The folks here in Harford County, Maryland, have decided to spend more than a million dollars a year to put cops in middle-schools and set up a crisis center for drug users. At least an initial report in the local paper included some funding for a crisis center. A more recent report says nothing about it, so it may no longer be under consideration. I’m all for a crisis center but wonder why, both locally and nationally, nobody is answering the key question of why kids are taking guns to school?
I’m a boomer and can remember when this never happened. Then it started happening. Why? Don’t we need to find an answer as to why a problem exists before it we can work on solving it? Is there a connection between the violence in schools and increasingly violent entertainment? Are kids acting out what they see in the movies and on tv? Is there some connection to our national acceptance of militarism as a solution to our problems?
History tells us that simply throwing money after a problem will not solve it. How many billions have been spent on the 50 year-old “war on drugs” which has been a miserable failure? Anyway, whatever it is that’s going on here, it’s probably not because of drugs. This wasn’t happening in the 60’s or 70’s and there were plenty of drugs around. Even the terrible influx of cocaine into the central-cities didn’t cause kids to carry guns to school in the 80’s. The gang-bangers were shooting it out in L.A., but the schools were a kind of neutral “safe zone.” The violence was gang on gang. Occasionally an innocent bystander would be shot but there was not this indiscriminate shooting of kids in school. So what’s happening here? What changed? Are we on a path to becoming a police state without an answer as to why?
Where will this stop? When there are cops in body armor with machine guns on sling at every entrance and a tank parked out on the front lawn?