“School shootings are a fact of life.” — J.D. Vance

No it’s not. It’s just not. I hate to go all old man on everyone here, but these things didn’t happen when we were kids. I graduated from high school in 1993. I think there was a famous school shooting at the University of Texas back in the day, but that’s pretty much it. In 1999 Columbine happened. In the last 25 years it is has been like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, maybe logic is the way to go about it. I feel like the conservative response is to point to things we know we can’t fix. It’s a whole generation of kids raised by single parents. It’s the violent video games. It is the lack of God in our culture. It’s the ramping up of hate on social media. It’s the mental health.

These things might be true to a greater or lesser extent and I am not here to discount any of those things. However, school violence is a choice. Gun violence is a choice. Every other industrialized country on the planet has figured this out better than we have. It’s not a fact of life. It is what you have chosen to accept.

One of the things I’ve noticed with a child going into the college process is that I wouldn’t have gotten into the institution I went to with the grades I had. My SAT score wouldn’t have been enough. We are loading up our kids with AP courses, college essays, internships, and part-time jobs. These kids aren’t soft like we are accusing them of. They have a lot more on their plate than any of us had.

Now, what does this have to do with the issue at hand? Someone that shoots up a school, mall, movie theater, or anything else by definition is mentally ill. That by definition is someone in distress and is not exercising good coping skills. Mentally ill doesn’t have to mean being in a straight jacket. It doesn’t mean needing a padded room with no sharp things. It doesn’t mean they need copious amounts of medication and therapy.

It is so much more than that. We are increasingly creating an entire generation of people without coping skills. We heap all of this stuff on them, tell them they will have to pay for college for the rest of their lives, won’t be able to ever afford a house of their own, and we provide them with few ways to manage this stress. We tell them they have to choose a path early in life. They need to spend all of their free time either studying or getting better on that path. What stress relief strategies are we providing?

Guns are not necessary for the survival of 99 percent of us. Your little pea shooter is no match for the military might of the largest and most powerful armed force in the history of the planet. I want people to be able to do what they want in their free time as long as it doesn’t endanger me or my family. You can do that without an AR-15. You can do that by simply waiting a week to make sure you don’t have a history of domestic abuse, mental illness, or criminal behavior. Registering your gun is not going to seriously infringe on your rights. Heck, having a license to carry it won’t either.

I was perusing social media when I came up on a video. I have to admit I don’t pay attention to everything the Texas State Legislature does. It would probably drive me crazy if I did. Well, I cannot ignore House Bill 1147. As someone that has been teaching for 25 years I definitely cannot ignore it. I’ll post the video, but I have to warn you, it will put you through the emotional ringer.

If you don’t think you can make it through the video, please allow me to summarize the situation. The bill would require all school campuses with students third grade and up to have at least one station where medical supplies would be readily available. Students as young as nine can be trained to essentially be combat medics. They would apply tourniquets, seal off chest cavities, and treat other severe bodily injuries.

I’m a grown ass man (sorry momma). When I signed up for this gig back in 1997 I knew what I was getting into. I listened to stories from my grandmother, parents, and older sister. Every day wasn’t going to be sunshine and rainbows. Some kids don’t want to learn or do what they need to do to earn the grade. Some kids aren’t the best behaved. More importantly, some adults aren’t as professional or dedicated as they should be.

I signed up for all of that. I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t get trained to storm Normandy. I didn’t get trained to apply the kind of critical aid needed to keep someone alive long enough for an ambulance to get there. I certainly didn’t train to do that AND dodge bullets at the same time. Of course we have been trained to do rudimentary first aid and I’m sure kids can be taught the same. Maybe they cut themselves on the swing set or they get beaned with a ball during recess. Maybe someone falls down a flight of stairs or twists an ankle. This training is not about that.

As horrifying as this all is, it is the message behind it that is most horrifying. We know what is causing these events. We know how to stop it. Australia has done it. Most of the industrialized world has done it. The right doesn’t want to do it. I understand it on some level. Their base loves their guns. However, the different contortions we are going through to avoid addressing the issue is just beyond the pale. We don’t need kids to learn how to apply a tourniquet or stop their friends from bleeding out. We don’t need a damn tank in front of the school. We don’t need to reduce every school to one set of doors. We don’t need to issue every man, woman, and child a bullet proof vest. We just need to take the damn AR-15s. Period.

One of the principals I used to work for had a motto: it matters. Ultimately, what that meant is that everything matters. Unfortunately, that can’t literally be true. If everything matters then nothing really matters. This governing philosophy impacts so many things. It impacts our political priorities. It impacts our priorities in education. It impacts our priorities individually as we run through life.

