The gun mania that puts my boy in danger every time he goes to school
By CHARLES LAURENCE in New York
17th April 2007
Daily Mail
Charles Laurence is a British man who lives in the United States
With his 9mm handgun swinging at his hip and his body armour strapped over his shirt, Trooper Rell stalks the corridors of my son Luke’s High School.
His patrol car, with a shotgun locked in the rack, is parked outside the only entrance left open once classes start. He is there every day, all day.
The survivors: Wounded students are carried from the Norris Building
It is his full-time job. You don't get inside the school to attend, say, a meeting with a teacher or watch a sports match without passing under his eye.
He makes a disturbing encounter, particularly with the body armour. My son says he doesn't wear it all the time, as regulations demand, but sometimes just carries it.
But does having Trooper Rell around make Luke, 16, feel safer? "Not really," he answers. Does he seem intimidating? "Not really,"
Luke goes on. "Cops are like that. He’s OK, actually. Mostly, he takes kids down the police station if they get caught with drugs or get into fights." This is 21st century America. A High School, field of dreams for the new generation, crucible, surely, of hopes and achievements and ambitions, grand or humble, and the launch pad to life.
And the first person you see is an armed and armoured cop whose presence seems quite normal to today’s schoolchildren.
Yesterday's monstrous outrage at Virginia Tech spells out all to clearly why Officer Rell spends his days securing a small high school in a lovely mountain valley on the outer fringes of New York's exurbs (the thinly populated areas between the suburbs and the country).
The awful, even revolting truth is that as a parent with children growing up in America, you simply cannot take it for granted when you wave them off onto the yellow school bus in the morning that they will come safely home again.
Of course there are car crashes and sporting accidents to worry about – there always are, and children get driving licences at 16 here – as well as the ever-present worries over the temptations of parties, booze and drugs.
But it is a terrible indictment of a wrong-turn in the American way of life that, as parents, we worry more and more about our children getting shot.
Book after book has been written on why schools are such danger zones: they are fulcrums of fear, failure and rage as well as the opposite human emotions which should be the building blocks of adolescence, and as the world in which the teenager lives, they are bound to be the targets of the twisted and insane.
Back in 1966, Charles Simpson killed four students and wounded nine from the tower of the University of Texas campus at Austin, launching the current era of terror at schools.
He was a Vietnam vet with a rage against those who had escaped into the privilege of learning.
Columbine High outside Denver introduced us to the shocking concept of High School children who could believe that massacring their classmates was a means of getting even.
Last year’s slaughter of innocents in a one-room wooden school in Amish Country proved that no one at all could be safe.
But all of these tragedies and others point up another horror: the casualty rate keeps getting higher.
Is there now a warped competition in infamy, a figure attached to showing how really, really angry the killer is on the day he has chosen as his last, along with as many as possible of other people's children?
What kind of schooling lies ahead for my son Luke? One thing we can miserably predict is that going to school and university is going to become more like getting on an aeroplane in the wake of 9/11.
Just as flying becomes an increasingly ugly confrontation between honest citizen and fearful security, and less and less bearable as a result, so it will be at school.
We need security against terrorism in air travel. But why at school? The answers to that question shames America.
It starts with a culture in which the drive to getting rich and getting ahead has gone too far.
The 'rapper' 50 Cent's grotesque disc and film last year – Get Rich Or Die Trying – actually told a terrible truth to America's children.
They believe the message and, in a sense, they are right to believe it.
The culture of individual competition has driven America to great heights in material wealth and intellectual achievement, but it has gone too far. The Sopranos television show has become a cult - not for what it tells us of gangsters, but for what gangster culture tells us about modern America and the way it goes about its business.
This puts huge pressure on America's young.
Coming second is for losers; being poor is your own fault and don't ask for help; if you fail to get into law school and the onto the fast track, it is because you played too much baseball in the park at 15, and maybe fell in love at 17.
The nation which once slung on its six guns to rescue Europe and the world from the horrors of totalitarianism and genocide now seems like the bad guy straddling the world like Tony Soprano looking for business in a gang war.
A psychologist should write a thesis on the impact of President Bush, dressed up as a Hollywood Top Gun and swaggering over an aircraft carrier deck before the dead have been mourned, and saying things like: 'Bring 'em on!'
What does that tell an American kid? And what does it tell him when he sits in front of the television for hours at a time blasting-away at video games of absurd violence, structured simply for the fun of the gore without so much as moral theme to trouble the sheer vicious joy of vicarious power?
Young American troops training for the 'clash of civilisations' in the horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan have actually been trained with machines just like video-arcade games.
That, according to some doctors, is one reason why the rate of mental breakdown and post-traumatic stress disorder is accelerating: they are shocked beyond sensibility to discover that dead, raped and tortured enemies are actually real people with rights to live, and that when their gung-ho buddies get their limbs blown off, the blood is real.
The movies of Quentin Tarrantino, to pick a particularly talented pop-culture director, are arch ironic satires on America to those audiences who know what 'arch ironic satire' means.
However, the kids crowding the multiplexes for the gore fest have no idea, but simply think that slicing people like salami is a pretty cool move, dude.
If all this is something far too complicated to fix by the time Luke ventures off to university – and pray God he stays safe – there is one element to the mayhem for which there is no such excuse. Guns.
Most of what I have heard about guns and freedom and the Constitution in 20 years in America is pure poppycock. The concept that to be 'free', you must be able to buy a machine gun or a Glock 9mm pistol – or even an over-the-counter hunting rifle – is simply rubbish.
It is rubbish because if you look at the social forces within, and present dangers to America, absolutely none of them comprise a totalitarian revolution led by a cartoon version Stalin or Hitler, only to be stopped heroically by a bunch of roughnecks with their bang-bangs.
It is symbolic that Virginia, scene of yesterday’s tragedy, is at the epicentre of American gun culture.
How proud that makes the National Rifle Association! The old Virginie Colony of George Washington is still armed to the teeth, ready to reach under the bed for the gun to bring justice to that "arrogant" King George III.
What really goes on is that unscrupulous off-the-book gun dealers use their 'freedom' to buy as many guns as they want at any time, and sell them on the black market to the bandits of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore - all cities with terrible mortality rates among young black men.
The nation which believes it can create democracy and market economies at will, along the trade routes of the world, should be able to control its own domestic gun market. There is no excuse for the young having the means to storm onto a university campus and slaughter more than 30 innocents without even running short of ammunition. Absolutely none.
Along with the great majority of parents in this troubled land, I'd be more than grateful if someone in Washington's Imperial Presidency would cut the cant – and the campaign contributions from the gun lobby – and get on with controlling the firearms market. Before my boy ventures off into the danger zone.
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