SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, WHY THEY HAPPEN, AND WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE

19 Feb. 2018

Dear Friends and Patriots,

            The school shooting incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL was a true tragedy.  It was real.  I see nothing about it that hints of a staged event or a false flag.  Seventeen young lives were needlessly snuffed out.  Now countless parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends grieve over the loss of lives filled with promise that will never be realized.  The entire community, especially the student body of the high school, is in shock and coping with the enormity of the tragedy.  It will be many years before a true sense of normalcy returns.

            After the shooting was over it was inevitable that we could count to ten before the first calls for more laws and the elimination of all guns were heard.  Those calls came from the “usual suspects.”  There’s little need or usefulness in identifying those who grabbed media time to proclaim their positions.  Nor is there any particular usefulness in discussing the student-organized “March For Our Lives” demonstrations now being held and planned, except in relation to the overall context of this missive.

            The incident caused me to stop in my tracks to think the entire scenario through.  It’s easy to take on the gun control argument, just as it is to deal with the notion of ever more laws.  But, neither of those trains of thought are actually pertinent or useful.   I think I have a better focus, which I intend to share.  Before I do, I want to sing the praises of Kelly Guthrie Raley, who actually stole my thunder in a very succinct Facebook post.  I’ll share that post with you, then expand a bit.  For those who like their messages in succinct bites, you can stop after reading Mrs. Raley’s thoughts.  Those who want a bit more might read on, but be warned – you’ll be reading for a while. 

            Kelly Guthrie Raley is middle school teacher from Eustis, FL.   She is also a Florida Teacher of the Year, named just a couple of months back.   This is her post, taken directly from her Facebook page to ensure I got it right: 

Okay, I’ll be the bad guy and say what no one else is brave enough to say, but wants to say. I’ll take all the criticism and attacks from everyone because you know what? I’m a TEACHER. I live this life daily. And I wouldn’t do anything else! But I also know daily I could end up in an active shooter situation.

Until we, as a country, are willing to get serious and talk about mental health issues, lack of available care for the mental health issues, lack of discipline in the home, horrendous lack of parental support when the schools are trying to control horrible behavior at school (oh no! Not MY KID. What did YOU do to cause my kid to react that way?), lack of moral values, and yes, I’ll say it-violent video games that take away all sensitivity to ANY compassion for others’ lives, as well as reality TV that makes it commonplace for people to constantly scream up in each others’ faces and not value any other person but themselves, we will have a gun problem in school. Our kids don’t understand the permanency of death anymore!!!

I grew up with guns. Everyone knows that. But you know what? My parents NEVER supported any bad behavior from me. I was terrified of doing something bad at school, as I would have not had a life until I corrected the problem and straightened my ass out. My parents invaded my life. They knew where I was ALL the time. They made me have a curfew. They made me wake them up when I got home. They made me respect their rules. They had full control of their house, and at any time could and would go through every inch of my bedroom, backpack, pockets, anything! Parents: it’s time to STEP UP! Be the parent that actually gives a crap! Be the annoying mom that pries and knows what your kid is doing. STOP being their friend. They have enough “friends” at school. Be their parent. Being the “cool mom” means not a damn thing when either your kid is dead or your kid kills other people because they were allowed to have their space and privacy in YOUR HOME. I’ll say it again. My home was filled with guns growing up. For God’s sake, my daddy was an 82nd Airborne Ranger who lost half his face serving our country. But you know what? I never dreamed of shooting anyone with his guns. I never dreamed of taking one! I was taught respect for human life, compassion, rules, common decency, and most of all, I was taught that until I moved out, my life and bedroom wasn’t mine...it was theirs. And they were going to know what was happening because they loved me and wanted the best for me.

There. Say that I’m a horrible person. I didn’t bring up gun control, and I will refuse to debate it with anyone. This post wasn’t about gun control. This was me, loving the crap out of people and wanting the best for them. This was about my school babies and knowing that God created each one for greatness, and just wanting them to reach their futures. It’s about 20 years ago this year I started my teaching career. Violence was not this bad 20 years ago. Lack of compassion wasn’t this bad 20 years ago. And God knows 20 years ago that I wasn’t afraid daily to call a parent because I KNEW that 9 out of 10 would cuss me out, tell me to go to Hell, call the news on me, call the school board on me, or post all over FaceBook about me because I called to let them know what their child chose to do at school...because they are a NORMAL kid!!!!!

