It isn't really about race. It hardly suffices for the "multiculturalists" that the children of successful black judges and businessmen now go peacefully to school with wealthy white kids.

Nor did they ever much care that the main victims of their racial quotas (at least here in the West) turned out to be not white Americans, but rather deserving Asians, whose forebears were an oppressed minority.

No, the goal of the "multiculturalist" movement Å a goal so dominant that even basic literacy is happily sacrificed Å is to infiltrate the American middle class with the offspring of the liberals' "new plantation," the fatherless welfare homes of our crime-infested inner cities.

The result? A 6-year-old boy Å passed from hand to hand since his father was jailed for a home invasion and finally living in a fatherless crack house full of drugs, stolen guns, and other loot Å shot a first-grade classmate to death in Michigan recently.

This tiny killer is not some innocent who picked up an unfamiliar object and brought it to "show-and-tell." While on parole in December, his father, Dedric Owens, asked the child why he had committed violent offenses that led to his earlier suspensions from school.

According to Genessee County Sheriff Robert Picknell, "He said that the kid told him he did it because `I hate them'."

Gee, where could the kid have copped that attitude, in a society where whites who victimize blacks because of their skin color receive "hate crime sentence enhancements," while racism is hardly ever mentioned in the prosecution of black murderers who declare, "You're all white trash, racist pigs." (Guest quote courtesy of one Ronald Taylor, charged in Wilkinsburg, Pa., in the shooting deaths of three white males Å two others critically wounded Å after he apparently grew upset that white workmen worked too slowly repairing his broken door.)

In the real world, tens of thousands more parents of children now interned in these squalid government camps Å operated more and more on the model of penal institutions, complete with body searches and metal detectors Å will now quietly move their kids into private schools, or finally resolve to home-school their children, regardless of the financial sacrifice required.

But since it's politically incorrect, don't expect to hear about this swelling tide on TV.

Instead, the national whining will be the usual, "Whatever can we do to rid ourselves of these dreaded guns?"

The standard lie is that guns are more readily available and accepted these days. In fact, child gunshot deaths have been dropping for decades, and our nation is currently seized in a paroxysm of paranoia about these tools of freedom.

Guns make a hand voodoo doll in which our statist media can stick their pins, in preference to focusing on the real problem: the fact that fruitcake bureaucrats now control our children's lives from ages 6 to 18.

There, our children are rounded up, bored to tears, and increasingly treated like dangerous inmates until they end up acting like dangerous inmates.

Take, for example, the reason I found myself talking to Robert Deiro this week. He called to explain how his son, Guy Robert Deiro, who now runs the family auction business (and who just finished a two-year stint as president of the Boys and Girls Club of Henderson) decided to do a good deed recently, hiring a 17-year-old kid from a fatherless Las Vegas home to work as a runner Å driving contracts around town Å in his after-school hours, at $9 per hour.

Because he hired the lad 28 days prior to his 17th birthday, the younger Mr. Deiro relates, the state Labor Department fined him $2,800 and threatened to add penalties of 6 percent per day for any additional days he employed the young man, unless the lad took a mandated $3,000 commercial driving course.

"I had to let him go," Guy Robert Deiro explains. "He can't afford $3,000 to go to some dumb driving school. In addition to the $9 an hour, I was paying his car insurance, plus 21 cents a mile. I thought I was doing the kid a favor Å frying hamburgers and french fries is more dangerous than this job, and it was a way for him to learn the business, work his way up. It's absolutely absurd. It's big government getting in the way of people trying to hire kids and show 'em a work ethic."

Yet let some such lad eventually turn to a life of crime as the only option left him by our meddlesome government masters, and what will we hear?

"How could this have happened? It must be the guns."

Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is the author of "Send In The Waco Killers." His column appears every Sunday.