Local Opinion: Hunting for children

Our French friends now refer to America as a “gun culture.” They now worry about coming to visit us, and they worry about a culture that seems helpless to protect its children. For our children, we need a “cultural fix.”

What kind of culture protects its school children with routine drills about how to hide from the lunatics who go hunting for children armed with seeming state approval and weapons of war?

What kind of culture does this, then after the slaughter, arms us, the enablers, with mere hollow recitations of “thoughts and prayers?” What kind of culture, in effect, issues hunting licenses both for children and deer? Wait! I have misspoken! There are differences. No one goes hunting for deer in the hills of Tennessee or Texas with assault rifles or 9mm Glocks. The deer are “free” to roam the forest or blend into the brush, mesquite, and cactus of the desert. They are “free” to run from their predators. The deer do not have to be taught how to hide in the corners or closets of the forests and deserts, and deer hunters do not ever know exactly where to find their prey.

Children hunters, on the other hand, know exactly where to find their prey. The lunatics have it easy. Children are captives. Schools have signs which say “school.” The signs say, in effect, “inside the children are captives in groups waiting for you lunatics to arrive. Just open a door, look in a closet, or peer under a desk.”

The deer have a chance. They are hunted as individuals. They are not slaughtered in groups. The license to hunt deer has a “bag limit.” The license to hunt children does not. It makes so much “perverse sense.” If the license is to kill as many captive children as possible, why wouldn’t you be armed with the urban weapon of war of lunatic choice? The AR-15 is the perfect weapon, and it’s so very very available.

Hunting licenses for deer and birds in most states, such as Tennessee or Texas, have some training and other prerequisites attached to them. In some states the license to hunt children is the purchase of the weapon itself. You buy the gun, legally or illegally, and then you go hunting. You don’t even have to stalk your prey. The escapee from a virtual insane asylum goes on offense. To be offense is easy. The hunter knows where he wants to hunt. He does not even have to hide or use stealth. To be on defense is hard. Armed defenders can only wait. They can only react. Hunting for children often succeeds because reaction takes time. Defense, by definition, is reaction.

What kind of culture never goes on offense? What kind of culture is it that can only react to the hunting and killing of children with training to shorten the reaction time for first responders to get to the killing fields, or by teaching our children to hide in closets, or by arming and training our teachers how to play defense? What kind of culture produces leaders to think that school safety is to build better fences, install more security cameras, install more metal detectors, harden more doors, and hire more security guards? What has happened to us? We were the foremost culture of science, technology, and reason. We lit the darkness, put people on wheels, rails, and into the sky. We watered deserts and powered a great economic engine. We even conquered the moon. Now we are becoming a culture — not of power, dynamism, enlightenment, and reason, but of “darkness” and “helplessness.”

Wait! Above, I spoke of the hunter of children as an escapee from a virtual insane asylum. I have misspoken yet again. The hunter is not an escapee at all. He remains just another insane resident of a very large insane asylum — America.