Put the Parents in Jail

When I was in high school, a school shooting was a drug deal gone
wrong on a playground in Harlem. It wasn’t a suburban middle class kid
unloading a 12 gauge shotgun into his tenth grade math teacher.

But Columbine changed everything, and since that day there have been
eighteen school shootings in 13 different states in a total of eight
years. The most recent occured just last week at the Notre Dame
Elementary School in Ohio and the Louisiana Technical College.

I can’t begin to understand the motives behind these child killers,
but from my perspective, I do remember what it was like to be an
awkward teenager yearning for acceptance.

Kids called me dildo, beat me up to make themselves look cool, amd
my divorced parents were too wrapped up in their own lives to take the
time to understand mine.

I have to admit, it never occurred to me to just kill everyone, but
it wouldn’t have mattered we didn’t own a gun and I didn’t have the
money to buy one. But the truth is even if I had one, I probably would
have taken my life long before I had the chance to take someone elses.

Everyone always wants to blame the system. The system failed these
troubled kids. The system should have prevented this tragedy. But what
about the parents? Where were they?

The system can have children pass through metal detectors. And the
system can have video surveillance equipment. And the system can hire
therapists and psychologists. But it’s the parents who need to be held
responsible for their child’s actions.

It’s the parents who have to prevent their six-year-old son from
bringing in a .357 magnum into show and tell. It’s the parents who have
to know that their fourteen-year-old son is sawing off a shotgun in his
bedroom. It’s the parents that need to know that their
seventeen-year-old son has laid out a plan on his Myspace page to kill
his entire class.

And if the parents fail to prevent their child, then they should be
sent to jail. All it takes is one set of parents to be sent to jail for
their child’s crime, for thousands of others to take an interest in
their own children.