The children’s marches in the wake of Douglas Stoneman High School shooting elicit gut-wrenching sympathy for them. Let the aggrieved have their mourning. But the traumatized may not be a proper catalyst for good public policy. It’s a reason for the elevation of the issue, not the dictate for a particular approach … if any.
I’m loathe to raise the matter as many are in the grips of great sadness. Nonetheless, many are exploiting the event to pursue their own pet causes. They must be confronted before trauma is allowed to escalate into bad policy.
Reasonable analysis of mass school shootings goes way beyond guns. We have created a breeding ground for alienated and disconnected young males. Girls infrequently appear on the lists of mass killers and suicide bombers. What’s happening to our young men?
A toxic culture permeates: fatherless homes, the decline in traditional spirituality, a biased and incomplete education, the pervasive emotional detachment of a digital world, absentee parents, a girls-girls-girls contemporary obsession to the exclusion of boys, an emphasis on extreme behavior in pop culture, etc., etc. I could go on, but it is a culture of our own making.
Next, we have been softened to accepting state aggrandizement. This happenstance is partly a product of urban lifestyles, of a large part of the population acclimated to a coddling government. It goes further, though. Our schools propagate the benign state. As a result, our discussion is limited to the different ways to expand the powers of the state.
Lost in the debate is the reality of government’s potential for great malevolence and huge waste. “Civil servants” can be what Churchill was alleged to say of them: they can be neither civil nor servants. Whether a person is employed by the state or elsewhere, deep down we are the same, with all our flaws.
More waiting periods, gun bans, gun registrations, and liability regs will not repeal human nature, will not reorient the disoriented, or do anything to create an informed citizenry in dealing with traumatic situations. Until we get a handle on our toxic culture, all the state embellishments will be worse than wishful thinking.
What to do? First, up-armor the schools to survive in a toxic culture. Next, get parents back into the home and into the kids’ lives. Next, more church-going will help. Next, the relationship between an armed citizenry and a free state must be taught to counter progressivism’s state-love. And more could be done, before we ever get to the assault on “assault weapons” as a realistic option.
How’s that for a laundry list?
RogerG