{"id":82513,"date":"2022-06-18T10:06:25","date_gmt":"2022-06-18T15:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=82513"},"modified":"2022-06-18T10:20:14","modified_gmt":"2022-06-18T15:20:14","slug":"82513","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=82513","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Will We Choose Hard Work to Protect Our Children in School?<\/a><\/p>\n

Set aside what you imagine about guns and protecting students at school. Keeping our kids safe is hard work. It is ugly and almost always unappreciated. We don\u2019t want appreciation for what we\u2019ve been forced to do if a murderer comes to school. It is far better to be known for what we prevented. Defending our students from media-fueled narcissistic psychopaths is a dull job. Being present every day so you can stop a murderer is easily ignored because it is out of sight. Contrast that grinding job with the one-click solution of \u201cgun control\u201d. Gun-control politicians say they can put a few more words on paper, hold a few press conferences, and it will be as if evil simply went away.. or did it? We\u2019re conducting several large-scale social experiments at the same time. Our children\u2019s lives depend on what we do.<\/p>\n

Each day brings us something new. Our children live in a world where they are exposed to millions of online \u201cfriends\u201d they\u2019ve never met. Many of these friends might not even be real people. These online identities influence how our children think and feel. I\u2019m not sure about the benefits, but the downside has been a surge in both narcissism and anorexia. Today, our children constantly compare themselves to an image on a small screen.<\/p>\n

We also have millions of children growing up in broken homes. Many of these children are raised by the entertainment media and by electronic games. That isn\u2019t good for healthy children, let alone the children who lack a healthy mom and dad. We also know that we are not all the same and that electronic games are catastrophic for some people. These gamers already feel alienated to an unusual degree. They think they deserve more recognition. Immerse these fragile youngsters into hundreds of hours of violent first-person roll-playing games, and something happens. The psychopaths eventually think to themselves, \u2018I\u2019d kill to get this much attention.\u2019 Our voracious news media is ready to oblige. That is new.<\/p>\n

In contrast, firearms have been a part of society for a relatively long time. We have lived with guns for at least the last four centuries. We\u2019ve lived with semi-automatic rifles for over a hundred years. The so-called \u201cassault rifle\u201d is over 80 years old. What changed is that we\u2019ve never grown up with mass media in our pocket 24-7 starting when children are 6 years of age. We don\u2019t know what that does to people, and we\u2019re conducting the real-time experiment on our children and on our society. We learn new things every day.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen the mass media turn the last murderer into an instant celebrity by giving him a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign. The\u00a0next<\/em>\u00a0murderer notices the attention poured on the\u00a0last<\/em>\u00a0murderer. That creates a new generation of \u201ccelebrity-murderers\u201d, a term that didn\u2019t exist as little as two decades ago. We\u2019ve seen over 80 copycat murderers after the attack on Columbine High School, but that data is now several years out of date.<\/p>\n

Not only are our children ill-prepared to deal with the media, but adults and politicians do only a little better. The public is influenced by the most outrageous claim that can be taken from a situation or statement. The media and unscrupulous politicians feed us a series of false choices. Please consider each of these claims for more than a minute and you can easily see a context in which each statement is clearly right. You can also see a context in which the claim is clearly wrong.<\/p>\n