General Discussion Board
Comments, comments and still more comments.....
Posted By: Blue Knight <dodsongp@hotmail.com> (149.101.1.104)
Date: Wednesday, 1 March 2000, at 9:09 a.m.This is a response to everyone, most of us have have voiced opinions on the incident that happened yesterday in Michigan. After reading thru all of the comments and seeing all of the pain that everyone is feeling, I am happy to see that we all feel so much empathy and sympathy for people that we have never seen, much less met. The poor people in Mount Morris Michigan might even be a little surprised to find out the reactions that are being voiced here and else where. Maybe, in some small way, we are moving forward...
As to the ideas, feelings and opinions that we have all given voice to here, I figured that I should add my own to the mix. An odd thought came to me as I sat here reading your responses and ideas, even tho we disagree on some issues and points, we still say pretty much the same things. Near as I can tell, no one has any bad ideas. On the contrary, everyone has some excellent ideas on what steps should be taken to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the future.
First off, Pete has a valid point when he tells us that a child age 6 or younger can not be held accountable for a criminal action. I don't know if all states have their own law about this age or not, but the precedent exists. The U.S. Supreme court ruled that a child age 6 or younger is not mentally capable to determine right from wrong. Now tho Tracy makes an excellent point too. Given the state of the mass media in this country, why wouldn't a child age 6 know what death, dying, murder, mayhem, theft, etc. are? The simple answer is that they do. They know full well what the crimes are and that they carry some fairly severe penalities, however, the ruling by the Supreme court addressed *ONLY* the ability of the child to distinguish between right and wrong. And that is where the flaw is. Who is teaching our children and grandchildren the difference?
The heros of today are the gang bangers, popular music (not just "Gangsta" Rap), the video games and their characters, these are the role models of children today. The child watches a movie which shows that the only way to gain respect is to kill someone. Then they hear songs which glorify violence and crime in general. Then we have the games like Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, etc. where you score points by killing. Is it any wonder that a child of 6 would have trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality or right and wrong?
About 15 years ago, here in Washington D.C., a man and his pregnant wife were drivinbg home from their jobs one evening. As they were driving along the passenger side window shattered and the wife (think she was 6 months pregnant with the couples first child) slumped forward in her seat. She was killed instantly by a single rifle bullet to the head. Mother and child both died. The killer was caught a day or so later. He was a 15 year old boy who, when asked why he had committed the crime, replied "I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone". He stood on the opposite shore of the Anacostia River and using a rifle, just fired randomly at cars on the freeway. He never saw his victim, he never knew her, she nor her family had ever done anything to the juvinile killer or his family or friends. He just wanted to experience the *thrill* of killing another human being. BTW, since he was 15, the juvinile was charged as an adult and convicted of double premeditated homicide and is *still* serving back to back life sentences in a maximum security federal facility. Odds are he will *not* survive to see his freedom again, if he does survive, he will be in his eigthies.
So what happened? What would drive a teenager to commit a murder for *NO* reason? What should his parent(s) have done differently? Yes, he was a child of the inner-city ghetto, yes, he came from a poor, severely dysfunctional family. But what could/should have been done to prevent him from taking the actions that culminated in the deaths of a mother and her unborn child? Maybe the real question here is *WHO*, rather than what, should have done something to prevent this from happening.
You know, it amazes me to no end when I see reports like this one from Michigan. I'm 45 years old and I came in a little on the late side into that generation that survived Vietnam, protests marches, riots, civil rights unrest. Hell I remember watching Doctor Martin Luther King making his "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial *live* on, *black and white*, television! This was during the "Free Love" generation, the peaceful people! Yet they set into motion the events that brought us incidents like the freeway shooting, the Colombine High School shootings and now the Buell Elementary School shooting. It appears that somewhere along the way, the message of peace and love got lost. We seem to have given up *our* rights as parents and instead now expect the government, schools, mass media, or even strangers on the street to control and disclipline our children, even teach them values.
This is NOT peculiar to America, this is happening in Canada, England (now theres gun control. Not even the police carry guns!), France, Spain, etc. It is a world wide epidemic! Laws and even religion don't seem to be doing the trick, if they ever did. I am of the opinion that the breakdown in moral fiber goes much, much deeper. That we as families and parents have lost something in the last 30 (or so) years, something that we may not have even been aware of. Not control or disclipline, but rather family.
Remember the so-called "ME" generation? I have seen people that I **would** have considered *good* parents leave a toddler in a crib all day long, while mommy and/or daddy played video games, hung out online, or did other things. They tied the child down by putting them in their crib so that they (mommy and daddy) could have *their* life. What kind of message does the toodler get from that? The child gets to watch television thru the bars of the crib and play with their toys in a 2 foot by 4 foot cell, but that is it. Nothing to make them wonder, nothing to make them start moving into a *productive* direction, no love, no intimacy, no family. What a pity, what a loss, what a crime!
Are we all *really* surprised to see things like the school shootings? Will tighter gun laws help? I doubt it. Like Barbi and others have already said, we have *more than* enough laws on the books now, what we need is some responsibility in our society. Look at Washington D.C., our nations capitol! We have the most stringent handgun laws in the entire country. Here you *can not*, under *any* circumstances, legally possess a handgun. Yet we have a very high murder rate. So do we really need more laws? Do we as a society really believe that more laws are the answer? What about morals? What about upbringing? If somehow, all guns were forever removed from the entire world tomorrow, does anyone *really* believe that that alone would put and end to violent crime? May put a big dent in the number of violent crimes, but it still wouldn't stop assault, rape, murder, or robbery.
Society is rotting and it has been for some time now. We, as a world wide community and society, have a cancer. If we don't soon stop the infection that is killing us, there will indeed be hell to pay in the end. We are raising our own executioners! And it is **ALL OUR FAULT**!