Occasionally, the world of sports and the political world collide. Star basketball player Brandon Miller is a perfect example. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, he was involved in a fatal shooting in January. He did not pull the trigger, but the gun was supplied by him. From here we get into the normal rigmarole of whether he possessed the gun legally, knew how the gun would be used beforehand, or even if he knew the gun was in possession prior to the shooting. What we know is that the shooter asked him to bring the gun via text message before he arrived. He may not have read the text before leaving or didn’t realize he was actually bringing the gun.

This case is interesting for any number of reasons. For one, he is still playing basketball and has since the incident occurred. The university, his coach, and the athletic department presumably knew about the incident after it happened in January. We are in damn near March and he is still leading his team in scoring and driving them to a number two overall ranking. He hasn’t been charged with a crime, so I guess they legally can do that. However, as we have discussed before, there is a huge difference between whether we CAN do something and whether we SHOULD do something.

This is where we ask a few common sense questions. If your best friend calls you up or texts you after midnight and casually says, “oh, and can you bring the gun?” you would think just about everyone would ask some very pointed questions. After all, very little good can come of that situation. His attorneys will obviously argue that he couldn’t foresee what would happen. Maybe he didn’t know that a murder would occur, but he should have known something.

I’d be remiss not to point out the similarities between Miller and Kyle Rittenhouse. No, he didn’t bring an AR-15. He wasn’t protecting property. However, the language surrounding it is similar. Maybe he legally could possess the gun. Maybe he was returning the property to his friend. Maybe Rittenhouse could legally bring an AR-15 over straight lines. Maybe he had a legal right to defend himself. Maybe a lot of things. What we know is that neither of them should have been doing these things.

There is a difference between legal culpability and moral culpability. More importantly, notice the difference between the groups of people that make excuses for each of these young men. I guarantee that the intrinsic circle in the Venn diagram will be very small. As an educator, I can’t help but think that we’ve failed these young men. We’ve made excuses for both of them for different reasons. One can run, jump, and shoot better than most of us. Another fit a narrative of the good guy with a gun. In the not so distance past, both would feel some level of shame that would cause them to withdraw for at least a time so they could rebuild their image. March Madness is just around the corner. Sadly, the time for culpability or personal responsibility will have to wait.

Our politics seems to have hit a single note these days and I would love to apologize for that. However, we’ve hit an existential crisis and we seemingly have any number of solutions that people are throwing out there. Then, there’s this guy.

It’s not the gun. It’s the evil. Raise your damn kids. Take them to church. Spank them when they deserve it. Be good to your neighbors. Throw this woke shit out of the window. Fire the blue-haired school teachers. Get in the room when the babies need you. Man up. — Robert J. O’Neill

He was a part of the seal team that took out Osama Bin Laden, so as much as I would love to throw all the snark I can at this guy, let’s treat him with the respect he deserves. So, let’s take these shots seriously. Asserting that a mass shooter is evil is like saying water is wet. A mass shooter must be evil or disturbed to shoot a room of strangers. So, saying the problem is evil is not particularly helpful. How does one identify evil before it acts? Therein lies the question.

Well, based on statistics on church attendance, 41 percent of Christians in the United States attend weekly or more as of 2018. Believe it or not, that puts the U.S. at about the midpoint in the world. Most of the countries in front of them reside exclusively in Central America, South America, and Africa. Japan is the notable exception to that. Of course, this is the percentage of Christians that attend at least once a week. It doesn’t count people that don’t identify as Christians. Poland comes in tied at 41 percent. Otherwise, every other industrialized country in Europe comes in below that. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United Kingdom all came in at five percent or lower.

Of course, then we get to the parenting advice portion of the tweet. We should spank our kids when they deserve it and be good to our neighbors. I’m not sure about the spanking part, but clearly something is going on when 18 year old kids want to rush out and buy a military grade weapon. Something is missing there. So, I’m not tossing this sentiment away. We can reasonably debate the best way to raise kids, but I think most reasonable people would agree that an 18 year old (or anyone else) shouldn’t have access to semi-automatic weapons or enough bullets to take out an entire elementary school.

Of course, the focus of the message was probably the reference to “woke shit” and blue haired teachers. I’ve only worked with one that I remember, so I’m not quite sure what he thinks is going on in schools. Naturally, it is a lot easier to simply say “woke shit” and not define your terms. I can imagine the very worst that way. The truth of the matter is that teachers encounter the world and the whole gamut of options on a daily basis. Most of us deal with that compassionately. A few of us don’t. We tolerate all of our students because that’s what compassionate people do. We certainly don’t preach one way or the other. We accept. I suppose if that qualifies as “woke shit” then call me guilty.

