It is past time we Americans accept full responsibility for our children and our schools.. The carnage currently being witnessed in Uvalde, Texas, was totally preventable. It is the result of our social ills and our reluctance to face our problems. And believe me, the problem is not the gun!
The leading cause of America’s social difficulties are our broken homes. Forty percent of couples are not married, and about 40 percent of children are reared in homes most often without a father.
Poor or a total lack of parenting skills results in children who follow in their parents’ misguided footsteps. Being unwanted, unloved, and abused, they fail to learn common social norms such as consideration and love of others and the absolute necessity of hard work, restrictions and discipline. Treat a young puppy the same way and the result is a dog who behaves the same way: wild, afraid, miserable and angry, but a primary difference between a child and a dog is that the dog does not have access to a gun!
The increase in the number of children with only one parent originated in the 1930s during the Roosevelt Administration with the passage of A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). Illegitimacy began to explode in the 1960s with a guaranteed income for unwed mothers, the advent of The Pill, and the decline of our sexual mores. Women in mass began taking the pill but sometimes forgetting to take it, and men found it convenient to enjoy sex without having to pay for it. The result should have been no surprise, yet here we are, and we are now paying the devil for our lack of judgment and morality.
Uvalde is only one in a series of continuing examples where a young, single, disturbed, white male from a broken home has used a firearm to take his frustrations out on those who were nearby and helpless. How can we forget Luke Woodham, Pearl High School, 1981, when this type of tragedy first came to our national attention? And we should remember that Woodham suddenly decided to cease and desist his deadly rampage when a school administrator confronted him with his own handgun. All of these horrible, preventable tragedies provide a segue to the purpose of this article.
Why do people in authority, such as our police and military, use a firearm to change human behavior? Because firearms, although admittedly a last resort, are extremely effective at making people stop whatever it is they are doing. Dictators throughout recorded history have known that. Their universal modus operandi has been and continues to be:
Register all firearms.
Register all persons who own a firearm.
Make some firearms illegal.
Require that all illegal firearms be turned in.
Arrest those who fail to turn in an illegal firearm.
Outlaw all firearms.
Arrest everyone who owns a firearm.
Arrest, imprison and kill everyone they desire.
I am reminded of the inscription on the wooden grips of an old Colt .45 revolver: When danger threatens, no matter the size, call on me, I’ll equalize.
Now for the good news. Even though our children, our schools and our guns are being threatened, we have both the ability and the responsibility to stop those threats, and we do not need more police to do it.
Mississippi currently has four hundred fifty thousand students in one thousand public schools. There is absolutely no way we can afford enough police to protect those children. Our police are already among the lowest paid in the Nation, and we simply do not have the money to recruit, hire and train more for that absolutely essential job. But we do have other resources
More than sixty-four million Americans volunteer every year to assist non-profit organizations. The average volunteer gives an agency 53 hrs each year, so their total commercial value to those agencies at $29/hr is $193 billion. And 95% of those volunteers say that volunteering enriches their lives.
Mississippi has the resources to address the pressing problem of school violence. We have 37,500 retired school teachers, 165,000 retired military veterans, 394,000 licensed hunters, plus an unknown number of retired security guards, members of church security teams and residents with an Enhanced Concealed Carry Weapon permit. We should also include the number of current teachers in Mississippi who would gladly be armed while at school if not prevented from doing so. Also, it is extremely important for us to realize that a significant percentage of Mississippi’s potential volunteers have already received some type of firearms training and certification.
Conservatively, I would say there are at least one million Mississippians who would respond if asked to take a part-time, volunteer role in protecting our school children. Towards that end I suggest the creation of a Mississippi program that identifies, enrolls and trains those volunteers. It might be named the Mississippi School Safety Volunteer Program, (MSSVP).
More good news is that the mere presence of armed guards in all of our schools will effectively stop the current wave of violence by mentally disturbed young men. Those attackers are not crazy. They are cowards who vent their anger only on the defenseless.
Defending our children, our schools, and our constitutional right to own firearms are easy problems to solve. We just have to do it!
More difficult, if not impossible, may be resolving the demise of our national morals.
Clyde Morgan is a decorated Vietnam veteran. He lives in Crossgates in Brandon.
