Saving Our Children

Yesterday, as news of yet another horrific tragedy involving a deranged gunman and a school full of innocent kids unfolded, my coworker John told me of the conversation he just had outside the store with a student heading home from our local high school. John said that it seems that each generation is more screwed up than the previous one, and his (John is in his mid-30s) is the worst one yet. Seems he was trying to place some blame for the shooting on the shoulders of his contemporaries. The student disagreed with him, stating that it was his own generation that was truly messed up. I didn’t comment at the time, but I didn’t really agree with either of them. Every generation since the dawn of time has bemoaned the fate of the younger generation, wondering: what went wrong with the kids?

“Why can’t they be like we were,

Perfect in every way?

What’s the matter with kids today?”

Lyrics from: “Kids”, Bye-Bye Birdie

Back in 1974, as I was finishing high school (yes, it was a long time ago), I took an English course about how to write a research paper. We could choose any current topic of interest, and since recreational drug use was one of the big issues of the time, I wrote about the methadone maintenance program. Methadone was used to treat heroin addiction, by substituting a drug that didn’t get you high for one that got you very high. Turns out the program wasn’t really that successful, since (surprise!) most heroin addicts really wanted to get high more than anything. I came across one author’s view that the real problem with the failure of treatment programs wasn’t that America had a “drug culture” (a small subset of our overall culture). The problem was that America itself, in its entirety, is a drug culture. We thought then and probably think so even more today, that we can cure anything with the right pill (or right drug of whatever form). Our large multi-national pharmaceutical companies have been advertising their glorious triumphs over diseases, both real and imagined, for years. Why would we think it wasn’t so?

“One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small

And the ones that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all”

Lyrics from: “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane

The same situation exists with guns. America does not have a “gun culture”; America is a gun culture. We grew up with guns. But unlike our ancestors, who required weapons to put food on our table and protect them from their hostile environment, we have come to think of guns as the great equalizer. When bad people attack us or try to take what is ours, what else can be done but to fight back? And how can the weak triumph over the strong? Use a gun.

“God created man, Samuel Colt made them equal”

-Anonymous

Our media has been overwhelmed with gun use for generations. Dime novels of the Old West, movies, television, and video games have all featured the use of guns as a prominent deciding factor. I used to play point-of-view shooter video games when they first came out. In such games, you start out with a pistol, then work your way up through the levels, acquiring more powerful and more effective guns as you progress. If you run out of ammo, you revert to a knife. You rarely last long against the forces of evil with just a knife. I’ve played more advanced versions, on better systems, over the years. The level of carnage has increased, as have the graphical displays of blood and gore. At some point, I lost interest. I’m really a peace-loving guy at heart.

So now you’re thinking that I’m about to propose radical gun control as the solution to our problem, right? Well, here’s another little surprising bit of information: I am a gun owner. I used to hunt a little, but never really enjoyed tramping through the woods in inclement weather. Besides, being out there with all of those other people with guns is a bit worrisome. Once the beer companies came out with 30-packs of beer in camouflaged cartons, I was pretty sure it was time to stay clear. I also liked to target shoot when I was younger. My brothers and I would go out in the woods of my grandfather’s “farm” (it was a hobby farm; he wasn’t really a farmer) where there was an old garbage dump and shoot up cans and bottles with our .22 rifles and BB-guns. Astonishingly, there were no firearm-related injuries. I suppose we should thank the Boy Scouts and the YMCA for good training, but we were generally just careful.

I have a good friend who is also a careful gun owner (at least I think he still owns guns). When he was a youngster playing in the woods with friends and guns, his buddy thought it would be cool to scare him by shooting into the water of the creek that he was crossing, so he did. Guess he didn’t know that bullets can ricochet off of water, which one did, and gut-shot my friend. He was given the last rites in the hospital and had emergency surgery by a doctor called off of the golf course. His amazingly strong constitution pulled him through, although he is missing significant portions of his intestines. Years later, he was lifting weights in his apartment bedroom at Ohio State. One of the neighbor girls came over to show his roommate the cute little pistol that her father had purchased for her to use for protection. His roommate pointed the gun at the wall and, perhaps unaware that it was still loaded, fired a round that went straight through the wall. Luckily, my friend was bent over, putting his barbells on the floor. When he stood up, he looked directly through the tiny new hole in the wall. A second earlier or later and his head would have been in the way of the errant bullet. He lost his cool in the heat of the moment, instructing his dumbfounded roomie in the proper use of human fists as a weapon. You can be perfectly careful about the guns you own, but always remember that there are idiots everywhere.

Therein lies the problem with ownership of weapons for self-protection: they rarely do their job as intended. I know that there are dozens of stories where a homeowner has saved their own life by using a firearm against an attacker, but the cold, hard statistics tell us that we are much more likely to harm ourselves or a loved one with a gun in the home. The perpetrator of the latest school shootings (*) reportedly borrowed his mother’s guns to do the shooting. His mother was among the first victim of her own guns. Tougher laws about purchasing weapons would not have worked in this case, because the gunman stole the ones he used. (*Do you realize how many school shootings there have been since Columbine? Answer: According to ABC News, there have been 31 school shootings since the Columbine shooting in 1999).

Of course we’ve all heard that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” To be fair to guns, today’s paper had a story from China about a man attacking a school full of youngsters with a knife. He injured 22 before being subdued, according to Chinese news sources. The sources also reported that no one was fatally injured. So yes, guns are more deadly, especially in mass-killing events.

Personally, this kind of mass-killing just makes me sick. Would we be safer with strict controls on guns, especially assault-type weapons and handguns? Yes, we probably would. Are we likely to see any type of government action to control such weapons? Probably not. I would gladly surrender my guns if I knew that everyone else would do the same. I’ve been robbed at gunpoint twice in my life, and if I had been armed in either situation I likely wouldn’t have had a chance to pull a gun to defend myself. If I had, it would have probably cost my life. Given the proliferation of firearms in our culture, it is likely that a gun control law would not remove all guns from the market. We once had a law banning the sale of assault weapons and large capacity handguns, but it was repealed. I don’t know if it did any good, but it probably didn’t kill anyone either. In recent months, I have seen several full-page and multi-page ads in the local paper that feature a vast variety of deadly assault weapons. These are not weapons used by hunters. The sole purpose of this category of gun is the efficient killing of a large number of human beings. It is a sad commentary on our society that we continue to acquire such weapons. Perhaps we should recruit the owners to stand guard at the doors of schools. They really should do something positive with them, don’t you think? Although it might just traumatize the kids more than they are already experiencing by just showing up at school.

We probably should do something as a culture in order to protect our loved ones, especially our children. But what is the proper course of action? Someone posted a message that more violence has taken place since God was banned from school. They wanted to put Him back in the classroom. Too bad that the world has been fighting over who has the best idea of god for thousands of years, blowing themselves and others to bits in the process. However, I think an increase in education about moral issues and philosophy is probably a good idea. In fact, better education in general might help. Then again, maybe we should just succumb to the desires of the wealthiest among us, and ban public education all together. Instead we could re-institute child labor. The kids could be worked so hard (and for very small wages) that they would be too tired and too poor to buy guns and shoot each other.

There are lots of ideas out there about what to do, but most of them won’t work. Not until we reach a certain level of cultural enlightenment at least. What ideas do you have? Care to share them? The only thing that I know for certain is that if we do nothing, this will happen again.