Letter: Don’t ban guns, ban schools

Posted 10/10/19

The typical reaction composed by our press and public figures focuses on the “shooting” side of “school shooting.” But no attention is made to the environment that the …

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Letter: Don’t ban guns, ban schools

Posted

The typical reaction composed by our press and public figures focuses on the “shooting” side of “school shooting.” But no attention is made to the environment that the shooting is carried out in; no questions are raised as to why mass shootings in general seem to favor schools as targets.

The shadow of many uneasy questions is thus, consciously I think on most parts, avoided.

Schools by their very nature encourage shootings. An environment of trapped rats will see the rats grow desperate and exhibit behavior pathological to rats in the open wild.

It’s no secret that adolescent angst is widespread and presumed to be a symptom innate to the demographic. But what is missing from this conclusion is minimal surface level analysis. No child becomes angry for no reason. Even an infant throws tantrums for specific reasons — the most common of which being hunger, attention, or in response to unwelcomed advances.

Why is it assumed that teenagers or primary school children should act any more illogically than an infant? The disgrace of America is not our crumbling infrastructure, our healthcare system, our divided political climate, our any other media issue for that matter; it is the indignity we foist upon the young.

Dragging children to school, placing them in the hands of a rotating cast of “professional” strangers for the majority of their youth and then expecting them to love their parents or even themselves for that matter is a denial of human nature. Instead of giving them the world, experience, and our own guidelines based on ethics, religion or reason, they are thrown into a manufactory of discontent.

To deny children their agency and wishes for such a long period, in such confinement, with such regularity, causes no good to emerge. No self-responsible adult can be conjured from such an “upbringing,” or lack thereof.

The young have been disenfranchised from their own lives, destinies, and time on this earth. They have become restless. Angry. Their anger is directed towards their jailers, their parents, and eventually seeps inward towards themselves.

Opioids are on the rise. Some one in three of college undergrads are on antidepressants. You can expect prison populations to explode as well, and strangely enough they have been exploding ever since the late 19th-century, when the boot of public schooling first stomped on the neck of the American underclass.

Either we extend dignity to the young or we continue our march to an all-inclusive and thoroughly earned destruction.

If the future of our nation is made in the hearts of our children, then we have minted a crumbling empire. We cannot expect our “leaders” to represent our interests. They are paid for.

Vote with your children. Seek unenclosed pastures, or our nation, our families, and our community, will reap a terrible harvest that can only sour for years to come.

Nathanael A. Cooper
Warren

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