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Tag: gun culture
Careless Adults Take Note: 'Children Will Listen, Children Will See'

Careless Adults Take Note: 'Children Will Listen, Children Will See'

“Careful the things you say

Children will listen

Careful the things you do

Children will see

And learn.”

At his death late last month at the age of 91, composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was praised for writing for character rather than the hit parade. Playwright Arthur Laurents, who worked with him on several productions, once said that Sondheim “writes a lyric that could only be sung by the character for which it was designed.”

However, the audience for his work is everyone.

At this moment, the words of “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods sadly resonate in a country where children are learning the wrong lessons from adults who should know better.

In Michigan, family, friends and classmates are mourning Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre, Hana St. Juliana and Justin Shilling, killed in an attack in a place that should be safe — high school. A 15-year-old was charged in the murders at Oxford High School, and in a rarity, his parents were charged with involuntary manslaughter for what prosecutors said was behavior that made them complicit.

“Guide them along the way

Children will glisten

Children will look to you

For which way to turn.”

According to Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald and authorities, the parents bought a gun that their son called “my new beauty.” Mom spent time testing it out with him and texted him, “LOL I’m not mad at you … you have to learn not to get caught,” when teachers found him searching online for ammunition. Perhaps realizing too late the seriousness of the tragedy her son is charged with unleashing, she allegedly texted him, “Don’t do it.”

When the shooting started, Dad called authorities to tell them it could be his missing gun — and his son.

Both parents met with school officials the morning of the shooting and were advised that his behavior warranted counseling within 48 hours. But they apparently resisted taking him home or getting him the “help” the accused asked for in a disturbing note.

The teenage Kyle Rittenhouse was judged not guilty in Wisconsin and walked free after killing two men and seriously wounding a third. His mother, Wendy, was never charged and has said she didn’t really know what he was doing the night he traveled to Kenosha to patrol the streets holding a weapon. But where was the judgment of a parent who, according to prosecutors, accompanied her teen son to a bar where he and Proud Boys drank and celebrated? Come to think of it, where were the voices chanting “What about the culture?” and “Where is the father?” — questions always posed when a youth of color does far less than shoot and kill two people?

New Normal

For years, because of pressure from the NRA, gun rights groups and lawmakers, federal money for gun research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “advocate or promote gun control” pretty much dried up. Now, some research funding has been reinstated, just when studies are showing that the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the impact of the U.S. gun violence crisis.

Very few Americans are denying anyone’s right to own a gun — for protection, for hunting, for target practice. But is common sense too much to expect?

Where indeed was the sense or the empathy when, just days after the Oxford High shooting, Rep. Thomas Massie posted a holiday photo on Twitter, with family members of all ages smiling while displaying guns. The caption: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.”

The Kentucky Republican’s tweet got some support but also criticism, including from Fred Guttenberg, a gun control activist whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the 2018 Parkland high school shooting in Florida. In response to Massie’s message, Guttenberg tweeted a photo he took of his smiling child and another image of her gravesite.

Bad Choices

One lawmaker moved to outrage by the Michigan school shooting was Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, whose speech just after he learned the news was certainly informed by his passion for stricter gun control laws and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in his own state that killed 26 people, including 20 little children. “It happens here, in America,” he said, “because we choose to let it happen.”

Will more parents and lawmakers be as outraged over school shootings that are becoming shockingly routine as they seem to be about teaching children anything about America’s sometimes violent history and teaching Americans to do and be better?

Acknowledging facts, it is charged, could ruin a child’s innocence.

These are children for whom active shooter drills have become as much a part of the curriculum as English, math and chemistry.

At Oxford High in Michigan, as a classroom of terrified students hid, there was a knock on the door, and from the other side came a voice indicating that he was a friend, not a foe. The suspicious students did not believe him and decided to take their chances by escaping out of a window instead.

It turns out it really was law enforcement knocking. But who could blame the high schoolers for their lack of trust in people who are supposed to know best, who have promised and failed to protect them?

