Chris, as usual, great stuff here. Time Wise wrote an article a few years back attempting to address what he thinks is the profile of a school shooter - white males. Interesting article: http://www.alternet.org/story/10560/
I couldn't agree more that there is a morbid obsession with safety in schools when they really are some of the safest places around. Of course I realize that some schools (mine in particular on the upper east side) are safer than others. But we have to decide as a society if we want our schools to look more like prisons or our prisons to look more like schools. I know my vote.
Speaking on the welfare and future of our children, one of the most horrific crimes in our schools today is the failure to educate.
In John Grisham's novel "A Time to Kill," a jury of eight
white women and two white men are asked to imagine this wastheir daughter--a young white girl being raped, beaten and left for dead by two drunken and remorseless black men.The jury is tasked with delivering a verdict for a black
man, Carl Lee Hailey, who burst out of the courthouse
basement and killed his daughter's accused attackers with
an assault rifle.
Certainly, this lends itself to lively argument with regard
to Carl Lee's being guilty of murder, execution, revenge,
or justice. But there is no argument, amongst sane and
humane people, that this was a horrendous act that would
cripple this child forever.
It is baffling to me how some can look at a violent rape
such as the one of little Tonya Hailey described in "A Time
to Kill," and clearly see it as the horror that it is, yet
not be able to fathom that failing or refusing to educate
capable children and rendering them emotionally, socially,
and economically crippled for the rest of their lives as at
best an equal horror.