School Shootings question

[Igel]

7. Yeah, that explains the violence seen in the streets but not in the schools.

All those kids shooting kids in Chicago, for instance, are taught to "respect women and diversity from the minute they're in day care."

It explains a lot of lyrics. A lot of the attitudes I see in transfers to suburbia from urban areas.

The guy who tried to stab another to death where I had done my student teaching? The very essence of respect for diversity. It's why he tried to kill somebody of the same ethnicity who called him a bad name the previous day.

I look elsewhere. This hypothesis is has explanatory adequacy for some data, but fails to have predictive adequacy for much of the data. Perhaps one approach is to narrow your definitions to include just those areas without a lot of kid-on-kid violence and see if it accounts for all the data that remains in the data set. However ...

Keep in mind that those kids that we defend and whose back we have, the ones evincing great respect for women and diversity and life ... They were socialized in essentially the same environment that Cruz was. So we have to look away from that particular environment and maybe at his biochemistry, maybe at the microenvironment that he lived in. Perhaps the effect is best described for now as just stochastic, for every x hundred thousand kids y% will be prone to this kind of violence, and what's left is to deny the opportunity. That could be gun restrictions, it could be metal detectors. But I don't see Cruz and Kasky as evincing the same behaviors because of some deterministic application of the same preset conditions in their childhood.

So perhaps instead of focusing on "us v them" the answer is "what's the sum of the influences over the kid's lifetime," since many move and even within "urban" and "progressive" areas there's a lot of turnover.

As for many urban schools, the question is why we sometimes get large death tolls on the streets but not in the school hallways, but only in some cities or locations--they're all urban, after all. Maybe the answer is metal detectors. Maybe it's something pro-active in the classroom. Maybe the answer is out-of-school suspension and truancy so that the kids prone to this are just gone and don't see their honor and dignity worth fighting for in the school when they can pick and choose other places outside of school.

I honestly don't know. But facile answers don't get us anywhere and when they're incorrect should be chucked asap in order to spend time looking for a better answer.