5.27: Media -- School Shootings

It happened again, late last week. A student in a high school shot fellow students, killing one and wounding a few more. Then he turned the gun on himself. As a teacher and as a parent -- as a human being -- this horrifies me, as all of the school shootings have.

But only a few days later, the facts are pushed to the bottom of news outlets, fears about ebola and a recall on baby wipes taking their place.

There have been over 80 school shootings since the shootings in Newton, Connecticut, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. They barely make the news anymore. This complacency bothers me. At the same time, I don't think we should glorify the shooters by making a big deal of each shooting.

It seems, to me, that there's really no easy answer. I don't want armed guards at my school. I will not ever carry a gun, and I don't want my son's teachers to carry a gun. We have police officers at each of our schools in our district, and that's helpful, but if dude's down in the cafeteria and I've got a shooter in my classroom, literally a 4-minute walk away, that doesn't do much for me.

I feel like we should drastically limit the ability to obtain and keep guns. The NRA is too powerful, though, so that's not going to happen. So any asshole with a driver's license and no felonies can walk into a Walmart and get a gun. Any asshole with less than that can walk into a gun show and get a gun. And yet... if they're illegal, that's not going to stop the problem. People will always be able to get them.

Then I look at who the school shooters have been. Almost all male, (although here's a good article by Psychology Today about the handful of women school shooters) and many targeting females. In a 2006 article on The New York Times Opinion Pages, columnist Bob Herbert makes a sobering, yet true, statement, writing that a group of victims were, "just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected." Why are our boys filled with such rage that they're shooting people -- and why are they targeting women? 

The answer? Maybe it's our society. Maybe it's video games and music and movies and culture in general. Does that mean to ban all of those things? No. It means to talk to our kids -- to say "Hey, Johnny, that game you're playing where you're shooting the monsters? You know that it's just pretend, right? We don't actually harm one another." It means to have a dialogue. When SC was little, he would see someone hitting someone else on television, and then he would go to school and do that. So he got those type of shows taken away for a while, and I sat down and talked to him. And I continue to talk to him. We use our words. We don't solve problems with fists. 

I don't know what the answer is, to be honest. Every case is different, just like every person is different. Some kids feel bullied. This last kid shot his cousins, who were his best friends. He had just been crowned freshman Homecoming king. I'm left with a sense of hopelessness, just like many Americans.

What I do know, though, is that we can't just ignore this. We can't just say, "Wow, that's a lot of school shootings" and let schools have their ALICE drills and hold funerals for dead kids. We can't let a school shooting with two dead go by ignored, and wait until a classroom of 1st graders gets killed right before the holidays to really make a point. And we can't let the NRA lead us around, just because they have all the money and all the politicians in their back pocket. 

It's time to take the next step. I just don't know what that next step is. 

Go read NGS, too.