The kids marched, and I was proud of them. The school shooting in Florida stimulated teens across the country to cry out for help in being safe when they were in school. Hopefully, Congress and state legislatures would listen and do something to keep this from happening ever again. 17 schoolchildren shot and killed with many others wounded by one of their own and no way to stop this from recurring time and time again to this point. The march was a cry for help in finding answers to this problem. BUT!
The left grabbed the demonstration and tried to turn it into an anti-gun rally and succeeded with the help of the media. A friend of mine told me that she was at the march and heard many speeches about the plight of teens, which also included suicide and other violence, but the media left this portion out of their coverage. It did not fit their agenda, which is and has been, the elimination of the Second Amendment of the Constitution. Somehow the left has decided that guns are the problem in the same way that cars caused auto accidents a few years ago. The result of the media exposure to the portions of the march they wanted to show also showed one of the causes of violence in our youth. Signs of a US Senator with blood on him because he supported the NRA gave us a picture of the intolerance that causes the bullying leading to depression in our youth. The kid that doesn’t fit in is shunned or made fun of due to the intolerance of others. The peer pressure causes many to resort to extreme measures.
While school violence has killed many and is one of the most atrocious things in our society it doesn’t come near the number of teen deaths caused by suicide, which is about 12 per day, or the 11 per day caused by texting while driving. Of the 117 overdose deaths each day, many are teens and none of these will stop if all of the guns in the country disappear. Removing guns from our society will not cure the fundamental causes or our behavior, and limiting them due to age or type will be about the same as limiting alcohol use by raising the age to buy it. We have banned narcotics, but you can still buy them on most street corners; it has not put a dent into the drug overdose statistics.
If you can imagine graduating from high school being functionally illiterate and then trying to get a job, which will allow you to join society at a level you might have dreamed of, only to find yourself working at McDonald’s the rest of your life, you will start to understand some of the problems our youth are having. Schools are pushing students through without regard to their learning status. No one flunks third grade because they have not attained a reading level to go into the fourth. No one is held back in high school because they flunked a couple of courses, and, while doing so, they made so much commotion in their classrooms that many others had a hard time trying to learn the subject. The fourth grader who headbutted his teacher and caused a skull fracture that kept her from ever teaching again received no punishment. My sister-in-law, after sending a student to the principal’s office for calling her names with the F-word, had to continue to try to teach because the principal could not do anything to discipline him and resulted in his returning to the classroom with a smirk. Constant cell phone use and other disturbances in the classroom make teaching so difficult that I wonder why anyone does it anymore.
The student who can’t read or write and does math until they run out of fingers may get depressed because they realize that they are below everyone else in the learning curve. The class clown has run out of gas and may decide to quit and take a few with him. Some discipline or flunking the third grader until he applies himself to learn to read and write may have given him enough esteem to consider himself part of the rest of the class and a chance to be a manager at McDonald’s instead of a minimum-wage worker.
The responsibility that young people need to accept to join our society with the hope of achievement has to be taught and insisted upon during the learning years—the same responsibility to seek help when depressed or to not use their cell phone when driving. The responsibility to treat others as they wish to be treated—or to help those whom they see that need it—is the same as that needed to complete homework and become a responsible citizen. When we return to parenting, rather than becoming our children’s best friends, and accept that they are not always as perfect as we wish, we will start to use discipline and achievement requirements to reach the goals necessary to allow them to grow up and start to make their own goals and wishes. When we do this, we might start to diminish the problems we now see and realize that a one-item ban is not the answer because someone thinks so.
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