Parkland

Blaming a gun for Parkland is the easy, feel-good way to ‘fix’ the issue.  It is very easy to say ‘ban all firearms’ because it is a tangible thing to talk about.  But only talking about the guns, we miss the fact that it wasn’t the gun that killed those kids, it was the person standing behind the gun.  Taking the easy way out will not solve anything.  We need to have a more difficult conversation by asking ourselves these questions: ‘Why did this kid possess so much hate in his heart to overcome the morality of the situation?’, ‘How many ways did our government fail in protecting the students’? ,  ‘How was this kid treated by his fellow students?’ and ‘Why is our society now generating more of these killers’?  

The issue isn’t the gun! It is just a tool like a fork or hammer. The issue is the person doing the killing. If a person, such as Cruz, was going to kill, then the lack of a gun wouldn’t stop him. He’d use an ied, a knife, a pressure cooker or drive a vehicle through a crowd of kids as they left school. So, banning weapons would not have prevented this or any other event.

How do we keep guns out of the hands of one intent on killing? How do we prevent an auto sale or rental to a person intent on driving a vehicle into a crowd? How do we refuse to sell a pressure cooker to someone intending to blow up a marathon?  Once the 2nd amendment is gone, creating ‘thought police’ to figure out intentions of a person is the next step, and to do that, the rest of our constitutional rights are easily taken away.  Don’t scoff at this notion, we already have laws to determine intent.  Haven’t you heard about ‘Hate Crimes’?   A crime is not just a crime anymore if hate is involved.  I got news for you: All crimes are hate crimes.  The way I see it, we are about 1975 on a pathway to 1984.

Up until 5 minutes prior to Cruz becoming a mass murderer, you would have a great deal of sympathy for him. He grew up without a father, and his mother recently pass away. He didn't have a stable home life. He didn't have role models teaching him morality to know right from wrong. He's playing video games and watching Hollywood movies glorifying killing. He was lashing out at schools and rather then the school system obtaining the social and/or psychological help he needs, they bounced him around like an unwanted turd. The police were called on him many, MANY times yet they did nothing to get this kid the help he needed. Even the FBI was alerted and did nothing. Heck, He even called the police on himself! He was screaming at everyone who'd listen that he needed help!

At any stage of this, someone could have given this kid some help, and if they had, he'd not be a mass murderer and all those families would be whole.  At the very least, if the police had done their job, there’d be an arrest which would have prevented him from obtaining a legal firearm.

How many ways did our government fail in protecting the students?  

There were so many failures at the governmental level it’s not funny.  Lets start with the School system.  The new superintendent of schools recognized Broward county had one of the highest arrest rates for students.  There’s obviously two ways to get the statistics down — the easy way or the hard way.  The easy way is to simply stop arresting kids!  The hard way is to find the root causes and tackle them.  Well guess which path they took?  Yup, the easy way.  So simply not reporting incidents by shoveling them under the carpet led to better stats, but worse situations within the classroom.  

Teachers were no longer reporting incidents because they were afraid of being branded as racist since many of these incidents involved minority students.

Let’s move on to the Sherif’s department.  They are in full knowledge of the new policy from the superintendent and bought into it because they themselves are measured against arrests.  But it looks like they took it a step or two further.  Cruz was known to the Sherif’s department after many, many incidents they were called.  

Because of the new reporting (or non-reporting) system, the murderer had 21 incidents at the school that were not referred to the police.  The police then were called to his home 39 times. Not once was this person taken to the police station and charged with anything and kept overnight.  If just once he had been, he would not have passed his background check and he would never have been able to acquire a legal weapon of any kind.

But for whatever reason, they didn’t arrest him.

By this time, the Obama administration also adopted similar methods nation wide.  This normalized the terrible policies of taking the easy way out by calling the old policy racist in that bad behavior is somehow racist when too many black kids are arrested.  This is the easy way out rather then trying to get to the root causes, such as the total breakdown of the family unit in the black community, the cycle of poverty and violence in the black community, which has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘whitey’, but blame ‘whitey’ anyway as the easy way out.

