Remember Jonesboro, Arkansas? That
community experienced a traumatic shooting incident that involved a
couple of
middle-school
students opening gunfire on their classmates. Two
suspected
kids were captured near their getaway car-their parents'' car.
Each of these kids had about 100 bullets on each of them. The getaway
car contained 2,000 to 3,000 rounds of ammunition to supply their
shouldered weapons. Four classmates and a teacher died. The news
reports revealed that the
school counselor had been warned of potential
trouble three months earlier. Other students witnessed these kids with
knives at school and heard repeated statements that they vowed to kill
someone soon.Neither of these kids had a police record. Who would
have suspected that a couple of kids living in a rural area of Arkansas
would commit such a
violent act?Could this
happen to us-in quiet Fort Collins with one of the best school
districts in Colorado? Yes it can. Thank God for the cooperation among
our school district, citizens, and the police. As a result, we
intervened before it happened at Preston Jr. High School.Now
we are tormented with more student violence. March 5, 2001 in Santee,
California, 15 students were shot and two of them died. I sent a note
to Mayor Voepel of Santee, California, expressing our concern and
bereavement of the incident. Their tragedy is a national threat to us
all.In a 1991 survey of inner-city kids
under the age of 19, researchers at the University of Alabama found
that four in 10 had actually witnessed a homicide. "Moral poverty"
isn''t confined to urban ghettos. A lack of parental involvement places
any child at risk-especially if the television is running all day. No
one pretends that kids are doomed to re-enact or simulate every
atrocity they see on TV or in video games. But experts agree that a
constant diet of mass entertainment can warp children''s sense of the
world. When violent action is all they see, says University of Michigan
psychologist Leonard Eron, "the lesson they learn is that everybody
does it and this is the way to behave."Role
modeling and connectivity are the most powerful form of teaching, even
as it was when Aristotle crystallized the idea for his students in
ancient Greece: "The soul never thinks without a picture."It''s
possible, of course, those young men harbored bizarre revenge fantasies
but lacked the means to carry them out. "Without access to guns, these
kids might break a couple of windows," says Geoffrey Canada, president
of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in Harlem. "It would
be a pain, but it wouldn''t be mass murder."Unfortunately,
kids do have access to guns. Americans own nearly 200 million of them.
More than half of these guns are stored unlocked; 16 percent are both
unlocked and loaded. And though schoolyard shootings don''t happen every
day, a 1995 federal survey found that nearly 8 percent of high-school
students had carried a gun during the past 30 days.Today
we see kids without a police record acting out in very violent ways.
Kids are not born with a gun in their hands-someone puts it there. Just
like we put pacifiers in a baby''s mouth, we tend to pacify our kids
with TV, music, and allowing them too much unguided free time. Soon,
additional or different pacifiers are discovered like drug use, alcohol
abuse, and the ‘thrill'' of committing petty crimes, which can grow into
violent offenses against their family or society.I
encourage our community to take an active role in building strong
values and character in our young people today in every aspect of their
lives, so they will develop positive values, and become productive
citizens tomorrow. We can achieve this as a family, community, and with
our schools.
More abstracts about the Why Kids Turn Violent