Thursday, February 22, 2018

Guns and Sick Kids.

I am not a gun enthusiast. I never owned one and never fired one except while I was in the compulsory ROTC program in college. Even when I was in the Army, in the Medical Corps, I never used a gun. When we lived for years in an isolated wooded section of East Mountain where it sometimes felt a little scary it never occurred to me to get one for protection. It's not that I'm anti-gun; just not a gun person.

So I don't really have any skin in the game in the present gun argument after the school shooting. I know all the pro and con arguments and I don't want to get into that no-win situation. It just strikes me as sad that the immediate reaction is the usual angry debate over gun control which seems to take all the attention.

There are lots of ideas focused on the gun aspect of the problem floating around, and some of them even sound practical enough to get carried out this time, especially by some of the individual states, as opposed to the usual heated argument and do nothing result. We hear about raising the legal age to buy a rifle, banning "assault" weapons, limiting the number of bullets in gun magazines, arming some specially trained teachers, putting in metal detectors at school entrances.

I don't know. If this sick kid wanted to carry out destruction it seems to me he could have gotten a gun somewhere, or used a bomb, or a truck, or even waited a couple of years till he was 21. How much difference would it really make in the big picture if he killed 5 or 6 people instead of 17. And how pathetic is it that we would have to have armed teachers and metal detectors in the hundreds of thousands of schools around the country because of these rare incidents.

I was thinking about that the other day when we were flying from Florida and waiting in the long line to be inspected before going to our gate. I was around in the times when we just walked right in and so I guess this ritual that we've all gotten used to as being normal still jars me a bit. Think of all the waste of time and money being expended on millions of flights every day just because of lunatic fanatics.

Not much we can do about that I guess. But it seems to me the sick 19 year old in Florida is a different story, and while we're busy arguing about guns we're missing a big picture. Lots of people knew this young person was sick/violent and reported it but nothing was done about it except to expel him from school.

There are a lot of violent adults around but I'll bet most of them developed these traits when they were young. Pretty much everybody in our country goes through one school system or another when we're young. I'm sure it's not all that easy, but while we're arguing about guns, shouldn't we be paying at least as much attention to the idea of identifying sick kids and working with them. Parental loss seems to have been a major problem with this kid. Too bad there wasn't a guidance program supplying a surrogate adviser.

I had the good fortune to go to the old Scranton Prep. The physical facility at the time was bare bones and the tuition was very affordable for most families. Most of our teachers were Jesuits in training, not a heck of a lot older than we were. They took us on hikes and played football with us. We had to wear coats and ties and the teachers called us Mister. There was a lot of acting up as you would expect with teenage boys, but with only a couple of hundred students in the whole school it was pretty personal, unlike modern schools with thousands. So character building was part of the curriculum, not officially, but in actual practice. And those who had problems didn't get lost in the shuffle.

This treatise is getting too long as usual so I'll wind up. My point is that if all we do is make a few extra gun laws, or make every school child in the country go through metal detectors, and at the same time ignore problem kids we're fooling ourselves.