Why Do Children Have to Defend Themselves Against Being Shot at School?

Why do children have to organize, as some began to do in 2018, to defend themselves against being killed at school? We live in a culture that makes murdering school children not only a possibility, but an increasingly frequent reality. There is a contagion of school shootings starting with Columbine in 1999 that became commonplace in 2018 and remains commonplace. Emphasizing the cultural significance of this fact are statistics showing that for the first half of 2018 twice as many Americans—mostly children—died in school shootings than in war! During the past 20+ years, a series of school shootings happened across this country, beginning with Columbine High School in Colorado on April 20, 1999. On May 18, 2018, a 17-year-old who was not even born when the Columbine murders took place killed 10 and wounded 18 at Santa Fe High School in Texas. Prior to committing this horrendous act, he carefully read in detail the planning, clothes, firearms, and final acts of the murder of 13 young people as carried out by the Columbine teenage killers in 1999. He was literally copycatting their plan. Also, a couple of months earlier, this 17-year-old male undoubtedly noted that the teenage killer of 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida represented a worthy school shooting prototype to follow—one that received abundant publicity.

Overall, the horrendous nature of school shootings in terms of the number of shootings and the resulting number of children killed is best summed up by a February 15, 2018 New York Times

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article authored by Jugal K. Patel. In his article, Patel states the following:

When a gunman killed 20 first graders and six adults with an assault rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, it rattled Newtown, Conn., and reverberated across the world. Since then, there have been at least 239 school shootings nationwide. In those episodes, 438 people were shot, 138 killed (“After Sandy Hook, More Than 400 People Have Been Shot in Over 200 School Shootings”).

Teenagers are particularly prone to cultural trends. The present cultural climate appears to be one in which the vast majority of school shooting perpetrators are current students of the school they victimize (53%) with a median age of 16 and they are mostly males (87% of the mass shootings in the United States between 1970 and October 2018 were committed by males—Tammy Waitt & Campus Safety, “K-12 School Firearm Statistics Everyone Should Know,” American Security Today, October 24, 2018). While most teenagers would never consider such heinous acts, a few lonely, depressed, or mentally deranged teenage boys draw inspiration from the 24/7 publicity that television and other media are increasingly giving to school killings and consequently develop a compulsion to kill.

Some students feel imprisoned in school and daydream of ways to somehow escape. Death by cop or suicide after committing an unspeakable act is the ultimate escape. Consciously and unconsciously, troubled youth pick up on tensions in their home life and society. It is often true of adolescents that they tend to act out their feelings rather than know what they are. In a world of violence in the media, it can be tempting for troubled boys who’ve failed to be the super athlete or student to assume the role of the villain, which are found in popular video games and comic book movies. It only takes one in a school to turn his personal daydreams into a societal nightmare.

Who is working to obliterate this culture of teenage male violence? Where are the mothers? Answers to these questions are: very few and, bluntly put, mothers in general are helplessly on the sidelines, their voices and actions long ago muted by the very politics that opened the door for, and continue to promote, the National Rifle Association (NRA) gun culture. So, who can we rely on to

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make the cultural changes so desperately needed? What about the fathers? Answers to these last two questions can only be determined after taking an in-depth look at the role fathers have in their children’s lives.

The fact that most, if not all, school shootings since Columbine were perpetrated by young men is not a sign of a cultural aberration but instead further verification that when it comes down to the determination of “making” and “taking” human life, it is basically a gender-dependent process. Only females give birth to human life, then “sacrifice” themselves to preserve their children’s lives. The males of the species have been culturally aligned over the ages to “provide” for and “protect” the new life. Of particular significance is the aspect of “protection.” It’s not by accident that in the name of security/protection, literally hundreds of millions of humans were killed overwhelmingly by males during past wars. In fact, in world history, more than 96% of all murders were committed by males (“Homicide Statistics by Gender,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicide_statistics_by_gender)!

Of course, men are also involved with the nurturing of their children, but that is not the major preoccupation of most fathers. They have many pressures, especially that of earning a living and “providing.” Among their many pressures, they must also deal with the endless demands of their penises. In the past millennium, the sword hung very visibly on a man’s side until it was brought into the erect position for fighting, symbolizing a male’s potency. In the modern millennia, once guns and cannons were invented, they replaced the sword as his symbol of potency; in the case of cannons, it came into a permanent erect position. What do guns and cannons have in common? They are loaded with bullets, which can be reflective of the discharge of masculine energy. Also, it is not by accident that “arms” (male paraphernalia) have historically been associated with the male’s role in life to not only secure and protect but also to exert both physical and sexual “power” and “control.”

The extreme takeover of the gun culture by the National Rifle Association exploits the hidden fact that men’s knives, swords, and guns symbolize masculine potency. The country is awash in these symbols. Why do the women of America allow men these excessive numbers and types of guns? Where are the mothers?

After the Santa Fe High School killing, who spoke on

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television against gun violence in school? It was a high school student from another school (Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida) that had previously been attacked by guns. The outrage of the mothers in this country was muted or missing. Why do children themselves have to defend their right to live? Where are their parents? Where are their mothers?

After so many years not having the ability to act, what can mothers (women) do to create positive change in the present cultural climate? The kind of cultural change inferred here (changes in gun laws) will require major adjustments in political policies, something many politicians (mostly men) have been unable or simply unwilling to tackle. This question—what can mothers do?—and the subsequent answer have been around and staring us in the face for decades. It is this: women must rise up in large numbers and proclaim: “enough is enough!” Through the electoral process there must be an increase in the number of women in both houses of Congress until that time when their voice and actions will be able to address head-on the very forces that have, for more than 40 years, restricted implementation of the Equal Rights Amendment. Obviously, this won’t happen overnight. But the selection of more women to Congress in the 2018 mid-term election is encouraging, representing a step in the right direction.

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