Ollie North is already doing what he does best; deflect and redirect.
On Sunday, Colonel North, who is the incoming president of the NRA, blamed violent media and Ritalin for the school-shootings problem in America.
On the one hand, he’s not totally wrong. While America is the most gun-heavy country in the world both by percentage of gun ownership and by sheer numbers of guns owned, the vast vast vast majority of gun owners are law abiding citizens. Most enjoy gun ownership merely as an expensive hobby, which makes them feel empowered and reminds them of their essential rights and freedoms.
But many American gun owners, especially those in rural areas where police response times are not fantastic, do legitimately own guns for self-defense purposes. And that’s not even mentioning the thousands of Americans who live in places where dangerous wildlife species (I’m looking at you, Grizzly bears) pose a threat to the safety of their livestock and children.
Incoming @NRA President Oliver North says: “If school shield had been in place, far less likely that would have happened. “The disease in this case isn’t the 2nd amendment, the disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence, they’ve been drugged in many cases,” pic.twitter.com/TrFFG0jHK0
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) May 20, 2018
The issue of gun violence in schools, especially, is almost entirely separate from the question of gun ownership in society more broadly. Colonel North is right to suggest that “The disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.”
Ollie North is right about that much. School-shooters are almost always a certain type of individual. Typically a “creepy” mentally unwell young white guy who has had run ins with other students and school administrators in the past.
And what’s more, the teens who become the victims of these shootings can usually identify these guys in advance. After the shooting in Florida, numerous students said that Nikolas Cruz, the shooter in that case, was somebody they had totally expected to go on a shooting spree.
Maybe we should be listening to the kids when they tell us creepy guys are stalking them at school? Maybe, living as we are in a violent society where guns are an ever-present reality, we should be taking steps to prevent this violence?
Not, as the leftoid gun-grabbers want, with another set of useless laws on top of the ones we already have. What if, instead, we had school counselors who actually cared about children, and who were really in touch with them? What if we had student bodies who could express to the adults in their lives their fears about the mental health of their fellow students?
See, our society is stuck in a classic Catch 22. Nobody in high-school wants to be the guy who “snitched” on a friend or an acquaintance and got the school psychiatrist to give them a visit. That would be “bullying”, and our kids are taught not to bully! No no! We can’t have that.
But nobody in high-school wants to be the target of a nutjob with a gun, either. And the truth is that more gun laws, even gun confiscation programs, won’t solve the underlying disaffection and the disconnection from reality that motivates school-shooters.
These people don’t commit their crimes because guns are easily available. Although, it probably doesn’t help the situation, the root of the problem is deeper. What we’re seeing with the school-shooter phenomenon is a system of cultural transmission.
School-shooter types see the violent examples presented in the movies and even in the news, men with guns taking fate into their own hand, as examples of “badass” behavior. Many school-shooters are mentally ill in a way that keeps them from recognizing that the action heroes and video game characters they are looking up to are fictional archetypes, and that such people would be a true burden on society.
Their half-formed brains and their half-formed identities cling to these fictional examples of badassery because they see their own lives as uninteresting. They see themselves as pitiful, but they fantasize about being badass.
For the school-shooter, the act of violence represents empowerment, and notoriety, and being recognized and paid attention to. (Nikolas Cruz’s jail cell has been flooded with fan mail and love letters from adoring female “fans.” Our society is deeply sick, folks.)
Many boys probably have similar fantasies of violence. But most never act on them, or are content to act on them only in contexts where such violence is expected and appropriate. (On the football field, or in a video game played with friends.)
But some boys take those fantasies of violence further than others. And given that we live in a society with a large community of enthusiastic gun-owners, and thankfully a lot of freedoms when it comes to gun-ownership, some of these boys are going to be able to get their hands on an AR-15 or a Glock.
That problem is multi-faceted, and it’s unlikely to be solved by a single approach in isolation of other factors. In other words, “getting rid of the guns”, like the lefties want, probably won’t make the problem of violent young men go away. (Not to mention it would be ungodly expensive, unconstitutional, and overall ineffective. But of course the libs don’t care about the realities of the situation.)
And remember, it’s almost as easy to make a bomb as it is to buy a gun in this country. The Columbine shooting was originally intended to be a bombing, and schools are soft targets. A bomb in a school could wreak just as much havoc as a gun. But liberals don’t ultimately care about the victims of the school shooting, they only care about disarming the American populace.
And whether you can successfully disarm America or not, the “violent young people” problem is still going to stick around. It’ll continue to stick around as long as the role-models boys are being pointed towards are hulking, juiced up nut-jobs in the films and the media, instead of more realistic visions of men doing their responsibility and their duty to society. (What if our boys looked up to real men like John Basilone, rather than fictional men like Jason Bourne?) The problem is that action movies make so much more money than documentaries do.
