Alex, I totally disagree with the argument that the cult of self-esteem has anything whatsoever to do with school shootings. I already wrote a long post about it, in response to Duncan's, so I don't want to be boringly repetitious. But in one or two sentences--children who kill others exhibit many warning signs over time, including a fascination with guns and violence, the torture of animals (Kip Kinkel killed a cat by lighting a firecracker in its mouth), disconnected, unattached relationships with parents, and high levels of rage. They are children who feel powerless, not powerful, and have little or no self esteem. They have almost always been disciplined very harshly, and are out of control. That is why they act the way they do. In my opinion it is simply convenient to attach the latest pseudo-theory of what is wrong with our children to this phenomenon, or to decide they are simply "bad seeds", so that no deeper search into the soul of our nation (and its values) is required.
I have read nothing that would indicate that violence like this was common at all in the '50's and '60's, regardless of the race of the children involved. I also remember these times. Maybe I misunderstand your point here. What the newsmagazine I read this week said is that, statistically, there was a higher percentage of this kind of child violence in 1992, but of course it happened to black and brown children mostly in the inner city. As you will recall, this was the height of the drive-by shooting hysteria, especially turf wars over crack dealing.
I was happy to see that Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report did not put the latest shooting on their covers this week (I didn't see Time yet). I don't think glamorizing the violence helps these children, who are already crying out for attention and recognition. On the other hand, I hope that this state affairs doesn't just become normal in America. I read one article which assumed that we could not change the emotional breakdown in these children, or the fact that they are heavily armed, and suggested that the solution was to limit access severely to schools by closing most of the entrances, and then placing metal detectors and security guards at the one or two open entrances. Sort of like when we adopted metal detectors at airports, realizing we could not solve the larger crime of terrorism.
To make sure that more kids are nice people, we would probably have to go back to a time when families were not quite so dysfunctional, schools had counselors and nurses, the juvenile justice system had at least the stated goal of rehabilitation, children were not so exposed to endless television and video violence, there were far fewer drugs available to them, and squabbles among hormonally-challenged, slightly unbalanced teenagers were solved more frequently with fist fights than anything else, knives being what the most savage among them used, and guns being almost unheard of. I think we can realistically conclude that over 6,000 guns being confiscated already at schools this year is something quite new. If it were the norm for the last thirty years, I don't think we would be reading about it several times each week. Do you have statistics to the contrary?
Guns are the number one killers of children in California today, Alex, at least according to Jane Harmon's campaign ads. Do you have any reason to believe this is untrue? It is not that the press is overemphasizing this problem, or sensationalizing it, in my opinion, but that the society is absolutely out of control with guns. Sylvester Stallone had a comment on the deaths of Phil and Brynn Hartman with which I agreed wholeheartedly (although I know you will disagree). He said we need to go door-to-door and take all the guns away, that we are living in a dark age.
At the risk of being tedious, I think I would like to repeat these crime statistics from Joan Ryan's column in the San Francisco Chronicle just one more time (emphasis mine):
"According to a 1996 Police Foundation poll, Americans privately own between 190 million and 220 million firearms. So it's not surprising that, according to another study, THE OVERALL FIREARMS DEATH RATE AMONG CHILDREN 14 AND YOUNGER IS 12 TIMES HIGHER IN THE UNITED STATES THAN IN 25 OTHER INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS COMBINED. In real numbers, 14 children in America are killed with guns every day, and four times as
many are treated for gunshot wounds. About 400 children die every year in unintentional shootings."
I would argue that this is absolutely insane, an aberrant society out of control with guns and violence, having nothing whatsoever to do with anything as simple as different standards of reporting, journalistic emphasis, or "self esteem". |