I certainly don’t mean to pick on Mr. O’Neill too much. After all, he is a legitimate war hero and he deserves our respect. That being said, he is trying really hard to blame anything else for these tragedies except the one thing we know is at fault. It is the one thing that separates us from the rest of the industrialized world. There are bad parents, Godless heathens, and mentally ill teenagers everywhere. What there isn’t is easy access to guns. Let’s keep our eye on the ball here.

OK, so here where the Republicans stand:

1. All books about diversity should be banned from school libraries to protect kids from being exposed to anything not bible thumping, white, and straight.
2. Teachers don’t have the judgement to set their own curriculum.
3. In more and more states teachers aren’t allowed to say the word “gay” or even address the fact that millions of children live in “non-traditional” families.
4. Teachers are not allowed to teach actual history including slavery, subjugation of women, immigrants, or those who are not white.
5. Textbooks that discuss actually history are banned because they might upset kids.

Now these same Republicans are calling to arm teachers with firearms to protect children against shooters who are, BY STATUTE, allowed to buy and own weapons of war and unlimited amounts of high powered ammo online.

So, to be clear – Teachers cannot be trusted to teach their students on subjects of history, social studies, and civics, but those same teachers must be depended on to carry firearms that can repel attacks by crazed gunmen carrying high powered weapons of war and wearing body armor.

Is it me, or have Republicans and their base lost their fucking minds?

Written by Nick Carraway –

“Cause you gotta be hangin’ tough

Hangin’ tough, hangin’ tough,
We’re rough.” — New Kids on the Block

There’s nothing quite as ridiculous as watching five suburban white teens dancing in unison and telling us how tough they are. This song sold millions of records, so I guess it fooled someone. It’s just hard to say if it was anyone over the age of fourteen. They certainly weren’t fooling any teenage boys or any adults. It’s one of those songs that inspires laughter today. It almost makes you feel sorry for those five boys. Almost.

The problem comes with the illusion of masculinity. We saw that again when Lindsay Graham tried to defend gun rights in the only way he can. He asserted that he owns an AR-15 and he would use it to hunt down gangs. Yup, I can see him now just mowing down street hard gangsters. Sure, and the New Kids were rough.

The trouble with a topic like this is that it exists in layers. The first layer is that we know Graham isn’t exactly the picture of stereotypical masculinity. There have been nasty rumors about his sexuality since he’s not married and seems effeminate to some. So, the picture of Graham with his big gun is laughable at best.

Of course, then there is the immediate second layer. What exactly is the definition of a man? Then, we get the question of whether any of this really matters. What if Lindsay Graham is gay? What if he doesn’t really participate in stereotypical alpha male activities? Should any of that really matter? Certainly, it is a little rich for progressives to trumpet the rights of LGTBQ+ individuals and then turn around and whisper about Graham. If you are going to support some people on that journey you need to support all people on that journey.

Of course, this doesn’t mean anything about Graham. I’m not speculating one way or the other. I honestly don’t care. What I care about is how people portray themselves and portray masculinity as a whole. The insinuation is that men own guns and bigger men own bigger guns. In my younger days, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said, “If you own a gun you are a citizen. If you don’t you are a subject.” I certainly didn’t realize that the right to own a gun had turned into the duty to own a gun.

I don’t own a gun and I’m pretty confident in saying that I never will. I guess you would surmise that I’m not really a man. Would I become more of a man if I somehow lied about that? Maybe I could say I own a gun. Maybe I could say that I can lift 200 pounds. Maybe I could brag about a would be enormous porn collection. Maybe then I would be a man.

All of this goes back to marketing. The NKOTB were mass marketed as a group of tough teens that could also sing and dance. Graham is mass marketing himself as the man’s man there to protect us from the big bad government. Meanwhile, we can’t help but wonder what this is all saying about manhood and what it means to be a man. Obviously, these notions inspire more laughter than anything else and yet we can’t be blind to the overall effect that it has on us as men and on culture in general.

Men as a whole are struggling. Some of us are struggling since we aren’t going as far in our careers as we thought we should. Not being the breadwinner in a family can be a blow to the male ego. Some men are struggling with the “Me Too” movement and how to navigate the workplace and society at large with women. Some men struggle with the concept of male identity as it pertains to their own sexuality and how they are perceived in the world. All of these things get jumbled up when we are bombarded by the images of false bravado.

So, it isn’t so much to poke fun at NKOTB or Lindsay Graham for what they are. It is about poking fun at who they were trying to convince us they were. No one really believes those five teens were hanging tough and no one really believes Graham is roaming around town with his AR-15 looking for hoodlums to kill. Maybe he’s going after that Trump vote after all and thinks he can fool us into thinking he’s the man’s man. Most of us don’t care and those that do aren’t buying it for a minute.