DADI.org

by John Rosemond

I've always thought investigative reporter Ed Bradley ("60 Minutes") made reasonably good sense, even on those occasions when I've disagreed with him. Not this time, however. Asked by CNN's Larry King why school shootings have always occurred in suburban or small town schools (i.e., Littleton, CO) rather than inner city schools, Bradley said there are more guns in our suburbs and small towns. Given the problem of unregistered guns, there's no way of knowing whether that's true or not.

What Bradley was disingenuously attempting to do, of course, was promote public acceptance of the politically correct notion that school shootings are the result of lax gun control-that they're a Second Amendment problem. I'd love to ask Bradley to please explain why although most 19th Century American children had easy access to guns, no record exists of a child in the 1800s going on a shooting rampage in his school or community. In fact, such incidents have only taken place in the late-20th Century, during which gun control laws have been stricter than ever.

King's better question would have been, "Why have all these shootings taken place in public as opposed to private or church-run schools?" The answer is definitely not that upper-middle class and/or church-going Americans own relatively few guns. Rather, private and church-run schools are legally able to expel the budding sociopath, something public schools can no longer do. Courtesy of the American Civil Liberties Union and other like-minded elements of our society, public schools are helpless to do anything about anti-social children but "counsel" them. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that talking to a sociopath does anything but waste some well-intentioned person's time.

Private and church-run schools can also provide an education in moral foundations. Once upon a not-so-long-ago time, public schools could do likewise. Then someone decided that talking to children about God was toxic speech. In today's public schools, teachers can discuss every conceivable sexual subject. But God? Hush!

The same deconstructionist elements mentioned above are responsible for the fact that "freedom of speech" now includes the "right" of a child to express disaffection and disrespect by parading down the halls of a taxpayer-funded school wearing a black trench coat adorned with a swastika and an armband proclaiming "I hate people."

Mental health professionals aided and abetted the secular left by devising a bogus self-esteem culture that has turned public schools as well as many homes into virtual "no punishment zones" where children learn that adults do essentially nothing about misbehavior except wag their jaws. By Grandma's standards, many of today's children are getting away with "murder" long before adolescence, courtesy of parents and teachers who have digested 30-plus years of professional psychobabble to the effect that punishment causes shame, thereby damaging self-esteem. The latest research into "feeling special" tells what common sense should have told us all along; namely, that high self-esteem is synonymous with narcissism, and that narcissists are highly prone to violence when they feel unfairly treated. Meanwhile, we have yet to find a better way of dealing with misbehavior than to punish it.

No, the recent tragedy in Littleton is not symptomatic of lax gun control, but rather lax parents, lax schools, lax discipline, lax standards, lax expectations, and a culture which has become lax to the point of virtual indifference when it comes to morals, personal responsibility, and critical thinking. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise.

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