The Daily Escape:
Geminids Meteor shower, Grand Tetons, WY – December 2023 timed exposure photo by Jeff Bernhard
We’ve just passed the 11th Anniversary of the school massacre in Newtown, CT. Wrongo and Ms. Right live about 20 minutes from the scene. While that grisly event is never too far from our consciousness when December rolls around, we never thought there would come a time when America would have an easier time banning books than guns. From the WaPo:
“Last school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That’s more than six guns each day, on average. Nationwide…1.1 million students…attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year.”
It’s hard to imagine that while some children are trying to learn, others are packing.
Even that exhaustive review of local news sources doesn’t account for guns that are carried into schools undetected. In addition, many gun seizures are never disclosed by districts. Some guns are found on campuses located in communities that are underserved by news organizations.
The Post asked the country’s 100 largest school districts to share data on guns seized over the last five school years. Many said they do not track that data. But disclosures from 51 of them illuminated the gap between what’s reported in the news and what happens in schools.
In those districts, representing 6.3 million students, 515 guns were found during the 2022-2023 school year. That means 58% of seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations. The Post’s survey recorded guns recovered at schools in rural, suburban and urban areas, in all 50 states and Washington, DC. Here’s a chart from the WaPo survey:
Note the sharp increase after the Covid shutdown. A giant problem is that the true number of guns on school campuses is almost certainly far higher.
The Post found that the number of campus gun seizures spiked significantly between the 2018-2019 school year and the 2022-2023 school year — a five-year period that, following the pandemic shutdowns, has also seen significantly more behavioral problems in school. The 47 districts for which The Post was able to obtain five full school years of data saw a 79% increase in guns found on campuses over that time frame. In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings.
A huge question is what’s causing so many more kids to bring loaded guns to school? The WaPo quotes Megan Ranny a leading firearm-injury researcher and dean of the Yale School of Public Health:
“Kids are more likely to carry firearms, and even to bring firearms into school, if they have been victims of violence themselves, if they aren’t connected to a community, if they have post-traumatic stress….We’ve got a lot of kids who are scared…maybe have lost parents from Covid, maybe have lost community connections because of shutdowns of community groups during Covid. And then add on to it increased access to firearms. A lot of guns bought over the last couple of years. It becomes a perfect storm.”
Such frightening thoughts. One of the positive outcomes from Sandy Hook is that Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit launched after the 2012 killings, debuted the “Say Something Anonymous Reporting System” that allows users to anonymously alert school officials of safety concerns at any time of day, online or by phone. More from WaPo:
“More than 5,000 schools use the program….The system is free to schools….In the districts they’ve trained, about 3% of students and staff, on average…submit tips…although some school systems see higher participation rates, up to 5%. Most tips concern suicidal behavior and drug use. But the system has averted at least 143 acts of violence with a weapon, including at least 15 planned school shootings, since 2018…”
And what about parents? What’s their responsibility for one of their kids bringing a gun to school? Parents have largely skated on accountability for the misdeeds of their children, except in Virginia, where last week, CNN reports that:
“The mother of the Virginia 6-year-old who shot his first grade teacher in January was sentenced Friday to two years in prison, according to the court in Newport News.”
What happens to her son (she’s a single parent) will be collateral damage in this story. Parents need to be held accountable for these acts, particularly when the kid took the parent’s gun to school.
When we talk about what‘s wrong today, we have to admit that there’s nothing more important in America than the supremacy of the Second Amendment. Your life, the lives of your spouse and children, or your friends are worth nothing compared to that “right” to own guns.
Time to wake up America! The nation is sinking under this sick and warped interpretation of the Amendment. To help you wake up, It’s the perfect time for Tchaikovshy’s 1892 “Waltz of the Flowers” from his ballet “The Nutcracker”. Here it is performed by the Concertgebow in the Netherlands, conducted by Semyon Bychkov.
The waltz is the last number in the Nutcracker Suite, which is set on Christmas Eve at the foot of a Christmas tree in a child’s imagination:
The second amendment has morphed from something in the background that was virtually a dead letter to something that – as you suggest, has primacy over all else. Ignored in the so called textual analysis by conservatives is the opening which tries to give some foundation for the amendment. Of course a serious examination of the meaning of the opening should have made it clear that the founders were worried about a standing army, not the right to own a gun. And militia members, while including adults who did own firearms included many in their teens (especially when the militia was getting ready to fight). These kids did not own weapons. If we look to historical examples such as Shays rebellion (or John Brown’s) we see that a key event was taking control of a source of weapons – so Springfield Armory for Shays and Harper’s Ferry for John Brown.
Of course no one doubts that a non enumerated right to own weapons for self defense did exist when the Constitution was drafted, but conservative fear the non enumerated rights because to consider them would be to allow the constitution to evolve – which is what founders like Hamilton believed would happen. And in fact via case law, it mostly has (for example the use of the 14th amendment to give rights to artificial persons – corporations).
The abortion decision was another example of discounting a non enumerated right to privacy. But was was don’t tread on me, or the right against illegal search and seizure at heart expressions of notions of privacy that was the basis for Roe v Wade.