School Violence

 

The recent horrifying knife attacks in high schools is being covered as regular news, with none of the furor that occurs when a gun is used in an attack. 

It is interesting that acts of violence are the root cause, not the medium or the choice of execution.  It is the reasons for this outcropping of violent behavior that should be explored ad infinitum, not the choice of gun or knife or bomb or running over somebody with a car.  The press does not research the topic of violent behavior and the reasons for it and the prevention of violence.  Some of the press prefer to vilify firearms because it’s easier than really researching the causes of violent behavior in our society.    

Removing guns and knives and weapons of self-defense only reduces our society to that of the strong versus the weak, a notoriously poor position for women and children. 

So why no furor over the knife attacks?  What brand of knife was used?  How large were the knives?  Just think about all this information they left out.  Evidently there’s no detailed description of how the attackers obtained the knives and how they smuggled them into the school and how they were prevented from further attacks.  No diagrams, no maps and not much interest in the knife attacks exhibited by the press. 

So let’s examine the reasons for the violence.  Let’s talk about the small male knife wielder who apparently felt his fellow students deserved to be surprised by the horror of his knife attacks.  Why did this kid feel that way?  Take your choice:  On illegal drugs, on ‘medication’, socially shunned, physically different, not an athlete, not a member of a group, raised by siblings, raised by nobody, unrealistic expectations, in fantasy land, can’t attain ideals, a low IQ, bullied or just plain old nuts and vicious.  Why not explore all these possibilities?  Why not publicize the drugs in the bloodstreams of attackers, in order to discern a pattern, if any? 

So now a male student killed a female student who refused to go to the prom with him.  He killed her with a knife and then fled but was apprehended by police.  Nobody is asking why the prom was so important in this kid’s social setting.  Should the prom have been so important?  Other activities are not as important?  Did the male think the female was his property and when she disobeyed him, he killed her?  Was he raised in a brutal fashion that demonstrated that females had to be dominated or you were not a man?  Him showing up at the prom with this girl was more important than anything?  What does this say about values?  The prom should not have been that important.  Was his being with this girl bringing him into a social group he craved?  Prison has social groups.  So do high schools and the adults who run the schools often encourage the social stratification, which so often leads to violence due to the exclusion of ‘less desirable’ students from the mainstream activities.   But nobody in the press explores the ‘traditional’ high school culture that has spawned awful outbursts of violence.

Many teachers are self-avowed liberals, union members and others who want to preserve the status quo, without regard to the mounting seriousness of violence, blaming the availability of weapons instead.  With this misguided focus, the problem of violence in the schools will continue growing and the social issues of the high schools will not be addressed.