America now suffers from a mismatch between the lethal weaponry which is currently endemic in its public schools, and the level of intelligence among some of the people who run the public schools. I mean to say that the level of intelligence is not adequate to deal with the lethality.
Compounding the insufficient intelligence problem are three further problems:
- School leaders are incentivized to retain students.
- School leaders are often ideologically twisted in ways that make them not want to “give up” on vicious, mentally ill, people.
- Some school leaders are themselves in various ways violence-friendly or at least violence-tolerant. America is a violent country. It has a lot of violent people in it. Some of them are running our schools.
Schools are all about putting happy faces on everything. While superintendents and principals sit in their offices sketching school spirit happy faces, students and parents are out front in the parking lot sobbing in each other’s arms as police shut down their killing field for the rest of the week. It’s a strange duality, but one that won’t change, because of hardwired truths about some of the people who become public school administrators. Everyone can read the guns on campus numbers, the shootings/killings on campus numbers, all the way down to the elementary schools. (“The [Denver] shooting is the 83rd shooting on a K-12 school campus this calendar year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.”) UD assures you that, given the situation on the ground, they will only grow.
And no, UD is not picking on administrators. They are only part – though a crucial part – of the witches’ brew. Depraved parents whose children have easy access to AR-15s? Check. Fragile mental health plus growing up in a violent country? Check. Inept local police forces? Check. School districts that haven’t gotten the message that in a country with four hundred million guns their buildings have become armed camps and have to start looking like them? Check. There’s lots of stuff we could talk about. But the person in charge of keeping the schools safe holds ultimate responsibility.
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Read this background. The multiply-shot-up school at issue is simply a dumping ground. Disgusting.
March 23rd, 2023 at 9:43AM
I teach in a program for students with social and emotional disabilities. Some of them are nice and some are not. But not one of them in 30 years shot up a school or anything else. Students with emotional problems who are appropriately placed, like with me, are the most likely to be identified, and helped and mass violence prevented.
March 23rd, 2023 at 9:47AM
The colossal fucking failure of this country to deal with guns infuriates me. The leading cause of death for American children is getting shot, either suicide or by someone else.
And the GOP will swim in a river of children’s blood and climb over a mountain of their bullet riddled corpses rather than summon the wits or guts to do anything effective.
March 23rd, 2023 at 10:48AM
Matt: Yes, yes, and yes. As the situation becomes nightmarishly dangerous in the schools, nothing must impede the identification and appropriate placement of troubled students. Thirty years ago, these kids weren’t living in houses where guns are just one more appliance. Now guns are everywhere.
And anyone who thinks this terrifying problem is restricted to lower middle class neighborhoods needs to meet the eminent Murdaugh family of South Carolina. Drunks and addicts tossing their hundreds of guns all over the place in drunken abandon. Anyone who truly focuses on the short violent life of little Paul Murdaugh will learn a lot.
March 23rd, 2023 at 8:11PM
It looks like the US courts are leaning to legitimizing gun use on top of mere gun possession. The right-to-life ends at birth.
@Matt McKeon: Is it not the case that the Republican party has a core tenet to undermine secular organizations? Turning public schools into war zones seems both effective and consistent with that philosophy.
March 24th, 2023 at 8:35AM
But they’re turning churches, private schools, public and private gatherings, into war zones too.
March 24th, 2023 at 8:43AM
They’re riding a tiger. They can’t steer it, rein it in or get off of it.
March 24th, 2023 at 10:32AM
@Margaret Soltan: Presumably the victims are united with God? But the majority of cases are in public institutions are they not?
@Matt McKeon: The history of that party shows it has had charismatic, purposeful men behind the scenes steering the tiger. The opposition has had to come rather far over to the right just to keep up. Some lurches aside, the animal is going more-or-less where intended.
March 24th, 2023 at 10:38AM
Name four
March 24th, 2023 at 2:25PM
Rove? Stone? Ailes? Cheney? Cohn (distant past)? Thiel (present)?
March 25th, 2023 at 12:41AM
I suppose one could add the Koch brothers…
March 25th, 2023 at 10:52AM
I forgot to mention Bannon.