Jay Cronley: Society must examine all options to boost safety
BY JAY CRONLEY World Staff Columnist
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
12/18/12 at 4:25 AM
Working backwards, looking for ways to prevent another massacre of children:
Sitting around and doing nothing, even for a few hours, seems like a disservice to the families suffering the most.
Guns are an easy target.
Restricting the possession of automatic weapons makes sense to more than the politicians.
You see a lot of automatic weapons on the most popular video games, where victory is achieved by wiping out large segments of humanity. Anybody unbalanced in the head and buried in these games for weeks on end could lose respect for life and see killing as a solution. Violence in movies and grossness in television shows is glamorized as never before, Dexter the happy-go-lucky homicidal maniac plunging knives into bodies, deciding who gets to live or die on the fly, whistling as he works.
Controlling what sends people to a gun is society's chief responsibility.
Family bias: Forget family when it comes to being painfully objective about somebody possibly dangerous.
Not my child.
He may be different.
He may be quiet.
He may spend days sitting at his computer in his room without taking much of a break.
But he's not that bad.
It's usually the males committing the mass atrocities, which could speak to something in the upbringing chain.
Before guns, and before graphic violence as a way of life and a way to victory, and as entertainment, and before family protecting its own, or thinking it can straighten out its own better than anybody else, there are friends on whom society might rely.
Friends or acquaintances or neutral observers must report antisocial behavior to somebody in charge of keeping us safe.
Sorry, characters of the world, being odd is no longer colorful or acceptable.
Mental aptitude: What if there are no friends?
Then there's school.
That's all the teachers need, right, the task of identifying sociopaths, with the threat of lawsuits hanging over any action beyond testing and grading.
It has been said that a kindergarten or first-grade teacher can predict with a high degree of certainty what kind of person a child will become.
So test everybody's mental aptitude, along with learning skills.
What if there is no school?
Test everybody at age 10, door to door if it has to be done that way.
You have to take a test to drive. Coexisting can be harder.
Original Print Headline: Society must examine all options to boost safety
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