If you do your best to keep up with the news, you'll know that the gun control debate and criticism of the NRA has struck up again following the massacre of 17 people at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL.
If you keep up with more local news, like myself, you may have seen a string of similar actions occurring within schools right in the very neighborhood you grew up in. Maybe these threats didn't reach the magnitude of Stoneman Douglas or Sandy Hook for example, but they were still extremely concerning.
Two high schools within a five-mile radius of the one I attended had delayed openings on two separate occasions this week because of harmful threats made towards the school's safety by two different students. One student took a picture of the front of her high school and placed a bomb emoji next to the building, and she then posted it on her Snapchat story. The other student made a vicious threat about their school in an open conversation that was overheard by concerned students and faculty.
Even 200 miles away in central Pennsylvania, where I attend Penn State University, an individual felt it necessary to walk on campus in a joker mask, wearing all black and claiming to have pressure cookers located on campus. Though classes were not canceled because of the incident, campus police were called and an investigation was done as nervous and apprehensive students tried to continue about their day.
We have a severe problem with our American society, one that goes far and beyond simply regulating guns. Some of us feel the need to thrive and get off on the all too frequent and vile mass shootings that happen in what's supposed to be some of our safest public institutions. One psychopath reads all about and analyzes the tactics and destruction caused by the other one, and the chain reaction just continues till we're left with utter heartbreak and disbelief.
If you look at our nation's history, we did not have such an influx of massacres really before the 90's. I'm sure there are many arguments of why that could be, but I for one think the obvious connection is within society's advancements in social media and the internet as a whole. The fact that video effects in our movies and in television have progressed as well as realistically being able to portray violence and gore, does not really help when you accumulate all of this together.
Think about how easy it is to research a criminal and everything that they had done in their path of destruction. Think about how easy it is for someone to feel bullied or victimized by social media. Think about how weapons are glorified in video games and movies as they're used by either the good or the bad guys. All of these technological advancements were not produced in order to grow monsters out of society, yet for some reason, society has not done a very good job of being able to control these advancements as we see large scale views of what can be a very dark side of our world.
Change needs to come from the person as well, not just with a gun. We need to do a better job of teaching adults and our youth about the stability and understanding you must have to engage in content like this. We need to better our health care system and make sure we pinpoint these individuals who cannot handle such visuals and get the help they so quickly deserve. Censoring this kind of media could be seen as problematic, as epidemics like this obviously don't pertain to most people who ingest this specific media, so it's best to target those who are not part of the normal, upstanding majority.
Think about a society that thrives off of knowing the difference between right and wrong. That treats public safety with the utmost respect and takes tips about those who seem troubled seriously. Those that are troubled can be given special rehabilitation, and maybe then we can finally live in a society where violence doesn't have to be a major epidemic in our lives and our children's lives.
