We Need Parents, Not Laws
To The Editor: I watched (D) Sen. Chris
I watched (D) Sen. Chris Murphy’s emotional speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, “urging his colleagues to take meaningful action to address gun violence.” Emotionalism does not generate good policy.
“We’ve known how to prevent a school shooting for more than 20 years” is the title of an article written by a professional from a group of academics, lawenforcement professionals and psychologists who published initial research on mass shootings in schools more than 20 years ago.
Many of the things people are saying on the news that we should be concerned about, were identified 20 years ago. Their studies show would-be school shooters don’t keep their plans to themselves”. Their reports focused on behavior and the mental state of young people who talked about anger and verbalized thinking about suicide. One researcher described a “pattern of young people who were deeply depressed, unable to cope with circumstances and couldn’t see any way out. They were unable to control sadness or anger, and they started acting in “ways that were essentially suicidal”. Another, a professor of psychology at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in teen violence and began studying school shooters in the late 1990s, James Garbarino, stated, “”. “School shooters typically do this out of a profound adolescent crisis.”
A living school shooter, currently serving multiple sentences, revealed in an interview, “before the attack he spent weeks vacillating between suicide and homicide. Only after he tried and failed to kill himself did he settle on killing others in hopes that someone would kill him.”
Experts say policies that keep guns out of the hands of teenagers are important but it is “crucial to set up systems that spot teens that are struggling and may become dangerous. You can’t predict violent events or who will go from threatening behavior to murder, but it is possible for us to look around and see the people who are having problems and need intervention. Interventions can prevent violence.”
A legal fellow in the Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation in a recent testimony at a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform to discuss the shootings laid out the problems with gun control. Excerpts of her testimony include: “Semi-automatic rifles are the firearm least often used to commit gun violence,” “Pistol grips and barrel shrouds don’t make them any more or less deadly, while these features can and do make a difference in the context of lawful selfdefense, which is why millions of peaceable Americans own them.” She said that the few rigorous studies on magazine size and the link to gun violence have been “inconclusive” at best. She offered several alternatives including, “take violent crime seriously under the existing federal law.” “The policy of universal background checks would not have stopped, with perhaps one lone exception, a single mass public shooter in the last 20 years because they all either passed or were capable of passing background checks.”
We don’t need more gun laws that constrict our second amendment rights. We need more parents and adults who recognize and attend to the physical and spiritual needs of adolescents. We need role models that will make themselves available and give serious attention to concerns young people express and that encourage young people to talk about or ask about the challenges they are facing.
Cindy Rodibaugh
Flatonia