“I’m a little surprised at myself for my consistency so far with this. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks.”
I typed the previous sentence, started on my newsletter, and the shooting in Uvalde happened before I could finish it or get it posted. After that, these ramblings seemed pointless and silly at best.
I did not know what to really do with myself last week, like many people. I’ve worked in schools. I’ve worked with kids who killed someone (allegedly). I worked in a detention center that was basically a jail for kids (even it had more than one door).
I wrote a 30-page paper in grad school (mid-00s) on zero tolerance policy responses to school shootings in the late 1990s and how most did more to contribute to the already-racist school-to-prison-pipeline than they did to actually “deter” anything. Deterrence-based policies, in general, don’t stand up to statistical scrutiny for a variety of reasons, but anyone who has met children, teens, or even early-twentysomethings can tell you the flaw in deterrence. Clearly, I have more to say about all that, but last week didn’t seem like the time. Or, last week, I was too furious.
Too many people seem to think kids attending school in prison is the answer. Those people, are frankly morons. More specifically, they’re misguided or uneducated or just so beholden to their weapons fetish they’d rather lock up the kids instead of the guns.
Calling it a fetish is the correct approach. 3% of Americans own the majority of the guns. Dozens. So many are against banning these weapons of war because they might want one someday. We do not need them.
That’s quite a fantasy he has going there, of these ever-higher-taller-more-impenetrable walls that will absolutely-totally keep kids safe. I can see how, if you really-absolutely did not want to take responsibility for your own actions, the idea of a perfectly safe kid-prison might seem appealing. Thanks for helping to disabuse him & others like him of that notion.