The FBI had been notified several times about Cruz’ behavior and posts on social media.  The FBI did nothing.  I have to cut the FBI some slack here.  They are in a difficult position that they have to be right a million times whereas the killer has to be right just once.  Im sure the FBI gets a million calls like this one and it is terribly difficult determining which is legitimate and which is not.  However, this is still a total failure on their part.  They could have gotten this one right after several calls on this one kid.

Why did this kid possess so much hate in his heart to overcome the morality of the situation?

Who in our society is responsible to teaching our children morality? Answer: Parents.  It is the parents job to guide their kids by demonstrating moral ethics by example, by getting them involved in Church and pointing out to them what is right from wrong.  It is the parents job to mitigate the unmoral activities foisted on our youth by Hollywood, gaming and easy access to internet content.  Im not here to limit these things to our youth as most youth have parents to guide them through the minefields set before them.  Most kids can recognize these things for what they are, but some kids didn’t have the opportunity to learn from their parents.  Some kids didn’t have parents, like Cruz.  Some kids only had a single mother, and for the lack of a father, they turn to other father figures, and in some cases, these are gang members or other role models that do not teach proper moral ethics.

Now to the flip side of this coin.  Why would Cruz decide to shoot up a school?  Why not shoot at something else?  What caused him to hate the schools and his peers so much to do this to them?  We know the school system totally neglected him and bounced him around.  We know they didn’t reach out to help him in any meaningful way.  How would that make a person feel?  What we can also surmise is this kid didn’t have a lot of friends, and most likely was bullied, picked on or otherwise ostracized by the very people speaking out about gun violence.   I know 1st hand how ruthless kids can be.  I know how I felt when I was picked on mercilessly.  Each kid has to find their own pathway through this situation.  Most do, but some do not, but without a strong, moral compass, it is extremely difficult.  This coupled with his broken home life makes for a terrible situation for anyone to be in.  In the situations, some teens lash out like Cruz did, or suppress their feelings so much that suicide is what they feel is their only option.   Teen suicide is climbing.  I’ll speculate that there’s a correlation between the rise of suicide to the rise of deadly incidents by teens.

Why is our society now generating more of these killers?

The thing is, we’ve had guns in our society from the very beginning of our society.  Because ‘we the people’ had weapons, we became a free nation!  We overthrew the current, oppressive, tyrannical government who raised taxes to unsustainable levels (sound familiar?), over-regulated industries (sound familiar?) and quashed free-trade  (sound familiar?).  The framers of our constitution, recognizing what happens when a federal government gets too large, created our US constitution specifically to constrain federal government. They recognized that We the People’s rights don’t come from government, they are god-given thus cannot be taken away by government.  This is the primary reason why the Bill of Rights was included and why the 2nd amendment is as important today as it was when it was drafted, for without the 2nd, the rest of our rights are gone.

Arms has been a fact of American culture for as long as there’s been the USA.  Up until several decades ago, schools were teaching proper handling and marksmanship of firearms.  Up until a few decades ago, our children weren’t bombarded with death and destruction images coming from Hollywood or video games. Up until a few decades ago, kids are being raised by 2 parents and the family structure wasn’t as broken as it is today.  Up until a few decades ago, it didn’t take 2 parents working full time to support a family.

But all things being equal, what has changed?  Over this timeframe, guns haven’t changed all that much.  The AR15 was 1st manufactured back in the mid 1950’s and became popular because it was so modularized and customizable.  But other rifles have been around for a lot longer.  

The guns haven’t changed…. society has.  We need to take a hard look at what has happened over the last few decades that led to a degradation of the family structure, that has led us to accept the horror coming out of Hollywood and video games, and all of the other things that only serve to confuse our kids.  

This situation could be a teaching moment for all of us to understand Cruz's plight. We should be talking about this so schools, police, communities, FBI etc. can recognize these warning signs because there are most likely many more kids like Cruz out there right now.  But even more importantly, we need to take a serious look in the mirror at how we as parents, teachers, fellow classmates can effect our culture in a positive way.  These are the difficult questions to ask and having these conversations may actually prevent the next incident.  Taking away guns will have no effect at all and is a useless conversation to have.