Those 17 lives mattered. When are we going to take our own responsibility seriously?

It’s an interesting post in so very many ways.  Mrs. Raley starts out discussing mental health and the lack of actual treatment in our country since the medical profession decided pushing pills was a better option to in-patient care.   Then she goes to bad parenting, lack of moral values and then video games.  That one paragraph was widely reported in the media, but isn’t the most remarkable part of her message.  The rest of her post has to do with the role of parental control in creating good, responsible citizens out of kids who might otherwise become one train-wreck or another. 

            Mrs. Raley knocked the ball out of the park.  She captured the essence of the problem and laid it out for anyone who might want to ignore the truth.  I agree with her on each and every point.  It is mental health.  It is lack of parental discipline and lack of parental support.  It is a lack of morals and, yes, video games and their desensitizing effects. And, it’s true the young don’t comprehend death and its permanence until they’ve seen it up close and personal.

            All that is true.  All is relevant.  All is far more important and to the point than any debate about guns.  In this case the AR-15-style rifle was only the chosen instrument a guy named Nikolas Cruz used to play his symphony of death.  If it wasn’t that gun, it would have been something else.  What if he had chosen explosives or arson as his instrument?  What then?  What’s the point in blaming the instrument when the problem is whatever compelled young Mr. Cruz to pick it up in anger?  Oh, yes, it’s politics, isn’t it?

            One faction keeps yapping about the need for more or better laws.  I guess they didn’t get the memo on that.  Laws rarely save lives.  They’re not actually intended to.  Laws are intended to set up the pretext to arresting someone for the purpose of punishing them for social misdeeds.  I’m quite sure most of the laws Mr. Cruz broke on Valentine’s Day were entirely unknown to him.  He certainly knew murder was illegal, but that didn’t stop him, did it?  Would any law on the books have stopped him?  A rational person understands the truth that laws constitute boundaries for those who purposefully live their lives in obedience to them.  For those who don’t care, they are meaningless.  Our jails and prisons are filled to overflowing with examples of people who don’t give a moment’s thought about laws.  So, why does anyone who considers themselves intelligent believe any new law would do more than add an addition to the roster of charges that will be assessed against the next shooter?

The anti-gun people are screaming at full-volume.  They always do, don’t they?  They claim they’re interested in saving lives, and that guns are responsible for the taking of far too many.  It’s true that in the US there are more than 30,000 deaths by firearms each year.  That’s right at 0.01% of the estimated 330 million people in our country.   Of those 30,000 deaths fully two-thirds of them are suicides.   There may or may not be a debate regarding whether or not the person who offed themselves would have done so if not for the presence of a gun, but I personally think if each one of them had access to the right pharmaceuticals that number would be vastly lower.  Regardless, when you take the suicides out of the gun death conversation you have approximately 10,000 per year, which equates to 0.003% of the population.   Now, consider deaths from mass shootings.  They’re approximately 500 per year.  That’s a big number, isn’t it?  But it comprises 1.6% of all gun deaths per year, and 5% of non-suicide deaths by gun.  As a percent of the population it’s 0.00015%.   What the numbers tell you is your chance of being killed in a mass shooting incident are very small, 1:15,325 by one estimate.  Those are just using raw numbers, too.  If you consider the rate of gun violence in large metropolitan cities such as New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. is many times that of the average American city your true probability of becoming a gun violence victim is far lower.  It’s true that gun crime is like real estate – it’s all about the location.  It’s also true that for the vast majority of Americans, you have far more to worry about.  

To put the matter in proper context, these are a few things you’re more likely to die from:  motor vehicle accidents, pedestrian accidents, falling, drowning, fire or smoke inhalation, choking on food, bicycle accident, and airplane and spaceship incidents.   Where are the cries to ban cars, swimming, eating, riding bicycles or flying in airplanes?  Those things and activities kill far more people than guns, yet we don’t worry about them much, do we?