These children — and to me they are children — lost their innocence a long time ago, if they ever had it.

“Careful the spell you cast

Not just on children

Sometimes the spell may last

Past what you can see

And turn against you.”

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun and The Charlotte Observer, and as national correspondent for Politics Daily. She is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project and host of the Equal Time podcast. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

Obama Calls For U.S. Reckoning On Guns

Obama Calls For U.S. Reckoning On Guns

By Michael A. Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — At a town hall meeting in South Carolina this year, President Barack Obama looked back on the most difficult moment of his presidency — the shooting deaths of 20 children and six educators in the Newtown school massacre in Connecticut — and expressed regret over his inability to enact stricter gun laws.

It was “the hardest day of my presidency,” he said. “And I’ve had some hard days.”

Faced Thursday with yet another major gun crime on American soil, this one at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, about 115 miles from where he spoke in March, the normally even-keeled president did not hide his anger.

“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” he said. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”

In an eight-minute statement in which he was at turns frustrated and mournful, Obama renewed his vigor for increased limits on access to guns and, as a president nearing his final months in office, seemed to feel freer to raise the vexing political issue just hours after learning of the attack.

He blamed the shooting on someone “who wanted to inflict harm (and) had no problems getting their hands on a gun.” He said it was “particularly heartbreaking” that the victims were gunned down in a place of worship, and decried the rate of mass shootings in the U.S. as all too frequent. He quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Aides said he insisted that he address the issue in person — his 14th statement as president on a mass shooting.

The shooting in Charleston added two new elements to the president’s reaction: a personal and racial connection. Obama knew the church pastor who was killed; and the Justice Department is investigating the massacre as a hate crime — the victims were all black and the suspect is white.

As a presidential candidate, Obama had met the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who also was a state senator, and other members of the congregation. Pinckney became an Obama supporter in that tough 2008 campaign, forging a bond with him that “was strong enough to endure all the way until today,” a White House spokesman said.

Obama spoke Thursday with the mayor of Charleston to express his condolences, as did Vice President Joe Biden, who had visited with Pinckney last year at a prayer breakfast.

During Obama’s presidency, shootings — including those at the Connecticut elementary school; near a college campus in Isla Vista, California; at the Washington Navy Yard; and at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin — have brought about cries for legislative action to limit gun sales. Following Newtown, a measure in the Senate to expand background checks on would-be gun buyers fell a handful of votes short of being adopted in what became the only significant effort to enact new gun rules at the federal level.

The president, in his visit to South Carolina in March, had lamented that it seemed the carnage at Newtown would have been “enough of a motivator for us to want to do something about this. And we couldn’t get it done.”

The president has otherwise been reluctant to revisit the fight for new legislation, as intractable a fight as any in Washington, when his influence has been needed elsewhere. But, he said pointedly on Thursday, “It is in our power to do something about it.”

Still, he indicated he had little expectation that Congress would act any differently this time.

“The politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it,” he said. “At some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”

The apparent racial motivation to the attack was a reminder, Obama said, of “a dark part of our history.”

The nation’s first black president has put greater attention this year on issues surrounding America’s historic struggle with race. Two days after that March visit to South Carolina, he delivered an address in Selma, Alabama, that highlighted progress since scores of blacks trying to march to Montgomery were beaten back by state troopers on Bloody Sunday there half a century ago, but he also declared that “our march is not yet finished.”

Obama has also been forced to confront tensions highlighted by a series of encounters between law enforcement and young minorities, including the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore that sparked sometimes violent demonstrations.

Obama said Thursday that while racial hatred was a threat “to our democracy and our ideals,” he was confident the reaction to this latest incident “indicates the degree to which those old vestiges of hatred can be overcome.”

He quoted King’s comments after the death of four young girls in the 1963 bombing of an Alabama church, saying: “Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.”

(c)2015 Tribune Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.