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How have we got used to this?
Feb. 16th, 2018 08:56 amA frequent horror story in Italian newspapers is about the disaffected young man - sometimes it's a boy and a girl, most often a single boy - who one day just picks up a knife and kills an unfortunate mother, or girlfriend, or acquaintance. Then he most often commits suicide. This is the type who, in America, does school shootings. We have them too. What we don't have is the universal availability of instruments of multiple killing.
I have no doubt that the isolated, homicidal young man is a phenomenon that has been becoming more frequent in recent decades, in both your country and mine. That is a bad thing and it is very necessary to study where it comes from and how we can treat it. I am not taking a position of moral superiority. But the availability of guns in Italy is the difference. And one relevant point is that one group that is often on the front pages for sudden murder is security guards - the only profession in Italy apart from police and armed forces to carry guns on a regular basis. An ordinary citizen who finds his wife has been screwing his best friend may beat them or even strangle the woman; a security guard who makes the same discovery can shoot both dead, and does.
The complacency with which some Americans treat this phenomenon is incredible to me. People discuss how often school shootings happen and whether the media inflate their number. IN any other country, the very idea that when you send your children to school you risk their lives would cause a riot and probably bring down the government. I have briefly taught in one of the really bad schools in east London. Children were practically parked there, and the idea of going to college afterwards was strictly for the few gifted freaks. But even in this very bad school, nobody would ever have though of having a metal detector in the entrance or armed security guards or any of the other delightful ornaments of American education.
You have got used to living with madness, and you don't realize how insane it is in the eyes of others Don't you realize - or rather, don't you WANT to realize - that the very existence of school shootings as a category, as a thing, is something insane? How can you sit there and discuss their frequency and number? How can you live with the thought that you are thinking of schools as places where children may on a given day be shot dead?
Children are a category that ought to be protected. The instinct of any sane and civilized man is to save the children first. To have a whole nation that has got used to the idea that you can send children into danger when you send them to school - and we are not only talking about disaffected boys, as you very well know, but also about gangland schools in Chicago and elsewhere - should not be tolerable. Look at a child, any child; and think of that child being shot at by another child. How can you bear it?
I have no doubt that the isolated, homicidal young man is a phenomenon that has been becoming more frequent in recent decades, in both your country and mine. That is a bad thing and it is very necessary to study where it comes from and how we can treat it. I am not taking a position of moral superiority. But the availability of guns in Italy is the difference. And one relevant point is that one group that is often on the front pages for sudden murder is security guards - the only profession in Italy apart from police and armed forces to carry guns on a regular basis. An ordinary citizen who finds his wife has been screwing his best friend may beat them or even strangle the woman; a security guard who makes the same discovery can shoot both dead, and does.
The complacency with which some Americans treat this phenomenon is incredible to me. People discuss how often school shootings happen and whether the media inflate their number. IN any other country, the very idea that when you send your children to school you risk their lives would cause a riot and probably bring down the government. I have briefly taught in one of the really bad schools in east London. Children were practically parked there, and the idea of going to college afterwards was strictly for the few gifted freaks. But even in this very bad school, nobody would ever have though of having a metal detector in the entrance or armed security guards or any of the other delightful ornaments of American education.
You have got used to living with madness, and you don't realize how insane it is in the eyes of others Don't you realize - or rather, don't you WANT to realize - that the very existence of school shootings as a category, as a thing, is something insane? How can you sit there and discuss their frequency and number? How can you live with the thought that you are thinking of schools as places where children may on a given day be shot dead?
Children are a category that ought to be protected. The instinct of any sane and civilized man is to save the children first. To have a whole nation that has got used to the idea that you can send children into danger when you send them to school - and we are not only talking about disaffected boys, as you very well know, but also about gangland schools in Chicago and elsewhere - should not be tolerable. Look at a child, any child; and think of that child being shot at by another child. How can you bear it?
