The Schools Aren't Safe

Yesterday the news broke of yet another school shooting. In a small town in Ohio, a student opened fire. Two students have died - one at the scene and one in the hospital, and three others were wounded.

Filling in for Dana Loesch yesterday Tony Katz made this statement:
"We are then forced to ask ourselves the question: are our schools safe?"

He went on to explain that we not only need to ask if our schools are safe when you consider how many classrooms have been affected by just this type of violence. But we must also ask the underlying question: "how did we get here?" How did our society evolve to a point at which people believe that violence on such a scale is a reasonable response to feeling bullied.

I ask a different question. We do need to ask if our schools are safe in terms of violence. We also need to ask if our schools are safe in terms of what they provide for our children - and is it worth the risk of violence that we accept in trade?

In recent years we have seen increases in gun control laws to the point of children being suspended over plastic green army men. Somehow, children are still shooting up schools.
We have seen an increase of mollycoddling in the form of teaching "self-esteem" rather than excellence. Somehow, children still feel worthless enough to believe that violence and (in most cases) suicide are their only escape.
We have seen an increase in teaching "tolerance" in regards to religion, race, ethnicity that borders on ridiculous. A seven year old now faces charges of racial discrimination for asking a boy on the playground "are you brown because you are from Africa?" And at the same time they are taught intolerance of traditional values and Christianity in particular.
We have seen increases in the power that schools and state governments exert over our children, regulating even what they can eat. And when parents get the call about their child, the shooter, they have no idea how it happened.

The common thread here is that the government, through the schools, is slowly usurping the roles of parents. And parents are letting them do it. Just recently, in the wake of the debate over the government inspecting school lunches brought from home, school officials were recorded saying that they believed that the school (and by extension, the state) knew better than their own parents what was best for children. The scary thing is that parents, whether because they don't have time or because they just don't want the responsibility, are letting this happen. They are breathing a sigh of relief when the school offers breakfast because that's one less thing they have to worry about in a busy home.

The schools aren't safe, folks. But the guns are only a symptom of the disease. Until we realize that and address the root cause, they will never be safe for our kids. (One more reason to bring the kids home.)