"Before we can dream the impossible dream to fix this unfixable foe, we must first identify what the problem is. Why do kids shoot other kids today? Like I said, that did not happen when I was a lad."
Here it is folks. And no - I am not trying to plagiarize nor rip off lyrics from a wonderful song. What is the impossible dream after all? Bottom line - keeping our American dream alive by keeping our children safe. And how do we do that? By thinking outside the box. The current thinking has been proven to be archaic and outdated.
Elon Musk, like I have said before, is a hero of mine. This young man, who at 46 (and looks like 26) is young enough to be my son. But what a visionary! He is going to take this world places it has not been before! Why do I say that? Musk dreams the impossible dream. Like what? He said before he launched Space X, he was told by many learned experts and other space professionals, his chances of success were 20% at best. He was told this space venture was an excellent opportunity to turn his large fortune into a much smaller one. As we can see, to date Space X is doing very, very well.
To fix this problem, this problem with kids shooting other kids in schools, some good suggestions have been put forth. Suggestions like arming some of the teachers (like in Israel, only in Israel, most are armed). The suggestion by Governor Rick Scott, in having an armed guard in every school. Or someone else said we need medal detectors in every school.
Then of course there are the usual suggestions - raising the age to buy an AR-15 type of long gun (I am good with this one), better background checks (don't need them - already have them), shallower magazines (useless - mags are very easy to reload today), and blah, blah, blah.
Gun control is not dreaming. It is not thinking outside the box. Israel has armed teachers to shoot PLO types who want to commit carnage on students in schools. We don't have that problem (yet). This is us. We have our own unique problem.
When I was young, they taught gun safety in schools. Up north, kids drove to school with their hunting rifles in their pick up trucks. My high school class had over 800 kids. Nobody got shot. Nobody got killed. We never had "active shooter" alerts. What is going on today?
Before we can dream the impossible dream to fix this unfixable foe, we must first identify what the problem is. Why do kids shoot other kids today? Like I said, that did not happen when I was a lad. Let's have an honest discussion to find out the "Why" before we come up with wrong solutions. And by the way - we need to do this NOW.
Profiling is the answer. Whether it's PC or not.
ReplyDeleteThe notion of school shooters as troubled lone wolves is a misconception.
Their daily experience is not one of being alone, but of being enmeshed in social friction.
They experience rejection all the time, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to join groups. They just fail, all the time.
At first, a shooter-to-be might just be prone to clowning around and being obnoxious.
Shooting is the last act in a very long drama in which all the other attempts to gain attention have failed.
And sadly, shooting works.
It works because when these kids start to talk about shooting — and sometimes they talk about it for as long as nine months in advance of their actions, they start getting the attention they’re looking for, sometimes from other boys who are egging them on, sometimes because they have a sixth sense that they’re dealing with someone who is psychologically vulnerable.
Rampage-shootings happen in two kinds of places: a small town in the middle of nowhere, or an exurb.
But not in big cities. That’s because sadly, school is not much of a stage in urban America.
If you want to prove that you are somebody to be feared, doing something in school is not going to get you very far.
There are lots of other stages where you could prove your manhood, which is a part of what’s going on here.
But if you’re in a small town in rural America, what’s the stage?
There are no streets of the kind we think of in New York and Chicago.
The one institution that really is visible throughout the entire community is the school.
It’s a “stage,” in other words, on which to reverse all of the negative baggage they carry … to be seen as an antihero to be feared rather than a loser to be rejected.
all we have to do is to wish away all the weapons in the world and then wish away all the evil in the world that would create new ones. It is so simple, even the most simpleminded can understand it.
ReplyDeleteoh, and if we would simply have all the media refuse to print the name or likeness of these sick attention-seekers, it would quickly put a stop to a lot of it. Just in the two days after the Florida incident, there were at least six copycat incidents.
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