chasm and make it yet harder to even find a way.
More and deeper heels in the sand. We will never get rid of guns. Yet our little kids go to school every day and they and their parents trust they will not be the next Sandy Hook. We didn't have an elementary school to put a name on little kid carnage...Columbine was a High School...and many of them now have security guards on campus...for frisking the kids if necessary, or providing at least a deterrent to a crazy shooter.
Our best bet is to figure out to live and work with those who believe it is their right, as long as they are law-abiding citizens, to have a gun. Because as much as we might like, they aren't going away any century soon. Not going to happen. Magical thinking and pie in the sky. He just put out in the media what has been reality in the US for centuries...and it no longer sounds appropriate in the light of the dead kids.
So that leaves us with conversing as adults and mediators between the folks that want to own legal weapons, for legal uses, and abide by all the rules....and those of us who, forced into accepting the futile nature of total confiscation and banning, would like to change those rules in a significant manner...and how to treat those who don't want to play by the rules. That's a long, but necessary process.
But first priority...the social net has been breached forever. Our kids need to be protected. Number One priority in this conversation. Twenty six murders, women and children in the homeland by an American citizen, in a white elementary school, has guaranteed that there will be changes...big ones. Meanwhile, millions of kids are going back to school in January.
Social change is not as instantaneous nor as inexpensive as the social trauma and shock that created the situation of horror we are all going through. And I'm all for increased mental health funding, some reasonable retrofitting to school buildings, but with all due respect, it's a long process.
If I was currently a parent of a young elementary student, I would be engaging in a process such as ...
(1) calling a PTA Meeting just for parents, teachers of the school
(2) interface with district administrative personnel and Board of Education members...making some immediate recommendations for our school and kids
(3) interfacing with local organizations and civic leaders all of whom directly share our concerns.
(4) Directly considering ways that are within our current ability to provide beefed up security to allay the fears of just about every parent who has a television and drops off kids, with trust they will return safe and sound. That's not necessarily a given any longer.
(5) I believe that this is the level the real ideas will come from...as well as the power to decide what is best.
We have Crossing Guards, who are usually friendly retirees that get to know the kids. No one feels they are promoting the fact that kids can't cross the streets by themselves. Of course they can. It's just the time or two when things didn't go exactly right and a kid was injured and/or killed.
Same is true for high schools and sporting events...no one feels like they are in a Police State because there are uniformed security in the parking lot and in the entry ways.
Even the laws to put a kid in a car seat don't reflect on the parent's driving...it's to protect the kid from the occasional idiot driver who is drunk, doesn't obey the laws, got distracted...whatever...but the chances of death are lesser by taking precautionary measures.
Now we come to the heart of our communities...just short of the hearths themselves...elementary schools. Is it defeat that this conversation is even necessary? Yes.
The shoe bomber did not end air transportation. He provided the impetus for a new level of protection ... the TSA ... we had not formerly needed. A defeat, in a way, but I've accustomed myself to the insult of nearly stripping down and/or getting patted down at an airport as a small price to pay for fearing for my safety on my flight.
As long as every gun is obligated to be registered, re-registered, annually taxed, the sale and transfer of any weapon is equal to a 6-pack of beer and a pack of cigarettes...or a motor vehicle...it won't take that long. The social conversation is shifting. Total ban "nuts" like me are willing to accept the inevitability of guns and make new rules. Legal gun owners...most of them...will be willing to participate in the conversation as it now could very possibly affect their own children or grandchildren.
I'm waiting for the PTA or the NEA to speak. They, too have been silent. It was their charges who were murdered and their charges who are still alive and need public schools.
Security Guards at elementary schools are now needed. There are enough vets, retired military, retired peace officers ... all trained...to get up to speed on the difference of protecting a public elementary school and get us started here. In the present.
This is what our kids need to see. They are already terrorized. What they don't need is helpless, hysterical hand-wringing and blame/shame on "them" from the adults, let alone fear of going to school. They need to see the reasoned and adult actions identifying a crisis, being horrified, while contributing to its solution...in whatever little or insignificant way. Calming. The social equivalent of the First Responders. Yes this is horrific...now kids, we help to clean it up, as part of the good guys. That's how they learn from a trauma...responsible adult actions. "It's all going to work out OK."
After that, let the longer-term negotiations begin.
I say this after having been an elementary kid's mother during the Polly Klaas kidnapping...we were traumatized with the nation as her body was discovered in a rural part of our town. The publicity, if nothing else, changed the social contract. There had been a number of kidnapped kids in our county that we never heard of, so never feared. In fact, their parents occasionally gave interviews questioning the national publicity of the well-to-do pretty little white girl. The good news is that her father did start a national network for abducted children.
Our neighborhood society was never again the free, casual, friendly open-door, bikes in the front yard, kids going to the park to play baseball after school it used to be. That's what I call a change in the social order.
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lol
