Good Morning.
My two oldest granddaughters have been looking at colleges. The high school junior visited two universities in Colorado recently, apparently without too much fuss, but the senior was in the LA
area where security was tighter than a tick. She had to have an advance appointment at each school and go through some sort of clearance before she could set foot on the campuses; at one place where she hadn't gone through the pre-arrangement procedures, she couldn't even knock on the door at the admissions department. To get the Cook's tour of academic buildings, dorms, and athletic facilities, she had to be certified as a safe, well-intentioned visitor.
That some institutions of higher learning have become veritable fortresses is, of course, because of the mass shootings. When I was in grade school, we had fire drills where we filed outside in nice, neat lines, but we also had air raid drills because public officials at all levels of government were worried about Russia dropping a bomb on the United States. The air raid drills involved getting under your desk and covering your head with your arms, not likely to protect anyone during an atomic attack, but the exercises weren't particularly scary as I recall. Today's school kids have active shooter drills to learn where to hide and how to barricade themselves in a classroom against a deranged individual roaming the halls with an arsenal of weapons.
Some students are afraid to go to school and who can blame them; this stuff is scary as hell.
Mass shootings have occurred, of course, in plenty of places. Over the past few years, we've had a church in Charleston, a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and a synagogue in Pittsburgh shot up, along with a gay bar in Orlando where forty-nine people were killed and a concert venue on Las vegas where fifty-eight were mowed down with almost five hundred wounded. We've had shootings in restaurants, a movie theater, a nursing home, and at an office party in San Bernadino. Places of employment are often targets for people who were fired or who harbor some other kind of grudge. The scenes of mass slaughter that usually hit us the hardest, however, are the ones at the schools. We still talk about Newtown, Connecticut, Virginia Tech, and Margery Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. We talk but we do nothing.
There's something terribly wrong with this picture, apart from the carnage itself. We have crazy people wandering around with guns they can purchase at a gun shop, a gun show, or on-line, and it's more likely that a homemade bomb will be set off in Boston or Oklahoma City than a foreign power will drop one from the air. Anyone can learn how to assemble an explosive device on the Internet.
There have always been mentally unstable people out there, but this level of insanity didn't exist fifty years ago. Almost every month a governor, a senator, or a police chief says oh dear, our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the victims, but that's the end of it. There's no national conversation about why we have become such a violent country where exacting revenge over even petty issues is the disorder of the day. Another metal detector or thicker doors with triple locks get installed, but it's not much different than putting up a stop sign or a traffic light at a busy intersection. I'm not sure if we get to the point where we have to pass through a device, have a purse x-rayed, and wear a badge on a strap around the neck in order to pick up a few groceries at the supermarket we'll rise up and say enough is enough. The question is why?
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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