            Do you want to know what you should worry about?  According to a recent analysis of cause of death data compiled by the Center for Disease Control, which is charged with maintaining such information these are the ten current leading causes of deaths:  

1. 1.Heart disease
2. 2.Cancer
3. 3.Chronic lower respiratory disease
4. 4.Accidents
5. 5.Stroke
6. 6.Alzheimer’s Disease
7. 7.Diabetes
8. 8.Influenza and Pneumonia
9. 9.Kidney Disease
10. 10.Suicide

So, it’s only when you get down to number 10 that you see anything partially related to guns.  Now, consider that heart disease takes approximately 614,000 people each year and suicides accounts for 42,700 or so, what laws are you willing to support to compel people to take better care of their hearts?  Would you accept legally mandated diets?  How about laws that would make it illegal to have a body fat content above 12%?  Maybe you’d accept a law that required all citizens to do at least 10 hours of state-approved and state-monitored aerobic exercise each and every week?  That would certainly help, wouldn’t it?  But, no, few Americans would tolerate such any such intrusions into their lives.  Yet, many are willing to accept measures that would deny citizens the ability to protect themselves from bodily harm.

Think also about abortion.  The last year I see good date for is 2014, when 652,639 abortions were performed in the US.  I’m led to believe the number is down slightly from that year.  Even if we assume 550,000 abortions per year as of 2017, the numbers are incredibly high when compared to gun deaths.  I bring that up because it strikes me as odd that many of the same people who support abortion as a right and don’t blink at the actual numbers will revert to all kinds of negative emotions if the subject is deaths by firearms.   Evidently the lives of those snuffed out by gun violence are at least 18 times more precious than those of the unborn.   The numbers suggest it’s so.   Let one of them explain it to you.  Let one of them tell you the numbers lie.

            The media seems to want to buy into the lie that the US is unique when it comes to mass shootings, and especially school shootings.  We may be unique in the usual choice of weapons, but such things happen with frequency in other countries.  In Japan there was a rash of knife-wielding lunatics who attacked elementary schools and day care centers.  You might wonder what would motivate a grown man to invade a space filled with children and slash as many of them to death as possible before being subdued.  You may wonder, but it happens.  Recently a man in China invaded a classroom and killed 33 children with a knife.  Then, there was that psycho in Norway who murdered 77 kids at a summer camp.  It’s apparent the US isn’t unique.  That’s just another media fabrication designed to make us ashamed of being Americans.   We are far from unique.  And the factors behind such mass killings in other countries are little different from those we see here at home.

            The anti-gun arguments fall away under the weight of actual numbers.  It suggests the real desire of that faction is control.  Let’s just leave it there and move on.

            Mrs. Raley touches on issues of mental health.  Yes, something should be done there, but we don’t need more laws.  We need more adherence to existing laws, and we need people who are willing to take the time and effort to make the right considerations.  It’s been reported that over 30 reports of concern were registered by various individuals who thought Mr. Cruz was a potential danger.   The FBI knew of him, yet did nothing.  After all, he hadn’t broken any law until Valentine’s Day.  The local police knew of him and understood he was problematic.   They did nothing that impeded the shootings.  After all, Mr. Cruz hadn’t hurt anyone, had he?  Yet, it seems there were many, many people who believed Mr. Cruz had the potential to be what he is today – a mass murderer.  So, why did no one do anything?

            Unlike the characters in the movie “Minority Report” we don’t have a Future Crimes Unit empowered to arrest people based on predictions of oracles that a person will commit a heinous crime.  We have laws, and as long as a person doesn’t violate them they can’t, and shouldn’t be arrested.  But, if a person is believed to have some serious mental or emotional problems they can have Constitutional rights either removed or suspended.  In the case of Mr. Cruz, once officials believed he was a potential danger to himself or others they could have brought him before a judge for a competency hearing and possibly had his right to procure and possess a firearm taken away.  It might be a long shot, but it would be better than what was done, which evidently was . . . nothing.

            Let’s get to the heart of this matter now and discuss why Mr. Cruz did what he did.  Let’s discuss lousy parenting and youthful disaffection.  Heck, let’s even discuss a bit of biology.

