Put the Parents in Jail
When I was in high school, a school shooting was a drug deal gone wrong on a playground in Harlem. It wasn’t a suburban middle class kid unloading a 12 gauge shotgun into his tenth grade math teacher.
But Columbine changed everything, and since that day there have been nineteen school shootings in 13 different states in a total of eight years. The most recent occured today when a 16-year-old attending a Memphis High School was was shot while in gym class.
I can’t begin to understand the motives behind these child killers, but from my perspective, I do remember what it was like to be an awkward teenager yearning for acceptance.
Kids called me dildo, beat me up to make themselves look cool, and my divorced parents were too wrapped up in their own lives to take the time to understand mine.
I have to admit, it never occurred to me to just kill everyone, but it wouldn’t have mattered we didn’t own a gun and I didn’t have the money to buy one. But the truth is even if I had one, I probably would have taken my life long before I had the chance to take someone elses.
Everyone always wants to blame the system. The system failed these troubled kids. The system should have prevented this tragedy. But what about the parents? Where were they?
The system can have children pass through metal detectors. And the system can have video surveillance equipment. And the system can hire therapists and psychologists. But it’s the parents who need to be held responsible for their child’s actions.
It’s the parents who have to prevent their six-year-old son from bringing in a .357 magnum into show and tell. It’s the parents who have to know that their fourteen-year-old son is sawing off a shotgun in his bedroom. It’s the parents that need to know that their seventeen-year-old son has laid out a plan on his Myspace page to kill his entire class.
And if the parents fail to prevent their child, then they should be sent to jail. All it takes is one set of parents to be sent to jail for their child’s crime, for thousands of others to take an interest in their own children.
