Avoiding self reflection in the wake of school shootings

Is just what youth are doing across our nation today, as students bravely skip school to serve the designs of the Gun Control movement.  The fact is, almost every school shooter was a student who was brutally and ruthlessly bullied.  You'd think someone in our media would bother to ask all these students if they could reflect on what part some of them might have played in bullying others.

We know that before the Parkland shooter was officially identified, students reported that they knew who did it.  And they knew why.  The kid was bullied.  Given the fact that we have elevated bullying to being the worst thing since the Holocaust, this should somehow have made the news.  Of course the myriad failures that led to the shooting have been all but ignored, so I suppose that's grasping.

As Ashe Schow at The Federalist points out, this is ultimately just exploiting and using these convenient youth as ideological shields. After all, who dares question them?  They're the victims, they're the future and they're the hope.  A common partisan tactic.

BTW, Jonah Goldberg posted a rather controversial, but sane, piece exposing the lunacy behind this notion that 'the kids have spoken, so it must be.'  At least the kids that have spoken about gun control.  Kids who aren't about gun control seem to be strangely silent.

Fact is, we know guns have nothing to do with the overall violence problems in America today.  People have killed with or without guns for ages.  Around the world, where guns are scarce, in violent societies, people will turn to other means of mass killing.  And guns were far more available decades ago when we didn't have this phenomenon we casually refer to as 'school shootings.'

In our country, the mass shootings - as horrible as they are - account for a small portion of deaths by gunfire. The solutions everyone is talking about might have reduced some of the casualties in a few of the mass shootings, but that is all.  Despite promises that gun control activists know there is more to do than lobby for gun restrictions, they never seem to get around to anything other than lobbying for gun restrictions.

When thinking about the violence, more likely than anything is the fact that we are a society that peddles hedonism and narcissism as the two cardinal virtues, and that might not be a healthy trend.  We are a society that thinks nothing of defining what is and isn't a human being per our latest convenience, and that has to have a subconscious impact on people.   We are a nation that increasingly sees life as pointless unless we are able to indulge in creature comforts or even debauchery and decadence, and that must have devastating consequences for those who can't keep up with the material world.  We are a country that has become divided, and spews hatred and contempt at those who don't agree with us in a way that would shame most wartime propaganda, and we know what wartime propaganda is capable of inspiring.

These things and more are likely why we have school shootings, not guns.  The fact that our kids see adults acting like our nation just described, but without the cleverness and maturity of 'adults', has likely turned old time bullying into something truly wicked and evil.  And those who are in the cross hairs of that behavior, who have other problems to contend with, become the killers that are subsequently ignored by the forces who only see things like Parkland as validation for their agendas. 

If we cared about stopping the violence, instead of merely pushing an agenda, we might show up to the student protests and apologize for the nation we have built, and assure the kids it's time for all of us to begin walking back from the problems we have made.  I won't hold my breath.