School Shootings In Recent Years

If you’ve not been living under a rock for the past few weeks, I’m sure you’ve heard about the school shootings that seem to be the new fad here in the US. I just wanted to take a minute and give my two cents on the matter. Guns don’t kill people. People who have no respect for others because they’re sick little turds kill people! (Think that would fit on a bumper sticker?)

I’m sure someone’s going to blame the NRA, blame guns, blame the right to own guns, or pull some such other crap out of a hat and lay the blame squarely where it doesn’t belong, but I’m going to take a moment to voice my constitutional right for free speech here. In case you’re curious, that’s the same document that allows you to OWN a gun so you CAN protect that right.

• On Feb. 8, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.
• In Memphis, Tenn., a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student Monday during a high school gym class.
• The 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, Calif., junior high school has been declared brain dead, killed by a 14 year old fellow student.

Maybe I’m radical in my opinion on this, and please forgive me if I am, but aren’t all (or at least most of) these poor misguided souls the progeny of the "don’t spank your kid," "don’t leave a student behind," "corporal punishment is wrong" school of thought?

Technically, school shootings have decreased since the early 1990′s, but with the rise of the Internet as a media tool, publicizing the events have a much broader audience to be incensed than we had when I was growing up. But back to the point I was making; school shootings never even became a sideline until a few years after I graduated in 1995. I’ve just got to wonder what’s happened to the "adolescents" (read as kids) and poor misunderstood children that makes them think this is ok.

Let me see if I can think what’s changed since I was a kid.

• Guns: Nope.. had those, and they haven’t changed.
• Metal Detectors: well, looks like that’s been a wasted fortune spent on cool x-ray toys.
• Education: nope.. seems only to have improved over the recent years.

Oh yeah.. I remember! No one BEATS THEIR KIDS ASSES FOR SCREWING UP ANY MORE! That must be it. It’s ok to be "different" in today’s society. Children should be coddled and educated through reform. HELL NO! HEY PARENTS! PULL THE F*****G IPOD OUT OF YOUR KIDS HEAD, DISCONNECT THE BLUETOOTH CELL PHONE ON YOUR ELEVEN YEAR OLD, AND MAYBE TALK TO THEM LONG ENOUGH TO MAKE THEM PAY ATTENTION AND BEAT THEIR ASS WHEN THEY SCREW UP! SPEND A DECENT AMOUNT OF TIME WITH YOUR KIDS AND QUIT PAWNING THEM OFF ON THE COMPUTER, VIDEO GAMES, AND IPOD-NANNIES AND MAYBE YOU WOULD DETECT THAT YOUR CHILD MIGHT NEED SOME HELP!

What in the hell is wrong with our society? Have you not learned that your new ideas aren’t working? When I grew up, I lived in fear of getting a C in school. I used to hate it, but I very well remember the speech "you’re an extremely smart young man. There’s no excuse for you not to get an A." And WHOA let me tell you what happened if I came home with a D in anything. This was my parents grading scale:

• A: Awesome job TJ
• B: Better work harder in social studies and get an A, son.
• C: Chastisement for slacking off, and maybe maybe being half-way grounded.
• D: Dead as a doornail.
• F: Friggin’ move in with a friend rather than face my parents.

I was about 10 years old when I told my Grandmother to "take me to see my Dad" because he told me I could go to work with him that afternoon when I got home from school. I threw a temper tantrum and got my way all right. When I came home, Dad took me out in the Gazebo and stood me in the middle in front of god and everyone and proceeded to whip my ass until HE got tired… all for speaking out of turn to an elder. (Katie, ask your Mom. I guarantee she still remembers that one. She came out on the back porch to see what in the hell I was screaming about. She thought one of us kids had gotten hurt playing or something. lol.. although she and penny did sneak me ice cream for a week afterwards!)

One day I talked back to my Mother for some stupid reason… I can’t remember why now. What I DO remember is when she grabbed the fly swatter (the old metal pronged kind) and started beating my ass. I remember a brief moment of elation when the head of the flyswatter flew across the room. I still remember the orange swatter zooming off into space and thinking "Thank God! She has to stop spanking me now." Umm.. no one told her that. She kept right on whipping until the point got through my head. I remember jumping up and down thinking that would make her stop… which just resulted in these rather strange butterfly patterns on the back of my left thigh.

You know why I tell you all this? It’s not to make my parents out to be monsters, quite the contrary; I never got a whipping I didn’t deserve. I tell you this, to prove that I remember it. I’m 30 years old this year and I remember every major spanking I got, what I was doing to get it, and how bad it hurt. I can also tell you this; to this day I have never told my mother "No!" again, or ever cursed out an older person in public… ever! I can recall painful lessons I was taught over 20 years ago… because they were reinforced.

My daughter is eleven years old this year. In her life I have spanked her one time. Once. She was three. First, I ask her to do something, followed by maybe me "telling" her that it wasn’t a request. The last warning she ever gets is her full name. (Now that I’m a parent, I love that ability to call the full name and incite immediate fear of death!) Do  you know WHY I’ve only spanked her once? Because the one time I did, I told her I was going to do it. It was something along the lines of "if you do A, B, C, it’s going to result me tannin’ your hide so you’ll have to stand up to eat for the next three days!" Is my daughter perfect, no way in the world. But does she know to respect the value of something I tell her, yup!

So, in a final note of passing, "Hey parents. Try controlling your children, and raising them right.. before they wind up feeling all depressed at 14 and blowing some other kid away in math class!"

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