One dead, two wounded in Tennessee school shooting

Well Ross,

Here is another school shooting, which will no doubt produce more invectives against us "evil gun owners" and how it is so important to protect the children and all of that. Now it is tragic for all, for the victim and the perp (although one hopes that he gets what he deserves from the criminal justice system).

If you will indulge me for just a moment while I take a walk down Memory Lane, but back in Yuma, Arizona at Kofa High School (from whence I graduated back in 1966 )in the early and middle 1960's it was not uncommon for the lads to take their guns to school and leave them in their vehicles, you see it was not uncommon for them to go hunting after school. The same could be said for some of the teachers, too. Ahh...a different time and place.

Regards,

Mark
 
mark056 said:
Here is another school shooting, which will no doubt produce more invectives against us "evil gun owners" and how it is so important to protect the children and all of that.

That was my point, basically. A kid who's already decided to kill is not going to be stopped because of a law saying you can't have a gun in school; he's already decided to break the law about not killing people. Something that the GFW's manage to overlook.

I know my post sounded a bit flip, but I just get so tired about the inevitable comparisons to Columbine. And from having been just a bit picked on in grammar school and jr high, I can understand the temptations to kill a few people. But... where the F*** were the teachers? Didn't they see these kids are going to snap? Don't they get to know their kids?

All my grammar school teachers KNEW me. Heck, I even knew where some of them lived! In junior high, my best friend and I went CAMPING with our science teacher! (wish I knew where Mr MacCubbin was now... I'd love to write him). I liked to hang out with him after school.

Anyway... something is very wrong with our public school system today. It's broken, and I wish I knew how to fix it.

Ross
 
Ross,

I didn't think you were being flippant at all and I got your point. I agree with you.

My latest greatest wish is that you could somehow figure what is wrong with the public schools today. Frankly, I think it has something to do with Brown vs the Board of Education, 1954 which desegregated schools. Now there is something very wrong with the doctrine of "seperate but equal" because it never was. The issue was not racial segregation per se which is totally repugnant, but de facto segregation and forced busing which came after legal desegregation and destroyed the cornerstone of the American Public School, which was the fact to paraphrase the late Tip O'Neal "all education was local." The public school was the focal point of pride within the community. In the inner city it was a magnet that drew parents at night for night school, and fostered pride in various school plays, athletic events and social events. The strange thing was that the phenomena was also observed in suburban schools too.

Then came the 60's and 70's and the idea that the goal of the school was self-actualization, combined with two family incomes, and different theories regarding parenting.

I was originally trained as a teacher, but I went back into the military. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see where things were headed.

I really appreciated both your posts Ross. There were and are some good teachers out there...but the system they have to work in, makes good teaching extremely difficult.

Regards,

Mark
 
Interesting comment, Mark.

My grammar school was (literally) about a 3 minute walk from me, and I don't recall that there was ANY busing in Fair Lawn at all. Too small a town - no one lived far enough away from their school to be bussed!

There was no forced "desegregation", either... in a town of 32,000, there were about 64 blacks (as we called them then). I didn't think anything of it, there were a couple of black kids in my junior high... and in fact when I went to a private high school and my mother asked me if there were any blacks in my class, I had to picture each kid in the class to think if there were or not!! I may have been sheltered, but I sure didn't learn any prejudice... there wasn't anything to prejudiced about!

But the school was definitely a centerpiece of the community. We played on the school grounds after school and on weekends, and the school had plays, bake sales, was the local polling place, etc. My sixth grade teacher was a Rabbi in one of the local temples, IIRC... and my brother and sister had some of my teachers before me. (no, it wasn't Mayberry... but no one got shot, either.)
 
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