What the hell is going on? Where did all the crazy people come from? If it isn't the current students, it's the former students. If it isn't students, it's random adults.
I don't remember violence like this when I was growing up. And yet I remember that song that the kids used to sing:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school...(don't remember this part)...
Glory, glory, halleluia
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Met her at the door
With a loaded .44
And she ain't gonna teach no more.
OK, so the concept of school violence was there when we were children, but the actual violence wasn't there. So what has changed?
When I was a kid, students got angry because of things teachers did or said. But no one brought a gun to school to shoot them. When I was a kid, children got punished (even paddled) by the principal, but not one kid came back to school to kill the administrators. When I was a kid, the playground was rife with teasing and bullying, but none of the picked-on kids snapped and planned a siege on their classmates. So what had changed?
I'm not asking these questions rhetorically. I really don't understand why we have this chain of school-related shootings in the past ten years or so. Is it something the schools are doing (or not doing)? What about the parents? Is it a lack of supervision? Is it all the violence on TV?
I ask these questions partly as a horrified citizen in a world that seems to be going crazy. I also ask these questions as a potential parent (I don't have children currently, but it is possible some day). And I REALLY want to know the answers as a teacher. I work in a private Catholic school that is populated by all girls, and it is unlikely that any of them could snap in that way (all the perpetrators of the school shootings seem to be male). But that doesn't preclude the possibility of something like what happened this past week in Colorado or in Pennsylvania today, with a seemingly random adult shooter taking and killing hostages in a murder-suicide.
I just don't understand. Maybe I should start taking donations to purchase some body armor...
2 comments:
well ... there are probably lots of reasons, but topping the list (in my opinion) is the ease with which people can procure guns in this country - guns that can then find their way (without much effort) into children's hands.
i was surprised to learn there are only six federal gun control laws in the united states. hell - there are more laws than that regarding marijuana. why? because the uber-powerful NRA lobby has the republicans by the cajones, and when our controlling party refuses to outlaw even machine guns for private ownership, well, what kind of message are kids getting?
they're getting that guns are a-okay.
i work with kids, too ... and i feel just as bummed out as you do.
I totally agree.
And somewhere along the line they are also learning that violence is a great problem-solving tool. Instead of using reason and logic to support emotion, they have learned that giving in fully to the emotion of the moment is healthy. That's great when they're happy, but when they are angry and they give in to that emotion, well, just look at the results. Over and over again.
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