Here’s a bit of advice for parents: Instead of worrying that your children are about to be the next victims of a school shooter, worry that your children will be the next school shooter.
The question needs to be asked, “How did we raise a generation of homicidal maniacs?” The styles of weapons made have not changed in decades–and their availability has only become more difficult–and yet more young people are killing their classmates in very public ways every year. So why are today’s kids so much more inclined to seek violent resolution to what they perceive to be personal slights? And if your answer to that is “not enough gun control”, “vaccines” or “toxic masculinity”, then you are part of the problem and not the solution.
There is almost a “hold harmless” clause for the parents of school shooters. Media outlets easily discover previous on-line postings of threats or neo-nazism interest, or videos of weapons use immediately after an incident–and yet no one ever asks if the parents were aware of that and if they just chose to ignore it? Police investigators find journals filled with disturbing writings and graphic illustrations or additional weapons in the bedrooms of the shooters–but parents never noticed that stuff just laying around inside their own house? Or were they “giving their teenager space to become their own person”–without the kind of guidance and oversight that parents had provided for nearly all generations of non-school shooters before?
And now it is time for parents to look at themselves and ask are they doing all they can to keep their child from becoming the next school shooter? (And it isn’t just the parents of boys that need to consider this, it’s just a matter of time before a teenage girl decides she wants to be famous like the boys). Do you know what your child is reading on-line? Do you know with whom they are communicating–in all forms, both digital and in-person? What do they have in their rooms? Have you allowed them to experience failure, rejection, frustration and anger without immediately satiating them or allowing them to blame others for their problems?
And if you detect signs of trouble, are you prepared to take the steps necessary to keep everyone else safe? Are you willing to seek professional help for a disturbed child? Are you ready to take away internet access and cellphones, or to limit gaming time involving first-person shooting games? Are you able to confront your child about dangerous habits, disturbing political interests and checking everything that they post on-line on all accounts? Are your willing to remove all access to weapons in your home?
Abdication by parents of their duties to monitor their children and to teach them the skills needed to cope with everything that life will throw at them–especially the unpleasant and difficult stuff–is the underlying current that continues to feed the school violence threat. And if you think the school districts that take kids as young as six months away from parents for much of the day to make sure they are “ready for school” are going to do that for you, you are now seeing the results of that belief.
Parent your kids–and maybe they won’t want to kill everyone else’s kids.
