inappropriate and ask him to remove it?

To be sure, wearing the coat to the Woodland Hills campus was insensitive. But was it so grievous to strip the boy of his constitutionally protected right to wear the overcoat?

``We were not terribly concerned about First Amendment rights or freedom of speech,'' Bauer said. Bauer couldn't be more forthcoming.

So where, with this blatant affront to the Bill of Rights, was the American Civil Liberties Union?

Normally, the organization, whose motto is the ``preserve the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights,'' would be staging a news conference to attack the policy.

Not this time. The civil liberties group is not commenting on anything related to Littleton, said Michael Fleming, the spokesman for the ACLU of Southern California.

In similar cases, the ACLU's Southern California chapter has fought for students' rights to wear whatever they want as long as it falls within a school's properly approved and not overly exclusionary dress code.

In 1994, the ACLU defended a Simi Valley teen, who repeatedly was denied access to Valley View Junior High School when he showed up wearing a ``USA'' T-shirt with an American flag and a bald eagle. The school claimed he was violating a district policy barring shirts with any writing other than school emblems.

At the time, Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the ACLU of Southern California, said: ``Students do not give up their First Amendment rights when they enter the school house doors.''

In the post-Littleton atmosphere, it's a different story.

It's apparently acceptable for students to have their rights trampled upon when it's not politically correct to defend them.

Remember this is the same organization that threatened legal action when Los Angeles city park crews painted over a Venice Beach mural of a pig wearing a police uniform.

The lesson of the day for students at El Camino Real is that it's fine to call a cop a pig but it's not appropriate to wear a long, black coat to school.

I can comprehend the limit on potentially harmful speech, like yelling ``gunfire'' in a crowded school cafeteria. A school policy prohibiting black trench coats because they can conceal weapons may also be appropriate at many schools.

But I fail to see the good that will come out of banning long, black coats from high school campuses just because they resemble the trench coats worn by the Littleton killers.

Surely, the El Camino Real student acted stupidly and with a lack of understanding for the tragedy. But it's lamentable that his rights were abused and no one is sticking up for him.