Thoughts and prayers and reflections on mass school shootings

The recent Georgia shooting once again has shifted the focus off the victims and onto the shooter--Colt Gray--a teenage boy with a disastrous home life. Yes, he had a terrible upbringing. But not everyone who has such an upbringing finds a gun and kills his or her peers and teachers. And while I'm commenting on these types of shootings, has it ever occurred to anyone that the majority of shooters are teenage boys and not girls? I'm not sure why this is. 

What kind of father buys a mentally-troubled son an automatic rifle (AR15) for Christmas? An evil father is the answer. If you read M.Scott Peck's People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, you'll find that he describes such a family--parents who bought their (suicidal) son a gun for Christmas. They were all in therapy with Peck for some reason, but Peck described the parents as evil for essentially placing an instrument of death into their son's hands. As if to say to him, 'feel free to kill yourself'. The book was published in 1983, before the age of social media and school shootings. Peck found dealing with the parents very unsettling and held out little hope for the possibility that they could change. The entire case bothered him enough to write about it. 

The father of the Georgia shooter has stated that he bought his son a gun because he wanted him to stop playing video games and get outdoors. I can think of a hundred other ways for him to entice his son to spend time outdoors--teach him how to swim, boat, surf, camp, golf, ride a motorcycle, grow his own food, etc. There are a myriad of activities that this teenager could have participated in, but no, it had to be hunting animals for sport, which in my book is already questionable. Why do you need to shoot animals for sport, and why do you need an automatic rifle to kill them? Why make a hunter out of someone who has an unstable home life and personality to boot? Because you yourself are an unstable and aggressive individual with anger issues. It's only natural to pass that along to your children and to defend doing so. 

If I were the parents of murdered schoolchildren, I would be furious if someone offered me 'thoughts and prayers' in response to losing my children. There are too many thoughts and prayers, and while it's fine to pray for the victims of tragedies, it's not enough. Not for the parents and families of the dead. Not for the parents and families of all of the 50 dead individuals from all of the school shootings this year alone. Fifty people dead because young people who should never had access to guns, got access to guns. But God forbid we change the laws and make it nearly impossible for them to get access.

One possible solution? When parents buy a gun and have children in the home, they should have to sign a statement saying that they will be responsible for use of said gun by their children, should that happen. They will be legally and financially responsible for any injuries and/or deaths caused by said gun if fired by their children. Families of the victims should be able to sue the gun owners and the gun store owners in order to receive reparations. Only when we begin to force parents who are gun owners to ante up, will there begin to be some changes.

School Days

When we were children, we sang along to the song School Days, at least at home. My mother was very good at finding records for children, and one of them was School Days. I'm not sure who sang the song we listened to, but the lyrics and music were written in 1907 by Will D. Cobb and Gus Edwards: 

School days, school days
Dear old golden rule days
Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick
You were my queen in calico
I was your bashful barefoot beau
And you wrote on my slate, "I love you, Joe"
When we were a couple of kids

There was no hickory stick to keep us in line when we were schoolchildren, just the Catholic school nuns. One look or word from them and you stopped misbehaving. There was also no rampant social media addiction to warp our minds. I don't know why I was reminded of this song today, perhaps because the reality of school days for children nowadays is anything but innocent and carefree. 

I cannot imagine being a parent or grandparent and watching young children go off to school, not knowing if you will see them again. School shootings (and mass shootings in general) have become part of the norm of everyday life and they shouldn't be. There are people I know on Facebook who always post the same thing after a school or other mass shooting--"guns don't kill people, people kill people". It's semantics. Of course guns kill people. If access to those guns wasn't readily available, there wouldn't be guns to kill people. We can argue about the differences between a handgun and an assault rifle. I know that they are not the same. Most of the shootings seem to be done with assault rifles. Why? Because the intent is to kill as many people as possible. There is no other purpose to an assault rifle. You certainly don't need one to riddle a poor animal you're hunting with a barrage of bullets. What's left of the animal after that? If you defend the right to own an assault rifle, you are part of the problem. One solution, perhaps the best, is to ban assault rifles, as they have no place in civilized society. Another is to require thorough extensive background checks on anyone who wants to purchase any type of gun or rifle, period. 

Do our senators realize that their children and grandchildren are at risk? Or don't they care? I ask that question because such shootings are unpredictable. They occur in all states, in small towns and in larger cities. Living rurally doesn't protect anyone or hinder such events. Uvalde is proof of that. Another unsettling factor in so many shootings is how the shooters post their intentions or photos of themselves decked out as if for war on social media. What is wrong with our society? Something is definitely pathologically wrong about society's love of guns. If it continues unchecked, there will just be lawlessness and random shootings everywhere in the next ten years. 

When we were in grammar school and high school, we were taught how to crouch under our desks in case of an atomic bomb attack. Little good that would have done us. Once a year we may have had that drill. Teachers and parents did not focus on it because such an attack was not a very real threat despite the Cold War and the rhetoric surrounding the use of atomic bombs. Everyone saw the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and decided that such horrific occurrences would never happen again. It can't be so difficult to see the carnage after a mass shooting and ban assault rifles as well as change the laws as to who is competent enough to own a gun. Each life that is saved has incalculable worth. Why are we arguing over this?