            If you look at past mass-shootings and exclude those that were ideologically-driven, such as San Bernardino and the Pulse night club shooting in Orlando you find some amazing commonality in the lives of the killers.  They are all young men.  They come from less-than happy homes.  Their parents are either absent in their lives or virtually so.  They all exhibit some degree of mental instability.   The Trench Coat Mafia of Columbine have a lot in common with Dylan Roof in Charleston and with Seung Hui Cho at Virgina Tech, and also with Nikolas Cruz.   What was missing from their lives was pointed out by Mrs. Raley:  self-discipline, a strong moral code, and good parenting. These young men didn’t live in the same world we inhabit.  Their world was hostile, and they believed they were victims.  They lived lives filled with fantasy instead of the truth.  Some played video games.  All played with guns.   All had a sense of themselves as martyrs to some nebulous and heroic cause.

            If we want to lessen the number and severity of mass killings our society needs to change.  We need to re-embrace the primary importance of religion in our lives.  We need to appreciate the need for strict moral codes.  We need to re-evaluate the importance of intact families and understand how far the chain of victims can run when a family explodes.  We need to understand that parenting must be a primary consideration in the lives of everyone with children.  We need to re-engineer our society to turn back some aspects of our social clocks.  

It’s commonplace to point to TV’s June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson and discuss the depth of fiction they portrayed in their roles as stay-at-home moms in the 1950’s.  At the same time, it’s also true that many women strived to emulate June Cleaver and Margaret Anderson, and the 1960’s update named Laura Petrie.   Men tried to emulate their own role models, too.  Today all that is considered nonsense.  Today fathers and mothers alike are supposed to go forth and slay dragons.  The fact that dragons don’t exist isn’t important.  It’s all in the idea.  Somewhere in all that is where kids got lost.  Now, we’ve seen three generations of lost kids.  It started in the late 1960’s and we haven’t turned the tide back yet.  Perhaps one day society will realized there was a better America and strive to replicate the social emphasis that made it so.  Someday perhaps we’ll decide to take what’s good and scrap what isn’t and strive to go back to a family-centric America where people looked out for each other and kids were watched over and corrected by real adults.

            It would be wrong not to mention some biological facts, too.   Males between 15 and 24 aren’t the most rational creatures on their best day.   Maybe some are, but most aren’t.  It’s a chemical thing.   In those years most male thought is affected by testosterone levels in the bloodstream.  Most young men naturally experience a version of the same thing body-builders refer to as “roid rages.”  While body-builders get their rages as a side-effect of injections of anabolic steroids – synthetic testosterone – young men’s high levels of the natural hormone often leave them somewhat unbalanced.  That’s not an excuse – it’s a proven fact.  It’s also a fact that the brain of any teen has trouble with rational thought anyway because it’s still developing circuits to the brain’s logic center.  In scientific terms, adults process a lot of information through the prefrontal cortex, which helps to make logical sense of all information.  Teens can’t do that.  Their brains process information through the amygdala, which is a center of emotional response, not logic and reasoning.  So, if you take the average teenage brain, which isn’t very good at logic and reasoning anyway, then bathe it with blood that’s overloaded with testosterone, the results are often less than optimal.   Nature corrects those “problems” as the natural level of testosterone wanes after age 20 and the brain fully matures by about age 25.  What’s that supposed to tell you?  It should tell you most young men need a strong controlling influence in their lives to help them make good sense of the world.  The troubles seem to arise when that strong influence isn’t present.

            To sum up, as long as we continue down the path progressives paved for us we should expect more and more of these incidents.  Only after our society comes to grips with the true legacy of the Great Society and all other progressive intrusions upon traditional American family life will we have a chance of correcting this phenomenon.  Mass shootings are a disease.  The cause of the disease is progressivism, and all it has brought with it.   The cure is a complete rejection of progressivism and re-establishment of the best features of an earlier, better America.  It’s easy to say “It takes a village” when talking about children.  The problem is – that village doesn’t actually exist.  And it’s evident the old nuclear family concept hardly does, either.  

            Thank you Mrs. Raley.  You know what I know.  Now, if only about ten million others out there would know, too, maybe we’d have a chance.

In Liberty,
Steve