By Jim Dickson
Like most people across the country I am saddened, frustrated, and angry about the recent mass shootings that occurred in New York and Texas. Why is this happening over and over again?
Is it because of easy access to military type weapons with high capacity magazines in the hands of young men? If you look at the profile of the perpetrators they are often young white males from broken homes. They are loners who don’t fit in and have few if any friends. They spend much of their time alone playing violent video games and surfing the Internet looking into it’s dark corners.
Why is it happening now? What has changed in past 10 to 15 years that is different than the proceeding years?
One obvious factor is that there are more of us, which increases the chances of a deranged shooter emerging. There was time when most school days were started with a short prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. That is long gone from most classrooms.
Students were taught a love of country, and that the United States was a special place where any citizen could do or become anything he or she was willing to work for. They were taught to respect teachers, parents, police, elders and fellow students.
We were proud to be Americans and when the “Star Spangled Banner” was played we stood at attention, placed our hands over our hearts and knew that we were part of something very special. Much of this is gone.
Semi-automatic military weapons with high capacity magazines have been available to the public for many years. With the end of World War II the military had hundreds of thousands of surplus M1 Grarands and M1 carbines which were the basic infantry weapons of the war. They were sold at very reasonable prices to the public.
I bought a surplus M1 .30 caliber and a model 1911-A .45 caliber pistol by mail order when I was in high school. I owned them for years, and eventually traded them for a scuba tank when I was in college.
I was certainly not alone, almost everyone that I knew then had one or more rifles or pistols or both. To the best of my knowledge it never occurred to any of them to walk into a church or school and randomly shoot innocent people.
The NRA is always an easy target after a mass shooting, but I can’t think of any shooting were any one of the over 5,000,000 members of the NRA was involved unless it was a case of self defense. The NRA teaches gun safety to adults and children, and strongly supports the enforcement of existing gun laws. Believe me, if over 5,000,000 well armed Americans was the problem we would know it.
If it’s not the easy availability of guns, what is the problem? Many of us think that America has lost it’s moral compass. How and why this happened is a subject of debate that the answer would be much different depending upon who you asked.
I am pretty sure that it is one of the underlying causes why were are producing angry, confused and miss-guided young men who vent their anger and frustration by shooting other people. It could be a school shooter in Texas or a “gang banger” in Chicago, but some of the basic reason are the same.
The question is what can we do to turn this around. I think that it has to start with concerned citizens and parents getting involved in the public schools so that they well know and approve of what their children are being taught.
Maybe even something radical like letting kids be just kids. It’s worked pretty well before and I’ll bet it would again. We all need heroes, people that we can look up to. They are few and far between today because of the ongoing effort to convince us that our country is an evil place founded by evil people.
This needs to stop because it’s not true. The United States has done some foolish things, and will again, but the good that this country has done for the world far out weighs the bad and our kids need to know that. We won’t change things over night, and it will take time to repair the damage but it’s sure not too late to start.
What about now? There are some good ideas out there that might prevent some the killing, and I think they should be considered as long as it doesn’t deny anyone of their constitutional rights, but lets get moving on correcting the problems now.
Born, raised and educated in the Southwest, Jim Dickson served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in Vietnam before a 35-year business career. Retired to St. Helena Island, Dickson and his wife are fiscally conservative, socially moderate and active in Republican politics, though they may not always agree with Republicans. Having lived around the country and traveled around the world, Dickson believes that the United States truly is the land of opportunity.
