Elementary School Shootings

Shootings in schools are bad enough when it's an adult gone wild.  Shoot the sick ticket and be done with it; no trial, no jury, no waste of the taxpayer's money.  However, when a student perpetrates the crime against our children, what are we to do?  Shoot the parents, and then go after a legal system that has removed our ability and right to discipline our children.  This kind of violence was unheard of in my day, of course we had the feared "beating in the woodshed" to temper our thoughts of doing anything wrong.  

My daughter decided that her career was to be a parent and divide her attention with another job until that one was completed.  What a novel concept.  If you can't do two things well, and one of them concern children, make a decision to either stay away from kids or dump the other job.  There should be parental accountability for damaging a child or allowing the child to damage others because of a parent's lack of focus.

Children aren't born inherently bad.  Children are born without sin, or thoughts of sin, and as they grow into those sinful ways it is up to parents to provide course corrections along their journey.  If the child is beyond help, the parent should be able to seek assistance from the courts.  Remember when a "bad" kid was offered detention or the Marine Corps?  This was a way of giving unruly teenagers a wakeup call and, for many, structure in their lives.  I have known quite a few military people that swear they would be in prison if not for the direction the military provided to them.  But, the truth of the matter is that, for most of these children, parenting is not a priority.  Children are in charge of the family, or the parents are teaching them the wrong values.

Values came from dinner time sitting around the dinner table and bonding.  Values come from religion, spirituality, and faith.  Values come from parents that give a damn; parents that do more than put a leash on their child so they don't wander off in the store.  God forbid the parent should pick the child up or make the child sit down and behave.  Parenting is a concept lost on those that had children from about 1990 onward, and probably a bit before that if you include the hate mongering taught to children by parents with any affiliation to the American Nazi Party.  Christians are not immune to blame; bombing of abortion clinics is not a Christian lesson to teach children.

So now we have a twelve year old child shooting up a Roswell, New Mexico elementary school.  Twelve years old?  My God!  All the usual questions come into play here.  Where did a twelve year old get a gun? Where did the child learn how to use it?  Where were the parents during all of this?  And, let's not forget my favorite "catch all" question:  Why?

In these cases the authorities need to keep their eyes on target.  The target is parenting.  How did parents let this happen?  If the parents tried to get help, where did the authorities drop the ball?  How can we stop this senseless, mindless, killing of our young people by their fellow students?

The problem reaches beyond gun violence and into technology.  Facebook bullies, schoolyard bullies, date rape, racism, and much more abuse permeate our schools and the family and personal lives of our young people.  The real crime is that we as a society cannot seem to stop it.  The most important, advanced nation on this planet cannot do what Mexico seems capable of doing.  Mexico gates their schools.  Mexico stations police in front of their schools.  Mexican parents and grandparents wait outside the schools all through the daily session and even pass lunch through the bars of the gates to the waiting children.  Is this right?  It is their culture and I'm certain they would defy criticism by a first world nation incapable of doing the same.

It should make a parent think.  It should, but...this is just my opinion; I could be wrong?