Last month a 9-year-old brought a .45-caliber handgun to his elementary school in Washington. It discharged by accident, critically wounding an 8-year-old girl.
Then on Monday morning, 17-year-old T.J. Lane opened fired with a .22-caliber handgun in his high school cafeteria — he also had a knife — firing 10 rounds at random victims. Three are dead.
What’s with all these school shootings? What ever happened to teachers worrying about Pokemon cards and cheating on trig exams? Even marijuana is a better problem to have. (Hide the Cheetos, though.)
I can’t imagine sending my kids to school and telling them to be careful, duck when you hear the click, don’t be afraid to run.
School has always been a safe haven, a place where people flock during natural disasters, a place of innocence and childish enthusiasm. It’s not a place of violence and fear and terror.
Believe it or not, school shootings are far more frequent in American than in other countries, though there have been awful massacres elsewhere. Why? And what can we blame? We like to blame the media, violent movies, Facebook. But really, is that where the system has failed? Shouldn’t we be talking about upbringing and values and compassion?
Or it is about access — to guns, to bullying, to drugs, to violence?
It’s scary to think how easy it is for kids to grab a handgun, post some vague threat on social media, and open fire in a classroom or cafeteria. Weren’t there signs? Didn’t someone suspect?
It’s such a tragedy for both the gunmen and the victims. No one wins. We have all lost.
14 Comments
Personally I think it’s the godless society that we have become. There is no accountability, no stability.
It’s scary! I can’t imagine being a parent and sending my kids to school. With all the bullying and violence — and shootings! — I would be worried ALL THE TIME!
Hey Cat … this is a tough subject … and my heart sinks everytime I hear breaking news about an incident like this …
… blame??? … there’s so many things that we could point to … and maybe it’s flawed to think that it’s just one aspect that leads to these tragic events … I can’t even begin to imagine what goes on in minds of those people who carry out such terrible acts …
… the world has changed so much in our lifetime … it seems that as we take leaps forward in technology, we also take steps backwards in humanity …
… and that’s not such a good tradeoff …
We should pay more attention to where these kids are getting the guns. Probably from home, right? This article sums it up pretty good – https://ideas.time.com/2012/02/28/ohio-school-shooting-why-parents-are-to-blame/?iid=op-main-lede
There is so much that makes being a parent difficult. The idea that school is no longer a safe haven is one of them. If anything like this ever happened at my son’s school and he emerged OK he’d never set foot in an institution of higher learning in this country again.
It all depends upon upbringing. It used to be an insult whenever someone said, “Didn’t you have any home training?” Parents have the sole responsibility for educating their children. If a kid goes bad, it is the parent’s fault.
One of my favorite artists, Cheryl, Wheeler, had this take on the problem.
https://www.cherylwheeler.com/songs/iiwutm.html
And here’s the accompanying video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S5CabGWsv4
I have a dissenting opinion. And I’m the parent of a 12 year old and 8 year old. Statistically it is MUCH more dangerous to put our children into cars and drive them places (school, practice, the grocery store, etc.). And we do that EVERY SINGLE day. Schools, statistically, are incredibly safe places to be.
School shootings are awful, and they gut at our hearts because they do happen in what are safe spaces for our most vulnerable population. But an infant was killed in a car crash last week on the Big Island, and yet I don’t hear an outrage about never putting our children in cars ever again.
We live in a culture of unrealistic fears, fueled by 24 hour news cycles and powerful images. But you can’t (and often shouldn’t — because how will they learn to deal with unexpected things?) protect your kids from every single possibility. That’s why we get out there on the road — we’ve decided the risk is worth the convenience. Education and socialization and FUN is worth the miniscule, over-hyped danger of a school shooting.
It’s a tough, complex problem isn’t it? Knee jerk is to blame something simple, like the tool. While it is irresponsible for parents to give access to their firearms to kids in any form, especially without safety and more importantly, responsibility training, in reality, you can get guns illegally just as easily, and if not that way, you cn easily make them yourself. So the tool is neither the root cause nor the solution. In Japan a guy took out 17 kids and teachers with a kitchen knife. Was it the tool to blame? A tool which is silent, doesn’t need ammunition, and is deadly from multiple directions at once.
Or should the focus be in the individual, or even society? Is interesting how when these tragedies happen, it is the tool that becomes the focus. What about the parenting? What about the upbringing? My parents used to bring their shotguns to school to go hunting after class was over. Perfectly legal then. It was not the implement that made people nuts then either.
As a country where did we derive our values originally? What is happening to our values today? How are they changing and why? How is our world view changing as a society and what is the outcome of this change? (pros and cons). It’s hard to say that a particular world view is right or wrong as it’s fundamentally based on a perception. However, there are results that will be tied to each perception.
These are all interesting questions to me.
@Carrie … I respect your opinion … but I also respectfully disagree with your assessment …
… you cannot compare the risks of going to school with the risks of riding in a car …
… a car is inherently dangerous … we understand that danger and exercise caution and safety (most of the time) while in a car … these schools are inherently safe (or at least I used to think so) … they are filled with children, teens, the youth of our society … it is NOT supposed to be dangerous by any stretch of the imagination …
… so even a single shooting in any school is something to take note of … it is not miniscule and it is not over-hyped … it is just not supposed to happen … and it is not remotely acceptable …
… yes, we can’t protect our children from everything … but as individuals, as parents, as humans we can realize that these dangers are real and these fears are warranted … and we should do everything we can to keep this from happening again …
RayBoy — I don’t think we should ignore the incidents and didn’t mean to imply that. I was responding more to David Jackson’s comment about how if an incident like that occurred at his son’s school, his son would never set foot on a campus again. And, to continue my analogy, terrible car crashes happen EVERY DAY. And yet the vast majority of us get into our cars (with seatbelts and airbags and working brakes) and head out on the road. Because we have weighed the risk to be worth it. We don’t hear of a car crash (or even, after we ourselves have been in an accident) and decide to never get in a car again. (Again, most of us).
I’m just arguing against extreme responses to [relatively] and [fortunately] isolated incidents.
Carrie if you were responding to me why not post it under my post.
I so agree. Ugh.
I hate having to be scared of my students. Sometimes they use that power. I’ve been threatened in all kinds of ways. I have even worried that a couple of them will come back and make do on their promises. It’s completely disturbing that we have become this way.
There are so many reasons I think this is happening. You have hit on some of them. I think it’s so much about our society– our focus on media without teaching the responsibility of it, poor self-esteem stemming from poor work habits, our change in parenting styles… It’s all a piece of a problem– and other related problems.