Foley and School Shootings

(I tried to get through Mark Foley's e-mails, but the pages were stuck together)

      Three school shootings in the United States in a week and congressman Mark Foley ( R) Florida resigns after he got himself outed for trying to write a page turner online.  How does this fit with “They hate us for our freedom?”
     
     Am I the only one who wonders, if we can’t keep our own children safe either in school or from their congressman, what the heck are we doing?  Was it No Child Left Behind or No Child Left Unmolested?

     I know I’m supposed to blame this on the various troubled souls who wandered into schools in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Pennsylvania over the last several days.  Fwiw, when I used to visit inner-city schools around the country, a lot of them had metal detectors and secure entrances.  All these current school shootings though took place in rural and suburban areas.  In general, the perpetrators in school shootings tend to be male and more than likely white, but for the most part the real connecting thread is that the three killers this month had easy access to guns.  

“Miller said Roberts was apparently preparing for a long siege, arming himself with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, a 12-gauge shotgun and a rifle, along with a bag of about 600 rounds of ammunition, two cans of smokeless powder, two knives and a stun gun on his belt. He also had rolls of tape, various tools and a change of clothes.”

Ten years ago, I wrote a column about school violence that argued that people accept the idea that occasionally individuals “go postal” because the post office itself is dreary, insane, and inhumane, but no one was looking at public schools and asking whether there was something causing the kids to go “postal” or “standardized testal”.  This latest run though has little to nothing to do with what’s going inside our schools.  In one case, a milk truck driver picked a public school filled with Amish kids as an easy target.  In the Colorado case, it was a similar thing.  Only the Wisconsin case had a student or staff member actually shooting people.  Whatever criticisms I might have about schools, these had nothing to do with schools dehumanizing kids and staff alike.  

It’s simpler than that.  We’re letting crazy people get guns easily, lots of guns.  On the other end, we’re cutting mental health funding.  It’s not the kind of national security that involves terrorists blowing up buildings.  In this case, the bombs are inside people’s minds and souls and these potential terror-makers are literally everywhere in America with especially high concentrations between Virginia and Maryland.  

It’s tempting to exaggerate here, but I won’t.  I’ll just ask this question, “How committed are we really to protecting our children or anyone else’s for that matter?”

chancelucky