Children shooting children…

It was just one of those days. You start out with the best intentions to accomplish something and you get sidetracked and end up doing something else. My daughter wanted some things shipped to her and I was going to break down a large Rubber-Made tote into two smaller boxes for shipping and then I went outside. Well I started to go outside but in my entryway there was a build up of snow. It seems the snow showers that were forecast arrived with a little wind, and it blew past the storm flap into the entryway. So I cleared the snow and opened the tarp to find a few snow drifts surrounding my truck, which led to…..

Well you get the picture, I ended up clearing the drive which for me took about an hour and a half even though most of the snow was only inches deep. Again it’s that ‘old age’ thing combined with a lifetime of bad habits, (smoking), and you end up with 5 minutes of shoveling with 15 minutes of sitting. The end result, as you can see, is a clear driveway but with my daughters re-packing still not accomplished. In between bouts with the snow I managed to listen to the radio and heard on the news of another school shooting. I used to think that the reason we are hearing about more disasters and shootings is because the media wants to keep our minds off of some other very important things like our government making new laws about gun control, immigration and the national debt.

But this almost weekly news about another child, shooting other children takes me back to an earlier post about respect and responsibility. Why was it when I was in grade and high school we did not have the number of shootings we have today? How about school children, during the time I was in school, not even being able to conceive of using a gun. The sad fact, I believe, is that we as adults are responsible for almost every shooting by the children of today. I know this sounds nuts but think about it. We allowed society as a whole to desensitize our children with more and more violent movies and computer games. Now the children today do not see firing a gun as something wrong since their hero’s kill a lot of people in the movies, and they are rewarded in computer games with the number of kills they get.

Their minds are conditioned to think gun when they face a situation that they can not handle otherwise. No, of course, it is not just the movies and games that are causing the increase of child related shootings. We have to add into this mix ‘our’ lack of parenting. If we did not ingrain the ideal of respect for each other we are also adding fuel to a potential fire. Through our own inaction when little Johnny beats up another boy, and just brush it off saying you shouldn’t do things like that, they learn there is no ‘real’ consequence for their actions.

Yes the groundwork for a new society has been and is being laid, where our children have a far different view of personal responsibility and respect for each other. I just wonder what our country will look like when our children’s children become adults.

And I pray for the sake of our children and grandchildren

that like always I am wrong.